(answered) Where is the piefed.social instance based in?
Their ToS mentions the laws of New Zealand, while their privacy policy includes GDPR. Are the servers hosted in NZ, the EU, or somewhere else?
Also, is there any reason not to use the piefed.social instance (over other Piefed instances)? I'm interested in trying out Piefed, and use it in conjunction with Lemmy
edit: It looks like it's hosted in Australia, and rimu (who operates the instance) is from New Zealand. Mention of GDPR does not mean it's hosted in the EU.
Also, it looks like it might be better to use a different instance regardless of where piefed.social is hosted, for decentralisation (like piefed.ca and piefed.blahaj.zone, which are Canadian, piefed.nz, which is hosted in NZ, or nord.pub and retrofed.com, both German)
15 replies
Generally speaking, it's best to avoid using the default instance. The fediverse works best when there are many, smaller instances, instead of one large instance and a few smaller one orbiting it. We should try to avoid the problems we see with the centralization around mastodon.social and lemmy.world happening to piefed as well, if we can.
Why?
To me it's the option that's important. Doesn't mean you're obligated to use it preemptively.
Off-topic, I just realised why I couldn't see a lot of posts on Lemmy (including my own!). When enabling the ability to view German language posts (I'm trying to learn a bit!), I accidentally deselected English. It's fixed now, and I can see English posts again!
Schön.
Ich kann nicht ein schlaffen.
Kann ich commen?
Kann ich helfen?
Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht!
That's about the extent of it right now.
Note that the GDPR is a "worldwide" law as long as you have European users, it doesn't mean the servers are in EU.
pinging piefed.social makes gateway.rimu.geek.nz respond. going there you'll learn that rimu is new zealander
piefed.social moderation is based on a number of questionable choices, and rimu previously hardcoded these questionable choices in piefed without explanation or an option to turn them off
Yes, and it has been forked because of this:
https://codeberg.org/quokkau/pylova
What questionable choices are baked into Piefed?
there are many default blocks.
Like what? What is piefed blocking that I can't currently access?
The main reason I landed on piefed.zip was because it was the only instance I could find that didn't defederate any content; piracy, .ml instances, hexbear, etc. Not that I necessarily want that content, but I don't like the idea of an instance admin making that decision for me. I checked all the pylova instances and they seem to all defederate the above to varying degrees. Is the only way to ensure I see the whole Fediverse to spin up my own instance? (Something I'm very sure I do not have the know-how to do.)
these blocks were iirc removed good couple months back, after backlash, in two separate incidents, so now they're opt-in only (by admin) and my understanding is that nobody else uses it. .social is rimu's playground so these might be still on
GDPR applies when the user is in EU, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the server is. Many websites are GDPR-compliant without being hosted in the EU.
The domain’s DNS point to an Australian IP.
The “about” page gives [email protected] as a contact method – maybe just ask them directly?
OK, that's good to know!
According to some geo ip databases the IP is is Brisbane, Australia