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Hardcoded censorship is a no no
Thats bullshit misinformation.
PieFed has a default block list, of which HexBear is on it and a few other shitty nasty instances. It’s 100% editable from the admin menu and is not hardcoded at all.
That's terrible and immediately makes me question the trustworthiness and motivations of a dev team that decides to block instances by default.
I'm not saying they're not trustworthy but that just feels icky.
If you've gotten to the point of something as advanced as spinning up your own instance of a federated software you probably know who you want to federate with.
Here is the list of defederated instances when a fresh install happens. This is editable in the admin UI after installation is complete. So, if you really want your instance to federate with the good folks of cum.salon, you are more than welcome to.
This is really just intended to provide what we think of as a good set of defaults for a typical user. Of course this is somewhat opinionated, just like something like an operating system has a set of opinionated defaults for stuff like default programs, window styling, etc.
I think the biggest thing is just including one of the oldest and most active instances in there. Hexbear (or Lemmygrad) is not everyone's cup of tea but a default block, or even to lump them in with an instance like the one you mentioned is kinda crazy. Some of the other bigger instances out there federate with one or both just fine.
I mean, the same is true for other PieFed instances. piefed.zip, for example, is federated with both (same admin team as lemmy.zip).
Like I said, this is inherently opinionated as any kind of defaults would be (themes, colors, user settings, etc.). I just don't agree that just because an instance is old and active means that it is a positive influence on or provides a positive experience for the average user. Just like I don't think forums like 4chan should be looked at positively just due to its age and activity. I know there are many that disagree with this, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Specifically, the piefed.social instance is a bit more opinionated than most other instances out there because rimu has pretty strong feelings about social media. Some of my contributions to the code have been to make PieFed less opinionated or to take some of those very strongly opinionated options/filters and make them configurable or optional at an admin level. So far, rimu has been pretty receptive to this kind of contribution.
At the end of the day, I am glad that all three threadiverse software platforms exist (people too often forget about mbin) and have been able to maintain a cordial working relationship. They each have different opinions, defaults, and features that might appeal to some users over others.
It’s also one of the most defederated instances around. People don’t want to interact with they site for a damn good reason.
Clearly it's polarizing. Clearly anyone spinning up a new instance certainly would know what site of that fence they fall on.
They can remove it then.
It’s not polarising, it’s the norm.
The majority of all instances defederate with them.
Uh, out of the top 10 instances by monthly active users (https://fedidb.com/servers) it looks like ~~5 federate with them and 5 don't.~~
Edit: I was mistaken, it was 4 do and 6 don't. But still, clearly not universal and tons of people are able to coexist just fine with them.
2 of those 4 are the other triad members, with lemmygrad being even more blocked than Hexbear.
Huh?
lemmy.ml lemmy.zip lemmy.dbzer0.com discuss.tchncs.de
I suppose you're talking about .ml but that's only 1 of 4.
Huh, my bad. For some reason it showed grad before for me. I must've done something on my end.
lemmy.zip if I recall has a sort of soft-block in that new users are warned about those instances and offered to block them. I was told about 50% of lemmy.zip users block them.
I can find the conversation with an instance admin if you like but yes, it reportedly automatically blocks those for users and provides instructions for how to remove them, making seeing their content as opt-in rather than having to be opt-out, and thus the PieFed.zip instance is truly Newbie-friendly.
I did a code review just about a week ago, see https://hexbear.net/comment/6827649 for what I found.
Kindly pass this on, but this is actually defunct code that is not actually functionally active on Piefed.
Mostly everything else being complained about is objecting to Piefeds attempts to weeding out spammers, trolls and AI spammers with arguably punitive detective functions - but the purpose is to mitigate that.
What does that mean.
It doesn't work even if he wanted it to. Rimu himself didn't even add it. He's not the only contributor to the code.
Ok, thanks for telling me. It's of course difficult when just viewing the code somewhat detached to tell something like that.
Also I have said nothing about Rimu. And I know he isn't the only contributor.
Some of your code review is not understanding that Piefed handles things differently. So in the context of blocking, if someone blocks you on piefed - you simply can't reply to them anymore. This isn't out of sync with how many services operate. Now Lemmy does not operate like this, but the disconnect between how Lemmy and Piefed handle it cause discrepencies like this.
This code exists, but is unused to my knowledge. Certainly for Piefed.social.
I also do not see this as inherently bad as it can be used to stop slurs.
This is anti-AI checking functions. Most of the other things you refer to generally here within the code are simply mitigation tools against spam, trolls and AI posters.
wjs018 says it is in use, https://lemmy.ml/post/42044700/23491105 / https://piefed.social/comment/9793872
I hope that piefed will publish the blocked phrases in the api at some point, like lemmy publishes the slur regex in /site. (This isn't trying to be "look lemmy is better," I mean this)
And maybe it wouldn't be a problem if we weren't for federation. The result is a desync, where either all but the instance with the blocker can see the comment, or only the blocked users instance can see the comment.
Yes, it's a contradiction with how lemmy handles the block function vs. how piefed currently handles it.
No. I can reply to my piefed.social account with the piefed.zip account it has blocked.
Then there must be a bug.
What did I miss? What's wrong with hexbear? Are you just a transphobe?
Can you please clearly state your argument? I have no idea what you mean.
What do you mean?
There was an allegation made some while back of Piefed having "hard-coded' blocks of certain instances. In actuality there is a default setting when you spin up an instance to defederate from some of the most aggressive instances that are known to brigade, spam, and generally act trollish. You can simple uncheck those during or after setup though, so it's a suggestion, not a forced state.
https://diggita.com/post/93963/91551
Sry for the hexbear thread, couldn't find the sane post i got the info from in the first place.
TLDR
Piefed has a list of words that are banned and no instance can federate with others that use words like porn
No, that's not true. Piefed has no list of banned words. That specific function (which has been toned down) is purely for when a new instance wants to fetch new communities. It will ignore communities with specific keywords, most of them are just insults.
I suggest not purely relying on the word of Hexbear users who have never used Piefed and are trying to interpret the code.
I saw that in a very different thread, but search engines are useless nowadays.
The "most of them" part is (or was) a huge problem a bunch had been communities which the programmer had some weird personal agenda against.
Rimu does not like meme communities and 4chan culture, and piefed.social specifically will automatically erase all post from meme communities (and drama communities) after 6 months to save space (or at least that's a partial reason). Other instances like piefed.world have disabled this function. There were other terms in the original code that blocked other things too, like "196" and "piracy" so new communities with those in the title could not be auto-fetched (although could still be added manually), but they've now been removed.
Then why bring it up, if you aren't certain? Let others who know do that? Anyway here are some details about the situation:
It was actually Lemmy that had a hard-coded list of banned words, and those word above are from Nutomic, except that after a huge outcry the Lemmy devs did relent.
As Skavau said there was a recent issue where new communities would not automatically be brought in, but that's not a "block" since they can always be added manually at any time. Even so, it was hard-coded (generally never a good thing to do in code), and it wasn't highlighted in the code to make it easier for new instance admins to see and change unless they were reading through all of the code (which I think most instance admins have been doing so far?).
So it's not "great", but it's not horrendous either, unlike the true hard-coded word block done by Lemmy.
Also, PieFed recently enabled allowing the showing of deleted posts. I think it's a bug that the OP image is still showing (when OP deletes something they should have the right to make it disappear, but conversely those conversations started by their OP yet continued by others are not their property to dispense so readily), but anyway you can read through it here: https://piefed.social/post/1623152. Note that many things have already changed since then, e.g. Lemmy has walked back its own hard-coding of another matter, the centralization of using Lemmy.ml as the sole authoritarian control source to define the list of popular communities sent out to new instances (it is still hard-coded, despite all the outcry about hard-coding when done by the PieFed devs, but at least now it provides for some alternatives), plus deleted posts are a thing now, they've also been changed to be allowed automatically without needing to be triggered.
The difference in handling these matters between the PieFed vs. Lemmy devs is very notable. I'm tired of how people speak as if the Lemmy devs have never done any wrong and PieFed should not exist so as to make room for Lemmy. If people want to use Lemmy, they will, but the same for Piefed? The full details are there if you want to peruse them, unlike on Lemmy where a deleted post returns an empty page that acts as if the OP never used to exist in the first place.
It sounds like that comment chain is discussing two different things. First is the piefed default block list, which admins can edit as they please for their instance. Hexbear and lemmygrad are on there.
Second is the lemmy slur filter, which used to be applied across all of lemmy and was not configurable. That may have changed, but it isn't clear how. But regardless, that doesn't seem like a complaint about piefed, unless I am misunderstanding.
Huh, on one thread I notice cunt was censored, the comment still went through with removed under that word, while other swear words went through.
I hate that kind of censorship, bad words are case by case, just because people have used cunt in bad ways doesn't mean no one should be able to use it, if it did the ill intentioned could disallow any word or argument by starting to use it, not all that hypothetical, the right co-opts left terminology and issues all the time, and discredits them with the sheep as such.
What you are talking about is way worse though, I find that disqualifying if true. Wtf? Is piefed started by religious extremists, trying to stay out of the crosshairs of extremists? Hate freedom of speech? Segregating from each other from some imperiously minded administrator deciding what's good for us is a road to NOT overtaking social media that has become parasitic.
This is all configurable by site admins and not baked into the code.
Fuck. I moved here from instance that was sinked. I need to move again? Is that true?
No, there's no word censorship of posts or comments. Rimu did add in a word filter for instances to be able to use if they wanted - but it's unused currently.
For piefed.social specifically, there are some words/phrases in the filter currently. Most of them are malicious links that have been spammed in the past or phrases that have been present among private message spam waves. Only one racial slur that I see in the list.
So, you don't know what 'hardcoded' means, and your hexbear link just demonstrates why they're stupid too?
The worry about a hard-coded list stems from Lemmy itself doing exactly that several years ago. And then when pressed, the response was:
-Nutomic
To be fair, after a huge outcry the Lemmy devs did eventually relent and removed the block. Yet somehow on hexbear and lemmygrad (see links to those in the context to this sub-thread above), Lemmy has never done anything wrong, and PieFed can never do anything right.
That's enough reason right there for me to leave Lemmy behind. Thankfully PieFed exists or else I'd have to leave the Threadiverse altogether, and yet there will always be some who bring their false arguments around the defederation filters.
Since that time btw Lemmy has added an additional hard-coded filter that highly ironically - and hilariously to me - went even further towards propagating community lists, even while PieFed has significantly walked back its own such efforts in that regard. Not that they would ever acknowledge either of such, of course:-).