this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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/0 Governance

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Hello m@teys,

I've been waiting for this a long time (half a year), personally. After seeing the surge in piefed instances, i.e. blahaj, .ca, .zip, quokk.au, and .world creating their own instances, and clients guaranteeing future piefed support, we've been thinking about potentially opening an instance in the future. Not a guarantee, just an idea. This isn't a voting thread, just a discussion. Later on we'll actually vote on this.

Do note that this thread will not guarantee an instance; we are discussing a hypothetical. Suggestions? Ideas? Criticisms? make your voice heard.

Have a good week!

pie picture comes from here

governance type: sense check

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[–] div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/fxomt GNU: an icon of a wildebeest, in orange-red, black and white colors A book with a loaf of bread in the cover  in orange-red, black and white colors First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color

This is a non-voting post. Known users should leave comments with your thoughts on the subject.

[–] nothrone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 days ago

Honestly, I am against it. I think we should collectively improve Lemmy and port whatever features make PieFed a worthy alternative. Better mod tools? Get them on lemmy instead. Lemmy's UI is much faster and responsive than PieFed, I have found. I just don't like seeing the community split over and over again. Even if they are federated services, it just splits the community and serves as friction of entry. Choice overload is a really thing, it may lead to decision paralysis and get us fewer and fewer people on these services.

[–] Eric_Pollock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago

I love the idea, and would be very excited for a db0 piefed instance!

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 6 days ago

Personally I'm for it, I think it has some approaches that are more interesting (topics for example).

So as long as its not a pain to run, I'm into it and would try it out for sure.

[–] Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 51 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean, unless you're closing here I don't mind what you do. I think this is the best instance. I think the leadership is top notch.

I'm a happy guy

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 35 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think that, for most dbzer0 users (and quite a few landlubbers like me), being able to choose between a Lemmy and a PieFed instances is only positive. What you need to take into account is the additional work this incurs towards you guys, the admins; you'll be maintaining two instances instead of just one.

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago

Maintaining the instance isn't too big of a problem, but thank you for your input!

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[–] WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I don't trust Piefed at all - they're far too eager to curate my experience, and they've reintroduced all of the reputation anti-features (plus more) that were part of what drove me away from Reddit and the absence of which is part of what I like about Lemmy and Mbin.

If you're contemplating a second instance, I don't much care, because I can simply not use it. If you're contemplating a move, I think it's an awful idea.

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

iirc Piefed started as a small personal project, so it was quite opinionated. Now that there's more users rimu has said he'll make it more neutral, and give more power to instance admins.

And yep, it's a second, separate instance

[–] WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 week ago (10 children)

rimu has said he’ll make it more neutral

I'll believe it when I see it.

It's an odd thing - the Lemmy devs are notoriously opinionated and intolerant, and are constantly castigated for it, but I don't recall ever seeing even a single hint of their opinions or even their intolerance baked into the Lemmy software.

Piefed, meanwhile, is a direct reflection of the dev's biases right from the start, and with everything from the curated subscription lists to the karma and private voting, seems designed explicitly for the purpose of empowering bias.

Say what you will about Dessalines and Nutomic - at least they keep their biases to their own instance and out of the Lemmy software. And further, they appear to have gone to some lengths to make the software as neutral as possible - not only not reflecting any specific bias but limited in ways that make it difficult for it to even be used to impose bias.

And the same can NOT be said for Rimu and Piefed.

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Perfectly put, .world is already turning into a new Reddit and Piefed is perfectly made to encourage turning into a new Reddit once all the .world'ers move there

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[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't know much about Piefed. What anti-features are you talking about?

[–] WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It tracks karma, automatically collapses replies and hides threads based on downvote thresholds and attaches icons to usernames to tell other users in advance that they have been downvoted in the past. And alongside that, votes are hidden. So a few determined users (or even one determined user and a few bots) can easily silence other users or even effectively censor content just by mass downvoting.

Just like Reddit, and notably NOT like the rest of the threadiverse which has done away with karma, doesn't auto-hide downvoted users or content snd makes votes public.

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[–] UnrefinedChihuahua@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] andrew0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was hoping a dbzer0 piefed instance would happen sometimes in the future! I would totally use it, since it has some pretty cool features that Lemmy has been quite slow in implementing. For example, merged communities that cover one specific topic.

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[–] y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I think I'm for it, but I also don't know if I understand the implications. So, some questions:

  • Is there a downside?

  • Would this be in addition to lemmy or a replacement?

  • If it is in addition to, is that the permanent plan, would this be working toward an eventual switch-over?

I should probably try piefed a bit so I understand it a bit better, but it's just a different Lemmy basically, right? Does it federate with existing Lemmy?

If it doesn't federate with what we already have, I'd have to keep up with two things, and two is a big number, so I'd probably just pick one and stay there.

Anyway, exciting nonetheless. I'll go eat some pie now and see what that's all about.

[–] viking@infosec.pub 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Piefed federates with lemmy, it's basically a clone written in python instead of rust, with advanced moderator tools, and developed by people who aren't braindead Stalinists.

[–] y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for the explanation!

I did some pierusing and liked what I saw, too.

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[–] leMe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

i like lemmy a lot. i also like that piefed seems to have better mod tools (at least i am told so). as one of the many people who lost their lemm.ee account to mod burnout, i think the important thing is what you like to work on.

if you can only support one plattform, choose the one you like better - i will most likely follow db0 for its governance.

if you can support both platforms and have fun doing so, i don't see a downside in it.

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago

Thanks for your input! Don't worry, we'll keep both instances alive.

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[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

A comment I came across a while ago puts it quite well:

I haven't used piefed myself but I wouldn't want to switch to it because I feel like it gives more power to downvotes and karma (or "reputation" as they call it):

  • Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
  • People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
  • Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.

Those are three of the twelve points listed as differences to lemmy on their features page.

I also don't agree with some of the points in their article on "PieFed features for growing healthy communities".

from: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/17119490
the comments' thread is also quite interesting

Plus it's written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales

Slightly edited from an older comment of mine:

EDIT: as such I believe that operating a Piefed instance would be a waste resources and actually harmful considering the fragmentation it would cause for little to no benefit at all (also it seems much better set up for a new Reddit with all the .world'ers flooding over there and the anti-features)

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

I think rimu has made the karma system to be optional (i.e. in the admin settings, not hardcoded) so we'd just disable it anyway. I think the second feature should only apply to mods/admins, since its a very useful tool. #1 #3 i agree, they are not good.

I'll address each point in the Piefed Features for growing healthy communities:

Find people who have low karma

This applies to admins, and while not really that effective, its okay to have.

Find people who downvote too much

This is a very useful tool, since this is a big problem on lemmy. Same thing; only for admins

Spot spam easily

Sounds like a good idea; but with feature #3 as you pointed out, this might cause some new-user shitposters to get falsely flagged, but we would disable it anyway.

Don’t award karma in low-quality communities

This is now opt-in, and we would disable it.

https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Low.20reputation.20communities/near/1872

Warnings on unusual communities

We would add nothing to communities, anyway; users are free to do whatever they want, themselves. (maybe to our own instance communities like /0 and governance? But not much honestly.

Icons next to comments by low karma accounts

As i said before, probably should only be seen by admins/mods.

Icon for new accounts

No problem here; most clients do this anyway.

Automatically delete content based on phrases in user name

Sounds very useful, and which is why piefed didn't struggle at all with nicole.

Report accounts, not just posts

Good idea.

Instance-wide domain block

We have this on lemmy too

Automatic reporting of 4chan content

Not a good idea imo. We'd disable it.

Plus it's written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales

We'll always have this lemmy instance anyway :) but afaik it scales fine, and has some optimizations coming along soon.

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[–] MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Some of my thoughts:

I value the community that we have and the style of communication that makes Lemmy different from other forum type software.

I very much dislike the political views of its creators.

I have an account on Piefed and while it's not terrible, it's still not as nice as here. I think it can get there over time.

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[–] anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don't think it's a good idea, but i don't care so long as the lemmy instance stays open.

I think people's concerns over the politics of the developers are overblown and fragmenting into a new project weakens the fediverse - especially when I don't see anything wrong with the software that is being done differently in piefed.

[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I think people's concerns over the politics of the developers are overblown.

It seems a little unnatural because people are trying to hide their racism, xenophobia, western superiority mentality, but the developers also made a lot of political posts to frame them as CCP talking heads. They should have just used alt accounts like rest of the internet platform owners. Rookie mistake.

But, at least they're honest about what they are and not covertly creating a foss product by hiding some sinister motive to rugpull later, like bluesky.

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[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If admins are okay with running both Lemmy and Piefed instances simultaneously then it seems fine IMO.

But otherwise don't feel strongly about it, I don't know that I'd actually use the Piefed instance unless something happens within the Lemmyverse side of things or issues with the dbzer0 Lemmy instance itself.

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[–] Hansae@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Against this idea as it merely causes significantly more work the instance maintainers with (imo) quite limited benefits. I'd only be in favour if lemmy began crashing and burning for whatever reason.

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[–] TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

I dont really care, but I won't be using piefed. the default UI doesn't allow me to adjust the size of thumbnails as i see fit: tiny and on the left. that's a deal breaker for me, even if it's petty.

I do not like new reddit and i have never liked new reddit and i have tried new reddit and will not be using new reddit. piefed UI is a new reddit ripoff.

or i guess a lot of social media platforms do that layout, Twitter FB insta. thankfully i dont waste my time with that shit either. I waste my time with YOU nerds and I am happy with that

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[–] BananaOnionJuice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Here's my two cents:

Because there's no direct integration with Lemmy, and we start with an empty piefed instance. I'll have to create a user and all that, and I "just" quit Reddit so it's not very appealing to me, even if piefed has better features.

I would create an account if everyone migrates, or if I can click a "move to piefed" button that copies all my comments and posts.

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