Knights of New was a reddit meme/movement where people would take the hit of exposing themselves to the river of trash that is /r/all, sorted by 'New', and upvote good stuff while reporting or downvoting bad stuff, as a public service. Now you can do that on PieFed, too.
When sorting the home page by 'New' or 'Top', the list of posts automatically displays new content once per minute. Disabled when scrolling down. This makes voting on new content much easier and makes the threadiverse feel more dynamic and alive.
It seems like a small thing but I've been using it for a few hours and I'm surprised and how engaging it is and how it turns the threadiverse into a river of posts flowing by, like on Mastodon. Compared to the static and slow-moving feeling that the threadiverse often has, it is quite refreshing. Give it a try by going to https://piefed.social/home/new/all and NOT scrolling down. It's ok to scroll down to look at things but return to the top to await fresh content. The title bar of your browser will show the time of the latest automatic update.
This works in Subscribed, Popular or All feeds - it's not just for 'All'. You can also switch to 'top 1 hour' instead of 'new' and leave it running on a secondary monitor, etc so you can dip into whatever's popping off at the moment without being a true Knight.
This release also includes multiple small bugfixes:
- rss feeds import - strip tracking codes on urls so cross-post detection works properly
- exempt Googlebot from Anoobis
- default to dark mode on Linux
- tweak opacity of blocked posts to be a bit more visible
- profiles of people who have posted a lot loads much faster now and doesn't time out
Also, community-specific rules. What one user considers "trash" might be allowed or welcomed in the community; but these drive-by voters would vote it down. (Of course, not any different from doing the exact same if they sorted by New and scrolled now.) Or what one user considers good, but is disallowed in the community, but gets heavily upvoted anyways (which I assume is because of drive-by voting) before a mod cleans it up, if at all. I see the latter decently often.
Usually people posting politics, political snark, or ragebait (whether posts or as comments) in communities that have rules against it, getting upvotes because it agrees with the Fediverse hivemind (and to be fair, I fit into the hivemind very well, except for the part where I do not want to see these political and cultural viewpoints I agree with brought up everywhere all the time), despite being inappropriate in the community, probably because drive-by voters largely do not read the community's rules.
Bringing up depressing real-world stuff in !nicememes in the comments ¬_¬
This is an excellent point. One feature that could help mitigate that is that PieFed offers to community mods the ability to restrict votes to only Subscribers. I am not sure if such communities would then even show up in All?
Though Lemmy or Mbin I believe do not have this ability, so PieFed users surfing the river in this manner could still brigade those, exactly like Lemmy and Mbin users already do so now except with PieFed instances perhaps now doing it at ever so slightly higher frequency than previously.
I would expect most communities would probably not enable this feature though, and thereby remain affected by such drive-by votes.
PieFed community mods can restrict down votes to only subscribers, or only local users (same instance) or only trusted instances.
Thank you for the correction!:-)
Heh sorry it if came across as a 'correction', I was just providing information and forgot to wrap it in polite language :)
It was polite, I thought? And I also thought it was pretty cool - I lacked some knowledge but learned a new thing by your sharing, so genuinely thanks! :-)