Skavau

The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all.

Are any Piefed instances doing any of this right now?

You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account.

I’m not aware of this. In any case, the ban functions on Piefed are undergoing changes right now anyway.

You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.

When you say “moderators” do you mean admins here or community moderators?

The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.

I can see a valid use-case for smaller instances that might want to elevate their own communities within their own local feeds. I think it would be pretty poor if any larger instance used this tool, but I am sure that all of these toggles can display publicly - so users on an instance would know if their experience is being gamed or curated by the admins of a local instance.

You can set up keywords on piefed to filter out.

So you find the prospect of a country launching a military assault against a far weaker opponent to be funny, do you?

I strongly oppose any US intervention in Venezuela, but the notion their civil society is equivalent to Norway other than superficial observation that both are oil-rich is absurd.