#piefed — Public Fediverse posts

Did PieFed 'steal code' from Pylova? Let's look at what happened

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2282589/did-piefed-steal-code-from-pylova-let-s-look-at-what-happened

Did PieFed ‘steal code’ from Pylova? Let’s look at what happened

This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.

A few months ago, someone made a new fork of PieFed, which they called ‘Pylova‘. In the first few days of it’s existence the developers of the fork were very enthusiastic about it and did a lot of interesting and useful work.

I had a browse of what they’d done and saw something cool that I wanted PieFed to have too – some improvements to cross-posting functionality and two new themes. Thinking “we’re both open source projects here, it’s fine to copy code between AGPL open source projects, right?” I went ahead and did exactly that. I genuinely believed I was exercising the rights that the AGPL grants us.

Here is the cross-posting code I copied, by generating a .patch file from the pylova repo:

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/4020ca1688069adf74c682fc9ca89adfee09e4c9

See how it has quokkau in the top left? That’s the original author there. I guess that was embedded in the .patch somehow. I didn’t give it too much thought as it didn’t seem important at the time.

Then I copied the themes:

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/785b15fde4a439c8a92f16eea5c2ff166fe3b7a5

This time I copied the code using copy and paste, by selecting the text in the browser and pasting it into my IDE. Unlike the complicated code in the first batch, I really just wanted the entire contents of the two styles.css files and it seemed simpler to do it that way. Unlike the first batch, this didn’t put quokka as the author in the git repo. Thinking nothing of it, I deployed the code and got on with other things.

Time passes…

A week later a third party told me that the Pylova developer(s) were very unhappy that I had copied some code. Something about not giving proper attribution and that I stole code. I was very surprised and a bit confused. The header of the theme files I copied didn’t have any attribution/copyright/author statement (and still don’t) so there was no attribution statement to preserve.

Seeking to avoid any problems and angst I immediately removed that code from PieFed. Here are the commits where I did that:

Removed ‘allow cross-posting of images’: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/fcac0f20b65a782c3fe73dd2b6fa985b8a2f152a

Removed quack and groovebox themes: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/616375673795e0fa86fb79bd8ecfb2ff982e4b59

I copied code from an AGPL repository, into my AGPL repository, believing I was permitted to do so. The original files contained no attribution notices. When I learned that the author objected, I removed the code. I still believe that calling that “stealing” gives a very misleading impression of what happened.

Verdict?

Perhaps I was clumsy and ham-handed with my work in this situation? Perhaps I didn’t follow social conventions about how FOSS projects are supposed to work together? I hope my corrective action was enough. What do you think?

Regardless, I am sorry for any problems I caused for the Pylova project and will not be doing that again. I wish them well with their fork.

Did PieFed ‘steal code’ from Pylova? Let’s look at what happened

This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.

A few months ago, someone made a new fork of PieFed, which they called ‘Pylova‘. In the first few days of it’s existence the developers of the fork were very enthusiastic about it and did a lot of interesting and useful work.

I had a browse of what they’d done and saw something cool that I wanted PieFed to have too – some improvements to cross-posting functionality and two new themes. Thinking “we’re both open source projects here, it’s fine to copy code between AGPL open source projects, right?” I went ahead and did exactly that. I genuinely believed I was exercising the rights that the AGPL grants us.

Here is the cross-posting code I copied, by generating a .patch file from the pylova repo:

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/4020ca1688069adf74c682fc9ca89adfee09e4c9

See how it has quokkau in the top left? That’s the original author there. I guess that was embedded in the .patch somehow. I didn’t give it too much thought as it didn’t seem important at the time.

Then I copied the themes:

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/785b15fde4a439c8a92f16eea5c2ff166fe3b7a5

This time I copied the code using copy and paste, by selecting the text in the browser and pasting it into my IDE. Unlike the complicated code in the first batch, I really just wanted the entire contents of the two styles.css files and it seemed simpler to do it that way. Unlike the first batch, this didn’t put quokka as the author in the git repo. Thinking nothing of it, I deployed the code and got on with other things.

Time passes…

A week later a third party told me that the Pylova developer(s) were very unhappy that I had copied some code. Something about not giving proper attribution and that I stole code. I was very surprised and a bit confused. The header of the theme files I copied didn’t have any attribution/copyright/author statement (and still don’t) so there was no attribution statement to preserve.

Seeking to avoid any problems and angst I immediately removed that code from PieFed. Here are the commits where I did that:

Removed ‘allow cross-posting of images’: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/fcac0f20b65a782c3fe73dd2b6fa985b8a2f152a

Removed quack and groovebox themes: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/616375673795e0fa86fb79bd8ecfb2ff982e4b59

I copied code from an AGPL repository, into my AGPL repository, believing I was permitted to do so. The original files contained no attribution notices. When I learned that the author objected, I removed the code. I still believe that calling that “stealing” gives a very misleading impression of what happened.

Verdict?

Perhaps I was clumsy and ham-handed with my work in this situation? Perhaps I didn’t follow social conventions about how FOSS projects are supposed to work together? I hope my corrective action was enough. What do you think?

Regardless, I am sorry for any problems I caused for the Pylova project and will not be doing that again. I wish them well with their fork.

What PieFed blocks out of the box - and how to unblock it

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2280527/what-piefed-blocks-out-of-the-box-and-how-to-unblock-it

What PieFed blocks out of the box - and how to unblock it

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2280384/what-piefed-blocks-out-of-the-box-and-how-to-unblock-it

What PieFed blocks out of the box - and how to unblock it

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2280384/what-piefed-blocks-out-of-the-box-and-how-to-unblock-it

What PieFed blocks out of the box – and how to unblock it

PieFed has a dizzying array of settings and options that instance admins can tweak. Most of them have obvious and sensible default values but some of those have been a bit controversial, especially to do with what gets blocked by default. In this post I will explain what those are and how you can set them to your liking.

During initial setup of an instance

Initial defederations

During the initial setup process there is a series of messages printed on the screen: “Added banned instance xyz, added banned instance abc, etc” followed by “Manage banned instances at /admin/federation.” The list of initially defederated (banned) instances is:

‘anonib.al’, ‘lemmygrad.ml’, ‘gab.com’, ‘rqd2.net’, ‘exploding-heads.com’,
‘hexbear.net’, ‘hilariouschaos.com’,
‘threads.com’, ‘noauthority.social’, ‘pieville.net’, ‘links.hackliberty.org’,
‘poa.st’, ‘freespeechextremist.com’, ‘bae.st’, ‘nicecrew.digital’,
‘detroitriotcity.com’, ‘gregtech.eu’,
‘pawoo.net’, ‘shitposter.club’, ‘spinster.xyz’, ‘catgirl.life’, ‘gameliberty.club’,
‘yggdrasil.social’, ‘beefyboys.win’, ‘brighteon.social’, ‘cum.salon’, ‘wizard.casa’,
‘maga.place’, ‘lemmychan.org’

View related source code. As the message suggests, admins can go to the Federation part of the Admin area to change which instances you federate with at any time.

The public can see what defederations an instance has by clicking on the ‘Instances’ link in the footer of any page.

Initial domain blocks

In PieFed domain blocks are used to limit what people can link to when doing a link post.

Straight after setting up initial defederations the next message new admins see is “Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” The No-QAnon list is a big list of fascist and conspiracy theory websites that any self-respecting social network should have banned years ago. View source code.

After that new admins will see a message “Added 'Peertube Isolation' blocklist, see https://peertube_isolation.frama.io/. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” This is a list of far right PeerTube instances and the list is maintained by Framasoft, the makers of PeerTube. View source code.

To unblock one or all of these domains, click on ‘Domains’ in the footer, then on ‘Banned domains’ then the ‘Unban all’ button.

These domain blocks lists are imported once ever, during initial setup and there is no ongoing sync.

Community federation-starter tool

Initially a new PieFed instance is a very quiet place – no other instances know about it and it doesn’t know about any other instances so there’s no federation happening. Federation starts to happen when people join communities and follow other people but that can be a slow process as each community needs to be added one by one. To speed this up PieFed has a couple of different bulk community-adder tools. Here’s one of them:

With this tool you can type in a popular threadiverse instance and then your instance will go and subscribe to all the communities on there. It’s a pretty blunt instrument and using it risks bringing in a lot of weird stuff you didn’t expect so there is a keyword filter to screen out some of the more jarring communities. The keywords are: ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘tits’, ‘greentext’, ‘4chan’, ‘fauxbait’. Any community with those words in it cannot be accidentally added while pulling in dozens or hundreds of others. View source code.

You can still manually add any community, including ones with those words in them (like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. Do this by going to the main Communities page and clicking on ‘Add remote community’. View source code.

During new user onboarding

There is a small wizard that new people go through while setting up their account and one of the questions is “How tired of Trump and Musk news are you?”. If “Please make it stop” is chosen as an answer then some keyword filters are set up which will hide all posts with the word Trump or Musk in the title. View source code.

I think this is pretty funny. But also, vital for sanity.

Instance admins can turn this off by going to Admin -> Misc and unticking the “Filter setup during onboarding” checkbox. Also after onboarding people can change the keyword filters in their settings – there’s a “Blocks & filters” area for this.

That’s all folks

As you can see, these defaults are not permanent restrictions and they are configurable. Some of the defaults are opinionated but admins can override them easily.

Software that creates a social environment inevitably makes choices about what kinds of communities it considers acceptable to expose people to. I don’t think it is responsible to make software that leaves newbie instance admins without support in making those choices and PieFed tries to provide that in a visible and configurable way.

What PieFed blocks out of the box – and how to unblock it

PieFed has a dizzying array of settings and options that instance admins can tweak. Most of them have obvious and sensible default values but some of those have been a bit controversial, especially to do with what gets blocked by default. In this post I will explain what those are and how you can set them to your liking.

During initial setup of an instance

Initial defederations

During the initial setup process there is a series of messages printed on the screen: “Added banned instance xyz, added banned instance abc, etc” followed by “Manage banned instances at /admin/federation.” The list of initially defederated (banned) instances is:

‘anonib.al’, ‘lemmygrad.ml’, ‘gab.com’, ‘rqd2.net’, ‘exploding-heads.com’,
‘hexbear.net’, ‘hilariouschaos.com’,
‘threads.com’, ‘noauthority.social’, ‘pieville.net’, ‘links.hackliberty.org’,
‘poa.st’, ‘freespeechextremist.com’, ‘bae.st’, ‘nicecrew.digital’,
‘detroitriotcity.com’, ‘gregtech.eu’,
‘pawoo.net’, ‘shitposter.club’, ‘spinster.xyz’, ‘catgirl.life’, ‘gameliberty.club’,
‘yggdrasil.social’, ‘beefyboys.win’, ‘brighteon.social’, ‘cum.salon’, ‘wizard.casa’,
‘maga.place’, ‘lemmychan.org’

View related source code. As the message suggests, admins can go to the Federation part of the Admin area to change which instances you federate with at any time.

The public can see what defederations an instance has by clicking on the ‘Instances’ link in the footer of any page.

Initial domain blocks

In PieFed domain blocks are used to limit what people can link to when doing a link post.

Straight after setting up initial defederations the next message new admins see is “Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” The No-QAnon list is a big list of fascist and conspiracy theory websites that any self-respecting social network should have banned years ago. View source code.

After that new admins will see a message “Added 'Peertube Isolation' blocklist, see https://peertube_isolation.frama.io/. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” This is a list of far right PeerTube instances and the list is maintained by Framasoft, the makers of PeerTube. View source code.

To unblock one or all of these domains, click on ‘Domains’ in the footer, then on ‘Banned domains’ then the ‘Unban all’ button.

These domain blocks lists are imported once ever, during initial setup and there is no ongoing sync.

Community federation-starter tool

Initially a new PieFed instance is a very quiet place – no other instances know about it and it doesn’t know about any other instances so there’s no federation happening. Federation starts to happen when people join communities and follow other people but that can be a slow process as each community needs to be added one by one. To speed this up PieFed has a couple of different bulk community-adder tools. Here’s one of them:

With this tool you can type in a popular threadiverse instance and then your instance will go and subscribe to all the communities on there. It’s a pretty blunt instrument and using it risks bringing in a lot of weird stuff you didn’t expect so there is a keyword filter to screen out some of the more jarring communities. The keywords are: ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘tits’, ‘greentext’, ‘4chan’, ‘fauxbait’. Any community with those words in it cannot be accidentally added while pulling in dozens or hundreds of others. View source code.

You can still manually add any community, including ones with those words in them (like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. Do this by going to the main Communities page and clicking on ‘Add remote community’. View source code.

During new user onboarding

There is a small wizard that new people go through while setting up their account and one of the questions is “How tired of Trump and Musk news are you?”. If “Please make it stop” is chosen as an answer then some keyword filters are set up which will hide all posts with the word Trump or Musk in the title. View source code.

I think this is pretty funny. But also, vital for sanity.

Instance admins can turn this off by going to Admin -> Misc and unticking the “Filter setup during onboarding” checkbox. Also after onboarding people can change the keyword filters in their settings – there’s a “Blocks & filters” area for this.

That’s all folks

As you can see, these defaults are not permanent restrictions and they are configurable. Some of the defaults are opinionated but admins can override them easily.

Software that creates a social environment inevitably makes choices about what kinds of communities it considers acceptable to expose people to. I don’t think it is responsible to make software that leaves newbie instance admins without support in making those choices and PieFed tries to provide that in a visible and configurable way.

I finally did it: I got a #PieFed account.

I finally did it: I got a #PieFed account.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@KentNavalesi/117065820340579018

#Mastodon is full of smart, creative people posting about all kinds of interesting things, while #lemmy and #piefed can't seem to get anything off the ground but news and politics.

This is sad, because Mastodonians can easily "cross-post" to lem/pie subs. If you post about a niche hobby or topic, take just a few minutes to see if there are any dead subs you can help revive. It will only expand your reach and make the #fediverse more robust.

#Activitypub #socialmedia

RE: https://mstdn.social/@KentNavalesi/117065820340579018

#Mastodon is full of smart, creative people posting about all kinds of interesting things, while #lemmy and #piefed can't seem to get anything off the ground but news and politics.

This is sad, because Mastodonians can easily "cross-post" to lem/pie subs. If you post about a niche hobby or topic, take just a few minutes to see if there are any dead subs you can help revive. It will only expand your reach and make the #fediverse more robust.

#Activitypub #socialmedia

What PieFed's "social credit system" actually does

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2266952/what-piefed-s-social-credit-system-actually-does

What PieFed's "social credit system" actually does

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2263772/what-piefed-s-social-credit-system-actually-does

What PieFed's "social credit system" actually does

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2263772/what-piefed-s-social-credit-system-actually-does

What PieFed’s “social credit system” actually does

Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere (except to administrators), to dissuade the karma-farming behavior common on Reddit. Reputation is not a game or status symbol, it is a mechanic for enhancing trust and safety on PieFed.

Some people have criticized PieFed for this, calling it a “social credit system” similar to the one in China so I thought it’d be good to explain exactly what it does so people don’t need to guess or rely on hearsay. 

Background

Recently I did some analysis of voting patterns and found that people using PieFed upvote posts 33 times more than they downvote. We’re a friendly bunch, we want to encourage good contributions, we upvote all the time. In this environment it should be very very easy to have a reputation above zero.

Despite this supportive environment, some people (around 1%) have a negative reputation balance.

People who get downvoted a lot tend to be posting spam, trolling or being exceedingly negative. Sometimes a well-meaning person with strong and well-supported opinions will go ‘against the herd’ and receive unfair downvotes but if they stick around long enough the upvotes they receive for other activity will easily balance this out.

How reputation is used

Spammers

PieFed uses reputation to spot spammers, producing a report to administrators showing the most downvoted content in the last 3 days. This helps admins take action before people report the posts. Consequently, piefed.social is one of the least spammy places on the fediverse.

Administrators can also sort the user list in the admin area by reputation, to find problematic accounts. Also when viewing a list of new accounts, any account with a negative reputation is worth taking a closer look at because it’s usually a spammer. 

Trolls

People who get downvoted a lot have a warning icon next to their name, like this:

This warns others that they might not be worth engaging with. The icons are not shown to the person who earned them, to avoid inflaming the situation.

At -3 reputation it’s one orange triangle, at -12 it’s two red triangles.

Roughly 0.4% of active accounts have two red triangles on them. It is exceedingly rare. Most people like that crash around making a mess everywhere then lose interest and go away or get banned.

Direct / private messages

At -10 reputation or lower the account can’t initiate direct messages (although if someone else starts a conversation with them they can reply). Abusive people, who tend to have a low reputation score, often use direct messages as a tool for harassment so this is a safety mechanism.

Trustworthiness

This builds on reputation a bit.

An account is ‘trustworthy’ if they have +100 reputation or are older than 7 days old.

Only trustworthy accounts can initiate direct message conversations. This stops spammers from sending direct messages and stops abusers from making a burner account to send abuse from.

The bio of untrustworthy accounts is not shown to anonymous viewers, to disincentivize spamming links there.

The way PieFed uses the concept of trustworthiness is quite limited. I see this as the beginning of something like what Discourse does but it is not a priority area of development at this time.

Low quality communities

In some communities, which the instance admin designates as ‘low quality’, upvotes on posts do not increase reputation (upvotes on comments on those posts still do, though). Someone who exclusively posts in low quality communities might have a hard time maintaining a positive reputation as downvotes decrease it while upvotes do nothing.

This feature has not turned out to be very useful (I just ban / delete really bad communities) and it’s not used much in practice.

And that’s it

Ultimately, reputation isn’t some gatekeeping tool for participation. It’s just a simple mechanic to help us filter out spam and harassment, while keeping moderation decisions in the hands of real people. To 99% of us, it’s completely invisible. 

In the past there were a few more niche situations which dinged accounts for 1 reputation point here and there but it was ineffective and inconsequential (compared to the flood of upvotes most people receive) so those were removed.

I hope this clears things up for people. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments! 🙂

What PieFed’s “social credit system” actually does

Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere (except to administrators), to dissuade the karma-farming behavior common on Reddit. Reputation is not a game or status symbol, it is a mechanic for enhancing trust and safety on PieFed.

Some people have criticized PieFed for this, calling it a “social credit system” similar to the one in China so I thought it’d be good to explain exactly what it does so people don’t need to guess or rely on hearsay. 

Background

Recently I did some analysis of voting patterns and found that people using PieFed upvote posts 33 times more than they downvote. We’re a friendly bunch, we want to encourage good contributions, we upvote all the time. In this environment it should be very very easy to have a reputation above zero.

Despite this supportive environment, some people (around 1%) have a negative reputation balance.

People who get downvoted a lot tend to be posting spam, trolling or being exceedingly negative. Sometimes a well-meaning person with strong and well-supported opinions will go ‘against the herd’ and receive unfair downvotes but if they stick around long enough the upvotes they receive for other activity will easily balance this out.

How reputation is used

Spammers

PieFed uses reputation to spot spammers, producing a report to administrators showing the most downvoted content in the last 3 days. This helps admins take action before people report the posts. Consequently, piefed.social is one of the least spammy places on the fediverse.

Administrators can also sort the user list in the admin area by reputation, to find problematic accounts. Also when viewing a list of new accounts, any account with a negative reputation is worth taking a closer look at because it’s usually a spammer. 

Trolls

People who get downvoted a lot have a warning icon next to their name, like this:

This warns others that they might not be worth engaging with. The icons are not shown to the person who earned them, to avoid inflaming the situation.

At -3 reputation it’s one orange triangle, at -12 it’s two red triangles.

Roughly 0.4% of active accounts have two red triangles on them. It is exceedingly rare. Most people like that crash around making a mess everywhere then lose interest and go away or get banned.

Direct / private messages

At -10 reputation or lower the account can’t initiate direct messages (although if someone else starts a conversation with them they can reply). Abusive people, who tend to have a low reputation score, often use direct messages as a tool for harassment so this is a safety mechanism.

Trustworthiness

This builds on reputation a bit.

An account is ‘trustworthy’ if they have +100 reputation or are older than 7 days old.

Only trustworthy accounts can initiate direct message conversations. This stops spammers from sending direct messages and stops abusers from making a burner account to send abuse from.

The bio of untrustworthy accounts is not shown to anonymous viewers, to disincentivize spamming links there.

The way PieFed uses the concept of trustworthiness is quite limited. I see this as the beginning of something like what Discourse does but it is not a priority area of development at this time.

Low quality communities

In some communities, which the instance admin designates as ‘low quality’, upvotes on posts do not increase reputation (upvotes on comments on those posts still do, though). Someone who exclusively posts in low quality communities might have a hard time maintaining a positive reputation as downvotes decrease it while upvotes do nothing.

This feature has not turned out to be very useful (I just ban / delete really bad communities) and it’s not used much in practice.

And that’s it

Ultimately, reputation isn’t some gatekeeping tool for participation. It’s just a simple mechanic to help us filter out spam and harassment, while keeping moderation decisions in the hands of real people. To 99% of us, it’s completely invisible. 

In the past there were a few more niche situations which dinged accounts for 1 reputation point here and there but it was ineffective and inconsequential (compared to the flood of upvotes most people receive) so those were removed.

I hope this clears things up for people.

https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2260099/anti-fascist-piefed-features

Anti-fascist #PieFed features if you're looking for an alternative to #Lemmy or #Reddit

edit: Also #trans friendly features: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2260057/trans-friendly-piefed-features

Anti-fascist PieFed features

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2260137/anti-fascist-piefed-features

Trans-friendly PieFed features

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2260130/trans-friendly-piefed-features

Trans-friendly PieFed features

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2260130/trans-friendly-piefed-features

Anti-fascist PieFed features

Some time ago some fascists took a copy of Mastodon and made Truth Social with it. Arguably the damage caused by Truth Social to the world is greater than the good Mastodon brought to a few of us.

This is my greatest fear, for PieFed. I can’t stop fascists from using software I made but I can make that software so repellent to them that they look elsewhere instead. So far, they have.

Making it repellent requires a pretty good understanding of fascism. Behold, my diagram:

We can see that there are many parts to it and they all inter-depend and support each other. The best interventions will take this holistic picture into account. Some of the rest of this article would seem weak or tenuous without bearing in mind the part it plays in the bigger picture.

Ok, let’s dive into the list of features.

Fascist web site block list

When you install PieFed for the first time it comes with a blocklist of 3000+ fascist, conspiracy theory and fake news websites. Admins are told about this during installation and removing the entire block list can be done with one click.

Before starting work on PieFed I spent years doing disinformation research and that list is the result. Prior to that I was working at the parliament of my country surrounded by the inner workings of politics. All that is to say: this is a high quality block list made by someone who deeply understands the subject matter.

4chan filter

Some people like to take screenshots of funny posts on 4chan and then share those around, perhaps not appreciating how by doing so they are portraying 4chan as a fun and interesting place that people should go to. In reality 4chan is a cesspit of the worst people on the internet and a hotbed of fascism. PieFed detects and reports those screenshots for admin action (usually deletion, but it’s up to you).

This detection is off by default and needs to be enabled in the admin area before it’ll do anything.

Pronouns and more

PieFed includes some trans-friendly features which fascists would find annoying.

• Pronouns
• Transphobia reporting
• Trans flag theme

Refer to the ‘sexual anxiety’ part of the diagram at the top to see why I’m leaning on this so heavily.

Rational Discourse Toolkit

In the sidebar of every page is an ever-changing list of links to resources about deradicalization, fact-checking, fake news, conspiracy theories, media literacy, and more.

I doubt many people click on those links – rather than provide direct utility or benefit to people they mostly serve as examples of the kind of thing that would irritate fascists by their presence and make them feel enough cognitive dissonance that they don’t stay long.

This feature can be turned off in the admin area if its earnestness is too cringy or whatever.

1488 easter egg

The numbers 14 and 88 are of special significance to fascists and are often used together. 

Bug reports and discussions in our coding workspace are automatically numbered sequentially so when issue # 1488 came up, I made sure it was used to document how lacking in manhood Hitler was. It’s true, he did have one, look it up.

AI content labeling

It can be argued that AI is a fascist technology being used for fascist ends – decreasing the power of workers, destroying our ability to know truth from fiction, flooding our noosphere with trash. See the ‘Anti-intellectualism’ part of the earlier diagram. Accordingly we need to keep AI-generated content to a minimum or at least let people opt out of it.

Every post can be labelled as having AI content, and people can filter their feeds to exclude it. Just like how NSFW content works.

Community standards

The PieFed project has rules for its flagship instance and contributor guidelines that are anathema to fascism. See https://piefed.social/rules and https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/project_management/contributing.md

Easily find LGBTQ and Activist content

Care has been taken to collate communities which celebrate the diversity and progressive nature of the fediverse. See https://piefed.social/topic/society/lgbtq and https://piefed.social/topic/society/activism. In PieFed topics are presented to new users during onboarding, like Mastodon’s collections feature and are part of the main navigation.

Admins can create the topics that suit what they’re trying to foster and on piefed.social I’ve made a point of choosing a few areas that fascists won’t like.

Managing conflict

There’s no point having good rules if there’s no way to enforce them and PieFed has a bevy of ways to spot bad actors and excellent moderation tools. See https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/

Also if you make a big mistake and the crowd has taught you a hard lesson you can do a public retraction and move on:

This works better than deleting your post because if you delete it people won’t know you’ve learned and changed. A lot of people need to learn and change.

In conclusion, enjoy this Pixelfed post I made 3 years ago about fully automated luxury gay space communism – https://pixelfed.social/p/rimu/549149551792993094

Anti-fascist PieFed features

Some time ago some fascists took a copy of Mastodon and made Truth Social with it. Arguably the damage caused by Truth Social to the world is greater than the good Mastodon brought to a few of us.

This is my greatest fear, for PieFed. I can’t stop fascists from using software I made but I can make that software so repellent to them that they look elsewhere instead. So far, they have.

Making it repellent requires a pretty good understanding of fascism. Behold, my diagram:

We can see that there are many parts to it and they all inter-depend and support each other. The best interventions will take this holistic picture into account. Some of the rest of this article would seem weak or tenuous without bearing in mind the part it plays in the bigger picture.

Ok, let’s dive into the list of features.

Fascist web site block list

When you install PieFed for the first time it comes with a blocklist of 3000+ fascist, conspiracy theory and fake news websites. Admins are told about this during the installation and removing the entire block list can be done with one click.

Before starting work on PieFed I spent years doing disinformation research and that list is the result. Prior to that I was working at the parliament of my country surrounded by the inner workings of politics. All that is to say: this is a high quality block list made by someone who deeply understands the subject matter.

4chan filter

Some people like to take screenshots of funny posts on 4chan and then share those around, perhaps not appreciating how by doing so they are portraying 4chan as a fun and interesting place that people should go to. In reality 4chan is a cesspit of the worst people on the internet and a hotbed of fascism. PieFed detects and reports those screenshots for admin action (usually deletion, but it’s up to you).

This detection is off by default and needs to be enabled in the admin area before it’ll do anything.

Pronouns and more

PieFed includes some trans-friendly features which fascists would find annoying.

• Pronouns
• Transphobia reporting
• Trans flag theme

Refer to the ‘sexual anxiety’ part of the diagram at the top to see why I’m leaning on this so heavily.

Rational Discourse Toolkit

In the sidebar of every page is an ever-changing list of links to resources about deradicalization, fact-checking, fake news, conspiracy theories, media literacy, and more.

I doubt many people click on those links – rather than provide direct utility or benefit to people they mostly serve as examples of the kind of thing that would irritate fascists by their presence and make them feel enough cognitive dissonance that they don’t stay long.

This feature can be turned off in the admin area if its earnestness is too cringy or whatever.

1488 easter egg

The numbers 14 and 88 are of special significance to fascists and are often used together. 

Bug reports and discussions in our coding workspace are automatically numbered sequentially so when issue # 1488 came up, I made sure it was used to document how lacking in manhood Hitler was. It’s true, he did have one, look it up.

AI content labeling

It can be argued that AI is a fascist technology being used for fascist ends – decreasing the power of workers, destroying our ability to know truth from fiction, flooding our noosphere with trash. See the ‘Anti-intellectualism’ part of the earlier diagram. Accordingly we need to keep AI-generated content to a minimum or at least let people opt out of it.

Every post can be labelled as having AI content, and people can filter their feeds to exclude it. Just like how NSFW content works.

Community standards

The PieFed project has rules for its flagship instance and contributor guidelines that are anathema to fascism. See https://piefed.social/rules and https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/project_management/contributing.md

Easily find LGBTQ and Activist content

Care has been taken to collate communities which celebrate the diversity and progressive nature of the fediverse. See https://piefed.social/topic/society/lgbtq and https://piefed.social/topic/society/activism. In PieFed topics are presented to new users during onboarding, like Mastodon’s collections feature and are part of the main navigation.

Admins can create the topics that suit what they’re trying to foster and on piefed.social I’ve made a point of choosing a few areas that fascists won’t like.

Managing conflict

There’s no point having good rules if there’s no way to enforce them and PieFed has a bevy of ways to spot bad actors and excellent moderation tools. See https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/

Also if you make a big mistake and the crowd has taught you a hard lesson you can do a public retraction and move on:

This works better than deleting your post because if you delete it people won’t know you’ve learned and changed. A lot of people need to learn and change.

In conclusion, enjoy this Pixelfed post I made 3 years ago about fully automated luxury gay space communism – https://pixelfed.social/p/rimu/549149551792993094

PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2257645/piefed-1-7-9-includes-anubis-like-scraper-blocking

PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2257645/piefed-1-7-9-includes-anubis-like-scraper-blocking

BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)

BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)

Oh, Boy George is violating the #PieFed guidelines.

Trans-friendly PieFed features

Trans people have a lot to deal with and there’s many of them on the fediverse so I’ve taken special care to ensure their voices influence the development of PieFed and have built some features with them in mind.

Pronouns

PieFed displays each person’s pronouns after their name, if they have provided them. Below is a post I made recently, showing mine.

On other platforms people achieve the same thing by putting their pronouns into their display name which achieves a lot of the same thing but is clunky and often looks out of place. PieFed reads pronouns from the profile’s Custom Fields, which federate with Mastodon.

Reporting transphobia

When reporting rule-infringing content one of the preset reasons for reporting is “transphobia”. Every PieFed instance supports and encourages people to report transphobia when they see it – this is not something an admin can opt out of unless they edit the code themselves.

Theme

PieFed comes with a theme that uses the Trans Pride flag colors. I’m not a designer so it’s a bit garish – help wanted!

Logo

piefed.social, the PieFed flagship instance, is currently sporting a Trans Pride flag style logo to support of the trans community on Lemmy which came under attack recently.

At other times the PieFed.social logo has been switched to flags of various oppressed groups or anti-imperialist movements such as Palestine, Ukraine, Tibet and others.

Safety

As a frequently discriminated against minority, trans people really benefit from safety, privacy and effective moderation tools, another strong area for PieFed.

• Abuse often comes through the direct messaging system, so it is possible to turn it off or only allow DMs from people on the same instance, or only from trusted instances.
• Moderation and admin tools on PieFed are far more advanced than similar platforms, enabling the provision of much higher degrees of safety with much less effort and admin burnout.
• Transphobia and fascism are often intertwined so PieFed’s anti-fascist features support and enhance the safety of the trans community on the fediverse.

It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface

What’s been done so far are all quite obvious things. Any ideas for what comes next?

Trans-friendly PieFed features

Trans people have a lot to deal with and there’s many of them on the fediverse so I’ve taken special care to ensure their voices influence the development of PieFed and have built some features with them in mind.

Pronouns

PieFed displays each person’s pronouns after their name, if they have provided them. Below is a post I made recently, showing mine.

On other platforms people achieve the same thing by putting their pronouns into their display name which achieves a lot of the same thing but is clunky and often looks out of place. PieFed reads pronouns from the profile’s Custom Fields, which federate with Mastodon.

Reporting transphobia

When reporting rule-infringing content one of the preset reasons for reporting is “transphobia”. Every PieFed instance supports and encourages people to report transphobia when they see it – this is not something an admin can opt out of unless they edit the code themselves.

Theme

PieFed comes with a theme that uses the Trans Pride flag colors. I’m not a designer so it’s a bit garish – help wanted!

Logo

piefed.social, the PieFed flagship instance, is currently sporting a Trans Pride flag style logo to support of the trans community on Lemmy which came under attack recently.

At other times the PieFed.social logo has been switched to flags of various oppressed groups or anti-imperialist movements such as Palestine, Ukraine, Tibet and others.

Safety

As a frequently discriminated against minority, trans people really benefit from safety, privacy and effective moderation tools, another strong area for PieFed.

• Abuse often comes through the direct messaging system, so it is possible to turn it off or only allow DMs from people on the same instance, or only from trusted instances.
• Moderation and admin tools on PieFed are far more advanced than similar platforms, enabling the provision of much higher degrees of safety with much less effort and admin burnout.
• Transphobia and fascism are often intertwined so PieFed’s anti-fascist features support and enhance the safety of the trans community on the fediverse. I’ll do another blog post on that facet of things soon.

It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface

What’s been done so far are all quite obvious things. Any ideas for what comes next?

PieFed is 3 years old today

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2241694/piefed-is-3-years-old-today

PieFed is 3 years old today

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2241694/piefed-is-3-years-old-today

Hey #mastodon! Less than 48 hours to sign up for The Button before it goes live!

What is The Button, I hear you ask?

It's a game where you press a button. No, really, that's mostly it.

I made a very silly #webgame that a got a bit out of hand and now we're on to Season 4, with hundreds of players.

You can sign up at https://thebutton.social and sign in with your #fediverse account!

#TheButton #SocialExperiment #InternetCulture #BrowserGame #Gaming #IndieGame #lemmy #piefed #activitypub

Hey #mastodon! Less than 48 hours to sign up for The Button before it goes live!

What is The Button, I hear you ask?

It's a game where you press a button. No, really, that's mostly it.

I made a very silly #webgame that a got a bit out of hand and now we're on to Season 4, with hundreds of players.

You can sign up at https://thebutton.social and sign in with your #fediverse account!

#TheButton #SocialExperiment #InternetCulture #BrowserGame #Gaming #IndieGame #lemmy #piefed #activitypub

Less than 4 days until The Button starts!

You can pre-register now at https://thebutton.social for a couple of bonuses when the game starts.

Each season brings with it a new theme and a new way to play!

If you've played before, then I look forward to seeing you again. If you're new... do YOU push the button?

#thebutton #game #fediverse #fedigames #mastodon #lemmy #piefed #social #experiment

Less than 4 days until The Button starts!

You can pre-register now at https://thebutton.social for a couple of bonuses when the game starts.

Each season brings with it a new theme and a new way to play!

If you've played before, then I look forward to seeing you again. If you're new... do YOU push the button?

#thebutton #game #fediverse #fedigames #mastodon #lemmy #piefed #social #experiment

You can now block posts based on their flair

You can join /c/technology and then block all the posts in there about Windows, for example. Or join /c/politics and block all the USA news.

In the video I demo this with [email protected]

You can now block posts based on their flair

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2216045/you-can-now-block-posts-based-on-their-flair

You can now block posts based on their flair

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2216045/you-can-now-block-posts-based-on-their-flair

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stuartml/116857338780957801

If anyone is curious, I did find an alternative to reddit, over at
https://piefed.social - so far it's awesome - I'm sharing the science facts into the Science Facts community over there.

#tech #technology #alternatives #reddit #piefed #fediverse

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stuartml/116857338780957801

If anyone is curious, I did find an alternative to reddit, over at
https://piefed.social - so far it's awesome - I'm sharing the science facts into the Science Facts community over there.

#tech #technology #alternatives #reddit #piefed #fediverse

The closing post in the "Fediverse Beyond Mastodon" maps forums, social reading, and music, the formats that don't fit the microblog.

The Threadiverse (Fediverse's answer to Reddit): Lemmy, Kbin/Mbin and PieFed (created by Rimu - @rimu).

Forums that predate federation: NodeBB (created by @julian) rewrote its core so every new forum federates by default.
Discourse (@Discourse) ships it as an opt-in, per-category plugin.
Both were built years ago to replace phpBB and vBulletin, and both now speak ActivityPub.

Social reading: BookWyrm (created by @tripofmice), a federated Goodreads where your shelves and reviews show up in a Mastodon timeline.

Music: Funkwhale (@funkwhale) - a self-hosted Grooveshark successor.

Bandwagon (created by @benpate) an online music storefront where musicians sell directly, built on the Emissary framework.

Read the full post here:

https://federatedmind.com/forums-reading-and-music-on-the-fediverse/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fediverse-beyond-mastodon-4

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #Lemmy #PieFed #NodeBB #Discourse #BookWyrm #Funkwhale #Bandwagon #OpenWeb

The closing post in the "Fediverse Beyond Mastodon" maps forums, social reading, and music, the formats that don't fit the microblog.

The Threadiverse (Fediverse's answer to Reddit): Lemmy, Kbin/Mbin and PieFed (created by Rimu - @rimu).

Forums that predate federation: NodeBB (created by @julian) rewrote its core so every new forum federates by default.
Discourse (@Discourse) ships it as an opt-in, per-category plugin.
Both were built years ago to replace phpBB and vBulletin, and both now speak ActivityPub.

Social reading: BookWyrm (created by @tripofmice), a federated Goodreads where your shelves and reviews show up in a Mastodon timeline.

Music: Funkwhale (@funkwhale) - a self-hosted Grooveshark successor.

Bandwagon (created by @benpate) an online music storefront where musicians sell directly, built on the Emissary framework.

Read the full post here:

https://federatedmind.com/forums-reading-and-music-on-the-fediverse/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fediverse-beyond-mastodon-4

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #Lemmy #PieFed #NodeBB #Discourse #BookWyrm #Funkwhale #Bandwagon #OpenWeb

Season 4 of The Button is coming soon!

The Button is a #fediverse #game where you press a button. Yes, really.

You can pre-register now if you want. No pressure. https://thebutton.social

Season 4 starts in just under 2 weeks, with new features, a new theme, and a brand new puzzle to mash your brains :)

#games #webgames #bluesky #mastodon #lemmy #piefed #fedigames