this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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PieFed Flagship Instance Shadowbanning Instances from Discoverability & Other Questionable Updates (mander.xyz)
submitted 6 days ago by cm0002@mander.xyz to c/fediverse@lemmy.zip
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This morning while checking if Quokk.au's new instance logo was federated out, I discovered that overnight we had been shadowbanned from the PieFed.Social Instance Chooser (This is a tool to help spread out users across the platform and help avoid funnelling users into the largest.)

Knowing that Rimu was happy to explain, I just asked for some clarification as we were visible on every other PieFed instance except his.

Apparently for ' obvious reasons ', of which I can only assume is our left leaning anarchist/pro-trans stance we were chosen not be advertised on the PieFed flagship instance and first point of contact for many potential new users. Seeing as a large portion of our new users found us via this method, it will have a tangible effect on a small instance such as ours.

This was a pretty sad sight to see, and reflects the sort of petty drama that is emanating from the PieFed project lately. It's now the third such move to discredit and harm left leaning instances by PieFed's lead developer. This also shows a trend towards autocratic unilateral decision-making on Piefed.social, of which is starting to be run as a personal fiefdom without consulting the team or users.

I must commend Lemmy.ml for remaining neutral and not letting its own political leanings influence [despite what they do with their instance itself] join-lemmy.org, while simultaneously condemn PieFed.social for this immature move that is harmful to the health of the Fediverse.

Following this exchange, Rimu announced a new update to PieFed allowing for some rather concerning things.

  • Modlog: Reason for the action is only shown from trusted instances, so abusive mods won't have an audience. Admins can still see the reason though. Which instances are trusted is set in the admin UI.

This feature means problematic users can now go undetected, and will harm moderators ability to view their past moderation history. For example PieFed.social runs a 'trusted' list of only 34 instances, meaning any mod action taken by any of the hundreds of instances outside of this will not show up. So for example if Quokk.au was to ban a user for transphobia (our most common ban), this will not be reflected for piefed.social users potentially leading towards more hate speech on the Fediverse.

  • Instance silencing similar to Mastodon. A silenced instance is not defederated from but their posts do not show in the Popular or All feeds and their communities are not shown in Starter packs aka Topics. Their communities can still be found in the communities list and joined in the normal way. Once joined, posts in there show up in the subscribed feed as usual.

This is another way to shadowban instances and not 'advertise' them. Surely if an instance is problematic enough that a defederation would be in order rather than this reddit-like move.

OC writeup by @Quokka@quokk.au

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[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)

3 times already? Only knew about one, about hardcoding banning communist instances at engine level, which afaik requires admins from other instances to fiddle with settings if they don't want to go the same way.

Kinda odd, since centralized decisions without much of a saying of those affected is the modus operandi I'd expect of communism. Almost feels like I'm seeing a dispute for power unfold.

If it keeps going that way, the best I can say is "everyone is free to do whatever they want, but no one is free of the consequences of their actions".

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Nothing hardcoded about it. This is all editable in the UI by any admin for their instance, no code editing required.

[–] Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

didn't he add that UI because they were hardcoded and people complained? the same with penalizing upvotes on memes?

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

This stuff with the instance chooser was never hardcoded, and was added to the codebase 8 months ago. It has always been an option that any admin can prevent other instances of their choosing from appearing in their own instance's version of the instance chooser.

The meme stuff was added to the admin UI 10 months ago. Back then, piefed basically only consisted of piefed.social and a couple other very small instances. So, as the software grew, and different kinds of users/instances have been using the project, those have been made optional (off by default) and editable. I am the one that made those settings optional, and I got zero pushback from rimu about it. In many cases where I have made the piefed codebase less opinionated, it is usually a relic of when piefed was basically a single-instance project and it was intentionally pretty experimental.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 6 days ago

Thank you for this comment.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip -3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If it keeps going that way, the best I can say is “everyone is free to do whatever they want, but no one is free of the consequences of their actions”.

Interestingly enough, that's valid for both sides of the situation. Had the dbzer0 admins directly reversed the ban calling Rimu a Zionist, that whole thing would have been avoided.

https://piefed.zip/post/1470832#comment_5164740

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You mean the thing they offered to do?

The thing they were ignored about and never engaged in conversation with?

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Quokka, is your instance defederated from the troika? If so, why?

Edit: if not, why did you choose piefed?

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

The troika?

I chose PieFed as I can read and understand Python, allowing me to edit the code and maintain the software. I originally ran Lemmy, but found even editing text to be highly confusing and stretched across multiple files for the most minimal of changes.

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth -4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Lol. 2/3 blocked, question met with silence. But don't punch left.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Hey so I had to leave for work, and am now on my morning tea break.

You’ve already seen, but we are federated with .ml.

We are defederated with HexBear due to concerns over trolling and harassment of our users. And grad is grad.

As anarchists that’s punching up not left. We don’t consider MLs to the left of us 🤭 Hope that’s cleared up your concerns.

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth -5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You're kidding yourself. You're reactionary af.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Would you like me to introduce you to some anarchist theory? It might help you understand what we value and what we don’t.

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 0 points 5 days ago

Lemmygrad, .ml, *hexbear. Thanks for answering the part you can. I understand.

[–] Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Oh, I didn't realize you were an admin at quokka.au?

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Cm0002 isn't, he cross posted the post from ! fediverse@lemmy.ml.

He does admin Lemy.lol iirc

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's also funny AF considering Zion/nazi.world preemptively defederated instances.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 4 points 5 days ago

Why is this comment in my inbox, I wasn’t even mentioned. Weird.

[–] cm0002@mander.xyz 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Nah, please see authorship tag

OC writeup by @Quokka@quokk.au

Why am I cross-posting .ml content?

I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to help vitilize non-.ml comms and make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don't want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some active niche comms.

Megathread on the issue

Some highlights from the link:

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068

"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035

General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510

And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can't even put them all here because this comment would be really long.

I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda

On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like "Lemmy? Isn't that the place with a bunch of tankies?" Or "Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left". The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team.

[–] fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

lemmy.zip was the nearest similar comm? This could have been put in an instance that is involved with the dispute, many of them have Fediverse communities.

Putting aside the irony of cross-posting a thread about the potentially ideologically inspired muting of smaller instances by Piefed to draw attention to lemmy.ml's potentially heavy-handed censorship and bias harming the growth of the Lemmy-verse - it looks less like "vitilizing" and more like fragmenting discussion.

More ironic still is that if I see one of your posts now it means that I'll probably go look at ml to see the actual discussion and hear more from the OP. Perhaps posting original content might go further to achieve your goals?

[–] cm0002@mander.xyz 2 points 5 days ago

I'm deprioritizing posting to PieFed.social comms for the moment, the next nearest was PieFed.social

it looks less like "vitilizing" and more like fragmenting discussion.

The Threadiverse is inherently fragmented, what one person sees from one instance could be wildly different from what another on a different one sees.

You could be a ani.social user and think you're participating with .ml, but you're actually not because .ml defederated ani.social...for reasons apparently. Or maybe a user is on one of many instances that defed hex and grad or even one that does the whole triad. Or perhaps a user got tired of them and blocked the instance themselves or a boycott participating user. Or one of many many people banned in some form or another. (I could go on forever lol)

Perhaps posting original content might go further to achieve your goals?

I do that too with heavy frequency, usually from my lemy.lol account these days because now that it's an admin account, it's been removed from the crossposting rotation.

Hell, some of the things Ive crossposted I genuinely enjoyed and started posting it on my own, like !gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe (one day your cross-posting and the next you're starting at chapter 1 of a 101 chapter comic series 😭) or The Devils Panties webcomic I post on !comics@lemmy.blahaj.zone

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip -1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

The "obvious reasons" come from the drama I tried to summarize in this comment: https://lemmy.ml/post/47022286/25575766

If we go down to the core of the issue, there's a fundamental disagreement between some instances on a niche use case: can the modlog be used for permanent slander, without giving people the option to reply?

Dbzer0, quokk.au and anarchist.nexus instance admins didn't see the value in allowing admins to act on other instances modlogs. Rimu and other people in the Piefed staff were interested in this, hence the new feature regarding the modlog.

There was some additional tension between Quokk.au admins and Rimu on the way he handled the AI moderation disclosure, leading to a quokk.au admin leaving the channel.

Now remember that all of this only affects Piefed.social. I've been a Piefed.zip user for 11 months now, and that's the instance I recommend to everyone. Even from a federation perspective, Piefed.zip doesn't defederate from for instance hexbear or lemmygrad (but the Piefed instance blocking is an actual blocking compared to Lemmy's incomplete one).

Switching between Piefed instances is as easy as it can be.

Some people will see these decisions for Piefed.social and the new Piefed feature as "drama", but they seem to be a way to deal with what triggered the drama in the first place (slander in modlogs)

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 days ago

Now remember that all of this only affects Piefed.social.

This is a dishonest way to frame it. Of course being excluded from instance chooser directly affects other instances.

Personal grievances shouldn't impact discoverability of other instances. Wasn't that the point everyone kept shouting at Lemmy devs from Kbin back in the day?