If there’s another place to find answers, do let me know. I went over the piefed feature page and did a couple searches already.
I came here from Lemmy to try out Piefed and make another community, but I get an error that my account is too new and/or I don’t have a reputation.
Questions:
What does reputation or attitude mean? What do I need to have to make a community?
How old does my account have to be to make a community?
Why do I need to have an X account age to make a community?
Is there a way to separate upvotes and downvotes? If not, I don’t like it. Just seeing a number doesn’t tell me very much, especially about engagement. A -1 score could have 200 upvotes.
Why are the communist/socialist instances blocked by default and not like, maga? I see it’s blocked by my instance anyway, but thought it was weird to block those three considering there are much worse instances. I already unblocked them, so I don’t need help, I’m just wondering why.
Oh, and why can’t I see the modlog?
Thank you all for your time.
Again, this is up to your local admin. Each instance is going to be run differently. The .zip instances (lemmy and piefed are run by the same team) tend to be a bit more open with their defed/block policies compared to some others. I can only really speak about piefed.social for which I am an admin.
Something to note here is that there are two different things going on. The first is user-level instance blocks like you mentioned here. They are removable by the user, and are a kind of softer way of blocking things compared to the second method - defederation. When an instance is defederated, then it is server-wide and the user can’t see content from that instance no matter what their settings are. You can review the defederated instances set by the .zip team on their instances page.
This means that the .zip admin team has decided not to make the modlog public. One of the settings available to a PieFed admin is to toggle whether the modlog should be accessible to non-admins or not. Other PieFed instances might have a public modlog. On piefed.social for example, you should be able to view the modlog even without an account.
Hidden modlogs. Can’t say I like that, it was one of the suckier things about Reddit
It’s just an option available to an admin. Different instances can have different use cases and goals.
An example is that earlier in PieFed’s development, there was a schoolteacher that was experimenting with using PieFed as a forum for the class. This would have primarily been just a local forum with no/minimal federation. In a setting like that, having a public modlog would essentially mean having a log of every classmate’s transgressions and punishments (at least with regards to content). This isn’t necessarily something that would be desirable in a more school-like setting.
As for .zip’s decision not to have a public modlog, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference since they are so heavily federated to other instances that do have public modlogs. The modlog actions are federated similar to content.