PieFed has done it once again, this time adding ‘warning’ labels for opposing ideological perspectives, well at least one; Can’t find any warnings for fascism or capitalism 🤔
This can be demonstrated here: https://piefed.social/c/globalnews/p/1697164/sudan-civil-war-spills-over-into-neighboring-chad-peoples-dispatch
I’m happy to explain. You could have just asked, though.
During initial installation PieFed downloads a big list of 3000 right-wing domains from https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon and blocks them all. Admins can unblock them if they want but they would need to do them individually so I bet none do.
The list includes things like fox news, breitbart, etc. Before starting work on PieFed I spent 3? years studying right wing disinformation - qanon, antivax, all that and that blocklist is an output from that. Every site on that list was reviewed personally.
So.
Additionally, I have manually added these warnings (not blocks) onto some domains, for piefed.social only. You can download a list of those warnings from https://join.piefed.social/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/warnings.ods
Most of them are tabloids, AI slop farms and a handful are authoritarian government mouthpieces.
So there’s 3000 right wing sites that simply can’t be linked to and 47 sites with warnings, about 10% of which are left wing. There’s no need to warn for fascism because posts that link to them are not displayed in the first place.
There’s an ideological slant to PieFed for sure, and it’s very much in favor of the left. That could be why maga.place and lemmychan.org use Lemmy and not PieFed.
I’ll take another look at peoplesdispatch and see if there’s a less triggering warnings I can put on it.
To clarify: you say that by default all PieFed instances don’t even allow to link resources considered “right-wing”, without an easy way to disable such anti-feature?
If so, it’s basically a centralized point for censorship in a decentralized system, which is very antithetical to the spirit of the Fediverse and is something even the very left Lemmy devs prefer to avoid. I see it being very detrimental in its own right.
Shouldn’t it be an offered setting instead? Like, “if you want your instance to avoid certain topics, here are filter lists to freely enable or disable”?
Much can be said about the definition of left and the way Marxists you are addressing don’t see “liberal” as “left” to begin with.
What matters, though, is that you end up projecting a certain personal, even if somewhat educated, bias onto both PieFed as a project (banning right-wing outlets from even being linked to, globally), and the flagship instance (making warnings about Marxist-inclined outlets). This is very unwelcome for many, myself included, and, as previously mentioned, antithetical to what Fediverse is and what it stands for.
It depends on your definition of easy. Here is the admin UI for unbanning domains.
Also they can go into the database and empty the
domaintable.Oh they could have asked, could they? Like you asked before spreading disinfo about our instance using GenAI for moderation?
Are we supposed to bring back the whole history every time Rimu comments anywhere?
Now, listen, db0: we’ve discussed a lot in the past, you know I like what you do, I support you and your instance most of the time. But that’s also true for Rimu and Piefed. I think it’s pointless to try to count points and see who was wrong when by how much. From my perspective, there were issues from all sides during that whole story.
Bringing it up every time anyone involved comments somewhere doesn’t seem relevant, and will just start another round of “you were wrong”, “I was wrong because you were wrong” etc. It can be endless, and most of the people are tired of that whole story.
Take care.
Also:
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.
When he’s being hypocritical AF about people “could have just asked”, then yes I think I will.
Talk about underplaying the situation…
Rimu spread purposeful disinfo. He never “just asked”. He ignored comments from our admins explicitly telling him he’s wrong, because it went against his narrative. Was purposefully uncharitable so he could spin it as badly as possible. Crossposted to Mastodon in an attempt to initiate a pile-on. I could go on…
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
there was no LLM moderation, and rimu knew this before making his post[1]
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42212552/20361800 ↩︎
Apparently piefed smuggles in domains from a completely different repo that clearly isn’t just “right-wing domains”[1] and it requires an admin to unblock them all individually.
so it is a personal semi-hardcoded blocklist, that requires an admin to go through and re-vet every site individually to see if they agree with your assessment or not.
lol. lmao even, you put a warning on electronicintifada.net like come on now
https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon/blob/master/sources/Fake news/README.md ↩︎
It’s not smuggled, during initial setup when installing the blocklist it prints this on the screen:
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanonHere is the (piefed.social only) warnlist in readable format
|-----------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | aa.com.tr | Turkish state media | | adele.pages.casa | LLM-generated posts | | bild.de | A tabloid that has been unfavourably compared to The Sun, and is considered generally unreliable. | | browsergate.eu | AI slop | | caixinglobal.com | LLM-generated posts | | chainalysis.com | LLM-generated posts | | coindesk.com | Crypto boosters | | counterpunch.org | Not always reliable. | | dailysabah.com | Turkey govt properganda | | dailystar.co.uk | Tabloid | | electronicintifada.net | Unreliable source | | english.news.cn | Ok except about anything to do with China | | eurasiantimes.com | Unreliable source | | forbes.com | Anyone can write a forbes article. Check the byline to determine whether an article is written by a "Forbes Staff" member, "Contributor", "Senior Contributor", or "Subscriber". | | fullstackpm.tech | slop | | gbnews.com | Unreliable source | | hispantv.com | Unreliable source | | houseofsaud.com | AI-written posts | | journal-neo.su | Russian propaganda outlet | | marathonhandbook.com | AI | | metro.co.uk | Unreliable source | | ndtv.com | Modi propaganda. Check MBFC | | nerds.xyz | AI-written articles | | news.cgtn.com | Chinese govt propaganda source | | newsus.cgtn.com | Chinese govt propaganda source | | nycjournals.com | fake news | | nypost.com | Unreliable source | | peoplesdispatch.org | Promotes Marxist-Leninist perspectives | | plenglish.com | Cuba state media | | presstv.ir | Iranian state tv | | rawstory.com | Often inflammitory and kinda biased | | republicworld.com | Unreliable source | | sixthtone.com | Singapore govt source | | tasnimnews.com | Iranian state tv | | techtimes.com | LLM-generated posts | | techtrenches.dev | LLM-generated posts | | telesurenglish.net | Propaganda news channel directly sponsored by the governments of Venezuela and Cuba | | telesurtv.net | Bolivarian propaganda outlet | | thatprivacyguy.com | LLM-generated posts | | theamericanconservative.com | A self-identified "opinionated source" whose factual accuracy has been questioned | | theintercept.com | | | the-sun.com | Trash tabloid | | united24media.com | Factual, but still state-aligned advocacy journalism | | vgchartz.com | Unreliable source | | wheresyoured.at | The author of this blog works for AI companies https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/use-the-tools-of-the-job-youve-chosen/#the-unguarded-flank | | writings.hongminhee.org | LLM generated posts |But why? I don’t understand why you want to make your software politically charged. I’m left leaning, but I believe in free speech for all. This makes piefed a censored platform by default. You are manufacturing an echo chamber.
I don’t want fascists to benefit from my work. But it’s FOSS, so anyone can download and install it, so I made it extremely unattractive to fascists.
There are plenty of other places where people can have “free speech”.
Facebook, or reddit, for example. /s
Heh, this puts Piefed in the same basket as Reddit, Facebook etc. for the same reasons you dislike them.
You can’t fork Reddit or Facebook.
Pievolution is a Piefed forks that removes this feature (as well ad other stuff)
https://codeberg.org/Situation0262/Pievolution
It’s not completely ready yet.
By the way, thank you for your work on lazysoci.al
Fork PieFed and remove the 4 lines of code involved in doing this, then. See cli.py, line 160.
IDGAF.
I’ve rarely seen a crashout so spectacular. Piefed going from the new darling to pariah software in the blink of an eye.
Can you imagine the shitstorm MOG would have raised if the same blocklist was hardcoded in lemmy?