But “some control over modlog visibility” is inevitably going to be abused to protect problematic mods and admins. A right of reply, or a context field added to the modlog record would be a better approach, where subsequent actions can be listed and clarified. It’s also kind of amazing he just went ahead with these changes without broad consultation with piefed users or admins, or with the wider fediverse, since it effectively break normal federation.

If we go down to the core of the issue, there’s a fundamental disagreement between some instances on a niche use case: can the modlog be used for permanent slander, without giving people the option to reply?

To be fair, that is more a function of the modlog technical design in Lemmy, where ban reasons cannot be changed after the fact and federated out. It is not technically possible to provide a “right of reply” or to remove the comment from the modlog in either piefed or lemmy.

What we did do is talk to the folks who banned Rimu and MrKaplan, asked them not to do it again, and reversed the bans. And the admin who was involved also stepped down from his admin role. That’s about as much as could be reasonably expected to happen, given the technical limitations. And afaik Rimu never asked to be unbanned, that was simply an act of good faith on our part.

And despite all the effort we put in to smooth things over, Rimu has consistently refused to engage in good faith with any of our admins over this, instead spreading intentional falsehoods and drama-farming over multiple posts.

These recent changes to PieFed were simply a blatant extension of his kneejerk response to the whole situation. Instead of building useful functionality like a right of reply such as we have in fediseer, his approach is just to shadow ban our instance and break proper federation of mod logs for all PieFed instances.

These actions are not designed to protect users, they are designed to protect the fragile-egos of power tripping admins who will seemingly go to any lengths to censor criticism of their actions, whether those criticisms are legitimate or not. It’s childish behavior, and demonstrates Rimu has little commitment to the wider fediverse and the principles of transparency under which it operates.

!direct_donations@anarchist.nexus

Hi there, could you please provide me with a link to the comment, or to the modlog entry, so I can check it out?

Edit: you might want to send it via DM.

I hate the idea of AI agents on my phone without my consent. So this is definitely fucked up. And fuck google in general.

But the power consumption argument makes little sense. That’s like downloading one movie in 1080p.

In which I stated there was no automated ban process, no less. That is perfectly consistent with what I have said all along, and exactly the opposite of what you later claimed was going on. Honestly, this just makes things look worse in terms of your public accusations.

Correction, three drama posts.

Well quite, but then he couldn’t have made three drama posts about it.

Please dont.

Our instances voted not to defederate from lemvotes, so votes are effectively public.

But there is no AI banning. All mod decisions are made after human review, and oftentimes after group discussion amongst the admin team.

Hardly, this was just a bait post. Rimu seems to be convinced if he flings enough mud, eventually some of it will stick. It’s all very petty.

So what’s the problem?

Lies.

Them’s fighting words, Rimu. That Zionist bastard was banned by me personally. I can hardly believe you are so tone deaf to be in here defending a piece of shit undisputable Zionist scumbag like samskara. Yes, I linked it in the ban reason, it was one of my first tests. And on that occasion it matched up beautifully with my own assessment, so why not?

That is exactly the case. I really can’t be bothered reading this whole fucking post, so I’m gonna just reply to you, since you sound reasonably sane.

First, it should be obvious to everyone that their post and comment histories are completely public, and accessible to anyone on the fediverse. There is zero privacy on the fediverse. Your comment histories have already been scraped a thousand times over by every big model out there.

All we have at the moment is a simple script, developed by one of our mods (who will be publishing it on codeberg soon), that any user can run that logs into lemmy using your own account, and downloads a set number (or time period) of comments into a text file. There is no abuse of admin powers going on, it’s just the stock lemmy/piefed api. This is massively faster than manually paging through comment histories on lemmy, and can make mod decisions more robust and more informed.

Using the text file, mods or admins can quickly search for keywords or whatever, using a simple text editor, or simply skim read it. Another option is to ingest it into an LLM to provide a summary. I tried doing that just a handful of times, for testing, but honestly I found it a bit cumbersome and who knows if the summary is actually accurate given the tendency for hallucinations? A couple of tests seemed consistent with my own assessment, and a couple were way off base.

That told me everything I need to know about how much to trust the summaries… very little. I honestly don’t think they are much of a value add, because you just can’t reliably trust the results. In any case, we have absolutely no plans to use llms for that on a regular basis, I just wanted to see what it came up with, and how well it matched a manual assessment.

And to also clarify, there is/was absolutely no automated scanning of users. The process is the same as always. We get a report, we investigate the report, and make a human mod decision. The only difference in this case is that the investigation can be done more efficiently, because we don’t have to go slowly paging through comments and searching through the Lemmy UI for the relevant data.

Obviously as well, no mod or admin is gonna download the entire comments history of a user unless it is a complicated report that is difficult to get to the bottom of from a quick look at the report. 90%+ of mod actions would never need that much detail.

The way OPs post was written was obviously designed from the ground up to stir up drama about AI use. Honestly, I don’t know why he’s still malding, but Rimu seems to be engaging in a lot of very bad faith hit pieces at the moment, designed solely to stir up drama, and directed at our instance. It’s really shitty behaviour.

Sure bro, keep on making shit up, I guess? By the way I have removed all the community bans for yourself and Skavau. You only had to ask btw. Might have saved a lot of pointless drama.

Yikes, nothing honest ever came out of that community.

If Rimu wants us to reverse a misguided community ban by a community mod I’d be happy to do so. But he hasn’t even asked afaik. We are actually quite reasonable people, despite claims to the contrary.

I don’t have any particular beef with Rimu except for the current hostility towards our admin team. And hit jobs like this post are not helpful.

It doesn’t give one person license to make that decision for thousands of users, in a paternalistic way. Ask the damn users. Otherwise it’s nothing but admins treating their instances like personal fiefdoms.

Yeah me too.