this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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PieFed has done it once again, this time adding 'warning' labels for opposing ideological perspectives, well at least one; Can't find any warnings for fascism or capitalism πŸ€”

This can be demonstrated here: https://piefed.social/c/globalnews/p/1697164/sudan-civil-war-spills-over-into-neighboring-chad-peoples-dispatch

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[–] rimu@piefed.social 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

I'm happy to explain. You could have just asked, though.

During initial installation PieFed downloads a big list of 3000 right-wing domains from https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon and blocks them all. Admins can unblock them if they want but they would need to do them individually so I bet none do.

The list includes things like fox news, breitbart, etc. Before starting work on PieFed I spent 3? years studying right wing disinformation - qanon, antivax, all that and that blocklist is an output from that. Every site on that list was reviewed personally.

So.

Additionally, I have manually added these warnings (not blocks) onto some domains, for piefed.social only. You can download a list of those warnings from https://join.piefed.social/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/warnings.ods

Most of them are tabloids, AI slop farms and a handful are authoritarian government mouthpieces.

So there's 3000 right wing sites that simply can't be linked to and 47 sites with warnings, about 10% of which are left wing. There's no need to warn for fascism because posts that link to them are not displayed in the first place.

There's an ideological slant to PieFed for sure, and it's very much in favor of the left. That could be why maga.place and lemmychan.org use Lemmy and not PieFed.

I'll take another look at peoplesdispatch and see if there's a less triggering warnings I can put on it.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

There’s an ideological slant to PieFed for sure, and it’s very much in favor of the left. That could be why maga.place and lemmychan.org use Lemmy and not PieFed.

PieFed bakes in preferences against left wing groups, and you've been launching a crusade against anarchist instances lately. As much as you believe yourself to be left, you've done your best to left-punch wherever you can, and have unilaterally made decisions greatly impacting the functionality of PieFed to suit your overwhelmingly liberal views. This isn't even getting into how you agree with racist conspiracy theories like the idea that China is kidnapping people for organ harvesting.

Also, it's nice that you admit that PieFed has an ideological slant and that you do develop PieFed with that in mind, socsa swore up and down that that wasn't the case for some reason.

Also, since Rimu permabanned me from Piefed.social at PugJesus' behest after I critiqued PJ's views from the left, they won't see my comment, sadly.

[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To heap insult on top of injury, Rimu has now unilaterally, and without any notification (to anyone it would appear), chosen to silently suppress anarchist.nexus and quokk.au from appearing in the PieFed.Social instance chooser. So, just more of the same old trolling and drama farming from him that we have been getting for weeks now.

vs

[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Rimu is single handedly generating so much misinformation and nonsense that essentially anyone else who works on Piefed alongside of him is becoming radioactive. Not sure how much I want to trust someone who is willing to help further Rimu's behavior. Working on Piefed used to be a bullet point and it is rapidly turning into an asterisk.

[–] Diva@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Modlog Reason for the action is only shown if it is from trusted instances, so abusive mods wont have an audience. Admins can still see the reason though.

pughitler is a mod on piefed.social and nobody seems to care about his abusive behavior.

rimu gets temporarily banned for 'emulating a zionist' and now suddenly it's a priority to address moderator abuse... via censorship shocked-pikachu

incredible

[–] eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

pughitler is a mod on piefed.social and nobody seems to care about his abusive behavior.

Don't you dare call out his actions, but he'll gladly smear you over his private kingdoms where you can't defend yourself.

[–] Goferking0@ttrpg.network 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's also very telling they named it noqanon.

While sounds great weird that would trigger ml warnings as no one would consider qanon that

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The noqanon list and the OP warning sign are two different things.

The first is a default url blocklist that gets pulled on first start of a Piefed instance and which contains extreme right-wing and mis-information outlets.

The domain warning sign mentioned in OP is a separate list only manually added to the piefed.social flagship instance.

[–] Aria@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 month ago

So ignoring the censorship aspect entirely: Admins are asked if they wish to block right wing domains, and then if they say yes, the software blocks (some right wing domains and) left wing investigative journalism sites like The Gray Zone. Russian news sites like RT, Sputnik and TASS, Harry Potter related sites, all of Telegram, vk.com (Russian-language social media site), Video hosts like Peertube and Rumble.

Is the whole reason you made this list so you could sneak in some personal vendettas? Also pretty suspicious that the BBC isn't on there. Or CNN. Or WaPo. Or Ynet. Or Mako. Or Times of Israel. Or DW. Given the era we live in, and their complicity in genocide, surely that'd be a higher priority than almost any other website if you're aiming to block harmful news sites with right wing editorial lines.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To clarify: you say that by default all PieFed instances don't even allow to link resources considered "right-wing", without an easy way to disable such anti-feature?

If so, it's basically a centralized point for censorship in a decentralized system, which is very antithetical to the spirit of the Fediverse and is something even the very left Lemmy devs prefer to avoid. I see it being very detrimental in its own right.

Shouldn't it be an offered setting instead? Like, "if you want your instance to avoid certain topics, here are filter lists to freely enable or disable"?

Much can be said about the definition of left and the way Marxists you are addressing don't see "liberal" as "left" to begin with.

What matters, though, is that you end up projecting a certain personal, even if somewhat educated, bias onto both PieFed as a project (banning right-wing outlets from even being linked to, globally), and the flagship instance (making warnings about Marxist-inclined outlets). This is very unwelcome for many, myself included, and, as previously mentioned, antithetical to what Fediverse is and what it stands for.

[–] rimu@piefed.social -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It depends on your definition of easy. Here is the admin UI for unbanning domains.

image

Also they can go into the database and empty the domain table.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You could have just asked, though.

Oh they could have asked, could they? Like you asked before spreading disinfo about our instance using GenAI for moderation?

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Are we supposed to bring back the whole history every time Rimu comments anywhere?

  • an anarchist.nexus admin calls for murder of Zionists in their username
  • a LW admin and Rimu gets qualified as Zionists in dbzer0 community modlogs
  • LW defederates anarchist.nexus
  • Rimu bans that admin
  • that anarchist.nexus admin changes their username and steps down as admin
  • LW refederates anarchist.nexus
  • Rimu asks the dbzer0 staff to act on the modlog calling him a Zionist, no action is taken, the dbzer0 staff advices him to ignore that
  • Rimu discovers that a dbzer0 mod has been using a LLM for moderation. That mod has been somehow pretending to use OpenAI to upset the !fuckai crowd, actually it was a local freeware model. He posts about it.
  • a dbzer0 admin reverts the ban calling Rimu a Zionist after I asked
  • Rimu is still upset, doesn't take the previous action into account and keeps the post about LLM moderation up
  • You bring it up here

Now, listen, db0: we've discussed a lot in the past, you know I like what you do, I support you and your instance most of the time. But that's also true for Rimu and Piefed. I think it's pointless to try to count points and see who was wrong when by how much. From my perspective, there were issues from all sides during that whole story.

Bringing it up every time anyone involved comments somewhere doesn't seem relevant, and will just start another round of "you were wrong", "I was wrong because you were wrong" etc. It can be endless, and most of the people are tired of that whole story.

Take care.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yes, it's very important to remind people what sort of a troll Rimu really is.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

You think defederating because they call for death upon Zionists is a win?

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Also:

I think it's pointless to try to count points and see who was wrong when by how much. From my perspective, there were issues from all sides during that whole story.

We have bent over backwards to de-escalate the situation, both with L.W. and with Rimu. Our admins have stepped down. People changed their usernames. Our admins overruled our mods. Literally creating tension within our instance to maintain relations with the larger fediverse. On the other hand, rimu's deliberate disinfo is still up to this day, without any statements from our team, or correction to their blatant lies. They've even blocked people calling them out, so piefed users can't see this criticism. So don't try to "both sides" me.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Stop making concessions to them

[–] kopasu22@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Cute, but not enough, not by a mile. Calling Piefed "left-leaning" is a LARP at best.

You’re treating these neoliberal interpretations of bias as some sort of intellectual debate to "inform" folks, instead of the existential threat it is to the nature of online discourse.

Sure, left-wing discussions are "allowed" as long as they wear their scarlet letter and stay in the ghetto where we put them.

I spent 3? years studying right wing disinformation

Guess some of it rubbed off.

[–] TanteRegenbogen@feddit.org -2 points 1 month ago

For MLs, leftists are never left enough.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But why? I don't understand why you want to make your software politically charged. I'm left leaning, but I believe in free speech for all. This makes piefed a censored platform by default. You are manufacturing an echo chamber.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I don't want fascists to benefit from my work. But it's FOSS, so anyone can download and install it, so I made it extremely unattractive to fascists.

There are plenty of other places where people can have "free speech".

Facebook, or reddit, for example. /s

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Heh, this puts Piefed in the same basket as Reddit, Facebook etc. for the same reasons you dislike them.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago

Fork PieFed and remove the 4 lines of code involved in doing this, then. See cli.py, line 160.

IDGAF.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

β€œThere’s and ideological slant to PieFed for sure”

Slant?!?! It’s a giant goddamn left-wing circle jerk propaganda machine 🀣

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

PieFed isn't left wing, it's overwhelmingly liberal.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It definitely isn’t lol. Banning all right wing sources while allowing left wing really screams liberalism over left wing lol.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Many of the "right-wing sources" are left wing sources that Rimu wants to drag as right-wing, and left wing sources get a warning while liberal ones do not.