Fun fact: you can't upload this image on piefed.social
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Wow, great post. I was mildly annoyed by all the piefed shenanigans from non compliance with activitypub but this really is quite eye opening
Yeah I don't understand why the project can't conform to the AP standards. I get the desire to have a blocking feature that's more robust than just a cosmetic feature. One that actually prevents a user from replying. But they way they've gone about it obviously isn't it. Creating ghost comment chains on other AP services is not good.
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Piefed has code to explicitly fuck over Sxan or what's their name, by replacing the thorn character with ‘th’. Meaning you can't properly cite Old English, Old Norse, or modern Icelandic on Piefed. But of course, “Lemmy is the authoritarian communist platform”.
Piefed's code also reeks of a recent college graduate, being a stream of consciousness with almost no comments. Meanwhile the most known, and seemingly most active dev claims twenty-five years of experience, making one wonder if they learned anything in that time (or if they count from when they've typed up some Logo at three years old).
They did roll this back after people got annoyed with the change. The fact that it was added at all though is very silly! Why should it matter to the project maintainer what some user is doing? Why build a community on a platform that is going to inject such a wildly silly opinion on you? If you don't think EM Dashes are an issue, you have no choice but to be endlessly pinged every time an EM Dash is detected by the system if you're a community admin.
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"Social Credit" eh? Well I guess I did not expect anything more.
Til all you can do is hide it with css.... According to their docs
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Like, how? It's perfectly readable (even as an ESL can do it without issues, for one). And honestly it's a goof bit of flavour. Like using ß for things like aßhole, although San's choice has the advantage that it is actually part of Ebglish.
WAS part of English. It's archaic now, and therefore not natural for me to read. I do like the use of the ß, but it's more familiar to me than to most English speakers since I lived in Germany for 10 years.
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Sorry, friend, it is.
You are free to be wrong.
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There are all kinds of fun stuff in the Piefed code. Allow me to dredge up a comment I made recently:
@edie@lemmy.encryptionin.space 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 contentIf 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 FalseEvery 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 earnedaka 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 FalseYup. If your image contains the word
Anonymous, and contains the textNo.orN0it 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 thecurrent_user.reputation -= 1PieFed 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 adminThis 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 FalseI'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 NoneFor 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 testing@piefed.social from my account testingpiefed@piefed.social, replied to it from my other testingpiefed@piefed.zip 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.
What's sad is that since
lemmy.mlis blocked by default, most PieFed users won't see it. -
ITS HARDCODED so it affects every instance.
It's open source. Every instance can change it and if something is common, people can maintain the patch together.
Lenmy devs who are unpalatably heavy handed in their “moderation” on the ml instance.
Which is their instance. I don't like the hate they receive. They have established a social network that allows everybody to run their own instance with their own moderation. To present them as the villains must be nurtured by the establishment.
So it’s funny that it’s even stricter
Absolutely
That isn’t how it works. They would have to FORK the code and maintain their changes going forward with every update. That is poor software development practices no matter how you look at it.
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But why is hardcoding shit code for open source code? The code is easier to read because no if or switch statements are needed to distinguish between the options. No configiration menu has to be maintained.
Open source just means people are free to edit it and distribute their changes. Hardcoding things like this is bad practice no matter if it’s open source or not. It’s not maintainable. Maintainable as in easily maintainable, I.e., configuration files not code edits.
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That isn’t how it works. They would have to FORK the code and maintain their changes going forward with every update. That is poor software development practices no matter how you look at it.
I think the Brave browser does it with Chrome. Wouldn't the source control tool do most of the maintenance?
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I'm on your instance. I never encountered any of the filters mentioned in this thread.
You can always the details on !home@piefed.zip to be sure, the admins are quite reactive.
I was hoping to see a page with the list of instance rules. Mastodon and PixelFed seem to have one.
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I think the Brave browser does it with Chrome. Wouldn't the source control tool do most of the maintenance?
Chromium is a well-organized and mature codebase, which makes syncing changes relatively easy (also Brave's chageset is limited in scope, so less conflicts to worry about). PieFed is neither mature nor well-organized. Maintaining a downstream project from it would be a nightmare.
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What's sad is that since
lemmy.mlis blocked by default, most PieFed users won't see it.Funnily enough piefed.social does not seem to block .ml
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Funnily enough piefed.social does not seem to block .ml
You're right, interesting

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I was hoping to see a page with the list of instance rules. Mastodon and PixelFed seem to have one.
The code of conduct is linked in the About page showed at the bottom of the page