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.
The amount of disinformation here should not be nearly as shocking to people as it seems to be. e.g. the non-conditional title statement of this post, even if its text walks the situation back a bit, is now being called "de-escalation"? Or the GIANT letters calling for the immediate defederation of Lemmy's most popular instance in this comment? These are the very epitome of escalation.
And as for AI moderation, see this comment, where the AI output went entirely unreviewed by any kind of intelligence, and iirc the moderation reason stated was also written entirely by AI? Every single time I have chased down the accusations to find the real story, I become more and more disappointed in certain Lemmy instances that are now expanding the influence of hexbear, Lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml.
If they want to cut themselves off from the rest of the Threadiverse by defederating not only Lemmy.world but also every single PieFed instance, regardless of the stance of the admin team (in one of the multiple calls for defederation, click on the username of the commentor and read the statement), then at this point I am no longer against that outcome. It will create an echo chamber for them, but they do not seem to be listening anyway, and increasingly I find myself not listening to their incel-based arguments anymore either (where they must be free to do whatever they please but everyone else owes them something, somehow).
Edit: even the title of this very post screams disinformation - like how is this "Shadowbanning Instances from Discoverability", when instead it is plainly simply a banning? If it were a shadow-ban, then it would still appear to the end-user to not be a ban, but then to everyone else it would be handled differently. Instead, it is an even ban, always looking the same way to everyone. Calling it a "shadowban" is a fallacy that appeals to emotion, rather than explaining the situation logically. i.e. it is clickbait, presenting a false front in order to entice people to read it, but when the details become understood the term is seen to be the polar opposite of what it attempted to portray. This is not what I hoped to get out of the Threadiverse, personally. I came here to get away from the right-wing Reddit, not find another Reddit 2.0, moar tankie drama version.
But that's what piefed is?