According to Rimu, the main developer of PieFed, all PieFed instances come with a 3000-long block list of resources that cannot be linked to. These include all sorts of right-wing outlets. There is no easy opt-out, forcing existing instances to follow the blocklist.
The flagship PieFed instance also rolled out a feature marking various other sorts of outlets - among them, resources considered AI slop and Marxist outlets. These are specific to piefed.social.
Related discussion: https://piefed.social/comment/11254679
Why YSK: Many users have hard time choosing between Lemmy, PieFed, and Kbin/Mbin. Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives. Users that are right-wing, Marxist, or generally concerned about global censorship of the Fedi-/Threadiverse, might opt for other options instead.
Note: The post is only meant to inform users of the potentially important differences between Threadiverse platforms. Any ideologically charged discussions are better left in the respective topic.
I need to tack on a moderator blurb to this post. I received a report from Rimu that this post doxxed them. While it does appear the original post contained Rimu’s full name, I do not believe this qualifies as doxxing.
Posting someone’s full name typically would be doxxing, but Rimu has completely subverted their own expectation of privacy by publicly linking their full name with their development work on Piefed. Their username is even their real first name. I do not believe you can doxx someone who already did it to themselves.
This information is publicly available, and it was made so by Rimu themselves.
Not only is this not doxxing but under these circumstances it smacks of a half hearted attempt at censorship. Rimu made themselves a public figure. You cannot post their address, or other personal information, but their name is fair game by their own choice.
Indeed, removing his full name is more of a good faith act. I don’t think much is to be achieved by leaving it anyway, so if someone is so discomforted by it that they ask for the removal - alright, I will. After all, we all need to remain good neighbors around here.
But, as you said, leaving your full name out in public and then trying to make it never see the light on the Threadiverse specifically is very inconsistent, and will likely fail at some point.
We really need an alternative to Lemmy and piefed for the threadiverse.
People are not children who need child locks put on their internet.
Except it seems like we do since these platforms have propagandized an entire generation towards far right ideologies.
So join a different instance or deploy your own server. We don’t need a third alternative. All are interconnected via ActivityPub, so you can choose what blocks you want, who you want to federate with, etc.
If you’re choosing to sign up on someone’s instance you’re choosing to agree to how they’re managing it.
That’s frankly why I like Lemmy.zip, the only time they’ve defederated is for a technical issue was was causing the servers to crash. Beyond that, I’m treated like an adult capable of making my own choices of which instances I want to block or interact with.
i know right, tankies love to say they are being censored like CONSERVATIVES, but they would censor you in return without a single thought.
Neither Lemmy nor PieFed puts locks on anything, other than what an instance’s admins choose to put on them. One might try to argue that PieFed’s optional default blocklist is a bridge too far, but that’s about it.
Since you proclaim to be a Leftist, what’s wrong with Lemmy?
Mbin exists, but it never seems to get as much attention :/
what are the differences? i signed up with this instance but am still learning.
Piefed is a fork of Lemmy I believe, and has a bit more features, but by and large the two are the same. Just different interfaces overall, and some different communities.
Piefed isn’t a fork of Lemmy, it’s completely independent code. They just speak the same language.
so they’re both hosts that serve and share content using the same protocol?
Same backend, different frontend
gotcha. thx.
No they are different backends, they just use the same protocol.
Teseraract, Photon, and Mlmym are different frontends for Lemmy.
PieFed has completely separate frontend and backend code from Lemmy’s code.
Yes they are completely different front and backends but they use the same protocol (ActivityPub).
the list for the curious. I don’t mind if rimu wants to maintain a default blocklist, if I maintained my own fediverse app I would probably make something similar, based on my own preferences, to cut down on the mod work. If you want your piefed instance to allow botfarm produce, disable the blocklist or just fork it and live your dream.
For those who really like the idea of blocking the sites on that list, the linked github repo also has it formatted for pihole and the like.
Dang I gotta show Rimu the American owned Canadian blight known as Post Media. Everything they own should be on there.
Who is rimu
He’s the maintainer for piefed.
Why does he post on powertrippingbastards or is that a different rimu
Dunno. I think it’s the same guy.
The fact that it includes wikileaks tells me everything I need to know.
Remember when they didn’t release the rnc emails they hacked, but did release the dnc’s? Tell me why that is you think. Be honest with yourself.
When did the definition of misinformation expand to include saying true things? Should we block the Epstein files from being posted because only part of them has been released?
I notice you didn’t answer the question.
Because it doesn’t matter.
A source that provides exclusive, true information about politicians, but that also has a political bias, is not something that should be blocked outright as though it were misinformation. Otherwise you’d have to block just about every source.
I mean, hell. I sometimes watch John Oliver despite disagreeing with some of his politics and considering him to present a biased or incomplete picture of certain subjects, because I sometimes learn about true things I would not have otherwise been informed about. I’ll criticize him, but I’m not going to call for him to be blocked, especially not in the code like this.
At a certain point, you’re just censoring proven facts, just on the basis of who said them.
Yes, because Fox News is known for their facts. (No one mention the court case.)
Who was talking about Fox News? I thought we were discussing WikiLeaks.
I notice you haven’t apologized for removing the people calling out bad faith users on .world but didn’t remove the people spreading misinfo about the people calling out bad faith users.
It enters the realm of mis-, even disinformation when true statements that contradict a narrative are actively repressed.
Selective truth can easily be a lie.
What is and isn’t selective depends on your perspective. You’re moving into the question of what counts as relevant and important, which is inherently ideological.
If country A launches a missile at country B, then it’s probably relevant if country B launched a missile yesterday, which would frame country A as retaliating. But if country A launched a missile a week ago, do you also include that? What about actions from a year or more ago? What about inflammatory rhetoric, or broken promises? What about differences in military might, or economic interests like oil?
Every source has to make decisions about what to include and what not to include, and there’s no objective basis to do so. To try to apply the label of “misinformation” in that context is just censoring narratives and perspectives that are out of line with your own.
I could easily point out the biased reporting of The New York Times on various issues like Palestine or trans people (which in several cases have gone into overt misinformation). But I’d rather be able to see and discuss that source while understanding what it’s biases are, rather than writing it off completely and potentially missing out on actual information. You don’t just block every source you disagree with.
Sometimes I feel like liberals fundamentally misunderstand how sources work, sorting them into “good” or “bad” and leaving no room for nuance. Sources can be reliable about one thing but not another, and there’s no such thing as a source with no bias.
Any source on this?
No I don’t, would you mind linking a citation on this claim?
That it recognizes Russian state media as Conservative disinformation and propaganda? Yeah, me too.
I scrolled the list until about the P, at which point I accidentally tapped on the top portion of my screen and went all the way back up.
Notably the block list includes Harry Potter affiliated sites, Fox News, and Info Wars.
Everything else pretty much just looks like slop or are sources I’ve NEVER heard of. Some were local papers, I think? But none that I would have recognized immediately.
This really seems like a mountain made out of a molehill.
Pravada’s domains were on there which is one I was looking for. I didn’t see South China Morning Post on the list, which is unfortunate; otherwise though, I think it’s a solid list.
It will be an absolute nightmare keeping it up, given how quickly bad-faith actors are setting up fake local and regional news outlets.
This really seems like a mountain made out of a molehill.
unless you are interested in spreading the same kind of ideas that are on those sites, like IDK, CCP propaganda, or far right deals, or transphobia.
There are tons of spam factories that pose as local newspapers. The first one that comes to mind is the Denver Guardian, which gained brief notoriety during Trump’s rise to power. But there are a million of them, probably literally. They are easy to make and they are easy to launder through social media bot networks.
most of those fake local ‘news’ farms are spouting far-right or extremist views.
Yeah, I saw some sources for a city local to me, but they didn’t match for our actual local paper or papers.
Which was weird.
That explains a lot.
Why block InfoWars? Tim Heidecker is a treasure.
/s
It’s a molehill that’s threatening to become a mountain. I wouldn’t trust I always agree with this person.
Not a good look. I can empathize with not wanting right wing propaganda machines to profit from your work but it should at least be opt in and not curated by a single person.
Feel free to self-host and empty the blocklist. As for the far-left and far-right, they love censorship.
What’s the far-left?
It’s an enormous cult of political loonies
Can’t call conservatives retarded or leftist mods will delete the comment
the horror
Far-left politics are politics further to the left on the political spectrum than the standard political left. The far-left encompasses a wide range of heterogeneous ideologies, including anarchism, communism, and Marxism; it includes groups that advocate for revolutionary socialism and related communist ideologies, as well as anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation. The modern far-left distinguishes itself from social democracy through its inherent opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While anarchist strains of far-left thought are anti-authoritarian in nature, and most far-left schools of thought aim at a classless, stateless society, Leninist-led revolutions have imposed authoritarian rule in practice.
Sounds good tbh. Well, except for the authoritarian bullshit of course.
‘Authoritarian’ is a meaningless buzzword. There is no definition of it that includes ‘authoritarian’ countries while excluding non’authoritarian’ countries.
Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.
Pretty succinct actually.
Cool, so China, Cuba, Russia isn’t authoritarian?
Of course they are authoritarian.
The modern far-left distinguishes itself from social democracy through its inherent opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While anarchist strains of far-left thought are anti-authoritarian in nature, and most far-left schools of thought aim at a classless, stateless society
Terrifying!
Thankfully they’re too busy being more-far-left than the other guy to actually organize
It’s interesting that a developer thinks they have authority over other people’s instances, while using it to block authoritarian discourse (both right wing and m-l).
What part of having a blocklist for your own instance is asserting authority over other instances?
It’s not for one instance. PieFed’s block list can only be edited by changing the source code. I’m more than in favor if giving instance owners control over their server. If said list was just a default, easily editable from the user (admin) interface, that would be OK. But as it is, it’s an attempt to exert control over other people’s servers, no ifs or buts about it.
Here is the user interface for unblocking:
Oh, nice! It’s good to see progress. So this line from OP:
there is no easy opt-out
Is outdated? All 3k+ addresses can be removed from this interface?
If they want to click 3000 buttons, yes. These buttons are not new functionality, it’s been like that since the beginning.
Easier just to empty the relevant database table! It’s called ‘domain’ if anyone in the future finds this.
citation needed. no one has provided evidence of that and i highly doubt it simply due to the multiple claims by individuals here crying foul claiming multiple versions of how that block list is stored. not to mention, you know, it’d need to be updated periodically.
The commenter is a bit confused. There are two distinct things at play.
This post is about the domain blocklist, which is not mandatory on install—though most new instances choose it—and can be removed by an admin with either the patience or the database skill to remove it.
The other thing at play is the hard-coded list of banned fediverse instances, which are automatically added to the federation blocklist on new instances. These can also be removed by an admin. The list contains far-right & outright fascist instances, threads.com, and two socialist instances: Hexbear & Lemmygrad.
[Edited to fix link.]
smile I assume most of the individuals crying foul here are just generally confused about many things.
we know “tankies” and conservatives cry about being silenced, about not able to produce misinformation and disinformation.
My solution: make blocklists subscription-based. I don’t mean for money, though like most of the Fediverse, donations would be accepted.
What I mean is, there’d be an independent site that maintains a list of everything that could be blocked with keywords that specify why you might want to block it. People who run instances can make a custom, dynamic block list based on keywords that they want to block.
Say we have a tag, “paedo shit.” I suppose most people would want to block that.
But say we also have a tag, “Zionist.” So some instance would block that. Others wouldn’t.
Now say you’re running some site, you go to this site and see you’re flagged as Zionist. You don’t think you are, so you contest it with your reasoning. This opens a thread and anyone can comment on it.
Now when you go to block all “Zionist” sources, you have an option to also include all “contested” sources as well. If you say yes, it doesn’t matter what they say. You’re taking the source repository at their word. If you say no, you are presented with the sources that have contested it, and you can read the threads, and add or exclude them as you like.
How is this a bad plan? (In the words of my boy Luis Guzman from The Count of Monte Cristo (2002, Kevin Reynolds))
sounds like exactly what piefied did, they provide a default set of sites and you’re free to adjust them on your instance as you feel.
Adding a check for the latests posts and the one flagged and see if any of those are blacklisted would mark the instance as not reliable. If 24 hours later the links aren’t down it gets an automatic block.
What always pissed me off was the general block of green texts, which I find funny. Especially because it took several months until I got to know why and how they are blocked exactly.
On the contrary I found it fucking weird how the fediverse loves reposting 4chan screenshots.
I think a lot of sites associated with terrorists are blocked in lot of places…
Funny, I blocked your positivity comm because I kept seeing right wing astro turfers posting in your comms as a way to call out serial down voters and do more trolling than positivity. It’s no surprise we take different approaches to moderation.
I joined piefed to have a healthier experience with my social media and go figure removing a lot of right wing bullshit does wonders!
My main issue with this actually is its controlled at the instance level. I actually have said I am fine with a default block list as long as it can be changed later. Its understandable that someone having an instance would want a good default experience form their perspective and I can even see it at the code level in this case. I have a few caveats though that make it troublesome for me. One it should be highly advertised or easy to peruse and change. Bigger though is as a user I want as much as possible to be controllable at the user level. So I want to be able to reverse this for myself. I completely understand defederation for legal reasons and the ideal instance for me would deferederat based on that, but I would completely appreciate a default block list for my user that I could then go through and revers if I cared to. I was actually aware of this and do intend to get off my tuckus and move instances because I can’t control the blocks but Im lazy and honestly I have no real incentive to unblock any of these but rather on philosophical grounds want the ability to do so. Im kinda hoping the software will evolve to allow a more direct user control like that before I move but its been awhile and I sorta doubt at this point that is going to happen.
No, very probably not all PieFed instances, and AFAIK the socialist sites are not in that list of defaults.
If you’re going to make public accusations, please don’t sabotage yourself by making incorrect or imprecise claims.
Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives.
There’s no reason to think that. I’d argue that Lemmygrad is more curated and politically uniform than any PieFed instance is.
Politically uniform means right-wing and liberal to USAmericans
this sentence makes no sense in this context
I tried initially and it was too opinionated for me so I switched out. Turns out it’s even more opinionated than I’d expected.
Lol @ politically uniform experience
Oh no, so when I eventually set up my own piefed instance, I’ll have to spend ten more minutes then initially expected? That’s awful.
You’re going to go through several thousands of links in ten minutes all to… maybe have a slightly less reddit like experience?
It takes you more than 10 minutes to run a db transaction?
…Do you think that is auditing a list?
Do you know what auditing is?
No, the physical action of removing things you already know from a list that may or may not include them is not the problem. No one has claimed it is.
What is the problem is going through the list, thousands of entries, and finding out if they’re accurate to what has been claimed. That take going to every single site you don’t necessarily recognize, which for a list of thousands will be thousands, and doing even the bare minimum of research.
Why would you audit the list? Just remove it lol
Cool, now you can be spammed by scam sites. Since its the same list.
So you’re starting from zero. Congrats. Hope your instance is never, ever actually populated otherwise your entire experience hosting the instance will be spent doing moderation.
Lmao okay, so how would you have it handled then?
Blocklist? Dystopian.
No blocklist? Spam city.
Enlighten us.
Don’t offer it by default. Offer a feature. Then, separately entirely from the project, offer a block list or set of block lists. Have that extra step.
Nearly all software users, and yes especially self-hosting server admins, use default settings. By declaring yourself as the arbiter of all things bad and including it by default, you have changed your software from a neutral party, to one that is the arbiter of truth that requires effort to turn off, and that’s not something most are going to do.
Thus whatever you say becomes the majority opinion. This isn’t a new or surprising opinion btw, it’s the literal reason the DMCA has section 230 in the US, and all countries have something similar for platforms, scientific journals, and news organizations.
