Fedibridge

Which post is that, can you share a link? The main thing with the democratization of moderation features on PieFed is how it places tools into the hands of the users, who unlike authoritianism, can decide whatever they want to do about what they see, individually and personally.

So e.g. while lemmy.ml will ban you from communities that you've never even heard of across the entire instance if you make a comment that violates no written rules (you are supposed to somehow "just know" that the anti-bigotry rule means that you can e.g. criticize genocide done by Western nations, but not done by Russia, China, or North Korea), PieFed merely places an icon next to the username, leaving it up to the recipient to decide what it means to them. Some are quite helpful, like if an account is under 2 weeks old, that's someone who is still learning the ropes, or someone who posts often but hardly ever comments, that's likely an unregistered bot account (or a human equivalent). Admittedly the rules to define all of those are still undergoing tweaking, but I like the idea in principle. Especially if users can choose to not display the icons at all.

Speaking of, a couple other related features affect the display of comments based on a combined up and downvote measure. One of these automatically collapses the comment chain - which requires just one click to open it back up fully - and another threshold hides the controversial/unpopular comment from view entirely. I have both of these disabled entirely, but for such people who want to live inside their echo chamber, I support their right to do so. Having a tool increases choices, and it's up to them to use it properly. And it's neat that PieFed allows the expansion of choices beyond merely moderator allows or denies content, to include more complex and nuanced views.

In one sense then it's the opposite of the opinionated Lemmy, which can only remove, lock, or ban users posting content that the moderator does not like, while on PieFed the moderator can leave it up to the end user to decide its fate, with help from the community overall.

So if on Lemmy the only options are "hard", like shouting, then yeah, PieFed is opinionated but in a "soft" way, like whispering, leaving the content up but placing a label next to it - though to reiterate again, the content can be left up, which is a huge difference.

Here's another example: on every single post from certain instances, a message can be placed. For now the only instance this is used for, on the flagship instance PieFed.social, is Beehaw, which offers:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

And that link goes to the actual words of the Beehaw admins describing themselves. Imagine if, for instance, someone were told that you were not allowed to criticize Russia, China, or North Korea, BEFORE having to find out the hard way, by posting or commenting and then being instance-banned, and even then not receiving a notification about that, so having to dig out what even happened, and then dig further to try to figure out why, etc. Lemmy is VERY authoritarian in nature - yes modlog but no modmail, or even a notification that content was removed, or being banned.

So yeah, in contrast, PieFed is "opinionated", offering those soft whispers, but that's a far cry from being so heavily a Reddit alternative that is somehow arguably even more authoritative than Reddit itself!?

Also, the Sync and Connect have many of these same features for Lemmy as well. For those who enjoy such features, PieFed has a lot to offer!:-)