cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/fediverse/p/887450/piefed-flagship-instance-shadowbanning-instances-from-discoverability-other-questionable-upd
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.
Fuck this NYT speak, call it what it is: he lied about it. There was no AI moderation and he knew it.^[https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42212552/20361800] Stop implying it was true. The issue wasn't "ThE wAy He HaNdLeD" it's that he spread defamatory falsehoods. There was an AI summary of some clearly rule-breaking comments linked in the modlog as the reason for a user getting banned and that's it.
And lets not gloss over
which cannibalizes smaller instances as their posters are incentivized to post in the communities of the bigger instance and not their home instance since less people will see it.
piefed.social isn't just a piefed instance like others though is it? It's the flagship instance. What it does carries more weight than what the other instances do.
Edit:
but this is only a solution for admins and their buddies that get slandered in the modlog. Us regular users that might get slandered with "stalking and harassing" for no reason still only get YPTB, which, ironically, has been silenced by piefed.social, making posts there not visible on their feed anymore.
And the guy clearly is a zionist, he puts up warnings for electronicintifada, I have not seen him be supportive of palestinians once, I mean you have a more direct connection to him I believe, go ask him what he thinks of the palestinians right to armed struggle against occupation.
Hi, I'm like 1000% out of the loop on all this- would you (or anyone else) be willing to give a short summary of what the ai feature in question was and what he lied or mislead people about?
I'm not on piefed.social but I'm still using a piefed based instance and would like to at least kinda sorta keep up with things. I'm sure there are also lots of other people out of the loop
Very short:
The slightly longer answer https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42253753/20358978 and also see https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42212552/20361800
Oof, that sucks shit, thank you very much for that context
I appreciate you! :)
By the way, for some reason those links aren't working for me- ive not seen the Lem.lemmy part of the URLs before, are those lemmy internal links?
For some reason I can't seem to open them in my browser or my mobile client. I may try again on my laptop at some point but I'm currently juggling stuff
I think it's something wiht the server it's being very slow for me atm. The lem.lemmy part is just the ui selection for blahaj, it shouldn't be an issue but try https://piefed.social/comment/11216693 and https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/25880065
Actualy the dbzer0 link includes comments from unruffled that weren't federated, it's a better overview of this whole attack
Thank you! ❤️ I think my client also just doesnt handle cross instance links like at all I'm realizing, I prolly need to go open an issue about that
This whole situation sucks. I just switched to piefed cause I wasn't in love with my last instance. Probably I'll stay where I am for some time (and I do like the folks running my current instance, even if the .zip domain is a bad idea), but this does sour me on piefed a bit. With the .ml folks its mostly how they run their own instance, and they take ownership of their ideology. The issues folks are talking about here feels potentially like it spills out onto other people/instances more, and I don't love that
Maybe I'll try mbin, or at least set up a lemmy.zip account in addition to my current piefed one
You're quite welcome. The most transpositive instences are hexbear and blahaj and dbzr0 I found.
Why would that be the case? Either you or me totally misunderstand that feature 😅
A poster usually wants to maximize their audience right? Posting in a community that got silenced will make that post not show up in the "all" feed of the silencing instance which means it won't be as easily discovered organically. So a poster might choose to forgo the silenced instances communities in favor of communities that didn't get silenced. Starving out the silenced instances who already are less likely to be found organically by users of the silencing instanced.
But that has nothing to do with the size of an instance of community. Rather the opposite is the case: an instance admin might decide to silence an community or instance because it is too big/busy and drowns out all the posts from smaller instances.
Or a very practical example: those Reddit and RSS repost instances. We had to defederate them because they were drowning out all organic posts and discussions. I would have rather liked to silence them though as people might want to stay subscribed to them without bothering other people on the same instance by having them pollute the federated feed.
On Mastodon it is also commonly used to temporarily silence an instance that is being abused for spam. This is much better than to defederate, as it still allows people to continue communicating with legitimate users on that instance.
Ok but this is clearly not how the guy who developed that feature is using it. He has a personal grievance with some instances and silences them. There is nothing about protecting piefed.social users from spam or reposts or other deleterious activity. "They called me a zionist so I will ban them" and lets get real here, the guy that puts a warning up for electronicintifada but not haaretz is a zionist. Here is the current silencing list of piefed.social
Lol he really went ahead and silenced every instance to the left of kissinger didn't he?
You guys really want this to be about political ideology sooooo badly.
Their barbarous echo-chambers vs our civil debate halls
lol, at this point its better to just defederate from piefed since its controlled by a rabid neolib that codes new ways to attack other instances for wrongthink