PieFed Meta

The trouble I have with Lemmy.ml (this is relevant, I promise you:-) is not how it bans all criticism of Russia, North Korea, and China, but in its lack of transparency to never ACTUALLY STATE that this is their "real" set of rules, which differs rather profoundly from its own provided statement of being "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developer". Overall that reads as extremely disingenuous to me - while to them, OF COURSE they are doing the "correct" thing, in ALL matters, and yet.. while I am not asking them to provide a justification, it would be nice to acknowledge in the light of day what policies are actually in place? It scares people away to have to discover that the hard way, and many seen to not land on other Lemmy instances afterwards but rather go back to Reddit or Bluesky instead.

Thus likewise I am against how this voting scheme is not currently implemented in a transparent manner. e.g. this noticeably reduces the Newbie-friendliness of an instance, does it not? Users coming over from Reddit will not expect it and, already being overwhelmed by "there being too much to read" (I don't personally agree but that is what THEY say, hence objectively true that this is their primary response), will get surprised and dismayed.

Also, if it helps to share, at first I wondered: what if the default were to be set to be a value higher than a human being is likely to reach (even someone recovering from an illness so indulging in social media more often than a usual balanced individual may casually & routinely do?). As a defense against bot accounts it may serve some value? Although then again, would merely limiting the bot be the best course of action here? Possibly detection and banning could be a better course of action, or even redirection into a honeypot, rather than steering their behavior to fall more into lines of human norms? So no, the more I think about it, the more that I see this not as a measure to separate bots from humans but rather to enforce conformity among human populations: neurodivergent or otherwise "unusual" people are told to get their own instance from now on, while this level of activity is all that is allowed in the main spaces (and even then, the votes cast and displayed internally within the neurodivergent spaces will be blocked upon entry into the main ones, having been throttled).

Anyway, the more transparently this can be handled the better.