Rimu

AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities. “If you ignore the negatives for everyone else and just focus on the positives for me, it’s pretty great” Mhmm. Right, ok.

Daily.

This project does not allow contributions generated by large languages models (LLMs). We are taking these steps due to:

• The potential negative influence of AI generated content on quality, developer alienation from their code and skill rot.
• Legal complications such as the inability to claim copyright and ensure others’ licensing and copyright have not been violated.
• Ethical concerns including but not limited to those regarding intellectual property theft, environmental impact, the effect on already-marginalized groups, devaluing labor for the purpose of concentrating power among the billionaire class, etc.

This ban of AI generated content applies to all parts of the project, including, but not limited to, code, documentation, issues, and artworks. An exception applies for translating texts for issues, discussions, and their comments to English.

If you ever need to move instances, go to https://sh.itjust.works/settings and export the settings. Then in your new instance, import the settings. You'll be following all the same communities as before, same blocks, etc. Settings exported from Lemmy can be imported into PieFed too. The real bummer is when you invest a lot of time and effort into creating then building up a community on the wrong instance. You can just make a new comm and tell everyone to follow it but making this kind of moving more high-fidelity is high on my list.

I can see why you'd say that because of the headings and the bullets. But I checked it and it's human.

Feels like a matter of time until the agents create an internet worm to distribute themselves globally, so they can’t be shut down.

Ahhh no no it's not a bot - the moderator is using OpenAI to check if a user has said anything that makes them a promoter of a political ideology that they consider to be bannable. The human mod still presses the ban button themselves, manually.

I agree. Compare https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=Hot with https://piefed.social/home/hot/all for example.

If the goal is solidarity and community, creating a world where little feudal lords reign over independent territories and negotiate the terms of the interchange of ideas can hardly be the best answer. I very much understand that in times of rising authoritarianism such an escape into decentralised resistance is alluring to progressive political movements. But this is a temporary fix at best. It is not a progressive vision for what comes after. Decentralisation without social institutions that debate, define and – when necessary – enforce fairness and equality is a euphemism for survival of the fittest.

Imagine Mastodon had a governance system where all users, admins and minorities were equally represented. Imagine this system intervened in the practices of some admins. Right now I can only imagine the Mastodon community to react with an outcry about such an audacious attack on their free and decentralised kingdom. This reaction would be completely in line with libertarian impulses that are so very present in all things digital. Cyberlibertarians routinely invoke the “free internet” as a vague supreme ideal that has to be defended against any kind of collective, democratic governance. Their ideology is based on private control and decentralised market-based exchange. It has no use for community, solidarity and participation. It is founded on contempt for democratic intervention, a belief in the unique nature of the digital realm and the superiority of those controlling it. These ideas are very present in the Mastodon community as well. Most often this is not the result of an active ideological commitment to libertarian or right-wing views. It is, however, very open to being instrumentalised by these ideologies and it is reinforcing them – willingly or not.

This is basically an article arguing for a fedi equivalent of the UN.

Anyone know of a gemlog to RSS tool? Then that could be fed into a RSS to fedi bot.

Yep, it's LLM-generated.

In FEP 1b12, that is what occurs (most of the time) - as soon as an instance has a dozen users their interests will be varied enough that almost every active community in the threadiverse is subscribed to and they’ll be receiving almost all the traffic. It works out ok at our current scale (small).

But they CAN zoom - https://piefed.social/tags/cloud/community/11516

None taken. It’s just for fun and “wooo” ;)

I’ve been using .json so that text editors can do syntax highlights.

I don’t know of any platform which has those features plus AP plus ATProto.

Piefed is like Lemmy (communities) but also includes event functionality. For a blog you can create a community that only moderators can post in. Piefed users can be followed from Mastodon.

You’re hyperfocusing on one point, as if that’s the only part that matters and ignoring all the rest. I don’t consider that helpful, hence the downvote. What is especially unhelpful is abusing your admin access to call out people’s votes. Leave that shit alone.

How should PieFed handle accounts that mix human activity with automated reposting? Recently there have started to be a few accounts that seem to be used by a person for writing comments while also being used by scripts to automatically repost content from Reddit and possibly elsewhere. This doesn’t cleanly fit into our existing tools for classifying accounts and posts - a conventional bot might post RSS articles or other automated content, and users can choose to filter based on that bot setting. These new types of accounts are different from that because they’re partly human and partly automated. This causes a few problems: there are cases where the reposted content is written in the first person. Like for example, a Reddit post might say here’s a photo of my cat, but when that post is automatically reposted into the Threadiverse by a reposter script, it can appear to us that the PyFed account owner is claiming the cat as their own. Yet that’s obviously not the case, which gives an inauthentic feel to the environment. sometimes some of the material being reposted is content that violates the rules and norms of Threadiverse. And so we see a lot of strange culture war stuff and racist content coming through sometimes. a lot of people left reddit to get away from all the astroturfing and bots and LLMs running amok so letting that happen here too will just drive those people away. Despite this, their content is often quite popular and many people upvote it and comment on it. Many people seem totally ok with it. Before I change anything, it’d be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this. I’m considering several possible approaches, including doing nothing, or introducing a new automated / reposted indicator for accounts (with a feed filter, separate from the bot indicator and filter), or continuing to apply the existing bot label onto those accounts, or restricting those kind of accounts completely. But I’m not going to propose a particular outcome yet. I’d like to hear what, if any, problems people are experiencing from these accounts and what information or controls would be useful.

They are using multiple accounts to try to mask it. I’m not sure but it seems like about 4 to 6 different accounts all run by the same guy. It is a deluge. It is deceptive. No one opted in to it.

I spent 8 years in organisations that operated with consensus-based decision making. IRL, not larping online. You don’t know me. Even a little bit.

It is very hard to live with. Not all problems are solvable (this one is technically solvable but politically, it isn’t) and we need to accept whatever outcomes there are, despite our best efforts.

Please see https://piefed.social/c/piefed_help/p/2025442/europe-lemmy-dbzer0-com-banned-from-piefed

Yes those are the same person, on different platforms.

Ocean temperatures in recent years (video)

Well said.

Average number of downvotes (lower attitude is a higher ratio of downvotes to upvotes. Always 1 on instances with no downvotes) when banned: dbzer0 has 0.68 which is the same as lemmy.world or lemmy.ca.

Reposter feature Based on recent feedback, PieFed v1.8 includes functionality that lets instance admins flag accounts as being a “Reposter”. Other than putting a little icon next to their name this has no effect on anyone until viewers opt in to filtering based on this flag. It works just like how filtering for bots or NSFW content does - in your Filtering settings you can select to Show, Hide or Make Semi-Transparent posts by reposters, independently from bots or NSFW. In your filtering settings (at https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters ), look for the field “Posts by reposters”. By default this is set to ‘Show’ so unless you opt in to this everything will be the same as it was before. Admins: to flag an account, go to their profile and click ‘Edit in admin area’ (or find them at /admin/users), then tick the “Flag their posts as from a reposter (bot)” checkbox. PieFed v1.8 includes a raft of different tools for finding inauthentic behaviour, some of which falls under the umbrella of “reposting”, which you can employ. They are fairly complex so I will need to write more about how to use them, later. If you are unsure, you can just ask the potential reposter. Go to their profile and click ‘Ask if reposter’ and they’ll receive a direct message from you. Bots will ignore it and PieFed will automatically apply the reposter flag after some time. Each instance will need to define for itself what the difference between a bot and a reposter is. Some might choose to just ban all reposters rather than get into it. Many will just do nothing. For piefed.social I define a bot as automated posting of content, usually from a RSS feed or similar, always in the same community with no pretense of being human, no comments and no voting. A reposter is an account with automated posting of content, often from reddit or similar, often in a variety of communities, usually with a human operator that participates in discussions and votes. There are a lot of different reposters. Some limit their automated posts to a single community and perhaps do some manual posts in others. Some blast out all kinds of posts and manually delete off-topic or undesirable posts later. Some reposters are part of a swarm operated by a single person. Often their content is interesting, relevant and generates a lot of discussion. I don’t know how the threadiverse is going to look with them hidden from me but I’m keen to find out. This is a complex issue and it might take a few tries and experiments to find a good way of managing it. I hope you can bear with us as we feel our way forward through it.

PieFed 1.8 is released - multi-image posts, reposter filter, new admin tools Gallery posts, which is an image post with multiple images in it, compatible with Mastodon and Pixelfed. Check out this example from Mastodon. “Reposters” as a separate thing from “Bots” with the same Show and Hide options for filtering that bots have. Reposters are more targeted, with higher quality content than true bots and often have a human operator writing comments. However many people find this inauthentic so now they can be filtered out. More details /c/microblogs can show posts from people you’re following OR all posts. Recent hashtags shown on the home page sidebar. Support for receiving posts with jpegxl images. Communities can have a default hashtag for new posts - posters can edit or remove it if they want. For admins: Option to manually approve posts by new accounts, to cut down on spam while having open registrations (no approval on the new account). This will let people dip their toes in without waiting. Easily contact other instance admins, see /admin/instances Vote manipulation detection tools for simple sockpuppets and complex coordinated voting networks. See /admin/voting Serial downvoter report showing who made lots of downvotes against a single person in a short time. Other bot detection tools - e.g. easily spot unnatural runs of very quick post creation. Display list of alts on user profiles to more easily investigate activity by alts. Filter emoji with keywords rather than importing absolutely everything - this will speed up the emoji reaction dialog. Identify instances likely to be used by spammers in future. See /admin/instances?filter=liability Microblog posts with no replies can be automatically deleted - set the MICROBLOG_CONTENT_RETENTION environment variable to how many months you want to keep them for. To upgrade from 1.7.x git pull git checkout v1.8.x Then, ./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh Donations PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features. Donations can be made via Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi.

That’s a good idea!

Yep

Yeah you can do that but now you’re on my do-not-trust list. And probably a few other people’s lists. I appreciate you being open about your opinions because now I can make an more informed choice about interacting with you and the instance you run. Don’t you think everyone deserves the information they need to choose which instances they want to interact with, according to whatever criteria is important to them? Even if your criteria are different?

Yeah. And the reason they’re in charge is because we don’t have the requisite social consciousness / organisation / structure to put better people there. Changing culture and political systems takes a long time, which we don’t have.

Yes, I’m surprised by that too.

I was surprised to find that dbzer0 has 290 communities.

Yes, at a minimum, having a maximum limit on the size of an incoming activity seems prudent!

We've got to build the asteroid magnet before China does

you are free to leave and choose a different one. I only have that freedom if the admin tells me that they use LLMs in this manner or if they federate with instances that do. At the moment everyone is in the dark.

Check this out - https://www.structural-integrity.eu/the-politics-of-decentralization-and-the-libertarian-allure-of-mastodon/

from the mod log:

https://s.faf-pb.xyz/lXxek

The output from the LLM was provided as proof that someone needed to be banned.

I didn’t want to do this but my hand was forced by their dissembling, minimization and bullshit. Note how the output includes a nice big logo with a slogan and ascii graphics - this was not a one-off experiment, this is an app they were proud to call their own.

Many people will just throw up their hands and walk away but for me the only way I can accept what will happen is if I did my best (minus my handicaps, like living under capitalism, personal issues, etc etc) to stop it.

This is in a medical setting but has obvious parallels to coding: https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter

Student protesters disrupt NVIDIA AI climate panel Student protesters have interrupted an NVIDIA panel during NYC Climate Week, shouting about the climate impact of data centres and the company’s business ties with Israel.

Video at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-first-new-cat-species-discovered-in-100-years Like a mini leopard!

What is the modlog for, if not holding moderators to account?

The last post from you was 8 months ago, lol

It can be traced objectively. It’s mods. They’re using software that they made to do this quickly and easily, it’s not a manual copy and paste situation.