I am a big proponent of people making more use of curation tools available to them. I too often see people browsing the All feed and then complaining about seeing too much of one type of content or some content that they don't like.

As an aside, I was in a matrix room a little over a year ago with one of the lemmy.world admins and the conversation was about instance blocks. They provided some stats on how many instance blocks existed among lemmy.world users, and the most-blocked instance had 730 lemmy.world users blocking it. Out of all of their 150,000+ users, the most-blocked instance only had less than 800 blocks against it. I was just surprised because it seemed like a shockingly small value given the size of the userbase.

In any case, glad the filters are doing the trick for you!

You mean basically like an ignore option for applications?

There are two proposed solutions I have seen. I do not claim that this is exhaustive, just only limited to the proposals that I have stumbled across.

FASP - Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider

The idea that mastodon has is to have a third-party service that does something like generate a link preview once and then share that to fediverse instances that need it. They have a whole spec they wrote up about these kinds of services that can be run to help out fediverse instances with different things like this, search, or discoverability. They call these FASPs - the repo with the spec is here.

I don't yet know of any FASP that is live and running, so it is kind of a paper spec at the moment. I don't do too much on the microblogging side of the fediverse though, so I very well could be wrong.

Federate link metadata and the post at the same time

This comes from an issue on PieFed's repo. It is basically just an idea at this point, but it is a pretty basic one; have the originating instance fetch the link preview information and simply federate it out alongside the post itself.

You might have clicked the bell next to their name on their user profile. You can check by going to Account -> Activity Alerts and look for that user listed there.

From Sal on matrix:

From what I can find, the managing director of the company that runs serverspace.io (ITGLOBAL.COM NL), which is the company that rents me the VPS space, was arrested by Dutch authorities. The infrastructure in Amsterdam was disconnected without warning when this happened. Since my latest database backup is unfortunately not very recent, and because there is still hope that the severs will come back up, I am waiting and hoping that I regain access to the data. They originally published some somewhat optimistic message, but as of today their website is inaccessible.

https://www.comnews.ru/content/247454/2026-09-21/2026-w39/1007/globus-dlya-itglobal-umenshilsya

https://theins.ru/news/297340

I could not find any statements from Dutch police or really any source other than IT Global themselves. But, this event may be related to "Dmitry Gachko" (owner of ITGlobalcom Rus) being added to this sanctions list: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec/2024/1484/2026-07-13

I recieved no warning, and I did not know about the ownership structure of serverspace and did not consider that the infrastructure was exposed to this risk. I figured "VPS in Amsterdam from a Dutch company" was rather safe. But "Dutch company operating in NL" does not mean the same as Dutch owned...

Just an update on this front, server load is stable right now as I type this after rimu did some stuff on the server to help. It's pretty clear this was a DDOS and not a rogue AI scraper because it was hitting the same url many times a second instead of crawling tons of urls like a scraper bot would.

We'll keep an eye on things. Thanks for your patience.

I don't think the privacy issues here are too salient. Pretty much everything on the fediverse is public already and have likely federated outside any particular region like the EU, so GDPR doesn't really have any teeth. The exception to that would be if instance admins are using database access to also feed private messages to an LLM (especially a corporate LLM). I know that the "private" in private messages on the fediverse can be conditional...but it should at least be considered private from LLMs as an expectation since those messages are inaccessible to things like scraper bots or listening instances designed just to harvest data.

My biggest concerns here would be twofold:

1. False positives - LLM sycophancy is a thing. So, I worry that if you ask an LLM to dig through a big pile of text looking for a thing, that it will tell you that it found that thing...even if it is completely removed from context or completely made up. The false positive rate might be low (I have no idea), but I guess I just don't trust the LLM enough to let it take the wheel with stuff like this.
2. Outsourcing moderation - LLMs are not going to be up to the task of moderating everything, just ask digg. However, tools to help moderators effectively do their jobs are helpful as well. There is a balance to be struck here. I think, for me, something like asking an AI essentially, should I ban this person, just feels like you are outsourcing your decision making too much. It is too far on the automation side of the scale for my tastes.

All that said, people can run their instances how they want. I don't really have strong opinions on LLMs/AI in general, I just kinda hate big tech companies. That is my foundational belief in the work that I do for the fediverse - fuck big tech and the oligarchy they have built/funded in my country. That is really the only axe I have to grind in all this.

Also fun fact, you can probably upload it to most other piefed instances just fine.

rimu has pretty strong opinions on social media. This filter is optional and can be turned on/off by an admin. Some of my contributions to piefed have been to make filters or features that are strongly opinionated like this optional. For piefed.social specifically though, rimu has all of them on because that is his instance and he runs it the way he wants.

I don't necessarily disagree. I haven't really taken a close look at how this is implemented, but it also hasn't really been a high priority to revisit, at least not for me. There are still plenty of more fundamental features to get right first in my opinion. The big one I have worked on for the next piefed version is to get local sticky posts working for example.

My experience from working with rimu though is that he has been pretty receptive with contributions to make it less opinionated in these kinds of ways. I have removed or made optional tons of stuff that he spent time coding and I haven't really gotten any pushback from him over it. I know it kind of makes me sound like a douche to just say open a PR, but if somebody out there feels strongly about this filter, that is probably the fastest way to get it changed.

the whole þ fiasco

That has since been removed. Yeah, rimu is certainly opinionated and passionate about what he believes in, but has also been pretty receptive to feedback, both from users and from admins (like in the private voting case). Fortunately, there are alternative threadiverse platforms out there for people that want them. Both lemmy and mbin do some stuff better than PieFed, and that's ok. The different projects have maintained working relationships at the dev level to try to make sure interoperability outside the base activitypub spec doesn't completely break (the post-moving feature/FEP was a collaboration between PieFed, lemmy, and NodeBB for example).

You brought this up in the matrix room, so I will try to put down here a summary of what I responded in there so that it lives in a more permanent fashion.

Lots of profile changes are not federated out in realtime, extra fields being one of them. Instead, your profile, as seen on remote instances, is only refreshed periodically. In the case of PieFed, when an instance receives an activity from a user (post/vote/comment), and their profile information hasn't been refreshed within the past 24 hours, then the instance will query your home instance to make sure it is up to date.

What this means is that if you update your extra fields right now, it can be up to 24 hours before that has propagated out to remote instances depending on when your profile was last refreshed on their instance. It could be even longer if you don't federate any activities out in that time.

A very similar process also happens for lemmy as well as for other "actors" in the ActivityPub parlance. This includes communities and feeds.

Yeah, I think I see the issue in the jinja template. PieFed handles some video hosting sites a bit specially to make the compatibility a bit nicer, but the blur setting was not being passed on to those special cases. I think this is a pretty simple fix.

In the meantime, if you switch to either of the compact view settings, then the videos won't be loaded in the feed.

Something like that could be a good place to utilize "trusted instances." So, instead of just choosing a random instance of all of the piefediverse, it chooses a random trusted instance.

The feedback in this thread overall has been helpful.

Is there a software solution on the app developer level that combines like posts together?

As mentioned in this thread already, piefed consolidates all the comments for crossposts when it detects them. As an example, you can look at this post on piefed.social. The link I shared is for the post on ![email protected], but below it you can see comments from the same article posted in ![email protected] as well as ![email protected] in their own sections as you keep scrolling. So, problem solved, right? Well...

One of the key phrases I used above is "when it detects them". So, how does piefed detect crossposts? The answer is pretty simple, it basically just looks for other posts that point to the same destination url. In the example I linked, that would be the Guardian article that is being discussed. This is the same way that lemmy detects crossposts. This approach is nice and easy and computationally cheap on the database (quick), however, there is a big shortfall of this method...posts that don't point to a url (discussion posts) can never be detected as crossposts. Lemmy offers the ability to hit the crosspost button on a discussion post and it will create a big block quote of the original post for you, but it isn't actually recognized as a crosspost in the software.

I don't have a good technical solution to be able to make discussion posts (and other non-url posts, like piefed events or polls) be crossposted properly. It likely would need to be tracked in the database somehow, but it would rely on users somehow indicating that the post they are making is meant to be a crosspost. I don't know really...

Anyway, that is the current state of crossposts. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

This was removed. Instead, users have the option to simply not federate out their votes if they want.

Yeah, there was recently a case where somebody was doxxed in the modlog. At that moment, there really wasn't anything that you can do about it. So, being able to have some control over modlog visibility is a way to prevent abuses like that.

A PieFed admin can disable not-logged-in users from viewing NSFW content. IIRC, this was added after the recent UK laws about NSFW content.

piefed.world is on an older version of piefed where that wasn't added yet. Similarly, instances that are on older versions of piefed won't have links to the modlog on a community's sidebar or on a user profile's dropdown.

I'm not sure what is holding up piefed.world from updating. They are still on the 1.1 branch when 1.2 has been stable for some time now and we are preparing 1.3 for release very soon.

First of all, let's dispense with the conspiratorial thinking here:

Is this Piefed/Piefed.social’s “business model” now?

The monetization links in these posts are for the artist, nothing to do with any instance/software. Also, the user making this post is on a lemmy instance, and the community it has been posted to is on a lemmy instance. Nothing about the monetization here has anything to do with piefed other than that you saw it from a piefed instance.

Are you sure you are viewing the Subscribed view on the home page? As far as I can tell, it seems to be working correctly for me and isn't showing posts from communities that I am not subscribed to.

You have a couple options for how to prevent these posts from showing up in the future in places like the All or Popular front pages:

• Block the OP (there are usually just a handful of accounts that make up the vast majority of these posts)
• Block the community
• Hide communities with "moe" in the name (most of them have this naming structure). You can add this at your filters page just above the keyword filters.
• Block the domain (most of the images are hosted at files.catbox.moe)

Alright, after another user pointed it out to me, I suspect the reason you aren't seeing links to the modlog is likely because you were on piefed.world. They have been slow to update their piefed instance and are still on the 1.1 version. That means that updates to piefed that have been introduced in 1.2 (current stable version) and 1.3 (current dev version) are not present. Some updates to the modlog since then:

• (1.2) searching and filtering the modlog if you are logged in
• (1.3) introducing a dedicated link to the modlog on the footer of every page
• (1.3) adding a link to the modlog on each community's sidebar
• (1.3) adding a link to the modlog on a user's profile page