The code is open source. Nothing is obscured.

“Security-by-obscurity” is a phrase used for any measure that is useless once you know how it works. In this case it’s hoping that a troll doesn’t know about the specific hardcoded rules. None of the rules in PieFed actually work if you are at all aware of them.

Thanks for clarifying, I guess I misremembered the shadowbanning part. I think I was mixing together the fact that reputation isn’t really transparent (users’ reputation can change by even attempting to upload an image that gets flagged, and the vague error means they’ll probably try multiple times without realizing they’re being moderated) and the fact the communities can autoban any user whose global reputation is low enough.

I still think the security-by-obscurity approach to moderation is inherently flawed though, and I hate to imagine how the dev approaches actual account security if that’s their approach to moderation.

Honestly I would consider [user-obscured] hardcoded shadowbanning just as bad.

Just because I’m closer to agreeing with the PieFed dev’s opinions a little bit more doesn’t mean that I’d support shadowbanning someone because the trivially-evaded checks caught a false positive in the crossfire. Piefed’s auto moderation/social scoring is pretty much textbook definition security-by-obscurity. The second anyone knows how it works, it’s useless. It will pretty much exclusively catch people who just wanted to post a harmless meme or something.

At least (for now) Dessalines isn’t hardcoding his tankie beliefs into Lemmy’s source code.

Edit: Blaze is right, it isn’t shadowbanning, but the rest of my point still stands, added the [] part to clarify

There were a few, not exaustive since it’s been a few months since I looked through the source code, some of this might have changed and there’s also a few other checks that I’m forgetting:

• 4chan screenshots (specifically anything that OCR identified as having “Anonymous #(number)” in it) were banned. Honestly this one is fine as a toggle but I think for a while it was just on by default in the code
• any community that had specific words in it were blocked at instance level. I think “meme” was there, a few swear words, and a few carryover reddit meme community names (196, I think nottheonion was also there, anything with “shitpost” in the name, etc.)
• There’s a hidden karma/social credit score based on a user’s interactions and net total karma hidden from them that gets impacted by any moderation actions, including some of the automated hardcoded ones (e.g. even trying to upload an image that gets flagged by the hardcoded checks). In some cases the user is not informed of any of these changes (the image upload will appear as a generic image upload error)
• users with a low enough net score can be automoderated at both a community and instance level

Edit: the other thing is, a lot of this hardcoded moderation isn’t documented anywhere outside of the code, likely because a lot of the measures would be useless if people knew how they worked

Edit 2: updated based on Blaze’s reply from another comment, I misremembered the shadow banning, I was confusing it with the federation errors that occur when one user blocks another

Tbf Piefed also does have opinionated moderation literally hardcoded into the source code.

It’s pretty easy to modify since it’s python and not rust, but still not great

That’s exactly my point. Giving away the exact town you live in to strangers on the Internet is not good advice to give people generically.

Maybe I could see country or even general region, but town?? Why would I want to publicly give away my location like that?

Doesn’t W3C already maintain the ActivityPub protocol?

Edit: nevermind I misunderstood this

Signal is private in that other people can’t intercept your messages, including signal. The signal app is open-source so you can be relatively certain it’s not tracking your decrypted messages, unlike closed-source apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or any other private social media.

Signal is not anonymous from an account standpoint, because you need a phone number to sign up, even if you can choose not to display it in your account.

This could actually make sense if those bot posts that mirror reddit subs are included in this number since those don’t really get any comments

It got revived also! They’re back on F-droid as well, not sure about it being the same developer as this though since I don’t use friendica

edit: here’s the new GitHub link: https://github.com/LiveFastEatTrashRaccoon/RaccoonForLemmy

Hey did you know that any JSON file is also a valid YAML file? I bet you’ll love YAML a lot more now that you have this information

Kagi is no better than Mozilla though. They even bought a T-shirt factory lol https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

25565 also gets a decent amount of malicious traffic because of Minecraft though. I’d recommend switching the port to something different at the very least. When I hosted a server for the first time on 25565 my router pretty immediately gave me warnings about attempted network traffic coming from Europe/Asia when I (and everyone I gave the IP to) live in the US.

Pretty sure they’re talking about the devs, not the users

edit: still kind of weird tho

Not familiar with how piefed handles it specifically but aren’t posts/comments self-upvoted by default?

You could probably figure it out pretty easily just by looking at a user’s posts, no?

(This is unless piefed makes it so the main actor up votes their own posts, and the anonymous actor upvotes others’ posts, but then it would still be possible to do analysis on others’ comments to get a pretty accurate guess)

Try Raccoon, the UI feels very similar to what I remember from liftoff, imo it’s worth trying. It’s still a little bit beta and I’ve run into formatting issues a few times but the UI is so much better than Jerboa’s and has a lot of nice features (like linking cross-posts within the app) that Jerboa doesn’t.

I normally just use Jerboa but I’ve been trying Raccoon recently and it’s been really good. It’s definitely still beta and some formatting doesn’t work but each update has made it significantly better so it’s definitely worth checking out because the UI is the best of any of the apps I’ve tried imo

Jerboa is by dessalines, the same dev as Lemmy and the owner of lemmy.ml so it’s basically just all of the drama inherited from that.

Honestly at this point threads federation probably won’t even be able to get the first 2 E’s because it’s opt-in on the Threads side. Most Threads users don’t know what ActivityPub is and aren’t going to go digging through settings to turn it on. Aside from the POTUS Threads account I legitimately haven’t found a threads account I’d remotely care about that bothered to turn it on, even among some of the more tech-oriented ones