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 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?
It has a few evangelists, but I’m not sure I’d call them a “propaganda team” as I don’t think they get paid to do so.
And here I am, going WTF is a piefed?
a Lemmy alternative, which based on their blocklist puts more empasis on the “fed” part than the “pie” part
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.
With the users being unaware or is it marketed that way?
There have been a few fiascos about it. It isn’t exactly unknown, but it isn’t exactly advertised either.
Cryptic…
(Is someone just downvoting every comment you make?)
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.
“If I use a different definition than what everyone else uses I can bend it to my beliefs”
This is why you tankies aren’t liked by a lot of people.
Authleft are tankies, it’s VERY simple.
It’s where you are Fed a Pie
It’s similar to Lemmy, but with more features and has better integration with Mastodon.
- Edit -
Some specific features that PieFed has:
Downvoted for helpfully answering a question, only on
RedditLemmy.Yeah, it happens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I probably could have been more helpful by listing out some specific features, so I went back and edited them in.
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.
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.
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/881a5c95657b03c29e81ac8f619e4d26e4f6973d/app/templates/auth/instance_chooser.html Line 562
// 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.
'gregtech.eu': 'lemvotes-status'Oh look, I’m on a list :D
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).
Precisely. We could point people to the very dictionary definition of the word, but it seems not to change many people’s mind who have already decided which “camp” they want to be in, and that they will (attempt to) preempt the word to mean… whatever they feel like.
Therefore, a statement like
IF (instance-set-variable) THEN { ... implement block }is by definition not “hard-coding”, bc it asks the instance admin what value it wants for that variable, and then only conditionally runs the code to set the instance block if the admin asks it to.
There are plenty of things to criticize PieFed for, but “hard-coding instance blocks” is not one of them. (
And now it seems the same error was made regarding Tesseract.Edit: this point is terribly unclear but probably not correct, as in one of the two blocklists is definitely not hard-coded but the other seems to be.)The same error was not done regarding tesseract. It absolutely hardcoded instance blocks.
apparently there is some env var
PUBLIC_ALLOW_TOXIC_MODEthat disables the entire list. From https://github.com/db0/tesseract/blob/c6767607da9f08033bbc38c2c3e38975be0eef2e/src/lib/policies/system.ts#L89export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() { SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY) return if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) { SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY) return }dunno if it actually works as intended tho. Also the main repo got deleted apparently lmao
Yes for the second blacklist, if you knew that you were getting things filtered out in the first place and if you knew to look for the setting and find it.
But the first blacklist, the one I discovered, which prevents you from even using an instance whatsoever, is completely hardcoded with no way to bypass.
ah thanks for the clarification
Thank you for the clarification and for making the fork, that seems like it will be very useful if you want to continue with that front-end UI.
Edit: I edited my statement above and will try to do similarly for others where I have been wrong.
Forgot: They didn’t delete it. They renamed it then reversed its history to 2023 so that I can’t sync any more changes to my fork and my commits telling him to eat shit are not visible in the repo diff. lol
Please see my comment spelling it out in detail https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45697068/21461570
this is also a very backwards telling of events when people keep calling us “tankies” and “stalinists” or whatever whenever someone dares to say something outside the US State sanctioned lines about foreign policy.