Fun fact: you can't upload this image on piefed.social
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This is a really dramatic observation. The user did it specifically, if I recall, to try and evade AI detection or something.
It's also amusing because said user itself is literally on a piefed instance.
They thought it poisoned llms (it didn't, and they ignored people who mentioned it). Not to evade any ai thing.
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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.
Wow, thanks for posting this. I actually considered switching to PieFed because people say a lot of good things about it but now I know I won't. I can't treat codebase like this seriously.
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Stupid isn't ableist you 2014 tumblrina.
Calling people or ideas 'stupid' is ableist because it treats cognitive disability as an insult
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I think that's unrelated.
OK I'll keep trying to figure this out.
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I think that's unrelated.
Looks like someone opened an issue a few years ago for the same problem:
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OK I'll keep trying to figure this out.
You could mention this at https://lemmy.today/c/lemmytoday
Also, you could upload the images to https://postimages.org/ and use the direct link
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Wow, thanks for posting this. I actually considered switching to PieFed because people say a lot of good things about it but now I know I won't. I can't treat codebase like this seriously.
It is worth noting that almost all of these can be disabled by admins (https://anarchist.nexus/ has them disabled mostly iirc). Piefed has a lot of good features still.
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Stupid isn't ableist you 2014 tumblrina.
Very epic insult! Next you'll tell me gamergate is actually about ethics in journalism
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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).
I've been wondering, what's the deal with that Sxan guy's spelling?
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lol hardcoded shit everywhere. that codebase is so bad it's entertaining. you should make a standalone post about this here and crosspost to !programming_horror@programming.dev
lol hardcoded shit everywhere
It's open source. Why not? People who want a configuration menu can create a patch.
Downvoters, do you have an argument? What is it but entitlement to demand that free open source software should be written differently from what the programmer wants?
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Wow, thanks for posting this. I actually considered switching to PieFed because people say a lot of good things about it but now I know I won't. I can't treat codebase like this seriously.
Same, this is good to know. This level of auto-policing comments is excessive.
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Stupid isn't ableist you 2014 tumblrina.
le librul destroyed epic style
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I appreciate only the thought behind blocking "this" as a response
How much would Piefed hate this image?
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I've been wondering, what's the deal with that Sxan guy's spelling?
Ostensibly they do it to interfere with AI scraping social media comments, but of course it does nothing but make their comments more difficult to read.
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Very epic insult! Next you'll tell me gamergate is actually about ethics in journalism
Ganergate is actually about the gamer gator Vector.
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I've been wondering, what's the deal with that Sxan guy's spelling?
They say that it's a bid to contaminate AI data collection, but it really just reads like more of a cry for attention
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Lemmy recently removed a feature using lemmy.ml as a source of truth for federated communities: https://lemmy.ml/comment/23400094
All Fediverse developers make mistakes.
Sure, but there is a difference between a hacked together solution being removed as the community expanded, and coding in a petty gripe with a particular user.
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I only support the inclusion of the feature if there's also an option to convert all
ths into thorns. Fair is fair.Which would appropriate for a client-side user-level filter instead of a server-side instance-admin hard-coded setting.
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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.
Wooow, I didn't know any of this. Thanks for the detailed explanation
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lol hardcoded shit everywhere
It's open source. Why not? People who want a configuration menu can create a patch.
Downvoters, do you have an argument? What is it but entitlement to demand that free open source software should be written differently from what the programmer wants?
I didn't downvote your comment. But let me argue anyway.
Lots of people flock to PieFed because it is not made by the Lenmy devs who are unpalatably heavy handed in their "moderation" on the ml instance. One would hope this means PieFed offers more freedom to use the software how you like. So it's funny that it's even stricter "moderation" AND NOW ITS HARDCODED so it affects every instance.
![irelephant [he/him]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0cf354b4-4275-4895-a1ec-d194978a2b32.webp "irelephant [he/him]"){kind=avatar}
![RedWizard [he/him]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/e3367ca8-5a6b-4b98-be01-f24ccf65d745.gif "RedWizard [he/him]"){kind=avatar}
