It’s come out of nowhere. Totally unsolicited. Has his account been compromised?
this seems like a really weird way to piss off a bunch of people. I think this practice might need to be rethought.
I don’t like it either. It’s super awkward to have to ask people if they’re bots or not.
If anyone else has a better idea for how to go about this, please let me know.
Maybe you could identify who you are (piefed admin) and have a link to piefed social’s info page to prove it in the message. Them think about how you phrased it and consider how it looks to someone who has no idea what piefed is or why you would even ask about them being a bot.
Also keep in mind some people turn off or completely ignore their DMs.
Yes, I think that might help a little, thanks!
Although in this case the recipient was fully aware of who I am and what PieFed is. Most recipients of it will be, because they’re high volume posters who are heavily invested in the threadiverse.
It’s just fundamentally awkward to ask because it insinuates that the poster is acting weirdly. That’s why I only do it very sparingly.
I can send you my feet pics, hairy toes included.
I think in this day and age it’s not awkward at all to ask a member at any point if they’re a bot or not. I’d suggest an option to issue an automated a “challenge” for new accounts off the hop.
I’d also suggest removing any mention of weird behaviour or something untoward seen or suspected.
I’m thinking a message along these lines:
Hello,
This is an automated challenge message from the instance.
If this is an account run by a bot, do nothing and this account will be flagged as a reposter / bot.
If you are a person, please reply to this message.
This way at least the member can discuss whether they make their posts by hand or whatever, and the situation can be cleared up.
I think the biggest problem is messaging people outside of the Piefed instance to ask them. If you were messaging users just on piefed.social to mark them correctly it’d be one thing, since they agreed to how Piefed works, but a DM from a random account on a random instance (Many of us know you by name, but it’s likely many more do not) does seem spammy.
I’d agree with others that just replying back is better, not having to click a link. Don’t have a solution for the above though.
I understand the reasoning but the implementation is weird, I would never click on a link from some random instance without having interacted with it, I would have to assume it is phishing. On top of it if my client doesn’t show those messages I would not even know that I got one.
What if there was no link in the message and you needed to reply instead? Would that be less weird?
it’s so much less weird that i find it strange you wouldn’t obviously go with that from the start tbh
Yes that would be much less weird.
From what I understand, there’s been an uptick in accts which use scripts to share posts, yet do have a user presence to create comments. If you go back to the last PF public update, these accts are now being recognised as “reposter” accts to separate them from bot and fully human.
4000+ posts in 2yrs is a lot of posts, so it’s maybe not surprising that your acct got flagged and this message went out to you.
Some users are naturally not going to want to see bot accts, and some reposter accts, so the new feature allows them to filter such out if they want.
Yep. More info at https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2457619/reposter-feature for anyone curious.
For the record, 4k posts because I care and want the fediverse to be a success for people like me with interests like me. I post things relevant to me, things I find interesting, fascinating, things I’d like to learn more about or things I think need more attention. In my opinion, that’s what everyone should do. It’s how I’m able to avoid
Alland enjoy mySubscriptionstimeline full of content I’m actually interested in.I think this is a massive overreach on the part of piefed and actually discourages posting.
That sounds very much like my philosophy here.
Still, that’s something like five posts a day if you’re really doing it all by hand. May I ask if you’re posting stuff verbatim or whether you add on to whatever you’ve found?
I think this is a massive overreach on the part of piefed and actually discourages posting.
You’ve presumably read the explanations and the fact that Rimu is less than pleased with how this kind of thing works, and is open to better ideas. Still-- it addresses a real, known issue, and let’s not forget that hand-built, volunteer-based social media software like this is inevitably going to have growing pains like this. You know?
This is actually my second account, my first instance died. RIP lemmy.tf!
I don’t editorialise titles at all. I scroll through CapyReader, see something I think is worth sharing, open it in Firefox for Android, press share, select Summit, use the autofill for the title and then hope that it gains traction.
Narrator voice: In most cases it doesn’t.
You’ve presumably read the explanations and the fact that Rimu is less than pleased with how this kind of thing works, and is open to better ideas. Still-- it addresses a real, known issue, and let’s not forget that hand-built, volunteer-based social media software like this is inevitably going to have growing pains like this. You know?
🥺 I genuinely have zero reason to interact with piefed.social. He/his software has come to harass me and now I’m expected to go read the explanation? With all due respect, it’s a piefed problem, not a me problem. I’ve been posting from before piefed even existed. The explanation is akin to devout religious people who take issue with homosexuality making random people in their city prove they’re not homosexual because they breathe the same air as them. As I said, it’s a massive and weird overreach.
Narrator voice: In most cases it doesn’t.
Well, I know how that works, and good of you to make the effort.
He/his software has come to harass me and now I’m expected to go read the explanation?
No, the explanation’s right here in this thread. It’s been phrased several ways from several people. The link is only if you wanted to see the official announcement.
And I must say you seem to be taking this extraordinarily hard. To me, if that’s the worst thing that happened to you that day, then you’ve still had a lovely day. I mean it’s one bloody message that wasn’t phrased well with a real point behind it, as a small step to improving the overall experience here. You really haven’t understood that yet?
i mean five posts per day doesn’t sound like a lot to me, you can totally fire that off in an evening
True. But to average that per day for two whole years is still some dedication.
Personally, making a post takes me a lot longer. Usually I spend time on a combo of research, upgrading imagery, adding contextual info, and writing a mini-article for my posts. I’m happy to average over one a day, but I understand different people have different methods.
A “massive overreach” to simply ask if you’re a bot because you’re a prolific poster? Seems a little ridiculous to me. At best it could be perceived as suspicious or annoying.
There are tons of obviously-bot accounts reposting shit like crazy, and while I appreciate having content on the threadiverse, having thoughtless trash content is much much worse than having limited content.
Not compromised.
So you didn’t eat grilled cheese on the radiater?
I’ve gone back 20 days in my posting history, haven’t made a single post to a piefed community outside of this post here.
Since when do I have to authenticate my ID or my human status to instances I don’t use?
It’s actually weird and rude. I don’t know if I should be offended or flattered.
For the record, I have an instance of Miniflux running and share the majority of my posts from there manually. Outside of that, I’ve shared a few Ed Sheeran things from my YouTube feed and I occasionally share my friends YouTube animations.
I don’t even have a bookmarklet set up to share posts as I exclusively use mobile devices. Not sure why I should even have to defend myself.
Rude and weird.
Please don’t worry yourself over this. You’ve done nothing wrong.
I’d encourage anyone else that receives these messages to ignore them and block the sender.
The instance runner didn’t do anything wrong either, other than to word the message less than ideally. But there’s a major point going on with the new “reposter” category, and users have made it clear they’d prefer such accts to be marked as such. That’s the root of things.
I’d encourage anyone else that receives these messages to ignore them and block the sender.
To me that would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s a one-time message that’ll likely never be seen again, not any kind of spam or whatever. And if we blocked people as easily as that, then we might as well block everyone on the Fediverse who very occasionally annoyed us.
It’s a feature Piefed has. The idea is that if you were a bot, the operator would most probably not pay attention to DMs and not click the link. So after 24h the originating instance can mark your account as bot. AFAIK it does not federate between remote (not yours) instances
As someone that doesn’t post on any piefed instance, why is it bothering me? I’m not on the fediverse to be tracked or authenticate myself. If I wanted that bullshit, I’d join Reddit, X or one of Meta’s apps. There needs to be safeguards around features not harassing people. Especially people that don’t even use their instance.
When you post in any community, your posts come to piefed.social. I need to decide whether to accept them, or not, or classify them as automatically posted, as nsfw, as spam, and so on.
If I’m unsure, I ask the author.
That’s such a weird overreach. On the fediverse where there’s an active majority against the surveillance state, why is piefed trying to create one online? I’m literally a guy who likes to share things for various reasons and I’m being stopped and searched. It’s not cool.
On the fediverse where there’s an active majority against the surveillance state
This is a fundamental and major misapprehension of how the Fediverse works. Not trying to be rude, but I’d suggest you ground yourself in that stuff to better comprehend. Kind of weird to me actually that someone who’s been here 2+yrs is evidently unaware of such basic operational methods.
Fine, let me rephrase:
Within my interactions on the fediverse, where there’s an active majority against the surveillance state…
Do you understand how federation works, though? Unlike Reddit for example that’s run off their huge banks of unified servers, it’s absolutely key that posts and comments spawn out to all the 1000’s of volunteer instances with as much unity as possible. It has nothing to do with “surveillance.”
And if you’re worried so much about something like that in the first place, you’d probably be better of participating in closed communities and instances. Or just somewhere else, out of the public eye.
It’s just a question. And to answer it, all you needed to do is click once and then you would have seen this message
Would you have preferred it if there was no link to click and you needed to type a reply instead? That’d be fine with me.
I think we’d prefer if you didn’t harass users on other servers with this BS.
I don’t see the creation of any surveillance state here. The data collection, as it exists, is already something that happens (and must happen, as a function that is, by design, both public and federated). Somebody can pull most information used here from a public-facing API; that’s how clients render discussions and how instances automatically communicate with each other.
Basically anybody with a computer could have scraped your (and many other peoples’) data and come to similar conclusions about a wealth of posting, commenting, and voting patterns. I assume that, if anything, an admin doing this responsibly is a sign of a good one and not a malicious one.
where there’s an active majority against the surveillance state, why is piefed trying to create one online?
Sending you a DM asking if you’re a bot is not, by even the wildest of imaginations, creating a “surveillance state”, and honestly I have serious questions about your motivations for even suggesting such a ridiculous thing.
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why can’t your reply back you are not? the link clicking I think is something most anyone here would not do when instructed by a dm.
You can reply back or click the link. Either is fine but clicking the link saves everyone time.
thats not so bad. I think the link is sorta pointless because again no one will do it. I could see saying go to piefed and choose something from the site but that gets to be a complicated set of directions. honestly even reply back is a little iffy if you think about what a text out of the blue on your phone asking to text back makes people think. unfortunately I cannot give you an answer for a better solution.
You can. It says that in the OP. The link goes to Piefed.social domain, so shouldn’t be suspicious. Replying back requires manual review from someone who is a volunteer moderator, administrator and developer. The link automates the process so he can focus on other things.
