YSK All PieFed instances block links to "right-wing" sources by default
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
most of those fake local 'news' farms are spouting far-right or extremist views.
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.
Why block InfoWars? Tim Heidecker is a treasure.
/s
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.
It's a molehill that's threatening to become a mountain. I wouldn't trust I always agree with this person.
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.
The fact that it includes wikileaks tells me everything I need to know.
That it recognizes Russian state media as Conservative disinformation and propaganda? Yeah, me too.
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.
No I don't, would you mind linking a citation on this claim?
Any source on this?
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?
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.
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.
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 right wing has ass fucked the entire world into the ground, I say good riddance.
Yeah but, know your enemy and all that
We know the enemy.
We know every unoriginal comment, trick, and bullshit they do, because they have repeated them over and over again for decades.
We don't have to keep giving them the false legitimacy of equal time or attention.
If I want to point something out that a shithole site is promoting, I don't need admin to put up a baby gate so I can't talk about it. I don't know how that relates to legitimizing anything.
You can literally just say :shitholesite said "very evil shit". No need to feed clicks to their website.
Sounds like what a right-wing dipshit would say.
How so? Do we even have cons on lemmy?
The gatekeeping is to take away a cornerstone of misinformation. If brigading and manipulation didn't work the world wouldn't be in the state it is today. I run into conservatives frequently, even the question is disingenuous.
So I want to link to things idiots on reddit r/con are saying to point out a trend in right wing media, and that makes it spreading disinfo?
I don't trust you as the "misinformation decider", heaven forbid.
https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon/blob/master/domains.txt includes... wikileaks.org 🤦
afaik WikiLeaks still enjoys a spotless accuracy record and obviously has never promoted QAnon.
The fact that some QAnon promoters have themselves cited some WikiLeaks publications is, in my opinion at least, not a reason to prohibit linking to WikiLeaks (a site which hasn't published anything new recently but continues to host a massive archive of public interest documents).
I expected to see thegrayzone.com and was not disappointed.
They scored yet another vindication this week, this time on the OPCW cover-up of the 2018 Douma, Syria false-flag attack.
Assange cozyed up to Trump during his first presidency (despite, you know, the assassination attempts by the US).Additionally while Wikileaks has never published any proven false information, they have left out information on purpose. During the 2016 election Wikileaks received information on both Clinton and Trump, but primarily published information making Clinton look worse while not publishing information they received on Trump and the republican party.This editorializing is why they've fallen out of favor over the last decade, again despite not publishing anything known to be false; they chose to withhold information.This was liberal misinformation, I apologize.
citation needed
Sorry the liberal replying made me actually look this up and it turns out it was misinformation spread from liberal accounts. You're right. Apparently no evidence was ever uncovered that wikileaks ever received the RNC leak that came out a few years after they released the DNC leak; and the majority of Assange's quotes praising Trump were just wholesale made up by various shareblue linked propaganda sites.
Good job. You should be proud of yourself for making this post.
butterymales VS lack of trump disclosures.
is there any evidence whatsoever, or is this belief that they simply must have received and suppressed some trump-related smoking gun just blueanon dogma?
It was only about 15 years ago that censorship was an extreme taboo on the internet. I miss those times deeply.
I miss when fascists stayed on stormfront and left everyone else the fuck alone; and if they ventured outside, everyone hated them until they left.
We made the internet too easy to use…
I mean, we could fuck off to tor and see what boards they have there. I don't want to be used as an exit node for random highly illegal bullshit
ACTUALLY IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM
Yeah… I don’t miss it the slightest. It was so bad that Breadtube came to be in reaction to it.
It isn't censorship though? Just as much as people have the right to speak, others have the right to not have to listen. The beauty of the fediverse is that literally everyone has the right to say what they want, you can join a new instance or make your own but if you start saying stuff that people don't want to listen to then they can't be forced to listen.
This isn't an instance with a block list though. He's putting it in the software the instance runs, without an opt-out option (besides forking).
So what? Its open source software and subject to what the developer wants. Don't like it then fork it, remove the offending blocks and run your own, literally exactly the same freedoms offered. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to platform people.
There isn't a problem, until it's blocking what you want. I don't trust all people. If all the users are informed, then fine. This isn't that. This is trying to by tricky about it. It's an attempt to control information that he doesn't like (including leftist information) without clearly saying what's happening. That's not OK. It's fine if you consent. It's shady trying to sneak it through.
I still can't find a reason to say it is censorship or sneaky. Isnt the point that it highlights the sources? In which case it isn't really hiding it. And if you decide you don't like it then just leave and go elsewhere. I don't really see a reason why a creator of something has a requirement to be apolitical or make their feelings known. People complain a lot about .ml and lemmy's creator. Never understood why, nobody is forcing you to participate and stay instead of going elsewhere - and I say that as somebody who was on .ml during the exodus then saw everyone defederating.
I guess i very much see it as creative freedom, it isn't doing anything malicious and my understanding is that it does expose these blocks to the user when encountered?
Here's a question: how many users do you think are aware of this? Were you aware of this before the post? If the answer to those is not very high and/or no, it's not being forward with what it's doing. If the creator sees it as a feature users would like, and not trying to be sneaky, why wouldn't they proudly display it?
I don't use piefed so no, of course I didn't know or have seen it. And it doesn't need to be malicious, i would have zero issues morally in suppressing or warning about links to stormfront or infowars and would think nothing of it - the line that somebody draws for themselves is personal and it seems the person making piefed has decided what they think is appropriate for them and their userbase.
censorship is when the state does it. Not when individual people decide to program their own open source project in a specific way.
If this is the most mainstream of websites being blocked I think I'm ok, piefed is still great software even with these sites included in a linking block
Wonder if they'll unblock Infowars, now that it's The Onion.
because software requires maintenance, maintenance requires time, and the onion only got their hands on infowars very recently.
Why is info wars still there? Wasn't it taken over by tim.
Given that many "right-wing" sites are full of lies, bigotry, and hate, I think I'm quite fine with this.
I support
blockinghiding/flagging propaganda and fascism, this case is just censorship imo. This could be a good feature, IF the ultimate choice is on the instances and its users on if they want to have it enabled or not by default, not from the developer and "on all instances with no easy opt-out"I don't even support blocking propaganda and fascism. Maybe you could block malware sites, but even that's a push. Let moderators of individual communities figure it out, otherwise you're just going to turn whole instances into echo chambers.
Piefed dev's I talked to said they can decide to allow or disallow instances at least even as many come preblocked.
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.
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'm starting to think these are deliberate attempts to start a fediverse flame war.
Piefed has an easily lifted block on right wing propoganda, boohoo. Oh no, piefed called a Marxist-Lenninist website Marxist-Lenninist, how can I turn this into drama somehow
John Lennin
'easily lifted' isn't really easily lifted, and a platform technology shouldn't be the one implementing blocks. Individual hosts using that technology should be the one to implement blocks.
PieFed is already derivative technology at best, made by a bunch of redditors that didn't like being called right wing for supporting and endorsing genocide. Let's not try to pretend it's okay they want their echo chamber enforced at the platform level like reddit and twitter and facebook already do. The entire fucking internet already caters to you people.
How is emptying a database table not easy? If you're hosting your own public forum that should be child's play.
This is what I'm upset about. Why does every minor fediverse problem have to devolve into "us vs them (and 'they're definitely nazis btw)"? Piefed doesn't control the entire fediverse platform. If you want propoganda in your feed you can join an instance that allows it. And if you're going to accuse people of supporting genocide bring some fucking proof.
Not everyone on the fediverse is a free speech absolutist and that's fine. Having blocklists doesn't make an instance equal to the corporate hellscape of facebook and reddit. Be upset about things that matter please
Type rimiru into any search engine that crawls lemmy. Any of them. They weren't always a piefed user, and even their recent posts from their piefed.social account trying to rag on /0 users have plenty of evidence posted in response of their support of nazis.
And yes, I am upset that the nazi version of lemmy written by a nazi because for some reason Jewish nazis get a fucking pass in liberal spaces despite having the longest running holocaust in world history so far decides to try to be the arbiter of truth in their little nazi Activitypub technology.
That is a valid reason to be upset. It normalizes whatever they deem as offensive as being blocked by users of PieFed technology, because who the fuck is going to go through several thousand entries to actually audit their work? No one.
So the technology is all or nothing. What looks good to an instance host choosing PieFed over lemmy or m/kbin? All. Because they're not going to spend the days it would take for an independent audit of what this particular nazi thinks is unacceptable, and because 'nothing, build it yourself,' would also take days.
So yes, I will compare the little nazi tech you've chosen to be participant to to the nazi tech used by facebook (marks and sells data on palestinians to israel) and reddit (u/spez, also the term zionazi gets you site-wide permabanned). If you dislike that, choose better.
I've been searching for 30 minutes and couldn't find what you're talking about. Can the burden of proof lie with the accuser please?
Edit: I'm not disputing that what you say is true, but like i can't find it
goddamnit goddamnit goddamnit
Why does every fediverse reddit clone have to pull this shit? Like that blocklist isn't horrible - now - but what if the dude pulls a fetterman and next year he is blocking shit you agree with? Politically motivated censorship is the type of thing many people are trying to get away from.
This is why open source is so important. If the dev goes crazy and blocks all sorts of stuff the community can fork the code and remove the block list, while still remaining interoperable with Lemmy, other Piefeds, Mbin.
That's way different to say Facebook where they fight to the death to stop you using an app that isn't their official one.
Thats a fair and reasonable take
Then you move to another instance.
This says its all piefed instances
Any piefed instance can empty the list of right-wing sites, either as a whole or on a case-by-case basis. Source: https://piefed.social/comment/11254679
Thats good to know - but the fact the thread you link to shows some sites get a big WARNING COMMUNISM DETECTED doesn't make me feel much better XD
I would much rather it be something people have to opt into. But as long as it's something they can opt out of it isn't the most egregious thing.
blocking trash sites on your own instance, and providing default settings is perfectly reasonable.
If you can't opt out as an instance its a bit more than "default settings" imo
And my whole issue is not wanting too wide a net being labeled under "trash sites" I hate Fox News and Infowars but I also hate them being hidden from me with no way to get around that besides switching from piefed to a different service. Who is to say what the next trash site will be? Spam is one thing but I don't need a net nanny.
who can't opt out? just use a different instance if you dont like an instances setting. no one owes you anything. or run your own and just change the setting.
"Changing the setting" would involve forking the codebase, as it's hardcoded iirc
Just make a different account on a different instance, nothing is stopping you.
What? You mean lemmy? I have one. If you mean a different piefed instance, that's what I was saying, you'd need to fork the pyfedi repo to remove the list, it's on every instrnce of piefed
Make your own and opt out or use lemmy since you're complaining specifically about the features that differentiate piefed. Like this is a seriously dumb complaint. Like why would you want active disinformation sources? What benefit does that provide to discourse? Or do you just want disinformation to be disseminated? It's not a matter of fuckin opinion, these sites propagate actual fake news and that's their primary purpose. Fox news literally argued in court they're purely entertainment, like the onion.
...and that's hard?
No, but basically no instance will do that, and for the vast majority of people on this planet just self hosting it is so far out of their knowledge that forking it would be inconceivable for them
Does no instance want to do it, or there are those that want to but can't?
provide proof. highly doubt that.
Literally yesterday I tried hosting a piefed instance, with no intervention, it applied these exact lists, and there was no option to change it which is why I switched back to self hosted lemmy
so no proof got it. note other people in the thread mentioned DB records you need to clear out. fairly trivial work if your hosting systems.
The original post we are commenting on stated instances could not opt out. Or at least I thought it did, I don't know how to check edit history. I'm now aware thats untrue.
and provided zero proof of this fact. feel free to provide that proof. I'm too lazy to go research the codebase but i highly doubt they hard coded it.
People want to live in Echo Chambers.
Nah, most of 'em just want to be the ones doing the censoring.
Sounds like the liberals they are trying to appease
Then go to a different site...? What's the actual problem here?
Switching sites is annoying? I'm sure you are aware of that though...
Only mildly. At least on Lemmy, I haven't used piefed. The import/export went really well when lemm.ee shut down. And luckily there was an instance with a similar stance (lemmy.zip) to letting you decide what you want blocked.
piefed already blocks by default lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad. lol ... it's just a lib echo chamber.I stand corrected.Piefed.social is federated with Lemmy.ml, AFAIK.
Neither PieFed the platform nor piefed.social the instance block lemmy.ml:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/blame/commit/c9688103c45b5c473fdc388eb92ac70438b48b86/app/cli.py#L147-L154
By default, Piefed the platform blocks over two dozen far-right/fascist instances and two leftist instances: hexbear and lemmygrad. It's a hard-coded Overton window.
Blocking known disinfo sources is not politically motivated censorship, it's reality motivated censorship.
At this point, the difference between right wing and left wing polititics is simply that right wing politics is all about a single strong fascist billionaire leader who makes sure only his buddies get richer, and left wing politics is that we all have a nice life.
Many people actually prefer nthe former because only the former supports selfishness, and discrimination on race, sexuality, and whatnot, while the latter doesn't.
That literally nis the difference between the two. If you are rightwing, I will presume you're racist, sexist, and selfish.
This is should be considered an utterly absurd sentiment; and for the sake of fairness and good will no leftist should ever condone having this sort of perspective.
Which is why it hurts me so fucking bad to agree. Modern rightwing is utterly broken and evil. It feeds off of primitive instincts, unsuppressed intrusive thoughts, greed and prejudice.
"We may disagree with eachother, but at the end of they day, what we all really want is what's best for our country".
What the fuck happened that this adage has been completely nullified globally
I might recommend a game called 1000xResist
Sometimes, the whale is too big to fit in the backpack. You can't take everything with you. Keep this in mind when you reach the ending.
While we want everyone to have decent lives we have to reckon with the fact that there are people, even if they are provided everything that they need to have a decent and happy life, they will still choose to harm others around them to get ahead.
We call them billionaires.
And I believe that when faced with complex problems and fears, studies have shown around 30% of people will flock to authoritarianism. They crave not having to face ambiguity and a simple answer to complex problems they wish to hide from. Even if those answers are lies.
Personally think it's just really not the software's job to handle this or have an opinion on this - it's rather up to the instance admins to decide.
Meanwhile on every other platform, billion dollar algorithms dictate what videos millions of people can watch, for the benefit of the billionaires.
But the instance admins do decide this when they decide to use PieFed
blocklist.enabled = True
Having a blocklist option is of course perfectly fine. Pre-filling and pre-enabling that list is not the software's job, if you ask me.
that feels rather "i don't like politics"-y to me, i see no problem with shipping a default blocklist so long as it's opt-in.
free, open source software developed by humans with emotions and opinions is allowed to do things the developers think can help the world be better, so long as it doesn't cross the line into actively malicious: e.g. hardcoding blocklists and trying to hide that it exists.
Of course they're allowed - just saying I personally do not like it.
I can only imagine the person coming up with this idea
Sorry, what is mbfc?
A Zionist "fact checking" website which rates news sources on how pro Israel they are.
.world pushed it for a while and did fundraisers for it.
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!
Can't disrupt the liberal echo chambers. They are trying to turn a communist creation into Reddit.
This coupled with seeing "liberal" used as pejorative every day on this site is kinda wild.
It's what happens when you step out of the west and into any country that are the victims of the west, which is around 176 countries.
Why wouldn't a site that isn't slanted towards coddling western children like liberals and neoliberals be more reflective of the actual majority opinion in the world?
Bold claim from someone denying US participation in genocide. Misinformation is kinda your forte isn't it?
Feel free to report it. Vote manipulation is against lemmy.world's rules and the moderators can see the ip's.
It would be a quick instance ban.
Do it, you genocidal cunt.
I absolutely am using it as a pejorative.
A liberal calling me a bad person is like Ronald Reagan calling me a radical.
You will be the very poster child of why we say scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
It would be your support of the oligarchy and the systems that it breeds that is defending and propping up fascism
you're not beating the allegations
You are struggling so hard
well at least I'm not pissing off the people that should be allying with me and acting to empower those who hate me.
also, your mum struggles to fit my fat cock in her arse
Well, there's your confusion, liberals are not allies to the left, liberals are allies to conservatives. We are not even close in goals.
No one cares about your tiny incel cock
that's right comrade, who cares about civil liberties? Let's assist the further and further right party until we reach true communism!
The right is the party of white supremacy and child rape, so I’m happy not to see any material ignoring/defending/enabling that.
It's not just right-wing though, also thegrayzone.com and wikileaks.org get blocked as well as uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com
... In the US. We're not all from there. I'm decidedly left-wing, but censorship-by-default is a bad stance.
also the propaganda is annoying, but they arnt that big of a prescence on lemmy though.
Piefed is also blocking left-aligned Fediverse instances, so it's worth to being mindful. The dev has a previous history on applying CCP-inspired shadow profiles / "social credit", as well as some underhanded editorializing of other people's posts at the view stage (if not earlier). Honestly I thought from previous interactions he had learned better, but oh well, there's always room for disappointment.
I don’t need to agree with the sites to know this isn’t a good idea. The list is full of junk but it also has sites like fox news.
Should be an opt in.
but then again, you repeat yourself
you dont think someone posting about how fox news is reporting on something could be relevant? simply linking to an article is not always the poster agreeing with the reporting.
that's right. If you want to or not, you are propagating the misinformation and helping them by giving them more exposure for their stats, more data for them to sell and more money for them to gain through ads.
EDIT : What is there to learn from a misinformation link? Everyone knows its misinformation.
Okay yeah it’s junk but this is just division
🤔
Yeah, I stand by what I said lol
That Fox News isn't junk? Have you been living under a rock for 40 years?
I wish
Fox news argued in court that they're fictional entertainment and no reasonable person would take their reporting seriously.
I get that, but we can’t play the free speech for me, not for thee game
Free Speech means the government shouldn't prosecute people for their speech, that's all its ever meant. It doesn't mean non-government places must allow Nazis to say their piece on your platform. That just turns places into Nazi bars.
This isn't allowing them on a platform, this is disallowing platforms to choose whether to allow them on a platform based on the opinions of a guy that has endorsed genocide and child rape.
The block list is editable by any admin, and the sysadmin can delete the block list entirely.
Uhh, gonna need a source for that one, Chief.
So your choice is trust the genocide guy, spend WEEKS vetting a giant list that is mostly filled with dead links, or have no blocklist?
Gee wilkers I wonder which one most will pick.
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.
People were mad at Lemmy having a hard coded blocklist before, fortunately the dev sensibly removed it. This is worse than the one Lemmy had.
Blocklist? I though it was swearword censor.
Lemmy still has a site blocklist for URL posts, though it doesn’t come pre-populated at all, so it’s basically disabled by default. Same with the slur filter.
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.
Based. Fuck accelerationists and fuck nazis.
And you know what, censorship is a problem. But at the moment, the choking permeation of authoritarians is worse, and the authoritarians could use some of their own fucking medicine for a bit until shit calms down.
Funny how often this is the way it goes. Almost as if the label of "authoritarian" is essentially meaningless.
Other than the suppression of right-wing, counter-revolutionary views and movements (which you seem to approve of), what exactly is your problem with Marxism?
Marxists are not "accelerationists" btw.
🥸 : Hello fellow leftists in democratic countries with increasing support for fascist aligned parties. Let's all demonize and vote against the current center left candidates who are the most likely to beat back the authoritarians! Please ignore that I am in no way attempting to engage in any grassroots empowerment of third parties and their eventual path towards replacing the not ideal center left party in your country. Also, my preferred Marxist Lenninist Communist Theorist Authoritarian Left party recieved 4 votes out of a possible trillion last election, but I have a good feeling about this election! Please ignore that my IP address is from Timbuktu, Minsk or Guangdong, and that I get paid to post here 10 hours a day by the FSB/CCP/something else. Only when the current mainstream party is gone, can we replace it with my own hyperspecfic vision of society rebuilt from the ground up on the ashes of the current society. Don't worry about feeding yourself during this horrible violent phase of our lives, it is necessary to move onto FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY SPACE COMMUNISM.
Anyone who disagrees is a hyperzionist child eater.
Right-wingers: I think we should spread hate speech towards minorities
Marxists: Fuck that, you shouldn't be allowed to do that, we shouldn't be tolerant of intolerance
Liberals/you: How dare you evil Marxists be intolerant and suppress free speech, you shouldn't be allowed to spread those ideas
I should be the one posting about the "Paradox of Tolerance," because you clearly don't understand it.
The rest of your comment is just unhinged conspiracy theory shit.
Literally where did that come from? That completely opposes the entire content of their post.
The part where they're arguing for Marxists to be censored so that "authoritarians" get a taste of "their own" medicine.
I'd comment about that's how .ml operates, but that's where you're posting from, so we all know what's up.
Is there any possible evidence that could falsify your belief that I'm secretly a foreign agent?
Is there any reason to believe that the FSB/CCP have a greater influence over English language discussions than the NSA does? How do I know you're not getting paid off by them?
But what's the point in trying to reason with a conspiracy theorist? Your beliefs have no basis on either evidence or reason so there's no way to change them that way, any more than you could a flat-earther's.
I don't give a shit, I said my piece.
I'm glad you approve of the world as it is right now and hate anything that makes positive change, but leave that to your little echo chamber known as THE ENTIRE PUBLIC INTERNET, and maybe don't invade left wing spaces with it?
as soon as the authoritarians leave the left wing spaces, sure.
Define authoritarian in any way that includes what you have been brainwashed to believe is an 'authoritarian' country, but excludes any country you believe isn't authoritarian.
You're an enlightened centrist, who the fuck cares about your lazy copypasta.
your mum loves it and I'm not a centrist.
You're against everyone progressive, and supposedly against anyone right-wing despite spending hundreds of comments defending the right...
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.
Lol @ politically uniform experience
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.
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 mean, as long as the info is upfront, why does it matter? They are not censoring the Internet, they are censoring their own little chunk of it. That's cool with me, anyway. I myself am not the echo chamber type, but I do sometimes prefer a more civil platform, and in human society that inevitably requires some uniformity or commonality.
conservatives and tankie instances are rarely civil, and they have alot of mis and disinformation. i would rather not see those at all. if they do things like advocating for actual laws, electing those types politicians then that would be different, but its mostly propaganda.
You may have missed the point of my comment, if you were intentionally replying to my comment.
I think a lot of sites associated with terrorists are blocked in lot of places...
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-left_politics
Terrifying!
Thankfully they're too busy being more-far-left than the other guy to actually organize
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.
Pretty succinct actually.
Cool, so China, Cuba, Russia isn't authoritarian?
Of course they are authoritarian.
Can't call conservatives retarded or leftist mods will delete the comment
the horror
It's an enormous cult of political loonies
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.
good
Thanks for the hint, I am gonna update my DNS to block the sites from the list as well.
3000 line opt out for a 300 ppl community. seems legit.
We really need an alternative to Lemmy and piefed for the threadiverse. I say this as a leftist. People are not children who need child locks put on their internet. This is not the type of environment I joined the fediverse to be a part of, that censors links just because the server admin disagrees with the politics.
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.
Edit to add: Okay, PieFed does put some locks on by default, though they can be unlocked.
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 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?
Yes they are completely different front and backends but they use the same protocol (ActivityPub).
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.
not even close they dont even use the same codes, or programming.
Except it seems like we do since these platforms have propagandized an entire generation towards far right ideologies.
O.o
How so?
The only UI option to do so is to manually remove every single domain, one by one.
Removing all of them requires:
This was done intentionally (again, according to Rimu himself) as an ideological step. According to him, software must be ideological, and he doesn't like his software being used for any purposes that could help the right wing.
I guess this sums up Rimu's position pretty well,
I understand the sentiment, but as long as any project is FLOSS this is a risk. They can just fork and remove the list. It's sort of like the "security through obscurity" mentality. It's not actually doing anything to prevent motivated fascists from forking PieFed and removing that. It's just making it marginally less convenient for them to do so.
Source: https://piefed.social/comment/11256609
Please don't. A left-wing echo chamber is as bad as a right wing echo chamber.
In case you haven't already noticed. This place is so much of a left wing echochamber that the different shades of liberals and progressive are constantly at odds with each other. I'll probably be permabanned from another instance for even mentioning it.
Sadly true
Totally good-faith summary. Great work.
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.
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.
Here is the user interface for unblocking:
Oh, nice! It's good to see progress. So this line from OP:
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.