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.
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