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1. pistolero :thispersondoesnotexist: (p@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Nov-2023 22:49:50 JST pistolero :thispersondoesnotexist:

   in reply to
   @mint @dcc @sysrq I did say that when they first arrived on fedi, because my initial reaction to them was that they were lame and ugly and I didn't think too far past that. Having seen how that feature played out and how it affected federation, it seems like it was a mistake.
   
   Since Pleroma populates TWKN with posts from people that someone on the server was following, and posts it saw a reference to, before it was just likes, reposts, replies, so it was all stuff that there was a good chance someone on your server wanted to see. This was brilliant, it's possibly my favorite feature, not because it was technically difficult, but because it required careful thinking and insight. It made TWKN better and didn't require anything complicated, no stupid machine learning dystopia, just a small amount of code to build a human-driven feature. When I saw "Likes federate in Pleroma", it made me really impressed with lain, right, like it takes a good head to come up with shit like that. Most programmers just bash code out and don't think about second-order effects, they think about individual features instead of how this sort of thing plays out in the broader system.
   
   The reactions are an activity that creates a reference to a post that someone possibly *didn't* want to see, but also didn't want to expend the effort to reply to. So someone dumps a bunch of wrenches or red Xs over a big pile of posts that they hated seeing on TWKN, those posts (and the threads they are in) all federate to the servers where someone was following Eris^Wbot^Wthe person spamming reactions. It effectively undoes the cool feature. Posts that were undesirable or contentious would federate before, but because people won't usually click "like" or "repost" on something that they hate, and there's a practical limit to how many posts you can reply to, most posts that federated that way were posts that people on the server wanted to see, but it is very low-effort to just wrench 50 posts.
   
   I can't undo that: other servers still send EmojiReactions to FSE and FSE still processes them, even if it rejects them or turns them into Likes or something. But I can avoid contributing to the problem for servers that have someone following FSE and avoid having to deal with the feature locally.
   
   ...Plus if you send too many EmojiReact messages, Opal will sue you.
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