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.

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[–] Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I will quote your post since it's worth sharing with other people (this was news to me, but I am not surprised at all)

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

Really goes to show how "leftists" on the Threadiverse are committed to acting in good faith.

[–] eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

From the very same thread you quoted this from and then chose to ignore people giving better context: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68457682/25935975

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.

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The omissions in this timeline about brigading sockpuppets and falsified nazi smears…

But to list that timeline and act as though this is out of context or unrelated to an ongoing crashout… we are reaching some Hasan’s dog collar level of bullshit.

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If you're going for the whole history don't forget the nazi smear by some german troll and rimu trying to paint db0 as uniquely ban-happy. Like this has been a busy 10 days or so with shots fired on the FAF day-after-day, this is not history yet but an ongoing barrage from their POV. Also

Rimu discovers that a dbzer0 mod has been using a LLM for moderation

there was no LLM moderation, and rimu knew this before making his post https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42212552/20361800

If you're going to be so dishonest, at least try. Pinging the people who proved the original quote wrong so you can face the people who avoided: @ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works @mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Edit: he can't read my post because Piefed has me deleted from their DB.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

These are the people accusing us of trying to create a leftist authoritarian echo-chamber...

[–] eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 23 hours ago

Projection once again from the fascists of Piefed.

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I am fairly certain I'm ghosted from certain communities on piefed.social, but I don't know how encompassing that is. So I don't know if anyone on that instance can actually see what I write ever, or not, or if it's just more targeted on a community/user blocklist level.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The moderation of piefed.social is fairly opaque, people can get banned, deleted and blocked on an instance level afaik? (Don't quote me on this) but there is also the issue of comments being silently dropped if the commenter got blocked by the person they're replying to which is completely intransparent afaik. Either your comment gets posted or you're SOOL.

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I got interested and checked and it's just one community on piefed social. My comments are viewable on my instance and the instance of the user I reply to, but only that comment and only in that one community. If I view my user comments from any other instance, piefed or lemmy, those comments do not exist.

So I can't rule out that userblock scenario, but it is interesting that my comments effectively become a public facing DM.