Link: https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/13/what-piefed-blocks-out-of-the-box-and-how-to-unblock-it/

PieFed has a dizzying array of settings and options that instance admins can tweak. Most of them have obvious and sensible default values but some of those have been a bit controversial, especially to do with what gets blocked by default. In this post I explain what those are and how they can be configured.

Bookmarking this, so I can link it to people who keep comparing Piefed to Tesseract.

Autoblocking lemmygrad and hexbear is a solid W in my book

I see that Threads is blocked but does it even properly federate now? Last time I checked Meta completely gave up on it because they already got what they wanted, that is access to EU market which was granted upon a pinky promise of interoperability.

That's disgusting, it basically makes anyone using the platform pro imperialism, exploitation and pedophilia. Being tolerant with this kind of people is why the world sucks. I'll add piefed.social to the default blocklist of my fork.

Tankies support Stalin, an imperialist who surrounded himself with pedophiles.

Not to throw shade, and I don't block either instance, but that is massively overselling them. There are plenty of other anti-imperialist/exploitation/pedophilia instances, communities, and users on Lemmy and PieFed. Not to mention the rest of the world that's never heard of us.

You are basically making a libel against e.g. entire Federated Anarchist Flotilla ( /0, anarchist.nexus, quokk.au), which has never been featured on PieFed's default block list.

Yeah, fuck tankies. All my homies hate tankies.

I agree it's nothing like the Tesseract situation, tho I was recently told about some other things the PieFed dev has done, and it isn't all defensible. I'd like other people's takes on this stuff.

He’s the OP on this post, and what this post is here to explain. Why don’t you ask him yourself?

Those links seem surface level at best while remaining quite alarmist. If that’s concerning to you then you must hate the Lemmy devs

Oh... wow I didn't notice. Thanks lol

I mean, I do dislike the Lemmy devs bc they're tankies, but it hardly goes further then that. I just want to confirm or debunk some of what I've heard.

I understand defederation needing to be applicable to all users but can users reverse the blocks at the user level?

There are two different levels of domain blocks. The ones rimu is discussing here are instance-wide, controlled by admins. Basically an admin saying that they don't want their instance to host any posts that point to these domains. In addition to what rimu pointed out in the article, this tool is most often used to prevent spam posts that point to domains that host malware/phishing/etc. Whenever a remote spam user pops up spewing posts that point to some new malware domain, it is simple to ban the domain and those posts now will no longer federate to your instance even if the remote user isn't dealt with by their home admins.

There are user-level domain blocks as well in the filters tab of your settings page. Those only apply to an individual user.

weak bait, tankie

The "Tankie" Smear: A Confession of Imperialist Bloodlust

One thing he won’t tell you is that the toggle for these features were added after people complained,

Yes I listen to feedback and make changes accordingly. This is how good software gets made.

There’s also the reputation score that dings you for posting memes

Incorrect.

really hates quokka

I went no contact with the whole flotilla after they were abusive for weeks. Going no contact is grounds for more abuse, according to them. In any case, inter-instance drama is a separate thing from what features PieFed has.

Yes that list should really be checked and old offline instances removed, etc. Although any chance I get to give Zuck the finger is hard to resist.

No, it's because those instances are the nexus of a lot of the fediverse's garbage: the kind of people that unironically decry fascism while adopting a lot of its worst features.

They're called "tankies" for a reason.

ahh. so domain blocks are never federated instances as those are defederations?

I was always iffy about preemptive Threads defederation. If federation really worked we could tell folks on Threads that our instances are much nicer, ad-free and still capable of following Kim Kardashian or whoever is using Threads. A bit of a moot point now anyway.

Checks blocklist - Explodingheads - there’s a blast from the past. Right up there with wolfballs.

Hopefully this will help clear up fud.

I felt like the "stealing code" part was worth dealing with separately so I wrote this https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/14/did-piefed-steal-code-from-pylova-lets-look-at-what-happened/

Lemmygrad and hexbear are openly pro imperialism, genocide, exploitation

Insane that someone forking an entire project would complain about taking a single patch.

It makes a perverse kind of sense in the context of the disinformation campaign the flotilla (which Pylova is a part of) was/is running. They desperately needed anything they could to undermine trust in PieFed. Because to them I'm not a human being - they're convinced that I'm a transphobic zionist nazi, so any kind of attack is acceptable to them. A means to an end.