There are all kinds of fun stuff in the Piefed code. Allow me to dredge up a comment I made recently:

@[email protected] was looking at PieFed code the other week, and I ended up taking a look at it too. Its great fun to sneak a peak at.

For example, you cannot cast a vote on PieFed if you’ve made 0 replies, 0 posts, AND your username is 8 characters long:

    def cannot_vote(self):
        if self.is_local():
            return False
        return self.post_count == 0 and self.post_reply_count == 0 and len(
            self.user_name) == 8  # most vote manipulation bots have 8 character user names and never post any content

If a reply is created, from anywhere, that only contains the word “this”, the comment is dropped (CW: ableism in the function name):

def reply_is_stupid(body) -> bool:
    lower_body = body.lower().strip()
    if lower_body == 'this' or lower_body == 'this.' or lower_body == 'this!':
        return True
    return False

Every user (remote or local) has an “attitude” which is calculated as follows: (upvotes cast - downvotes cast) / (upvotes + downvotes). If your “attitude” is < 0.0 you can’t downvote.

Every account has a Social Credit Score, aka your Reputation. If your account has less than 100 reputation and is newly created, you are not considered “trustworthy” and there are limitations placed on what your account can do. Your reputation is calculated as upvotes earned - downvotes earned aka Reddit Karma. If your reputation is at -10 you also cannot downvote, and you can’t create new DMs. It also flags your account automatically if your reputation is to low:

PieFed boasts that it has “4chan image detection”. Let’s see how that works in practice:

            if site.enable_chan_image_filter:
                # Do not allow fascist meme content
                try:
                    if '.avif' in uploaded_file.filename:
                        import pillow_avif  # NOQA
                    image_text = pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(BytesIO(uploaded_file.read())).convert('L'))
                except FileNotFoundError:
                    image_text = ''
                except UnidentifiedImageError:
                    image_text = ''

                if 'Anonymous' in image_text and (
                        'No.' in image_text or ' N0' in image_text):  # chan posts usually contain the text 'Anonymous' and ' No.12345'
                    self.image_file.errors.append(
                        "This image is an invalid file type.")  # deliberately misleading error message
                    current_user.reputation -= 1
                    db.session.commit()
                    return False

Yup. If your image contains the word Anonymous, and contains the text No. or N0 it will reject the image with a fake error message. Not only does it give you a fake error, but it also will dock your Social Credit Score. Take note of the current_user.reputation -= 1

PieFed also boasts that it has AI generated text detection. Let’s see how that also works in practice:

# LLM Detection
        if reply.body and '—' in reply.body and user.created_very_recently():
            # usage of em-dash is highly suspect.
            from app.utils import notify_admin
            # notify admin

This is the default detection, apparently you can use an API endpoint for that detection as well apparently, but it’s not documented anywhere but within the code.

Do you want to leave a comment that is just a funny gif? No you don’t. Not on PieFed, that will get your comment dropped and lower your Social Credit Score!

        if reply_is_just_link_to_gif_reaction(reply.body) and site.enable_gif_reply_rep_decrease:
            user.reputation -= 1
            raise PostReplyValidationError(_('Gif comment ignored'))

How does it know its just a gif though?

def reply_is_just_link_to_gif_reaction(body) -> bool:
    tmp_body = body.strip()
    if tmp_body.startswith('https://media.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media1.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media2.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media3.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://i.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://i.imgflip.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media1.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media2.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media3.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media4.giphy.com/'):
        return True
    else:
        return False

I’m not even sure someone would actually drop a link like this directly into a comment. It’s not even taking into consideration whether those URLs are part of a markdown image tag.

As Edie mentioned, if someone has a user blocked, and that user replies to someone, their comment is dropped:

if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id):
    log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier')
    return None

For Example:

• Cowbees comment on lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/post/41587312/23288779
• Non-existent on piefed.social: https://piefed.social/comment/9647830

(see Edies original comment here)

More from Edie:

Also add if the poster has blocked you! It is exactly as nonsense as you think.

Example:

I made a post in [email protected] from my account [email protected], replied to it from my other [email protected] account. Since the .social account has blocked the .zip, it doesn’t show up on .social, nor on e.g. piefed.europe.pub.

I then made a comment from my lemmy.ml account, and replied to it from my piefed.zip account, and neither .social, nor europe.pub can see my .zip reply, but can see my lemmy.ml comment!

[ Let me add more clarity here: what this feature does is two things. On a local instance, if you block someone who is on your instance, they cannot reply to you. However, this condition is not federated (yet, it would seem), and so, to get around this “issue”, the system will drop comments from being stored in the PieFed database IF the blocked user is remote. This means you end up with “ghost comment chains” on remote instances. There is NEW code as of a few weeks ago, that will send an AUTOMATED mod action against blocked remote users to remove the comment. So long as the community is a local PieFed community, it will federate that mod action to the remote server, removing the comment automatically. For PieFed servers, eventually, they would rather federate the users block list (that’s fair), but it would seem this code to send automated mod actions to remove comments due to user blocks is going to stay just for the Lemmy Piefed interaction. I don’t really understand why the system simply doesn’t prevent the rendering of the comment, instead of stopping it from being stored. It knows the user is blocked, it already checks it, it should then just stop rendering the chain of comments for the given user, prevent notifications from those users, etc. ]

But wait! There’s More!

• PieFed defederates from Hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml out of the box.
• The “rational discourse” sidebar that you see on the main instance is hard coded into the system.
• Moderators of a community can kick you from a community, which unsubscribes you from it, and does not notify you. This has been removed actually, the API endpoint is still there.
• I was going to say that Admins had the ability to add a weight to votes coming from other instances, but the videos that showed this are now gone, and as of v1.5.0 they have removed the instance vote weight feature, claiming it was “unused”.

All this to say. Piefed is a silly place, and no one should bother using its software.

It is very tragic, and because of the nature of Reddit, this kind of advice would get removed more likely than not.

3

I think you’re going to have to look elsewhere, fighters are not the preview of the Democratic Party. See if there is a DSA chapter near you and join it, it might ease your mind some to find like-minded people who actually want to fight. The streets are where the fight is now, not congress. ICE is knocking on our doors, not the doors of Congress. That should tell you everything you need to know about who they think is a threat.

Why would the Democrats be the ones to green-light such a thing? Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have made it clear that they are not interested in dealing with this.

The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all. You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account. You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.

It leaves you to wonder how much of what you’re seeing is an accurate tally of votes and score. It seems driven purely to keep out opposing perspectives and stifle thought. None of these “tanky” instances have this level of user and content manipulation at their disposal. The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.

You don’t have a banned tag and there is nothing in the mod logs? What do you mean you were banned?

Yes, but guys like Planter are not better than neoliberals; they are still liberals, the same liberals that will support genocide if it gets you healthcare, that is, if you’re straight and white.

Thanks cowbee!

Most places that matter (popular chat apps, text apps, social media) use Open Graph protocol to provide a preview of the link that’s been sent. I don’t see the issue here. Its on the site operator to implement Open Graph and it works fine on Lemmy.

One of them could be the Tianfu Twin Towers in Changdu.

They are real pictures. Here’s another city you’ve never heard of.

If you don’t mind sharing, what bot were you using to manage the RSS feeds? I’m also curious what the operating costs / specs for the instance?

Your first point makes zero sense: it can’t be both “for profit” and have “no means of generating income”.

Are you for real? The entire concept of Enshittification hinges on the real fact that most internet services start out with a net negative “profit” and are kept alive through large injections of VC capital. This allows them to offer the service for free or close to free to gain a massive user base, which they then leverage for profit later on through measures that make the service worse for consumers. The entire reason Mastodon, Lemmy, and the federated social network exist is because of this contradiction.

I’m curious to hear the objections and alteratives. I’m not fully versed in anarchist thought.

Do they run candidates? I’m curious where. I know they do presidential campaigns but how many local races do they really run in?

Shiori is a single binary you can run on your desktop or host on a server. I use it all the time.

Lol RFA, always “reliable”.

It really depends on what these reactors are going to be used for. Are they going to be licensed to private corporations to power data centers, or are they going to provide power to citizens homes?