According to Rimu Atkinson, the main developer of PieFed, all PieFed instances come with a 3000-long block list of resources that cannot be linked to. These include all sorts of right-wing outlets. There is no easy opt-out, forcing existing instances to follow the blocklist.
The flagship PieFed instance also rolled out a feature marking various other sorts of outlets - among them, resources considered AI slop and Marxist outlets. These are specific to piefed.social.
Related discussion: https://piefed.social/comment/11254679
Why YSK: Many users have hard time choosing between Lemmy, PieFed, and Kbin/Mbin. Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives. Users that are right-wing, Marxist, or generally concerned about global censorship of the Fedi-/Threadiverse, might opt for other options instead.
Note: The post is only meant to inform users of the potentially important differences between Threadiverse platforms. Any ideologically charged discussions are better left in the respective topic.


goddamnit goddamnit goddamnit
Why does every fediverse reddit clone have to pull this shit? Like that blocklist isn’t horrible - now - but what if the dude pulls a fetterman and next year he is blocking shit you agree with? Politically motivated censorship is the type of thing many people are trying to get away from.
Then you move to another instance.
This says its all piefed instances
Any piefed instance can empty the list of right-wing sites, either as a whole or on a case-by-case basis. Source: https://piefed.social/comment/11254679
Thats good to know - but the fact the thread you link to shows some sites get a big WARNING COMMUNISM DETECTED doesn’t make me feel much better XD
piefed already blocks by default lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad. lol … it’s just a lib echo chamber.
Neither PieFed the platform nor piefed.social the instance block lemmy.ml:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/blame/commit/c9688103c45b5c473fdc388eb92ac70438b48b86/app/cli.py#L147-L154
By default, Piefed the platform blocks over two dozen far-right/fascist instances and two leftist instances: hexbear and lemmygrad. It’s a hard-coded Overton window.
People want to live in Echo Chambers.
Nah, most of 'em just want to be the ones doing the censoring.
Sounds like the liberals they are trying to appease
blocking trash sites on your own instance, and providing default settings is perfectly reasonable.
If you can’t opt out as an instance its a bit more than “default settings” imo
And my whole issue is not wanting too wide a net being labeled under “trash sites” I hate Fox News and Infowars but I also hate them being hidden from me with no way to get around that besides switching from piefed to a different service. Who is to say what the next trash site will be? Spam is one thing but I don’t need a net nanny.
who can’t opt out? just use a different instance if you dont like an instances setting. no one owes you anything. or run your own and just change the setting.
“Changing the setting” would involve forking the codebase, as it’s hardcoded iirc
…and that’s hard?
No, but basically no instance will do that, and for the vast majority of people on this planet just self hosting it is so far out of their knowledge that forking it would be inconceivable for them
Does no instance want to do it, or there are those that want to but can’t?
provide proof. highly doubt that.
Literally yesterday I tried hosting a piefed instance, with no intervention, it applied these exact lists, and there was no option to change it which is why I switched back to self hosted lemmy
so no proof got it. note other people in the thread mentioned DB records you need to clear out. fairly trivial work if your hosting systems.
I’m not going to look through the code for proof for an online argument, but the reason I believe that is because there is/was code that searched for anonymous and No. in any uploaded image, and failed with a fake error message when you try to upload it
Just make a different account on a different instance, nothing is stopping you.
What? You mean lemmy? I have one. If you mean a different piefed instance, that’s what I was saying, you’d need to fork the pyfedi repo to remove the list, it’s on every instrnce of piefed
Make your own and opt out or use lemmy since you’re complaining specifically about the features that differentiate piefed. Like this is a seriously dumb complaint. Like why would you want active disinformation sources? What benefit does that provide to discourse? Or do you just want disinformation to be disseminated? It’s not a matter of fuckin opinion, these sites propagate actual fake news and that’s their primary purpose. Fox news literally argued in court they’re purely entertainment, like the onion.
Wait, they did? Wow, accuracy!
The original post we are commenting on stated instances could not opt out. Or at least I thought it did, I don’t know how to check edit history. I’m now aware thats untrue.
and provided zero proof of this fact. feel free to provide that proof. I’m too lazy to go research the codebase but i highly doubt they hard coded it.
Blocking known disinfo sources is not politically motivated censorship, it’s reality motivated censorship.