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.
Rimu, of all people, complaining about user visbility on the Threadiverse? Ironic…
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.
Why block InfoWars? Tim Heidecker is a treasure.
/s
Wait, isn’t InfoWars now a The Onion site?
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.
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.
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The fact that it includes wikileaks tells me everything I need to know.
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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.
Given that many “right-wing” sites are full of lies, bigotry, and hate, I think I’m quite fine with this.
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.
what if the dude pulls a fetterman and next year he is blocking shit you agree with?
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
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 known disinfo sources is not politically motivated censorship, it’s reality motivated censorship.
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
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.
I can only imagine the person coming up with this idea
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.
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…
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.
censorship is when the state does it. Not when individual people decide to program their own open source project in a specific way.
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).
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.
they chose to withhold information
citation needed
butterymales VS lack of trump disclosures.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I absolutely am using it as a pejorative.
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
John Lennyverse
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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.
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.
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.
