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 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.
Fediverse are hives of benevolent dictators. The dictators must do what they feel is right for the hive.
The hives assumes dictatorship.
If we want this to change, we need to demand hives that are built with democratic control in mind.
I must commend Lemmy.ml for remaining neutral and not letting its own political leanings influence join-lemmy.org
Bogus. They have intentionally removed specific instances from join-lemmy.org. You will find that lemmy.world is missing, for example.
From my understanding lemmy.world is missing as it is the largest of all instances and this helps users find others.
That is not done for ideological reasoning but Fediverse health.
This is completely unsurprising when you’re aware of the reasons that motivated PieFed’s development (anti communism). Features designed to limit the voice and reach of certain instances lines up with that motivation. PieFed exists to counteract communist influence in the threadiverse.
Some here who helped push it spin it as a way to make the fediverse more palatable to the average Internet user because they care more about growth than culture, but the underlying motivation has always been to try to separate the threadiverse from its communist roots.
I’ll take the tankie devs over liberal devs every single time, personally. You can say what you want about them and how they personally run their instances, but I’m not aware of them developing any underhanded features like these and others in PieFed.
This stinks. I remember someone from anarchist.nexus posting a question about being banned but not seeing why (I think, I don’t remember the details) and a very terrible response from Rimu. I don’t see anyone else from piefed.social posting here but I can’t be the only one that has seen this negativity over the last month or so. Maybe time to instance hop again or use an old account. Guess I didn’t learn any lessons about flagships after being on kbin.social, although that was very different.
Well if you do decide to move instances, quokk.au is always open. We have a few improvements to our instance web view over the default PF.
:babaw_you::babaw_win:
I appreciate that! I am not in AUS tho, I guess I need to head over and see your rules. It would be my first time switching instances where I could move info over, that would be nice and a fun learning experience.
The domain is .au, but we’re international focused. I believe PieFed has features to migrate your subscribed communities over, so you won’t have to start over completely fresh.
As for rules, we (me) have been a bit slack and don’t have anything formalised. We basically follow the same as lemmy.dbzer0.com and anarchist.nexus, so you can view those rules here: https://wiki.dbzer0.com/divisions-by-zero/the-golden-rules/
Mostly it’s just be a decent person, don’t support nazism, zionism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
Well, I did it. I am sure I have more work to do but I do not have to worry about the other stuff. Thanks for your encouragement!
Pleasure to have you here! I know you just came from PieFed so you’re familiar with the software, but please let me know if you have any issues or need help.
Wow, I just finished reading the db0 conduct and it sounds more thought out than the piefed. Now I will look into migration before I leave for a work trip.
Thanks for your encouragement!
we had been shadowbanned from the PieFed.Social Instance Chooser
Badge of fucking honor
Unfortunately as >75% of all new members joined us from there it’s effectively killed off instance growth. Will have to do a lot of campaigning to get any visibility now.
Oof. Hope this gets resolved in your/your instance’s favor, but I do still feel a little proud that we pissed off Rimu so fiercely that we’re getting shadowbanned.
It’s always very interesting to see the imperialist type of “leftist” always punch left harder than they punch right. Almost as if that’s their actual intended purpose all along…
I actually like having a second order of downgrading an instance over pure defederation. For example it would be really cool to mark instances from which to accept downvotes. Etc
something like that already exists in piefed, in that it can be set that only trusted instances can downvote. all my comms are set to ignore downvotes from anywhere that isn’t on the AN trusted list.
they can still downvote locally, it just doesn’t federate.
not very surprising behavior for a boomer.
This is gen x erasure.
Yeah rimu is hellbent in his crusade against memes and defense of us imperialism. His “q-anon” blocklist contains leftist sites like grayzone as well as sites like wikileaks.org. He has warnings on his instance for sites like electronicintifada and peoplesdispatch. He put out a hit piece on bans from db0 like a week ago, days after a troll made a fake screenshot accusing some db0 admin of being an undercover nazi, then made his “LLM moderation” scarepost even though he knew that there was none because he asked about it before, blocked db0 the user so none of his posts show up on piefed.social (or federate if the post is in a community of piefed.social) and at this point I’d really ask if you all want to keep with software whos designer is openly hostile to you, be part of his network and introduce people to it. All of this right after MrKaplans knee-jerk defederation. Like it’s been a busy two weeks of hostilities from the liberal side of the lemmy/piefed fediverse mainly from rimu who has been very open I must say about being on an anti-tankie crusade and doing everything in his power to make “his software” hostile for people whose ideology he doesn’t like. And very much not open about how he intends to achieve this.
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 just cannibalising smaller instances. When their communities can’t be as easily discovered the conversations naturally will be on the bigger instances and posters will naturally fluctuate towards the bigger instances so their posts can be seen. I bet you all are “silenced” as well.
reposted from my hexbear account for more visibility
kicked Marxist-lemonist
Made me laugh.
Pretty awful changes. Doubt I’ll ever be moving to Piefed and unless it has a pretty substantial course correction gonna end up giving side eye to anyone promoting it
Piefed has always been a wrecker project. It’s not changing.
To EEE the threadiverse, thus protecting the innocent minds of the imperial core labor aristocracy from exposure to wrongthink?
There is no “correction” necessary, this was the plan all along. Piefed’s main selling point always was, “lemmy but anti-tankie”. That was the openly stated goal. All those little QoL features that got added at breakneckspeed and with little forethought were to make it easier and more compelling to switch, but I bet the number 1 thing among people that choose piefed over lemmy is that they hate the politics of the lemmy devs (which they don’t put into their software) and want the anti-tankie software that bakes it’s bias into it’s code. A lot of “har har fuck those tankies we like their platform but hate them.”
They have got a hardcoded slur filter no?
afaik the only robust slur filter is on hexbear.
in an awful Scottish accent
Ye power trippin’ bastards!
Not directly related, but many different instances are very buddy-buddy and share user info. Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works and discuss.social for example all share information like user emails, etc. this leads to shadowbans, defedding, and all sorts of privacy offenses.
Likely quokk is cause up in that.
This is why it’s important all users use a VPN and unique burner/alias emails.
LW and discuss.online are ran by the same team.
Ahhh that would explain it
SJW doesn’t ban email domains, IPs nor VPNs.
To my knowledge, we’ve alsp never shared specific details about users with dotworld or other instances for that matter.
I myself would take offense about leaking any of this info.The only thing I can even think of is we might have shared something like this once or twice during bigger spam attacks:
this last wave of spammer were all made in the last hour and fit the following pattern “5 letters, 5 numbers @ sketchy domain dot com” without sharing actual user info.
Edit:
I don’t know about dotworld, but at least on our end, there’s only TheDude and me who even have access to see a user’s email address.
The only other times we’ve really even checked one was before 2FA & password reset worked properly.We even have users who didn’t want to provide an email at all which we’ve verified manually through matrix.
to my knowledge
Right. Are you an admin?
They are an admin. You can check if you go to their original profile on sjw
Uh oh, I’d better be careful ;)
Realistically, not really.
To be honest, these days, most bans are for obvious spam, *phobes or the occasional CSAM.Just don’t post dentist adspam (which is oddly common) or be that one person who posts their cartoony-kiddie-diaper-fetish thing.
I usually get banned for calling for the death of Donald Trump, and the rest of the global billionaires.
AdVoCaTiNg vIoLeNcE and other lame excuses.
This is something different. The PieFed dev is simply being a massive jerk lately and declaring war on the left.
Well, the reason those did this was because my content is too… far left. Antifa, even. And World, SJW, and DS are all pretty conservative these days.
That anti-left mentality is pretty wide spread in the tech industry—surprisingly. If the PieFed dev is in that circle, it wouldn’t surprise me.
That anti-left mentality is pretty wide spread in the tech industry—surprisingly.
Not surprising. The dot-com boom was mostly libertarian techbros vying for their stock options to go stratospheric, and many in the industry today are still temporarily embarrassed billionaires. The industry’s origins were in the US military-industrial complex. There’s still a visible Western male chauvinist, imperialist through-line.
- Mute, 1995: The Californian Ideology
- LA Times book review, 2023: Palo Alto: Billionaire playground or Darwinian hellscape? Why not both?
that explains why my account got banned before i had a chance to use it.
atleast it ended up working out in my favor: i had intended to switch away from lemmy.word and the ban led me to lemmy.ml; where my social media diet hot a million times better and it made me stop doom-scrolling all the time.
Well, on ML they just ban you from ML when you don’t agree with the hive ;)
They ban you when you make it clear that you’re unwilling to learn how to deprogram yourself.
Sorry bud, China is a capitalist country. Just like all the rest. ✌️
Funny how ‘just like all the rest’ still manages to shrink billionaires instead of worshiping them or letting them control the gov’t; but sure, totally the same. Lol
Yawn. The billionaires control all the governments. Keep on showing us how you simp for the billionaires.
project harder. i just pointed out one system actually restrains the rich — you’re the one who needs all governments to look identical so you don’t have to update your tired, lazy worldview. now go tuck your billionaire boogeyman back into bed and maybe read a book.
“Noo don’t look at the executions of billionaires and corrupt officials, they’re fake! Better things aren’t possible! I’m not listening lalalala you’re a simp.”
Lol, no. They ban anyone not willing to buy the building propaganda they spew
history’s full of empires that swore they were the only ones without propaganda; you’re just repeating their script wo knowing it.
I never said anything about anyone else’s propoganda.
It’s ironic you’re saying this while Whatabouting away criticism of the propoganda you’re covering for.
And you’ll plug your ears and cheer when I get banned for saying this here.
I never cheer when they get banned; I feel like each one would be me if life hadn’t kicked my ass hard enough to force me to learn that western/capitalist contradictions are everywhere.
The fact of the matter is that the western hegemon – our hegemon – has been legally forced to admit that they fabricated their propaganda in writing thanks to the freedom of information act since the 1980’s yet westerners – Americans in particular – cling that that proganda nonetheless. (And the fact that you can learn of this propaganda just as easily as reading the Epstein files is icing on this cake).
The worst part is that they use the propaganda to defend their world view wo ever knowing it.
Is there any documentation on how they share user data like emails? That sounds super wild to me
Super wild? They are just people. Neckbeards, if you will.
I got banned from .world once, then accounts on the others that used the same email that had not ever been used got banned too.
All I have to offer is my experiences, you can choose to disbelieve me—I don’t care.
All that data sharing and sh.itjust.works mods and admins still haven’t removed the links to CSAM websites that I reported and messaged them about several months ago. They aren’t directly hosting CSAM, but the fact that they ignored the requests to take down the links in question is not particularly pleasing. (not sharing details publicly for obvious reasons)
Edit (1778443722): I messaged them on Matrix. The report was through the default reporting interface.
You didn’t message me afaik.
@imaqtpie.communick.com
Also why does your edit have that number in parentheses?
That number was the timestamp (since I didn’t know whether or not time of edit is federated) and if you want,
I can directly message you on Lemmy (since I deleted my Matrix account).I am creating a matrix account to message you.Sure
I have sent you a message under the name clean cation. Please verify whether you have received it. Thanks.
I didn’t receive it. I’m going to send you a message and maybe you can respond to me more easily.
Edit: Ok nvm I see it. I thought you sent it on Lemmy, I see it on Matrix.
I removed those posts. But I am reluctant to follow the Tor links to verify that they are what you claim, for obvious reasons. I’ll take your word for it.
Assuming that’s the 2 recently removed posts in the modlog, I’ll check if I can see what happened to those reports.
The post themselves were to our “test” community and first seemed to me like they were just random strings, but from the context I’m reading they might have been part of some onion link?
PieFed has been giving me the ick the last few weeks, it looks likes it’s heading in a bad direction.
diet reddit
Quokk.au is a left-leaning instance? Never got that impression. I feel like I’ve seen as many Israel-simping zionists from there as on .world.
Please name one?
I’ve seen many report about our users for saying Israel should not exist etc, I’ve never seen anything in favour of Israel.
Also Zionists and Nazis aren’t allowed on here.
Good to know, I’ll send them your way if I see any.
If you have names, please let the Quokk.au admins know. Quokk is an Anarchist-Flotilla instance.
