PieFedeology - Ideological Purity in PieFed
PieFed has done it once again, this time adding 'warning' labels for opposing ideological perspectives, well at least one; Can't find any warnings for fascism or capitalism 🤔
This can be demonstrated here: https://piefed.social/c/globalnews/p/1697164/sudan-civil-war-spills-over-into-neighboring-chad-peoples-dispatch
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I think Rimu has tied this warning to the peoplesdispatch.org domain. I think this is a custom thing he did to his instance, because I didn’t find it in the PieFed codebase.
[ETA: it is in the codebase, in a separate repo].[ETA: I’m told that no specific site warnings are baked into the code, just the feature is. For site blocks, there is an optional default list of domains, which I’m told contains only far-right/fascist sites.]I don’t think People’s Dispatch is even Marxist-Leninist. I think it’s an international anti-imperialist media site. But I wouldn’t assume Rimu could explain the difference or care that there is one. Maybe all anti-imperialists are tankies to him.
The blocked domains are, the ones with a warning like in the screenshot are configured on a per-instance basis
Ah, thanks. If the default blocklist only contains heinous sites, then I have no issues worth mentioning with this aspect of the code.
I mean it at least includes wikileaks.org, but I don't think anyone is gonna audit 3000 domains anytime soon.
It being in a separate repo is great but worse if not visible anywhere. Especially as it's just an install step calling it something completely different.
Will they have a warning label for Zionist outlets?
Nah but they have some for theintercept and electronicintifada ...
Unsurprisingly not currently. Based on current behavior and responses doubtful in future
https://lemmy.ml/comment/25577925
Yeah. My question was not a serious one. I knew the answer.
Are you sure this is a "warning"? /s
Sounds like an indicator of quality, instead. Even the icon is in red, the color of hope.
This is a strong and succinct argument, cheers.
We need peoplesdispatch.org I think it's valuable thing to have a take on events from their angle. Yet it needs to be read with an understanding that they have an angle. Using the warning icon to provide that understanding is clunky and wasn't really intended for that purpose. There has been some drift in the usage away from the original idea behind the feature.
One day it might be good to have a different icon for providing context, separate from providing warnings.
Will you provide context for state run Zionist propaganda like the BBC?
Or other ones like radio free Asia?
::: spoiler Title Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! :::
It's just an armband. You know. To help with context.
All the bullshit they say about silencing and 1984 is as always, a classic case of projection.
Please enlighten us on where we should be getting the full objective unbiased reality from, the New York Times maybe? God forbid a media takes a pro working class / global south bias instead of the usual neoliberal status quo ideology. Call them out on it and they'll deny they even follow any ideology, they're just being Objective™.
Two years ago, Lemmy.world tried a similar move with their MediaBiasFactCheck bot. It was soundly rejected by the community, and they finally relented after weeks of outcry. Why is @Rimu putting us through this again?
The take away was make it embedded everywhere rather than a bot addition
The takeaway was it fucking sucked and I hated it.
Media Bias Fact Check - Automation - Lemmy.World
The whole piefed thing has to be a bit right?
It's right in the name. Fed.
I mean... Same for Fediverse, and Federation?
or Federal agent
I understood the reference, but if we're going by that logic, the Fediverse itself is a federal ploy.
You never know...
Then Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey, Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Loops, Peertube, all made from disparate developers from around the world, are all one US Federal plot?
Why would they prefer a decentralized, difficult to control social media network over the centralized ones that are already entirely under the control of right-wing billionaires?
No one said they prefer it, but they’re also not going to ignore it, because they want to maintain their dominance of the public discourse. Previously. Previously. Previously.
Though with that said, I doubt PieFed is an op. Some people are so propagandized that they’ll do the work for free and without any direct involvement. Some people are just that “patriotic”.1
Controlled opposition of course. The prevailing ideology can reinforce and sustain itself anywhere, even in a completely decentralized media environment. Dissenting opinions can be safely relegated to smaller venues while liberal orthodoxy prevails in the more visible ones. Thus, reddit is recreated.
However, don't read too far into this, I was basically just making a joke about how "piefed" has "fed" in it.
If I hadn't given the instance to someone else, I would have considered leaving a community note on Rimu's user page with a red exclamation mark saying "this user is a complete idiot".
I wish lemmy admins could take the code away from these dorks.
I'm happy to explain. You could have just asked, though.
During initial installation PieFed downloads a big list of 3000 right-wing domains from https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon and blocks them all. Admins can unblock them if they want but they would need to do them individually so I bet none do.
The list includes things like fox news, breitbart, etc. Before starting work on PieFed I spent 3? years studying right wing disinformation - qanon, antivax, all that and that blocklist is an output from that. Every site on that list was reviewed personally.
So.
Additionally, I have manually added these warnings (not blocks) onto some domains, for piefed.social only. You can download a list of those warnings from https://join.piefed.social/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/warnings.ods
Most of them are tabloids, AI slop farms and a handful are authoritarian government mouthpieces.
So there's 3000 right wing sites that simply can't be linked to and 47 sites with warnings, about 10% of which are left wing. There's no need to warn for fascism because posts that link to them are not displayed in the first place.
There's an ideological slant to PieFed for sure, and it's very much in favor of the left. That could be why maga.place and lemmychan.org use Lemmy and not PieFed.
I'll take another look at peoplesdispatch and see if there's a less triggering warnings I can put on it.
PieFed bakes in preferences against left wing groups, and you've been launching a crusade against anarchist instances lately. As much as you believe yourself to be left, you've done your best to left-punch wherever you can, and have unilaterally made decisions greatly impacting the functionality of PieFed to suit your overwhelmingly liberal views. This isn't even getting into how you agree with racist conspiracy theories like the idea that China is kidnapping people for organ harvesting.
Also, it's nice that you admit that PieFed has an ideological slant and that you do develop PieFed with that in mind, socsa swore up and down that that wasn't the case for some reason.
Also, since Rimu permabanned me from Piefed.social at PugJesus' behest after I critiqued PJ's views from the left, they won't see my comment, sadly.
It's also very telling they named it noqanon.
While sounds great weird that would trigger ml warnings as no one would consider qanon that
Yep, Rimu does the tactic of conflating the left and the right to make their position as a right-wing liberal seem to be left. It's just rehashed horseshoe theory bullshit.
The noqanon list and the OP warning sign are two different things.
The first is a default url blocklist that gets pulled on first start of a Piefed instance and which contains extreme right-wing and mis-information outlets.
The domain warning sign mentioned in OP is a separate list only manually added to the piefed.social flagship instance.
This gets back to how poorly designed piefed is and rimus explanations.
The domain block list having more than qanon and being part of the install while not saying anything about what it actually brings in is poor design choice. Along with it apparently only being disabled by individually checking the list in the ui.
Rimu made it sound like they were connected in the qanon repo
To heap insult on top of injury, Rimu has now unilaterally, and without any notification (to anyone it would appear), chosen to silently suppress anarchist.nexus and quokk.au from appearing in the PieFed.Social instance chooser. So, just more of the same old trolling and drama farming from him that we have been getting for weeks now.
vs
pughitler is a mod on piefed.social and nobody seems to care about his abusive behavior.
rimu gets temporarily banned for 'emulating a zionist' and now suddenly it's a priority to address moderator abuse... via censorship
incredible
Don't you dare call out his actions, but he'll gladly smear you over his private kingdoms where you can't defend yourself.
Rimu is single handedly generating so much misinformation and nonsense that essentially anyone else who works on Piefed alongside of him is becoming radioactive. Not sure how much I want to trust someone who is willing to help further Rimu's behavior. Working on Piefed used to be a bullet point and it is rapidly turning into an asterisk.
I'm sure it's been in the pipeline a while but the instance silencing feature being added is great timing
Oh they could have asked, could they? Like you asked before spreading disinfo about our instance using GenAI for moderation?
Are we supposed to bring back the whole history every time Rimu comments anywhere?
Now, listen, db0: we've discussed a lot in the past, you know I like what you do, I support you and your instance most of the time. But that's also true for Rimu and Piefed. I think it's pointless to try to count points and see who was wrong when by how much. From my perspective, there were issues from all sides during that whole story.
Bringing it up every time anyone involved comments somewhere doesn't seem relevant, and will just start another round of "you were wrong", "I was wrong because you were wrong" etc. It can be endless, and most of the people are tired of that whole story.
Take care.
Also:
We have bent over backwards to de-escalate the situation, both with L.W. and with Rimu. Our admins have stepped down. People changed their usernames. Our admins overruled our mods. Literally creating tension within our instance to maintain relations with the larger fediverse. On the other hand, rimu's deliberate disinfo is still up to this day, without any statements from our team, or correction to their blatant lies. They've even blocked people calling them out, so piefed users can't see this criticism. So don't try to "both sides" me.
When he's being hypocritical AF about people "could have just asked", then yes I think I will.
Talk about underplaying the situation...
Rimu spread purposeful disinfo. He never "just asked". He ignored comments from our admins explicitly telling him he's wrong, because it went against his narrative. Was purposefully uncharitable so he could spin it as badly as possible. Crossposted to Mastodon in an attempt to initiate a pile-on. I could go on...
Idk, sounds to me like you're equally ignoring comments from other parties telling you you're wrong because it goes against your narrative too. "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" is hardly an argument.
That's why this is a slugfest: "You're wrong! "No, you're wrong!" "No, we told you you're wrong!" "Your telling me that I was wrong was also wrong!"
Reasserting conflicting claims like they're facts isn't worth jack shit.
Except they acted accountably and made efforts to fix the other sides grievances even if they didn’t agree.
Something that has not been returned and has only been met with increasing hostility.
I admit I don't know the whole story. I don't know what evidence was produced to support the LLM claim and what efforts were made.
The few comments I read here seemed like some attempt to reconcile were made but fell apart. I can't and don't want to point fingers one way or the other, personal bias notwithstanding.
I just wanted to point out "he said something even though we said it's wrong" isn't a particularly strong argument. That's just one party's word against the other's.
If you're going for the whole history don't forget the nazi smear by some german troll and rimu trying to paint db0 as uniquely ban-happy. Like this has been a busy 10 days or so with shots fired on the FAF day-after-day, this is not history yet but an ongoing barrage from their POV. Also
there was no LLM moderation, and rimu knew this before making his post^[https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42212552/20361800]
Until Rimu stops acting like this and learns better, yeah.
Plus there's rimu trying to tie lemmy as right wing (to maga and 4chan clones) because they used it as a platform...
Actually rimu is perfect fit with the lemmy.world admins and mods. Try to do the but are just incredibly terrible at messaging.
Yes, it's very important to remind people what sort of a troll Rimu really is.
The omissions in this timeline about brigading sockpuppets and falsified nazi smears...
But to list that timeline and act as though this is out of context or unrelated to an ongoing crashout... we are reaching some Hasan's dog collar level of bullshit.
You think defederating because they call for death upon Zionists is a win?
Apparently piefed smuggles in domains from a completely different repo that clearly isn't just "right-wing domains"^[https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon/blob/master/sources/Fake%20news/README.md] and it requires an admin to unblock them all individually.
so it is a personal semi-hardcoded blocklist, that requires an admin to go through and re-vet every site individually to see if they agree with your assessment or not.
lol. lmao even, you put a warning on electronicintifada.net like come on now
It's not smuggled, during initial setup when installing the blocklist it prints this on the screen:
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanonIf I saw this, I would not assume that Gawker, WikiLeaks, or FOX Weather would be included in a blocklist called "No-QAnon". The list itself might not be smuggled, but it's not accurately representing itself either. If it has simply evolved over time, then it needs to be renamed or split into separate blocklists.
Additionally, if someone installing this changes their mind or realizes that what they received is not what they expected, then requiring them to either directly modify the database or click "remove" over 3000 times is arguably a dark pattern.
The design is very human...
To clarify: you say that by default all PieFed instances don't even allow to link resources considered "right-wing", without an easy way to disable such anti-feature?
If so, it's basically a centralized point for censorship in a decentralized system, which is very antithetical to the spirit of the Fediverse and is something even the very left Lemmy devs prefer to avoid. I see it being very detrimental in its own right.
Shouldn't it be an offered setting instead? Like, "if you want your instance to avoid certain topics, here are filter lists to freely enable or disable"?
Much can be said about the definition of left and the way Marxists you are addressing don't see "liberal" as "left" to begin with.
What matters, though, is that you end up projecting a certain personal, even if somewhat educated, bias onto both PieFed as a project (banning right-wing outlets from even being linked to, globally), and the flagship instance (making warnings about Marxist-inclined outlets). This is very unwelcome for many, myself included, and, as previously mentioned, antithetical to what Fediverse is and what it stands for.
It depends on your definition of easy. Here is the admin UI for unbanning domains.
Also they can go into the database and empty the
domaintable.Easy as in "there is a UI button/switch during initial setup". Essentially, not banning all these domains should be equally as easy as banning them.
I don't believe software can be neutral. By making banning them equally easy as not, we're saying that those choices are of equal worth - doing that is taking a side and it's the side of giving fascists an easier way in. Nope! That's how Mastodon gets forked into Truth Social.
Interesting how this thread started out about me being too right wing and now for other people it's about me being too left wing. Heh.
Can't please everyone and I'm not trying to.
It's not about that, really. You'll always be too left for some and too right for others. The problem is a single person, regardless of their views, policing what others get to see or not to see, on all instances, globally.
Decentralization of power is the name of the game for the Fediverse - that's why most people are here in the first place. They escaped Reddit, with its sweeping bans over the "wrong" opinions. They escaped Xitter, with a megalomaniac policing what everyone can say. They are tired of this, they don't need this, they despise this.
You are the developer of a leading Threadiverse software. You contribute heavily to this world, and your decisions affect not only your project - they ripple through the whole thing. With an open heart, I call you to be open with the community you serve, and to give them what they need - open choice. Stripping them of that undermines trust in Threadiverse, tramples the spirit of freedom and tinkering, and brings drama and division instead.
If you are genuinely concerned about right-wing folks stepping in to destroy the Threadiverse - look around. Lemmy, Mbin have no guardrails, they are open to everyone - and yet, the whole right wing is like two obscure instances, barely known or accessible. Instance admins take great care to curate their instances and purge such spaces, and users double this. The very nature of Threadiverse - a place for the people - makes the very people you align with gravitate towards it. And they know full well what worth there is in each choice.
The reason the decisions of yours got so much resonance is exactly because people care. They care about PieFed, and, at the same time, they care about Threadiverse. They enjoy your work, and it brings unique developments not seen elsewhere. But if it keeps on these rails, as an ideological and opinionated project, it risks falling out of favor and into obscurity. None of us want that, and so, we call again: please, open PieFed for choice. You may suggest blocklists, even offer them as default - just don't bake them in and make a clear option for opt-out. Recognize some people need to make this choice. Hopefully, you trust your very own community to do what's right.
Thank you for that, I'll think about it.
Jesus, some folks so revved up they can't stop brigading :D
Thank you!
Wait so there is nothing in the code to check if the list on that repo got updated since after the setup? Are the admins supposed to maintain their own list or not?
::: spoiler Here is the (piefed.social only) warnlist in readable format
:::
Why isn't BBC listed as "British propaganda?" Same with many other western propaganda outlets. It seems like when leftists do it, it's propaganda, but when the west does it it's mostly fine for Rimu.
Bro my "left" leaning dev blocking all enemies of USA. If we put on a map only the highlight ones are permitted:
I'm assuming Rimu meant the left wing of fascism, not in general lol
::: spoiler Reformated it as a table
🤦🏽
That seems to be about the other list. The noqanon one.
I'm not sure. The post was about this list and the warning about a supposed Marxist-Leninist web. How an antifascist list has been created is unrelated, then, the logical conclusion is that was created at the same time or that was a bad faith and manipulative answer.
I love how it's basically a list of all the mainstream non western outlets.
Why is the intercept on there??
Who knows? Only Rimu. Maybe because they blew up the Paper of Record’s disinformation piece that manufactured consent for genocide.
Edit to add (and mentioned recently):
Disputing genocide accusations that the imperial core flings on its enemies, though, that’s his “red line.”
But why? I don't understand why you want to make your software politically charged. I'm left leaning, but I believe in free speech for all. This makes piefed a censored platform by default. You are manufacturing an echo chamber.
The difference between a proprietary, politically charged, censored echo chamber and an open source "do whatever you want" platform should be obvious though.
Free speech is about the right to say what you want, meaning the government isn't supposed to repress you for it, but it doesn't guarantee the opportunity to do so on other people's private platforms. However, in this case, you're free to host your own platform where you can say what you want.
As an aside, I'd like to point out the "Paradox of Tolerance" and the proposed resolutions: If you're an advocate for free speech, extending that freedom to those seeking to undermine it empowers them to use it against that freedom. That way, "free speech for all" is a good intention paving the road to authoritarian hell.
Hence, it is reasonable to deny a platform for those hostile to your principle. Popper frames it as a form of self-defense, to compromise part of the principle to protect the rest. Others frame it as a social contract of mutual respect, whereby the people violating it also forfeit their own right to demand it.
Either way, if "free speech for all" is a self-defeating principle, an open society needs to accept some measure of illiberty for its enemies if it is to be defensible.
Yeah, but let's take a step back for a moment here and look at how the Fediverse is run by people. These communities and instances are all equipped to take action, moderate, curate, and create.
The people on the Fediverse are well equipped to grapple with the Paradox of Intolerance in a public forum without the walls listening in and making decisions about doors.
I'm not sure what you mean with "walls listening in" when we're talking about a public forum, but the doors are perfectly openable. As the creator stated elsewhere, you can unban individual pages or delete the whole list. The "decision" is more like a suggestion.
I understand you'd rather not have that suggestion preconfigured. I personally see no harm in it.
What I mean is the code infrastructure of the public forum doesn't need to do what the users operating the platform do. These sorts of flags and tags for judgements on commentary have a direct impact on interactions between users, which is the door part of analogy.
Admin, my admin!
I don't want fascists to benefit from my work. But it's FOSS, so anyone can download and install it, so I made it extremely unattractive to fascists.
There are plenty of other places where people can have "free speech".
Facebook, or reddit, for example. /s
Heh, this puts Piefed in the same basket as Reddit, Facebook etc. for the same reasons you dislike them.
You can't fork Reddit or Facebook and then federate with them.
Pievolution is a Piefed forks that removes this feature (as well ad other stuff)
https://codeberg.org/Situation0262/Pievolution
It's not completely ready yet.
By the way, thank you for your work on lazysoci.al
There's an archive of an old version of Reddit's code available on Github, so theoretically you can fork it, just not the latest version.
And nobody used that as a Reddit alternative, due to missing the federation aspect.
What I should have said above is: you can fork Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, use that fork on an instance and connect to the Fediverse. That's the major difference with Reddit or Facebook.
I mean, you can just add the federation aspect. It's opensource, the code is at your fingertips to change as you please.
Perfect way of putting it: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/
Fork PieFed and remove the 4 lines of code involved in doing this, then. See cli.py, line 160.
IDGAF.
I've rarely seen a crashout so spectacular. Piefed going from the new darling to pariah software in the blink of an eye.
Can you imagine the shitstorm MOG would have raised if the same blocklist was hardcoded in lemmy?
MOG was upset that Lemmy had a slur filter for a time, they absolutely would crash out if Lemmy devs did anything near this.
You're the single biggest troll in the fediverse. Congrats on the dedication to the bit you're doing.
Just log off, please. Nobody likes this shit
Cute, but not enough, not by a mile. Calling Piefed "left-leaning" is a LARP at best.
You’re treating these neoliberal interpretations of bias as some sort of intellectual debate to "inform" folks, instead of the existential threat it is to the nature of online discourse.
Sure, left-wing discussions are "allowed" as long as they wear their scarlet letter and stay in the ghetto where we put them.
Guess some of it rubbed off.
For MLs, leftists are never left enough.
“There’s and ideological slant to PieFed for sure”
Slant?!?! It’s a giant goddamn left-wing circle jerk propaganda machine 🤣
PieFed isn't left wing, it's overwhelmingly liberal.
It definitely isn’t lol. Banning all right wing sources while allowing left wing really screams liberalism over left wing lol.
Many of the "right-wing sources" are left wing sources that Rimu wants to drag as right-wing, and left wing sources get a warning while liberal ones do not.