cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299
I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it’s been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.
Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There’s a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we’ve been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.
This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.
When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is “incompatible with that instance” which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.
Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don’t just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn’t it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think…
Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I’ll doubt I’ll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we’ll bring up mlmym again now that someone’s maintaining it again.
I noticed this post on Mastodon, wanted to open it in the threadiverse, which nowadays I usually do through Piefed.social.
- Copied link
- In Piefed, Search > Retrieve remote post
- “Post not found”. Me: what? Did the author or mod delete it already???
- Clicked on the link to try, it opened on the native instance (lemmy.world) just fine! Neither author nor mod has deleted it. I read the article.
- After, I investigate a bit more. On Piefed.social, I am subscribed to !fediverse@lemmy.world , I can open that /c & can see posts there. But not this post. It’s missing.
- Come to my Lemmy instance (lemmy.ca) with Alex front-end, confirm I can see the post from here. Twice even.
So why can’t I see it on Piefed.social??? Can I not rely on Piefed.social? Censorship, or just an innocent federation issue?
Piefed.social is run by an admin with similar views on censoring leftists as the Tesseract devs. There was a whole fiasco about it a few months back, where the lead Dev of Piefed kept lists of Leftists and other users they permabanned for pointing out issues with Piefed’s code.
OP is on that list.
What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.
My strong guess would be that the turbolib Zionist mods/admins of lemmy.world are at it again.
lemmy.world of course being… you know, mostly ex reddit power mods, from the US.
On an unrelated note: We all know Ghislaine Maxwell was also a reddit power mod, right?
Shitty Piefed dev -> lemmy.world mod -> ex-reddit power mod -> Ghislaine Maxwell
makes about as much sense as
“We shouldn’t have people starving in the streets or paying $35,000 to visit the emergency room” -> socialism -> USSR -> Stalin -> Holodomor
Sure, the links are there, but what a silly series of connections to reach to in order to paint your target as the worst possible thing to confuse the impressionable.
Lead Dev is a crusader for establishment liberalism, essentially. Hates conservatives but also hates leftists. This puts them at odds with much of the fediverse, who lean more left than liberal.
It’s definitely funny in an ironic kind of way that Piefed began as at least partly a reaction towards the politics of the Lemmy devs, but ended up themselves doing the very thing they feared (ie: letting politics affect the code). Meanwhile Lemmy still has never suffered from this, as far as I know.
I’m definitely biased as I’m a communist myself, but I’d argue this is more reflective of the politics of both sets of devs. Lemmy devs truly believe in the communist principles underlying the FOSS, federated project they have, while Piefed is unapologetically biased against that and towards liberalism. In other words, the principles speak for themselves in both projects.
I’m a communist myself
Well fuck you. May all the people who died in the concentration camps, in famines, cultural purges, or just simply shot dead at the border crossings, haunt you tonight.
While excesses have been committed in socialist countries, they absolutely pale in comparison to the atrocities committed for capitalism and colonialism. I won’t weap for landlords, capitalists, and fascists that were killed or imprisoned for their crimes against the working classes, and I will celebrate the immense gains made by the working classes after successfully gaining political power.
Everywhere the working classes have taken power, life expectancies, literacy rates, housing rates, and more have all dramatically climbed, while food insecurity and poverty dramatically declined. Every single time. The sheer effectiveness of socialism in uplifting the people is undeniable, and while it’s unfortunate that this can only be successfully established via revolutionary and therefore violent means, this violence is a response to the daily brutalization of the working classes
they absolutely pale in comparison to the atrocities committed for capitalism and colonialism
Colonialism is colonialism. No matter the color.
I won’t weep for landlords, capitalists
Then weep for the workers who were denied education because they refused Leninism. Weep for those who has been sent to work in the uranium mines. Weep for those persecuted for their faith. Weep for those who has been put to a fucking jail for watching a Knight Rider on TV.
working classes after successfully gaining political power
What you call a working class has never achieved political power. Only the chosen faithful families could ever get anywhere near the office desk, not even mentioning a political function. Without pledging you allegiance to a one of the worst dictators who ever lived, you were not even considered.
The sheer effectiveness of socialism in uplifting the people
Yes. The toilet paper outages and bribes for the butcher so you can skip the line were certainly very uplifting.
it’s unfortunate that this can only be successfully established via revolutionary and therefore violent means
And here we are. You’re openly advocating for death and destruction to follow some kind of a fairy-tale. You’re no better than an american soldiers leveling a primary school to the ground, or a russian soldier executing civilians in Butcha.
daily brutalization of the working classes
Open your fucking eyes. You can no longer see the real wold for the veil of victimization you have put upon yourself. There is no class.
And most importantly, stop scheming about some great revolution and CREATE the means of production!
I won’t weap for landlords, capitalists, and fascists that were killed or imprisoned for their crimes against the working classes
Well, yeah. Those are among the groups you said you explicitly want to
massmurder. Why would you weep for them?Edit: he never said mass murder, my bad. I should have fact checked before saying anything. Come one, come all, see how fucking stupid I am. It’s alarmingly stupid, and I probably should just fuck off forever instead of being a fucking moron in public. I’m so sorry for inflicting myself on you all.
I’m no expert, but it sounds like they were killed by authoritarianism, not communism. I don’t think communism requires concentration camps, famines, or cultural purges.
As established in the other thread here, state-wide communism can only be achieved by the violent means.
What needs to follow is for the people to willingly forget some of what they know, uninvent the market, money, and give up every possesion that’s of any significant value. That is not going to happen without violence either.
And to keep the society in this state, you need an aparatus that will constantly keep them in fear, or ar least apply some kind of double-think. A dictatorship is the only way to do that.
This is how the soviet style communism has been brought to my city:
Communism is inherently authoritarian.
And to that I say: Authoritarians of the world, gurgle my balls!
You say, the guy is fed up by the extremists? What an asshole!
I would recommend switching to piefed.ca
Or PieFed.zip (though since the person you were replying to is on Lemmy.ca I agree that your choice is the better fit:-).
From a purely software engineering point of view, I don’t understand why they feel the need to hardcode such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.
It also displayed bogus error messages, as if to appear to be a technical issue with the community instance, while hiding the black list deep in code. So the point here was to deceive and manipulate.
If it was a toggleable and customisable list that would be a good feature for instances.
Edit: this situation is terribly muddy but it seems that while one of the blocklists (the hidden, larger one) is not hard-coded, the other (smaller, instance-only?) actually seems to be.
Actually… it is toggleable, though not customizable, and for @theacharnian@lemmy.ca I will also add that it is separated into a different file, not hard-coded.
from src/lib/policies/system.ts:
export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() { if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) { SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY) return } // auto-update of blocklist continues below- source
This feature definitely needs greater transparency, and people can debate whether and how offering a “toxicity filter” at all offends them (especially if they are caught up in it), or the way it was implemented, but the reporting on this issue could also definitely stand to be more rooted in facts as opposed to tribal politicking. The fact that the OOP gives extremely strong indications that it was written by an LLM also does not help matters any.
I am not saying that this is a nothing-burger, but I am saying that I see an awful lot of posturing and opinions shared vehemently but exceedingly few people (including those cross-posting widely across the entire Threadiverse) actually opening up and reading the code to look at the facts.
I would think that people would be in a better position to judge, after first-hand reading an actual source of knowledge rather than merely the title and enormously biased summary? (Which has turned out to be incorrect in several places, notably in CRUCIAL details that it has left out - which wouldn’t you know it, sounds just like an LLM to me… - not everyone that I see on the internet is a bot, but then again some text undoubtedly is directly written by a bot.)
if you block all the commies, gays, software pirates, plis you individually block people one by one…sooner or later there wont be anything left. maybe just a few nerds fighting over linux ricing.
Oh this would be a bliss…
Doesn’t piefed also do OCR on every image to try and detect if it’s a 4chan screenshot and then pretend it had an error when uploading? Sneaky lil shits.
I keep hearing so much shit that piefed does but also see a ton of people either ignoring it or praising it. Does piefed have some sorta propaganda team or something?
And here I am, going WTF is a piefed?
A platform similar to Lemmy, but with an explicit ideological stance against communists, who are the main Lemmy devs (and the Lemmy devs, because of their belief in communism, adhere more closely to FOSS and federation, with less hard-coded bias as PieFed).
For those to lazy to make block lists?
More ideologically driven, the Dev of PieFed wants to reduce exposure to leftists.
Tankies specifically. Not all leftists are tankies, stop pretending otherwise
If I were to give my own definition of what constitutes a tankie, I’d say it’s anyone who defends existing socialist states, past or present. Those socialist states are generally understood to be the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, GDR, etc. The defense tankies give is not in accepting both bourgeois historiography as accurate but justified, but instead in directly combatting bourgeois historiography. Tankie is also a pejorative for these people, used to convey the strawman of the person that believes the lies of the Red Scare but believes them to be justified.
In that case, I am definitely a tankie. I spend a good deal of time talking about socialism both past and present, and arguing for how we can expand that movement and carry it to the future. I am definitely a defender of socialist states, I just don’t believe the common allegations such as “100 million were killed by communism” are at all accurate. I don’t think you’ll find someone who believes the 100 million number but also thinks it’s good and justified.
It’s also useful to understand it in this manner because it explains why even anarchists and liberals are called “tankie.” The throughline about defending existing socialism is the central identifier of a tankie, and the use of tankie to dismiss those who defend socialism as it exists in the real world is also covered by this understanding.
It’s similar to Lemmy, but with more features and has better integration with Mastodon.
- Edit -
Some specific features that PieFed has:- Support for Posts with Polls
- Ability to follow users (including Mastodon users that aren’t specifically tagging a community in the threadiverse)
- Feeds (combine multiple communities into a “feed” )
- If a post has been cross-posted, comments from every community are shown/organized below the post.
- Post/user flairs
Downvoted for helpfully answering a question, only on
RedditLemmy.
It does not help that for that issue, as too for this OP, a lot of misinformation is spread, which obfuscates the truth.
e.g. in both situations, people claimed that something was hard-coded when in fact it was not. (Edit: this situation is terribly unclear, and one of Tesseract’s two main sources of blocking actually is reported to be hard-coded, even though another source turned out not to be hard-coded.)
That doesn’t mean that PieFed isn’t actively censoring content (it is, and misleadingly so too), or that you should use it (use whatever software you want), but it does mean that the people criticizing it, having cited that specific “alternative fact”, were spreading lies. Probably without realizing it, yet they certainly don’t seem all that concerned about actually reading sources in order to find the truth. Which, yeah, complicates people’s decisions about what services to use.
There is a very much hardcoded list of instances that determine whether a piefed instance is considered to have a good “defederation policy” or not.
Edit: I was thinking of the default defederation list
As far as I understand it, it’s not “hardcoded” in the sense that all piefed instances have it (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to respond to you).
From what I understand, there is a default list, but this can be edited by any instance admins.
No! There is a hardcoded instance list to determine whether a piefed instance is considered to have a good “defederation policy” or not. All piefed instances have this if they didn’t fork the code.
// Handle federation status const watchedDomains = { 'hexbear.net': 'hexbear-status', 'hilariouschaos.com': 'hilariouschaos-status', 'lemmygrad.ml': 'lemmygrad-status', 'lemmy.ml': 'lemmy-status', 'gregtech.eu': 'lemvotes-status', }; const defederatedDomains = instance.defederation || []; countDefederated = 0; Object.entries(watchedDomains).forEach(([domain, elementId]) => { const statusElement = document.getElementById(elementId); const isDefederated = defederatedDomains.includes(domain); if (isDefederated) { countDefederated += 1 } }); if(countDefederated >= 3) defederationQuality = 'Good'; else if(countDefederated === 2) defederationQuality = 'Ok'; else if(countDefederated === 1) defederationQuality = 'Minimal'; else if(countDefederated < 1) defederationQuality = 'None';So you could defederate the “tankie triad” but not hilariouschaos.com, lemmychan and whatever else harmful instances and be considered to have a “good” defederation policy. This is what is shown to new users to make a decision which instance to join but it is impossible to find out on what basis this grade is assigned except for diving into the code. And it cannot be altered except for forking.
Thank you, this is an extremely helpful description.
Btw neither fedinsfw.app (with 2.4x higher number of MAUs than PieFed.social, making it by far the #1 most-used PieFed instance), nor PieFed.zip (with self-reportedly 541 MAUs, making it the clear #3 PieFed instance) show up in that instance picker list.
I tried viewing the list from multiple instances including from PieFed.social itself. So I’m not sure how much people actually make use of that picker, and it seems buggy as hell (unless both of those instances have intentionally decided not to be listed?). Though even more confusing is how PieFed.zip also does not report onto https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list (though Lemmy.zip does appear at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list).
Anyway, it’s good to know that while PieFed does not have a hard-coded instance blacklist - nor are those 4chan filters hard-coded either iirc - it does have an extremely odd and unhelpful depiction of what constitutes a “good” level of defederation on that instance picker list.
And now with the highly controversial and extremely bad roll-out of the vote quota issue, while I would not go so far as to recommend that people steer clear of PieFed itself (instances like PieFed.zip and quokka and blahaj seem to be doing just fine with it, e.g. maintaining a watchful eye on the opinionated additions to the sourcecode), I would unequivocally recommend avoiding trusting the instance picker at this point. As you showed and I piled onto here, it is just an absolute mess (and Rimu is showing strong signs of burnout so unlikely to be fixed anytime soon).
Amazing how these projects keep killing themselves by alienating huge portions of their userbase. Hard to survive in a FOSS environment by being extremely reactionary.
Lemmy has managed to survive in spite of the tankies that develop it. I guess federation works in the end.
Lemmy is surviving because communists are ideologically coherent and committed to FOSS and federation. The communism is a huge plus, and communists make up a huge portion of the userbase.
Stop pretending that tankies and communists/leftists/whatever are interchangeable words.
They are not.
If I were to give my own definition of what constitutes a tankie, I’d say it’s anyone who defends existing socialist states, past or present. Those socialist states are generally understood to be the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, GDR, etc. The defense tankies give is not in accepting both bourgeois historiography as accurate but justified, but instead in directly combatting bourgeois historiography. Tankie is also a pejorative for these people, used to convey the strawman of the person that believes the lies of the Red Scare but believes them to be justified.
In that case, I am definitely a tankie. I spend a good deal of time talking about socialism both past and present, and arguing for how we can expand that movement and carry it to the future. I am definitely a defender of socialist states, I just don’t believe the common allegations such as “100 million were killed by communism” are at all accurate. I don’t think you’ll find someone who believes the 100 million number but also thinks it’s good and justified.
It’s also useful to understand it in this manner because it explains why even anarchists and liberals are called “tankie.” The throughline about defending existing socialism is the central identifier of a tankie, and the use of tankie to dismiss those who defend socialism as it exists in the real world is also covered by this understanding.
Try a relevant reply next time dude
I already did.
Me: don’t equate tankies and all leftists.
You: rants for paragraphs about your own (incorrect) definition of tankie.
Yeah, no, you didn’t. More tankie bullshit, shocker
And this is a problem because? … I don’t even know what this Tesseract is, but why is everyone always pretending discrimination is “so big”! And “worse than it has ever been.”! It’s not, it’s a small minority and the left and right are both just as guilty. And I tipicaly only see this behavior online. However I kinda touch grass on a daily basis and have noticed the real world is far from what the internet portaits it to be. EDIT: typo
Honestly after looking at the list aside for blahaj (wtf I know) most of it is basically internet hygiene. Please look at the full list I wouldn’t be surprised if the dev got in a fight with someone from that instance and childishly just black listed the whole instance.Edit: after further inspection I was wrong and the dev has mentally derailed
