According to Rimu, 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.
I need to tack on a moderator blurb to this post. I received a report from Rimu that this post doxxed them. While it does appear the original post contained Rimu’s full name, I do not believe this qualifies as doxxing.
Posting someone’s full name typically would be doxxing, but Rimu has completely subverted their own expectation of privacy by publicly linking their full name with their development work on Piefed. Their username is even their real first name. I do not believe you can doxx someone who already did it to themselves.
This information is publicly available, and it was made so by Rimu themselves.
Not only is this not doxxing but under these circumstances it smacks of a half hearted attempt at censorship. Rimu made themselves a public figure. You cannot post their address, or other personal information, but their name is fair game by their own choice.
Indeed, removing his full name is more of a good faith act. I don’t think much is to be achieved by leaving it anyway, so if someone is so discomforted by it that they ask for the removal - alright, I will. After all, we all need to remain good neighbors around here.
But, as you said, leaving your full name out in public and then trying to make it never see the light on the Threadiverse specifically is very inconsistent, and will likely fail at some point.
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.
most of those fake local ‘news’ farms are spouting far-right or extremist views.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
Any source on this?
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?
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
blockinghiding/flagging propaganda and fascism, this case 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”Piefed dev’s I talked to said they can decide to allow or disallow instances at least even as many come preblocked.
Personally think it’s just really not the software’s job to handle this or have an opinion on this - it’s rather up to the instance admins to decide.
blocklist.enabled = True
Having a blocklist option is of course perfectly fine. Pre-filling and pre-enabling that list is not the software’s job, if you ask me.
that feels rather “i don’t like politics”-y to me, i see no problem with shipping a default blocklist so long as it’s opt-in.
free, open source software developed by humans with emotions and opinions is allowed to do things the developers think can help the world be better, so long as it doesn’t cross the line into actively malicious: e.g. hardcoding blocklists and trying to hide that it exists.
Of course they’re allowed - just saying I personally do not like it.
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.
Oh no, so when I eventually set up my own piefed instance, I’ll have to spend ten more minutes then initially expected? That’s awful.
You’re going to go through several thousands of links in ten minutes all to… maybe have a slightly less reddit like experience?
It takes you more than 10 minutes to run a db transaction?
…Do you think that is auditing a list?
Do you know what auditing is?
No, the physical action of removing things you already know from a list that may or may not include them is not the problem. No one has claimed it is.
What is the problem is going through the list, thousands of entries, and finding out if they’re accurate to what has been claimed. That take going to every single site you don’t necessarily recognize, which for a list of thousands will be thousands, and doing even the bare minimum of research.
Why would you audit the list? Just remove it lol
Cool, now you can be spammed by scam sites. Since its the same list.
So you’re starting from zero. Congrats. Hope your instance is never, ever actually populated otherwise your entire experience hosting the instance will be spent doing moderation.
Lmao okay, so how would you have it handled then?
Blocklist? Dystopian.
No blocklist? Spam city.
Enlighten us.
Don’t offer it by default. Offer a feature. Then, separately entirely from the project, offer a block list or set of block lists. Have that extra step.
Nearly all software users, and yes especially self-hosting server admins, use default settings. By declaring yourself as the arbiter of all things bad and including it by default, you have changed your software from a neutral party, to one that is the arbiter of truth that requires effort to turn off, and that’s not something most are going to do.
Thus whatever you say becomes the majority opinion. This isn’t a new or surprising opinion btw, it’s the literal reason the DMCA has section 230 in the US, and all countries have something similar for platforms, scientific journals, and news organizations.
It was only about 15 years ago that censorship was an extreme taboo on the internet. I miss those times deeply.
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.
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.
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.
piefed already blocks by default lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad. lol … it’s just a lib echo chamber.I stand corrected.
I mean, as long as the info is upfront, why does it matter? They are not censoring the Internet, they are censoring their own little chunk of it. That’s cool with me, anyway. I myself am not the echo chamber type, but I do sometimes prefer a more civil platform, and in human society that inevitably requires some uniformity or commonality.
conservatives and tankie instances are rarely civil, and they have alot of mis and disinformation. i would rather not see those at all. if they do things like advocating for actual laws, electing those types politicians then that would be different, but its mostly propaganda.
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.
🤔
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.
Feel free to self-host and empty the blocklist. As for the far-left and far-right, they love censorship.
What’s the far-left?
Far-left politics are politics further to the left on the political spectrum than the standard political left. The far-left encompasses a wide range of heterogeneous ideologies, including anarchism, communism, and Marxism; it includes groups that advocate for revolutionary socialism and related communist ideologies, as well as anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation. The modern far-left distinguishes itself from social democracy through its inherent opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While anarchist strains of far-left thought are anti-authoritarian in nature, and most far-left schools of thought aim at a classless, stateless society, Leninist-led revolutions have imposed authoritarian rule in practice.
Sounds good tbh. Well, except for the authoritarian bullshit of course.
‘Authoritarian’ is a meaningless buzzword. There is no definition of it that includes ‘authoritarian’ countries while excluding non’authoritarian’ countries.
Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.
Pretty succinct actually.
Cool, so China, Cuba, Russia isn’t authoritarian?
Of course they are authoritarian.
The modern far-left distinguishes itself from social democracy through its inherent opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While anarchist strains of far-left thought are anti-authoritarian in nature, and most far-left schools of thought aim at a classless, stateless society
Terrifying!
Thankfully they’re too busy being more-far-left than the other guy to actually organize
Can’t call conservatives retarded or leftist mods will delete the comment
It’s an enormous cult of political loonies
The right is the party of white supremacy and child rape, so I’m happy not to see any material ignoring/defending/enabling that.
It’s not just right-wing though, also thegrayzone.com and wikileaks.org get blocked as well as uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com
Users that are right-wing, Marxist, or generally concerned about global censorship of the Fedi-/Threadiverse, might opt for other options instead.
Based. Fuck accelerationists and fuck nazis.
And you know what, censorship is a problem. But at the moment, the choking permeation of authoritarians is worse, and the authoritarians could use some of their own fucking medicine for a bit until shit calms down.
I’m glad you approve of the world as it is right now and hate anything that makes positive change, but leave that to your little echo chamber known as THE ENTIRE PUBLIC INTERNET, and maybe don’t invade left wing spaces with it?
as soon as the authoritarians leave the left wing spaces, sure.
Define authoritarian in any way that includes what you have been brainwashed to believe is an ‘authoritarian’ country, but excludes any country you believe isn’t authoritarian.
What always pissed me off was the general block of green texts, which I find funny. Especially because it took several months until I got to know why and how they are blocked exactly.
On the contrary I found it fucking weird how the fediverse loves reposting 4chan screenshots.
