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.
As someone who doesn’t follow stuff like this why should I care? It all seems like drama for the sake of people getting to cosplay as people with authority.
Piefed is trying to be the next reddit with all the worst parts of reddit amplified in the fediverse but is being hostile towards others in the fediverse and occasionally does things that breaks the protocol fediverse uses.
Main dev now fully going hostile towards other piefed instances
Rimu != PieFed
You can tell because one is a person, the other is software.
And while we are at it, https://piefed.social/ is neither - it is an instance, like https://quokk.au/ is an instance, both of which run the PieFed software.
Your agenda is not supported by facts. There are definitely problems that need solving, though this post helps solve none of them.
If you want to help, stick with the facts, they will work better than emotional appeals, if the goal is truly to improve things on the Threadiverse/Fediverse.
Is Rimu not the "benevolent dictator" of piefed on a crusade to rid the fediverse of "tankies" and memes?
Right, and so just to step past the obtuseness and sticking to a fact:
Rimu is the developer of Piefed.
If we're at the point it is important to clarify "person v software", the person developer can be associated with the developed software.
And if this is, in fact, a call to compartmentalize and separate devs from software, and furthermore from how they operate their instances... Yes, that would be a nice change for Lemmy and Piefed alike for discourse on this matter.
Will it happen? Well, developers and instance admins can continue crashing out, or... maybe stop.
Done as of earlier today.
Now when can we expect the same from the Lemmy devs?
Bro what 🤣 when did the lemmy devs have a crashout over how other instances moderate and bake their ideology into the code?? The single most controversial piece of code was the hard-coded slur filter...
Hopefully, those 'insulating layers' will be an effective measure to how the code is approached vs the instance is handled.