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.

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).

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.

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.

Feel free to self-host and empty the blocklist. As for the far-left and far-right, they love censorship.

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))

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.

I think a lot of sites associated with terrorists are blocked in lot of places...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-left_politics

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.

what are the differences? i signed up with this instance but am still learning.

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.

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.

Mbin exists, but it never seems to get as much attention :/

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

What part of having a blocklist for your own instance is asserting authority over other instances?

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.

Piefed isn't a fork of Lemmy, it's completely independent code. They just speak the same language.

The fact that it includes wikileaks tells me everything I need to know.

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 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.

The modern far-left distinguishes itself from social democracy through its inherent opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While anarchist strains of far-left thought are anti-authoritarian in nature, and most far-left schools of thought aim at a classless, stateless society

Terrifying!

what if the dude pulls a fetterman and next year he is blocking shit you agree with?

Then you move to another instance.

Far-left politics are politics further to the left on the political spectrum than the standard political left. The far-left encompasses a wide range of heterogeneous ideologies, including anarchism, communism, and Marxism; it includes groups that advocate for revolutionary socialism and related communist ideologies, as well as anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation. The modern far-left distinguishes itself from social democracy through its inherent opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While anarchist strains of far-left thought are anti-authoritarian in nature, and most far-left schools of thought aim at a classless, stateless society, Leninist-led revolutions have imposed authoritarian rule in practice.

Sounds good tbh. Well, except for the authoritarian bullshit of course.

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.

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.

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.

Blocklist? I though it was swearword censor.

Lol @ politically uniform experience

This says its all piefed instances

Thats a fair and reasonable take

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.

There is no easy opt-out, forcing existing instances to follow the blocklist.

Totally good-faith summary. Great work.

Wonder if they'll unblock Infowars, now that it's The Onion.

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.

The list is full of junk but it also has sites like fox news.

but then again, you repeat yourself

so they’re both hosts that serve and share content using the same protocol?

because software requires maintenance, maintenance requires time, and the onion only got their hands on infowars very recently.

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.

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.

Users that are right-wing, Marxist, or generally concerned about global censorship of the Fedi-/Threadiverse, might opt for other options instead.

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.

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

Can't call conservatives retarded or leftist mods will delete the comment

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

Given that many "right-wing" sites are full of lies, bigotry, and hate, I think I'm quite fine with this.

Same backend, different frontend