Do as you will but if there is a problem, we may want to actually address said problem at some point.

No bc it’s not “him”, or at least not “just” him, that is the problem. It’s like, the system, man.

Absolutely. Plus the keyboard shortcuts are just outstanding - e.g. shift-M takes you to the middle of the screen - and you can even programmatically do things like make changes to every other line within the range 100-1000 but nowhere else, and even then restrict the changes to only those matching a pattern.

And it is installed on most every machine in the world - even Windows is putting bash onto things these days (I forget if that is still optional, admittedly I haven’t touched Windows in nearly a decade:-P) - and has been since virtually the dawn of computing, certainly long before the modern age. :-D I’ve used ssh on a fucking blackberry and edited files with vim before smartphones existed!

It is, however, notably hard to learn to use, I grant that:-).

Part 2 of 2 - again, oops.

re: batching - ah, that makes sense:-(. About the scenario of the post not showing up - perhaps nobody on Lemmy.World was subscribed to that community? I see my replies instantly on Lemmy.World, so indeed there seems to be no real “problem” between it and piefed.social (though ofc feddit.org is a different server), except as you say the high amount of complexity via what is vs. is not federated.

BUT, that is why I was thinking: if people were prevented from forcibly bringing in posts, then that actually solves a lot of the issue. As it is now, if I go to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards there are… well I don’t want to count them but there are an awful lot of posts there - multiple pages at least. Whereas here on piefed.social, at !YePowerTrippinBastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com I see… well there are some, though not all, and the most recent is a day, while the one furthest back is from 2 months ago. At first glance, without getting into the details, I deluded myself into thinking “this community seems to have all the posts until about 2 months ago, though it may have none before that” (b/c this is the chief explanation that would have been true on Lemmy). In actual fact though, it is missing many posts from that timeframe, it is missing votes for those exact posts, and also those posts all have zero comments from them. So these “ghost” posts aren’t really there, not really, or at least not “fully”, and others from the same timeperiod also are not there, however, posts from now on likely will show up there, b/c I subscribed to it - so as long as I keep my account active here, new posts, along with all of their votes, and all of the comments associated with such, should show up? This is happening with that “So I was just banned from starcitizen@lemmy.ml for no apparent reason?” post, with 49 comments and 43 overall votes, which on the original server shows… yup, 49 comments and 42 overall votes.

So my idea here is that if there were no posts prior to this one (not that I am advocating for actively removing them - that seems to take effort and anyway it’s a corner case that doesn’t really matter), then people would not get confused by these “ghost” postings - there would simply be all the posts that are “real”, and there would be no such “ghosts”. And to enact such in the future, the “Retrieve a post from the original server” would have to be disabled. But, it’s just a thought, and like I have no idea what all that would “break” in terms of other functionality, so it’s just something that we are enjoying talking about here - unless you want to take it forward somehow, or eventually I’ll put it as a suggestion into the meta community. But do you see what I mean, especially why that would help avoid confusion, by keeping things simple? That community for instance would contain only one post, the one from yesterday, which reveals that “hard” cutoff between posts that are actually there vs. only partially so, and it matches the existing behavior of Lemmy. Not that we need to always follow that as a guide, but when possible that does help ease transition as people come here from there, e.g. significantly lessening the need for a FAQ or meta post providing an explanation.

Although hopefully we can get more mainstream people here that have or would never have even used Lemmy before, b/c of all the toxicity and extremist postings that turn away literally everyone that I’ve ever mentioned Lemmy to irl. Whereas here, we can dare to be different, and hold ourselves to a higher standard! (which many people WILL like, I am certain of that:-D - though ofc not all, and ironically that will help too, by keeping those who do enjoy such “disruption” out).

I hope I am not barraging you with too much text! Rather, it is a lot but I hope it helps to have a sounding board for those ideas of yours, and to see some other alternatives that probably you’ve already considered as well but perhaps in a new light or at least fresher due to potentially different verbiage:-).

What caused me to start questioning it is when I went to another instance and saw a different vote count, so it was the mismatch, plus this behavior where it occurred too quickly to be due to human intervention, thus not matching my naive “expectations”.

That doesn’t make it “bad” imho, though it does take some getting used to. Now that you’ve explained it I even like the idea - I’ve had similar thoughts in the past, like Wikipedia and “web of trust” that weights more highly those who contribute more whereas those who contribute the opposite of more (not just less but fully anti) could get downweighted. Obviously all the notes of due caution apply, where you don’t want like a mod to outweigh 100 normal users, but you’ve considered that I’m certain:-). And just 1 extra I don’t feel like is excessive at all.

Another alternative as you said would be to have the sorting algorithm use it without displaying the individual voting differently. I am not sure I would like that though - the way it is now provides transparency, whereas that would “hide” it. Perhaps if there’s a FAQ that explained it, that would help people get over the counter-intuitiveness of it all? Even if writing that might be better saved for another day.

Still another alternative would be to not change the individual vote counts (not even just how they appear but the actual underlying counts, as affecting sorting) but display the “high value” badge next to the name. I’ve seen the low value badges, even doubled ones. Mine has a non-spinning in-progress one so I presume that means that it is still assessing, with it being so new. Edit: oh wait, no this is not well-thought-out, sorry - this would only work to identify posters/commenters with a high reputation score, but it would do nothing to help their votes on other posts/comments. So ignore this.

But the idea that immediately pops out of my head that I already like the best is to display (1) the user valuation badges next to the name, and (2) show the up & down-vote counters separately (b/c it’s information - ah, and I see the hover effect now, on my laptop! though it does take nearly a whole second to appear, so most people aren’t likely to find that just by poking around I would guess; therefore thanks again to cluing me in on it!:-)), plus possibly also (3) the combined score - and the latter could take into account all the various “weighting” factors. e.g. if I were an account that is high-value, yet I received 2 downvotes from likewise high-value accounts, plus 2 more from normal, plus 10 upvotes from normal, then it would put it all into the algorithm that could spit out a score closer to zero than to 7. The reason I like it is that while it did not immediately dawn on me, coming from Lemmy, before that Kbin, and before that Reddit, that an “upvote” would be anything other than an “upvote”, yet it doesn’t seem counter-intuitive to me at all that a “weighted total score” would not be a simple sum of the up and down votes. This provides full transparency, full consistency with other servers and approaches (Lemmy, eventually Sublinks, etc.), and also the exact number that is used in the sorting, with the algorithm that generates that explainable elsewhere. The downside is that it is the busiest display of all - though for those of us who enjoy “information”, we will love it! Perhaps a Theme or other Setting could hide a great deal of it for those who do not enjoy such.

I hope you like the idea to think about, whatever you end up doing!:-)

And I seem to have hit a text limit. Oops. Well, I will need to hold myself back in the future but for now, if you are okay with it, this will be part 1 of 2.

That’s so odd - here my own comment immediately got displayed as having 2 vote counts. IMMEDIATELY. Other times when I post that doesn’t happen, and still other times I see my replies from minutes, hours, and days older but still with =1 vote count. It seems random?

iirc, the way it is now, every action e.g. vote counts as a single event, and is sent out across the Fediverse at a rate limited to one event per second. In 0.19.6 there was chatter about expanding the implementation of the ActivityPub protocol to allow parallel sending of activities. It could cause mayhem, or perhaps be only optional? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623

Oh that’s neat! Can I see the downvotes on a mobile? Long press or … doesn’t seem to do anything and I’m out of ideas to try.

The difference between PieFed’s approach and Lemmy’s, especially after the upcoming 0.19.6, is that Lemmy seems to catch up eventually, whereas PieFed never will no matter how much time passes - is that correct?

So if what is desired is a “search for existing post”, that function would go better into the search box, while if what is desired is “import existing post”, yet that is impossible then perhaps simply not offer that rather than confuse people by offering a halfway measure, thereby leaving only the “find non-existing post”, which now that I think about it, especially since it needs an external URL to trigger it, is that really even something that anyone would want? i.e. if the goal is to “view” it, and someone must go to Lemmy in order to do so, then so be it (it is the same on smaller, newer Lemmy instances too), but since it cannot be imported (properly/fully), then don’t? Well, it’s a thought anyway!:-)

It does not though. I made a post the other day from the StarTrek.website instance and couldn’t figure out if nobody had upvoted or commented on it, then tried to look it up on my regular discuss.online instance where it didn’t exist, then went further to look it up on Lemmy.world (where the community is located) and saw that tens of people had. I wasn’t able to respond to any of those at first though, until it caught up on an instance where I already had an account (edit: except I could not do that from the StarTrek.website instance where I had made the post from, bc it hadn’t seen the comment yet even the next day - so I had to do it from a third instance involved in all this.)

And that wasn’t even the only time that very same day that I saw a post existing/not existing and/or having a different number of comments and differences in voting counts. Perhaps 0.19.6 will help with some of these issues, at least on Lemmy but then PieFed, Mbin, and eventually Sublinks are still going to have to figure things out on their own as well.

So I am glad that things are going well for you who I note is on Lemmy.world, but the rest of the Fediverse is definitely struggling, in part because rather than in spite of that centralization. Also I note that Lemmy.world federating smoothly within itself doesn’t even count in my book as “federation” at all! That’s just Reddit 2.0 with everything on a single server, with all the benefits and pitfalls which that entails.

More generally when the subject is man vs. bear, and someone chooses bear, it doesn’t help to simply laugh at those making that choice. Maybe we should listen, and maybe even expend efforts to make changes to become more welcoming for more people that would absolutely love to get off of the likes of Reddit, X, Threads, or Facebook?

That’s my 2¢ anyway.

fr fr such gyatt no cap

That’s very interesting, thank you for taking the time to explain!

Votes: yes I’ve noticed that a good deal of what I see has +1 vote added to it - including your comment here. In one case it was so deep and delivered within seconds before I saw it that it convinces me that it is due to a systemic bug. Also when I return to a page after making a comment, sometimes I see replies that I could swear that I had upvoted, but it does not show the green indicator for that, and it allows me to vote again. Fwiw, I have “vote privately” set to OFF.

Separately for voting, I would hope to see both up and downvotes displayed - I often have replies at “1”, and I have to go to the source Lemmy to get the information as to whether it is truly just unvoted on entirely or more likely it was a balance of +1 and -1, sometimes +2 and -2, and more rarely but definitely happens that sometimes it’s +3 and -3. Or other similar scenarios like +7 and -5, for a certain award-winning video I shared but that people did not universally seem to enjoy. The downvotes are still “information” and present a form of “active engagement” that merely showing the total score hides away.

Old posts: if I could suggest something, maybe it would be better to only “view” an older post - so like retrieve it only into a temporary location, and then discard later - without trying to retain it and present it to users as if it were really there. Perhaps that would increase consistency and therefore build more trust in the system, when information is not there sometimes and not there other times, but consistently absent always prior to a certain date and then afterwards always there and up to date. Though that seems to go beyond Lemmy’s functionality, and yet being better is the point:-).

Anyway, I hope this was interesting and it may help me work out the language on some of these issues before I post them in piefed_meta, so it’s definitely interesting and helpful for me:-).

Now to press the “Comment” button and hope that I don’t accidentally hit the Leave button instead, thereby discarding all that I typed as well as kicking me out of this community, as I did earlier today somewhere, whoopsie!:-)

Okay but… obligatory “gVim offers the best of both worlds by offering use of a mouse if you want it”. There are also native ports for Mac OSX and Windows, etc.

Vim, in contrast, is a command-line program, suited for e.g. working with a text file on a remote server that may not even be running an X-windows interface, or maybe the user simply did not bother to connect to it:-).

Okay, we may now proceed with the humorous jesting:-).

At least she merely skipped it, rather than unleashed a spread of unlimited photon torpedoes against it!

So aside from waiting for code changes, and pointing out some issues whenever I see them, do you have suggestions for things to do in the meantime?

One seems to be: don’t pull in posts manually like that - b/c for one thing, doing it that way means that the comments will never come. Then again, waiting for automated federation syncing seems unlikely to work either. Basically old posts are a lost cause at this point, without admin assistance? Also, I did not notice this at first, but the 3 posts that were already in that community prior to me pulling in the other 2 posts 2 days ago likewise have zero comments in them. Though newer - but not older - voting seems to be taking place, yet starting from a zeroed mark (at the time of the pull?) rather than the proper count on the original instance. e.g. the one by Blaze has 2 (is there a way to view this broken down by up & down separately?) rather than 43, and the dunk_tank one has zero rather than 13, and none of the other posts in that entire community show up. Also the ones that I pulled in have altered counts as well - e.g. the BonesOfTheMoon one now has -2, when the original instance displays -12.

To me this seems an argument to abolish the entire pulling in posts manually feature altogether, until and unless it is changed to pull it in “properly”, i.e. with all comments and vote counts intact. Otherwise, this is at minimum highly confusing to people and realistically it is even “misinformation”, is it not? e.g., in a hypothetical scenario, a post could have +1000 upvotes, but then someone pulls it in, and it receives 5 downvotes, making the total vote count as “-4” (since it would go through zero I would presume?), which would represent a fully qualitative rather than merely quantitative change in the presentation of such a post. +1000 minus 5 is a totally different “type” of change (barely noticable) than 0 minus 5 (finalizing at outright disliked, yet mostly ignored).

It would be better to have nothing at all than to present things in a confusing manner such as this. Ofc, this is not unique to PieFed - I see similar struggles on my own posts between StarTrek.website and Discuss.Online and Lemmy.World, with variations of vote counts and even number of contents - though the difference is that Lemmy eventually catches up, while it seems that you are saying that PieFed never will?

If space is the limiting issue, then delete everything after a cutoff like 6 months or a year. If network bandwidth is the issue then… I dunno about that, but that’s the task that must be worked out. Perhaps Lemmy’s upcoming update to 0.19.6 offering batch updates rather than sending each individual one alone will help? This isn’t a minor issue imho - this is the kind of stuff that will turn people away. Although if it is on the books to be worked on at a later time that’s understandable.

Thank you very much for the suggestion about Safari - I never use that browser, but that’s good to know. Fwiw, I also notice the same behavior on Firefox as on Chrome. And on Android Firefox I can go back just fine. So it’s not specific to Chrome, and I doubt it is fully specific to Mac though that could be the major one affected.

Btw Lemmy captures the back button properly when you have started to write a comment and it asks you if you are sure that you want to leave and thereby lose that. PieFed I suspect isn’t doing quite that but there may be something along the lines of where the focus is placed in order to provide the keyboard shortcuts, or something I dunno. I know basic syntax of HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of JavaScript, plus Java, C++ and many other languages, but who can keep up with the modern web these days - it’s a shitstorm of everything affecting everything else, and even the browsers themselves seem to DGAF to make things “just work” anymore, even on Windows but all the more so everywhere else.:-(

One thing I would argue should be changed is that when making a reply, the Comment box should automatically receive focus. Eventually the entire process of making a comment should be made in-line so as not to disrupt the browsing experience, but that’s a small change that should be easy to make and would help. I will keep a list of small things like that in case such suggestions could help:-).

Oh wow yeah, I did not think about it but… perhaps this meme was too hopefully optimistic even?! Wow. :-|

That’s a really good illustration but also I wanted to point out that it’s not merely some people choosing to be exploitative - though there is no doubt that the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos and the Musk are that way, ofc - but rather the system being geared to allow or even encourage thus.

e.g. Donald Trump failed at everything he did in life, and according to one analysis would have “made” 8x more money 💰 if he had simply left it in the bank 🤑 untouched by all his various bankruptcies, including somehow casinos that are basically money printers 🖨️.

They played the game sure, but someone made the game, and we all choose to watch it happen and do next to nothing about it.

Well hacqtually most Reddit mod hats seem to have a smaller brim, like so:

So this person might just be in a disguise of some sort! 😜