According to Rimu Atkinson, 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.
At this point, the difference between right wing and left wing polititics is simply that right wing politics is all about a single strong fascist billionaire leader who makes sure only his buddies get richer, and left wing politics is that we all have a nice life.
Many people actually prefer nthe former because only the former supports selfishness, and discrimination on race, sexuality, and whatnot, while the latter doesn’t.
That literally nis the difference between the two. If you are rightwing, I will presume you’re racist, sexist, and selfish.
This is should be considered an utterly absurd sentiment; and for the sake of fairness and good will no leftist should ever condone having this sort of perspective.
Which is why it hurts me so fucking bad to agree. Modern rightwing is utterly broken and evil. It feeds off of primitive instincts, unsuppressed intrusive thoughts, greed and prejudice.
“We may disagree with eachother, but at the end of they day, what we all really want is what’s best for our country”.
What the fuck happened that this adage has been completely nullified globally
I might recommend a game called 1000xResist
Sometimes, the whale is too big to fit in the backpack. You can’t take everything with you. Keep this in mind when you reach the ending.
While we want everyone to have decent lives we have to reckon with the fact that there are people, even if they are provided everything that they need to have a decent and happy life, they will still choose to harm others around them to get ahead.
We call them billionaires.
And I believe that when faced with complex problems and fears, studies have shown around 30% of people will flock to authoritarianism. They crave not having to face ambiguity and a simple answer to complex problems they wish to hide from. Even if those answers are lies.
good
According to Rimu Atkinson, 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.
I support blocking propaganda and fascism, however this is just censorship imo. This could be a good feature, IF the ultimate choice is on the instances and its users on if they want to have it enabled or not by default, not from the developer and “on all instances with no easy opt-out”
I don’t even support blocking propaganda and fascism. Maybe you could block malware sites, but even that’s a push. Let moderators of individual communities figure it out, otherwise you’re just going to turn whole instances into echo chambers.
I’d say that block in general (incl those in the blocklist) is a bit much, hide is better imo, so users have the choice on if they want to hide or show those posts with the blocked link in them. Meanwhile each instances can decide what the default is, on or off, but the end user can decide how they want
Piefed dev’s I talked to said they can decide to allow or disallow instances at least even as many come preblocked.
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.
Sounds like what a right-wing dipshit would say.
How so? Do we even have cons on lemmy?
The gatekeeping is to take away a cornerstone of misinformation. If brigading and manipulation didn’t work the world wouldn’t be in the state it is today. I run into conservatives frequently, even the question is disingenuous.
So I want to link to things idiots on reddit r/con are saying to point out a trend in right wing media, and that makes it spreading disinfo?
I don’t trust you as the “misinformation decider”, heaven forbid.
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).
I expected to see thegrayzone.com and was not disappointed.
They scored yet another vindication this week, this time on the OPCW cover-up of the 2018 Douma, Syria false-flag attack.
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
Sorry the liberal replying made me actually look this up and it turns out it was misinformation spread from liberal accounts. You’re right. Apparently no evidence was ever uncovered that wikileaks ever received the RNC leak that came out a few years after they released the DNC leak; and the majority of Assange’s quotes praising Trump were just wholesale made up by various shareblue linked propaganda sites.
Good job. You should be proud of yourself for making this post.
butterymales VS lack of trump disclosures.
is there any evidence whatsoever, or is this belief that they simply must have received and suppressed some trump-related smoking gun just blueanon dogma?
No, very probably not all PieFed instances, and AFAIK the socialist sites are not in that list of defaults.
If you’re going to make public accusations, please don’t sabotage yourself by making incorrect or imprecise claims.
Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives.
There’s no reason to think that. I’d argue that Lemmygrad is more curated and politically uniform than any PieFed instance is.
Politically uniform means right-wing and liberal to USAmericans
this sentence makes no sense in this context
It was only about 15 years ago that censorship was an extreme taboo on the internet. I miss those times deeply.
censorship is when the state does it. Not when individual people decide to program their own open source project in a specific way.
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.
There isn’t a problem, until it’s blocking what you want. I don’t trust all people. If all the users are informed, then fine. This isn’t that. This is trying to by tricky about it. It’s an attempt to control information that he doesn’t like (including leftist information) without clearly saying what’s happening. That’s not OK. It’s fine if you consent. It’s shady trying to sneak it through.
I still can’t find a reason to say it is censorship or sneaky. Isnt the point that it highlights the sources? In which case it isn’t really hiding it. And if you decide you don’t like it then just leave and go elsewhere. I don’t really see a reason why a creator of something has a requirement to be apolitical or make their feelings known. People complain a lot about .ml and lemmy’s creator. Never understood why, nobody is forcing you to participate and stay instead of going elsewhere - and I say that as somebody who was on .ml during the exodus then saw everyone defederating.
I guess i very much see it as creative freedom, it isn’t doing anything malicious and my understanding is that it does expose these blocks to the user when encountered?
Here’s a question: how many users do you think are aware of this? Were you aware of this before the post? If the answer to those is not very high and/or no, it’s not being forward with what it’s doing. If the creator sees it as a feature users would like, and not trying to be sneaky, why wouldn’t they proudly display it?
I don’t use piefed so no, of course I didn’t know or have seen it. And it doesn’t need to be malicious, i would have zero issues morally in suppressing or warning about links to stormfront or infowars and would think nothing of it - the line that somebody draws for themselves is personal and it seems the person making piefed has decided what they think is appropriate for them and their userbase.
ACTUALLY IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM
Yeah… I don’t miss it the slightest. It was so bad that Breadtube came to be in reaction to it.
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…
I mean, we could fuck off to tor and see what boards they have there. I don’t want to be used as an exit node for random highly illegal bullshit
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.
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.
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.
It’s a molehill that’s threatening to become a mountain. I wouldn’t trust I always agree with this person.
Pravada’s domains were on there which is one I was looking for. I didn’t see South China Morning Post on the list, which is unfortunate; otherwise though, I think it’s a solid list.
It will be an absolute nightmare keeping it up, given how quickly bad-faith actors are setting up fake local and regional news outlets.
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.
Why block InfoWars? Tim Heidecker is a treasure.
/s
Dang I gotta show Rimu the American owned Canadian blight known as Post Media. Everything they own should be on there.
For those who really like the idea of blocking the sites on that list, the linked github repo also has it formatted for pihole and the like.
Who is rimu
He’s the maintainer for piefed.
Why does he post on powertrippingbastards or is that a different rimu
Dunno. I think it’s the same guy.
The fact that it includes wikileaks tells me everything I need to know.
That it recognizes Russian state media as Conservative disinformation and propaganda? Yeah, me too.
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.
No I don’t, would you mind linking a citation on this claim?
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?
It enters the realm of mis-, even disinformation when true statements that contradict a narrative are actively repressed.
Selective truth can easily be a lie.
What is and isn’t selective depends on your perspective. You’re moving into the question of what counts as relevant and important, which is inherently ideological.
If country A launches a missile at country B, then it’s probably relevant if country B launched a missile yesterday, which would frame country A as retaliating. But if country A launched a missile a week ago, do you also include that? What about actions from a year or more ago? What about inflammatory rhetoric, or broken promises? What about differences in military might, or economic interests like oil?
Every source has to make decisions about what to include and what not to include, and there’s no objective basis to do so. To try to apply the label of “misinformation” in that context is just censoring narratives and perspectives that are out of line with your own.
I could easily point out the biased reporting of The New York Times on various issues like Palestine or trans people (which in several cases have gone into overt misinformation). But I’d rather be able to see and discuss that source while understanding what it’s biases are, rather than writing it off completely and potentially missing out on actual information. You don’t just block every source you disagree with.
Sometimes I feel like liberals fundamentally misunderstand how sources work, sorting them into “good” or “bad” and leaving no room for nuance. Sources can be reliable about one thing but not another, and there’s no such thing as a source with no bias.
I notice you didn’t answer the question.
I notice you haven’t apologized for removing the people calling out bad faith users on .world but didn’t remove the people spreading misinfo about the people calling out bad faith users.
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.
Any source on this?
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
‘easily lifted’ isn’t really easily lifted, and a platform technology shouldn’t be the one implementing blocks. Individual hosts using that technology should be the one to implement blocks.
PieFed is already derivative technology at best, made by a bunch of redditors that didn’t like being called right wing for supporting and endorsing genocide. Let’s not try to pretend it’s okay they want their echo chamber enforced at the platform level like reddit and twitter and facebook already do. The entire fucking internet already caters to you people.
How is emptying a database table not easy? If you’re hosting your own public forum that should be child’s play.
… supporting and endorsing genocide. … The entire fucking internet already caters to you people.
This is what I’m upset about. Why does every minor fediverse problem have to devolve into “us vs them (and 'they’re definitely nazis btw)”? Piefed doesn’t control the entire fediverse platform. If you want propoganda in your feed you can join an instance that allows it. And if you’re going to accuse people of supporting genocide bring some fucking proof.
Not everyone on the fediverse is a free speech absolutist and that’s fine. Having blocklists doesn’t make an instance equal to the corporate hellscape of facebook and reddit. Be upset about things that matter please
Type rimiru into any search engine that crawls lemmy. Any of them. They weren’t always a piefed user, and even their recent posts from their piefed.social account trying to rag on /0 users have plenty of evidence posted in response of their support of nazis.
And yes, I am upset that the nazi version of lemmy written by a nazi because for some reason Jewish nazis get a fucking pass in liberal spaces despite having the longest running holocaust in world history so far decides to try to be the arbiter of truth in their little nazi Activitypub technology.
That is a valid reason to be upset. It normalizes whatever they deem as offensive as being blocked by users of PieFed technology, because who the fuck is going to go through several thousand entries to actually audit their work? No one.
So the technology is all or nothing. What looks good to an instance host choosing PieFed over lemmy or m/kbin? All. Because they’re not going to spend the days it would take for an independent audit of what this particular nazi thinks is unacceptable, and because ‘nothing, build it yourself,’ would also take days.
So yes, I will compare the little nazi tech you’ve chosen to be participant to to the nazi tech used by facebook (marks and sells data on palestinians to israel) and reddit (u/spez, also the term zionazi gets you site-wide permabanned). If you dislike that, choose better.
I’ve been searching for 30 minutes and couldn’t find what you’re talking about. Can the burden of proof lie with the accuser please?
Edit: I’m not disputing that what you say is true, but like i can’t find it
Given that many “right-wing” sites are full of lies, bigotry, and hate, I think I’m quite fine with this.
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
Wonder if they’ll unblock Infowars, now that it’s The Onion.
because software requires maintenance, maintenance requires time, and the onion only got their hands on infowars very recently.
Why is info wars still there? Wasn’t it taken over by tim.
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.
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.
Thats a fair and reasonable take
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
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
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 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
…and that’s hard?
No, but basically no instance will do that, and for the vast majority of people on this planet just self hosting it is so far out of their knowledge that forking it would be inconceivable for them
Does no instance want to do it, or there are those that want to but can’t?
Just make a different account on a different instance, nothing is stopping you.
What? You mean lemmy? I have one. If you mean a different piefed instance, that’s what I was saying, you’d need to fork the pyfedi repo to remove the list, it’s on every instrnce of piefed
Make your own and opt out or use lemmy since you’re complaining specifically about the features that differentiate piefed. Like this is a seriously dumb complaint. Like why would you want active disinformation sources? What benefit does that provide to discourse? Or do you just want disinformation to be disseminated? It’s not a matter of fuckin opinion, these sites propagate actual fake news and that’s their primary purpose. Fox news literally argued in court they’re purely entertainment, like the onion.
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.
The original post we are commenting on stated instances could not opt out. Or at least I thought it did, I don’t know how to check edit history. I’m now aware thats untrue.
and provided zero proof of this fact. feel free to provide that proof. I’m too lazy to go research the codebase but i highly doubt they hard coded it.
piefed already blocks by default lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad. lol … it’s just a lib echo chamber.
Neither PieFed the platform nor piefed.social the instance block lemmy.ml:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/blame/commit/c9688103c45b5c473fdc388eb92ac70438b48b86/app/cli.py#L147-L154By default, Piefed the platform blocks over two dozen far-right/fascist instances and two leftist instances: hexbear and lemmygrad. It’s a hard-coded Overton window.
Piefed.social is federated with Lemmy.ml, AFAIK.
Why does every fediverse reddit clone have to pull this shit?
People want to live in Echo Chambers.
Politically motivated censorship is the type of thing many people are trying to get away from.
Nah, most of 'em just want to be the ones doing the censoring.
Sounds like the liberals they are trying to appease
but what if the dude pulls a fetterman and next year he is blocking shit you agree with?
Then go to a different site…? What’s the actual problem here?
Switching sites is annoying? I’m sure you are aware of that though…
Only mildly. At least on Lemmy, I haven’t used piefed. The import/export went really well when lemm.ee shut down. And luckily there was an instance with a similar stance (lemmy.zip) to letting you decide what you want blocked.
Blocking known disinfo sources is not politically motivated censorship, it’s reality motivated censorship.
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
you dont think someone posting about how fox news is reporting on something could be relevant? simply linking to an article is not always the poster agreeing with the reporting.
you dont think someone posting about how fox news is reporting on something could be relevant?
that’s right. If you want to or not, you are propagating the misinformation and helping them by giving them more exposure for their stats, more data for them to sell and more money for them to gain through ads.
EDIT : What is there to learn from a misinformation link? Everyone knows its misinformation.
Okay yeah it’s junk but this is just division
Fox news argued in court that they’re fictional entertainment and no reasonable person would take their reporting seriously.
I get that, but we can’t play the free speech for me, not for thee game
Free Speech means the government shouldn’t prosecute people for their speech, that’s all its ever meant. It doesn’t mean non-government places must allow Nazis to say their piece on your platform. That just turns places into Nazi bars.
This isn’t allowing them on a platform, this is disallowing platforms to choose whether to allow them on a platform based on the opinions of a guy that has endorsed genocide and child rape.
this is disallowing platforms to choose whether to allow them on a platform
The block list is editable by any admin, and the sysadmin can delete the block list entirely.
based on the opinions of a guy that has endorsed genocide and child rape.
Uhh, gonna need a source for that one, Chief.
The block list is editable by any admin, and the sysadmin can delete the block list entirely.
So your choice is trust the genocide guy, spend WEEKS vetting a giant list that is mostly filled with dead links, or have no blocklist?
Gee wilkers I wonder which one most will pick.
The list is full of junk but it also has sites like fox news.
🤔
Yeah, I stand by what I said lol
That Fox News isn’t junk? Have you been living under a rock for 40 years?
I wish
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.
Lemmy still has a site blocklist for URL posts, though it doesn’t come pre-populated at all, so it’s basically disabled by default. Same with the slur filter.
Blocklist? I though it was swearword censor.
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.
