I noticed responding to posts in communities hosted at lemmy.ml gives the following warning:

This post is hosted on lemmy.ml which will ban you for saying anything negative about China, Russia or Putin. Tread carefully.

While I see where this is coming from and I agree with the general sentiment, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to include such a message. I basically read it as an invitation to be off-topic and to derail conversations in order to annoy the admins. While it comes from a point of good intentions, it can be disheartening for the people running communities on Lemmy.ml to receive comments about Russia from users basically trying to get banned, in communities that has nothing to do with this issue.

It’s unfortunate, but a lot of valuable older communities are still hosted on lemmy.ml, and I think PieFed users should be encouraged to be constructive and on-topic users there as they should be everywhere else.

An alternative suggestion: Maybe it could be useful to remind people which community they are posting in? Like, “This community is dedicated to renewable energy. Please keep this in mind when contributing to the discussion”. Then again, that would be a mess to implement in a good way.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I agree this feature could do with a lot more finesse. Currently it is hardcoded to show on every lemmy.ml community, which is clumsy and over-powered. I’d like features that let the instance admin specify custom messages for any instance and any community.

    How this feature is used is then up to the instance admin. They might choose not to have any messages.

    With my instance admin hat on - I’d definitely keep this message on [email protected] as that is the one which regularly caused bewildered posts by people wondering why they were banned. All other communities on that instance seem relatively benign and don’t really need a warning.

    I’ll wait a few more hours to gather more feedback and then make a ticket for this.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Ok, I’ve changed how this works, as discussed. Now only one lemmy.ml community has a warning.

    Thanks to cabbage for starting this discussion to resolve it.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    3 months ago

    Tankie admins are a missing stair and people deserve to be warned.

    It’s an issue even in communities you wouldn’t think of as political. Another reply mentions OpenStreetMap… which is illegal in China. The Chinese government mandates that people lie about the shape of the Earth. Many obvious responses to this absurdity would get you a boot in the ass for “orientalism.” Oblique criticism of that moderation, in turn, will get you a boot in the ass under their rule against bigotry… as if polite feedback against abuse of authority is intolerable hatred. Because they’re such fans of democracy, you see.

    And they’re big enough that many communities are hosted there by surprise. Linux stuff, piracy, webcomics, video games - whoops! Your opinion has been deemed wrongthink. The people’s workers’ family super happy fun time council is the bestest and most democratic one-party state everrr, so how dare you take issue with a foreign superpower dictating that men in video games cannot wear skirts.

    Highlighting the instance is a great idea. I might do that in-browser, as a CSS hack. I appreciate that this reader calls out that information when it’s especially relevant.

    • cabbage@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      It’s an experimental feature. If you post on Beehaw it shows a reminder that Beehaw has a stricter code of conduct than most instances, and remind you to be nice.

      PieFed is also developed specifically to be unappealing to tankies and fascists, which I think is generally wise, but of course certain measures might be more successful than others. :)

    • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yeah.

      Often people will not be aware of the rules a community has (they don’t read the sidebar or are on mobile where there sidebar is hard to find) OR, as in the case of [email protected], the rules are written deceptively and there are many unwritten rules. Having an additional message that is front and center above the ‘compose a comment’ input field is an attempt to deal with that.

      We need alternatives to defederation which is too extreme and total. Mastodon has muting and silencing, for example. I’d like to figure out whatever the threadiverse equivalent of that is - some way to allow access to those who want it while steering naive users away from places where they’re going to have a bad time.

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        3 months ago

        I agree as well. Fediseer supports censures and hesitations towards instances. You could ingest those and allow piefed to report how they see others and how other see them

        • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Great idea.

          I’ve been trying to get into fediseer but piefed does not provide the necessary API to let me claim my instance. I think that’s what it is - I get an error message "There was an api error: Only admins of that piefed are allowed to claim it. ". Do you have any docs I can look at which might help me know what endpoints I need to make?

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            3 months ago

            Fediseer tries to understand the api of each software and then looks for the admins of the site to pm. Do you have an api endpoint which lists the admin usernames?

            • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              Yes, I have tried to copy Lemmy’s /api/v3/site endpoint because I saw a lot of requests to it in the server logs.

              https://piefed.social/api/v3/site

              Actually I can see a few differences that need tidying up… ‘name’ is not correct and ‘displayName’ is missing, for example.