According to Rimu Atkinson, the main developer of PieFed, all PieFed instances come with a 3000-long block list of resources that cannot be linked to. These include all sorts of right-wing outlets. There is no easy opt-out, forcing existing instances to follow the blocklist.
The flagship PieFed instance also rolled out a feature marking various other sorts of outlets - among them, resources considered AI slop and Marxist outlets. These are specific to piefed.social.
Related discussion: https://piefed.social/comment/11254679
Why YSK: Many users have hard time choosing between Lemmy, PieFed, and Kbin/Mbin. Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives. Users that are right-wing, Marxist, or generally concerned about global censorship of the Fedi-/Threadiverse, might opt for other options instead.
Note: The post is only meant to inform users of the potentially important differences between Threadiverse platforms. Any ideologically charged discussions are better left in the respective topic.
3000 line opt out for a 300 ppl community. seems legit.
The right is the party of white supremacy and child rape, so I’m happy not to see any material ignoring/defending/enabling that.
It’s not just right-wing though, also thegrayzone.com and wikileaks.org get blocked as well as uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com
… In the US. We’re not all from there. I’m decidedly left-wing, but censorship-by-default is a bad stance.
also the propaganda is annoying, but they arnt that big of a prescence on lemmy though.
There is no easy opt-out
How so?
The only UI option to do so is to manually remove every single domain, one by one.
Removing all of them requires:
- Figuring out the list exists in the first place, and it’s primarily right-wing resources
- Manually figuring out the position of the list in the database and removing all the entries
This was done intentionally (again, according to Rimu himself) as an ideological step. According to him, software must be ideological, and he doesn’t like his software being used for any purposes that could help the right wing.
At this point, the difference between right wing and left wing polititics is simply that right wing politics is all about a single strong fascist billionaire leader who makes sure only his buddies get richer, and left wing politics is that we all have a nice life.
Many people actually prefer nthe former because only the former supports selfishness, and discrimination on race, sexuality, and whatnot, while the latter doesn’t.
That literally nis the difference between the two. If you are rightwing, I will presume you’re racist, sexist, and selfish.
This is should be considered an utterly absurd sentiment; and for the sake of fairness and good will no leftist should ever condone having this sort of perspective.
Which is why it hurts me so fucking bad to agree. Modern rightwing is utterly broken and evil. It feeds off of primitive instincts, unsuppressed intrusive thoughts, greed and prejudice.
“We may disagree with eachother, but at the end of they day, what we all really want is what’s best for our country”.
What the fuck happened that this adage has been completely nullified globally
I might recommend a game called 1000xResist
Sometimes, the whale is too big to fit in the backpack. You can’t take everything with you. Keep this in mind when you reach the ending.
While we want everyone to have decent lives we have to reckon with the fact that there are people, even if they are provided everything that they need to have a decent and happy life, they will still choose to harm others around them to get ahead.
We call them billionaires.
And I believe that when faced with complex problems and fears, studies have shown around 30% of people will flock to authoritarianism. They crave not having to face ambiguity and a simple answer to complex problems they wish to hide from. Even if those answers are lies.
Please don’t. A left-wing echo chamber is as bad as a right wing echo chamber.
In case you haven’t already noticed. This place is so much of a left wing echochamber that the different shades of liberals and progressive are constantly at odds with each other. I’ll probably be permabanned from another instance for even mentioning it.
good
Personally think it’s just really not the software’s job to handle this or have an opinion on this - it’s rather up to the instance admins to decide.
Meanwhile on every other platform, billion dollar algorithms dictate what videos millions of people can watch, for the benefit of the billionaires.
But the instance admins do decide this when they decide to use PieFed
According to Rimu Atkinson, the main developer of PieFed, all PieFed instances come with a 3000-long block list of resources that cannot be linked to. These include all sorts of right-wing outlets. There is no easy opt-out, forcing existing instances to follow the blocklist.
I support blocking propaganda and fascism, however this is just censorship imo. This could be a good feature, IF the ultimate choice is on the instances and its users on if they want to have it enabled or not by default, not from the developer and “on all instances with no easy opt-out”
I don’t even support blocking propaganda and fascism. Maybe you could block malware sites, but even that’s a push. Let moderators of individual communities figure it out, otherwise you’re just going to turn whole instances into echo chambers.
I’d say that block in general is a bit much, this can be nice if it can be used as a similar feature to “hide bot posts”, so users have the choice on if they want to hide or show those posts with the blocked link in them. Meanwhile each instances can decide what the default is, on or off, but the end user can decide how they want
Piefed dev’s I talked to said they can decide to allow or disallow instances at least even as many come preblocked.
The right wing has ass fucked the entire world into the ground, I say good riddance.
Yeah but, know your enemy and all that
We know the enemy.
We know every unoriginal comment, trick, and bullshit they do, because they have repeated them over and over again for decades.
We don’t have to keep giving them the false legitimacy of equal time or attention.
We don’t have to keep giving them the false legitimacy of equal time or attention.
If I want to point something out that a shithole site is promoting, I don’t need admin to put up a baby gate so I can’t talk about it. I don’t know how that relates to legitimizing anything.
You can literally just say :shitholesite said “very evil shit”. No need to feed clicks to their website.
Sounds like what a right-wing dipshit would say.
How so? Do we even have cons on lemmy?
The gatekeeping is to take away a cornerstone of misinformation. If brigading and manipulation didn’t work the world wouldn’t be in the state it is today. I run into conservatives frequently, even the question is disingenuous.
So I want to link to things idiots on reddit r/con are saying to point out a trend in right wing media, and that makes it spreading disinfo?
I don’t trust you as the “misinformation decider”, heaven forbid.
I can only imagine the person coming up with this idea
https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon/blob/master/domains.txt includes… wikileaks.org 🤦
afaik WikiLeaks still enjoys a spotless accuracy record and obviously has never promoted QAnon.
The fact that some QAnon promoters have themselves cited some WikiLeaks publications is, in my opinion at least, not a reason to prohibit linking to WikiLeaks (a site which hasn’t published anything new recently but continues to host a massive archive of public interest documents).
I expected to see thegrayzone.com and was not disappointed.
They scored yet another vindication this week, this time on the OPCW cover-up of the 2018 Douma, Syria false-flag attack.
Assange cozyed up to Trump during his first presidency (despite, you know, the assassination attempts by the US).Additionally while Wikileaks has never published any proven false information, they have left out information on purpose. During the 2016 election Wikileaks received information on both Clinton and Trump, but primarily published information making Clinton look worse while not publishing information they received on Trump and the republican party.This editorializing is why they’ve fallen out of favor over the last decade, again despite not publishing anything known to be false; they chose to withhold information.This was liberal misinformation, I apologize.
they chose to withhold information
citation needed
Sorry the liberal replying made me actually look this up and it turns out it was misinformation spread from liberal accounts. You’re right. Apparently no evidence was ever uncovered that wikileaks ever received the RNC leak that came out a few years after they released the DNC leak; and the majority of Assange’s quotes praising Trump were just wholesale made up by various shareblue linked propaganda sites.
Good job. You should be proud of yourself for making this post.
butterymales VS lack of trump disclosures.
is there any evidence whatsoever, or is this belief that they simply must have received and suppressed some trump-related smoking gun just blueanon dogma?
No, very probably not all PieFed instances, and AFAIK the socialist sites are not in that list of defaults.
If you’re going to make public accusations, please don’t sabotage yourself by making incorrect or imprecise claims.
Users that prefer a more curated and politically uniform experience might prefer PieFed over the alternatives.
There’s no reason to think that. I’d argue that Lemmygrad is more curated and politically uniform than any PieFed instance is.
Politically uniform means right-wing and liberal to USAmericans
this sentence makes no sense in this context
It was only about 15 years ago that censorship was an extreme taboo on the internet. I miss those times deeply.
censorship is when the state does it. Not when individual people decide to program their own open source project in a specific way.
I miss when fascists stayed on stormfront and left everyone else the fuck alone; and if they ventured outside, everyone hated them until they left.
We made the internet too easy to use…
I mean, we could fuck off to tor and see what boards they have there. I don’t want to be used as an exit node for random highly illegal bullshit
It isn’t censorship though? Just as much as people have the right to speak, others have the right to not have to listen. The beauty of the fediverse is that literally everyone has the right to say what they want, you can join a new instance or make your own but if you start saying stuff that people don’t want to listen to then they can’t be forced to listen.
This isn’t an instance with a block list though. He’s putting it in the software the instance runs, without an opt-out option (besides forking).
So what? Its open source software and subject to what the developer wants. Don’t like it then fork it, remove the offending blocks and run your own, literally exactly the same freedoms offered. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to platform people.
There isn’t a problem, until it’s blocking what you want. I don’t trust all people. If all the users are informed, then fine. This isn’t that. This is trying to by tricky about it. It’s an attempt to control information that he doesn’t like (including leftist information) without clearly saying what’s happening. That’s not OK. It’s fine if you consent. It’s shady trying to sneak it through.
I still can’t find a reason to say it is censorship or sneaky. Isnt the point that it highlights the sources? In which case it isn’t really hiding it. And if you decide you don’t like it then just leave and go elsewhere. I don’t really see a reason why a creator of something has a requirement to be apolitical or make their feelings known. People complain a lot about .ml and lemmy’s creator. Never understood why, nobody is forcing you to participate and stay instead of going elsewhere - and I say that as somebody who was on .ml during the exodus then saw everyone defederating.
I guess i very much see it as creative freedom, it isn’t doing anything malicious and my understanding is that it does expose these blocks to the user when encountered?
Here’s a question: how many users do you think are aware of this? Were you aware of this before the post? If the answer to those is not very high and/or no, it’s not being forward with what it’s doing. If the creator sees it as a feature users would like, and not trying to be sneaky, why wouldn’t they proudly display it?
ACTUALLY IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM
Yeah… I don’t miss it the slightest. It was so bad that Breadtube came to be in reaction to it.
the list for the curious. I don’t mind if rimu wants to maintain a default blocklist, if I maintained my own fediverse app I would probably make something similar, based on my own preferences, to cut down on the mod work. If you want your piefed instance to allow botfarm produce, disable the blocklist or just fork it and live your dream.
I scrolled the list until about the P, at which point I accidentally tapped on the top portion of my screen and went all the way back up.
Notably the block list includes Harry Potter affiliated sites, Fox News, and Info Wars.
Everything else pretty much just looks like slop or are sources I’ve NEVER heard of. Some were local papers, I think? But none that I would have recognized immediately.
This really seems like a mountain made out of a molehill.
There are tons of spam factories that pose as local newspapers. The first one that comes to mind is the Denver Guardian, which gained brief notoriety during Trump’s rise to power. But there are a million of them, probably literally. They are easy to make and they are easy to launder through social media bot networks.
Yeah, I saw some sources for a city local to me, but they didn’t match for our actual local paper or papers.
Which was weird.
That explains a lot.
This really seems like a mountain made out of a molehill.
unless you are interested in spreading the same kind of ideas that are on those sites, like IDK, CCP propaganda, or far right deals, or transphobia.
Why block InfoWars? Tim Heidecker is a treasure.
/s
Pravada’s domains were on there which is one I was looking for. I didn’t see South China Morning Post on the list, which is unfortunate; otherwise though, I think it’s a solid list.
It will be an absolute nightmare keeping it up, given how quickly bad-faith actors are setting up fake local and regional news outlets.
It’s a molehill that’s threatening to become a mountain. I wouldn’t trust I always agree with this person.
Dang I gotta show Rimu the American owned Canadian blight known as Post Media. Everything they own should be on there.
Who is rimu
He’s the maintainer for piefed.
Why does he post on powertrippingbastards or is that a different rimu
Dunno. I think it’s the same guy.
For those who really like the idea of blocking the sites on that list, the linked github repo also has it formatted for pihole and the like.
The fact that it includes wikileaks tells me everything I need to know.
That it recognizes Russian state media as Conservative disinformation and propaganda? Yeah, me too.
Remember when they didn’t release the rnc emails they hacked, but did release the dnc’s? Tell me why that is you think. Be honest with yourself.
No I don’t, would you mind linking a citation on this claim?
Any source on this?
When did the definition of misinformation expand to include saying true things? Should we block the Epstein files from being posted because only part of them has been released?
It enters the realm of mis-, even disinformation when true statements that contradict a narrative are actively repressed.
Selective truth can easily be a lie.
What is and isn’t selective depends on your perspective. You’re moving into the question of what counts as relevant and important, which is inherently ideological.
If country A launches a missile at country B, then it’s probably relevant if country B launched a missile yesterday, which would frame country A as retaliating. But if country A launched a missile a week ago, do you also include that? What about actions from a year or more ago? What about inflammatory rhetoric, or broken promises? What about differences in military might, or economic interests like oil?
Every source has to make decisions about what to include and what not to include, and there’s no objective basis to do so. To try to apply the label of “misinformation” in that context is just censoring narratives and perspectives that are out of line with your own.
I could easily point out the biased reporting of The New York Times on various issues like Palestine or trans people (which in several cases have gone into overt misinformation). But I’d rather be able to see and discuss that source while understanding what it’s biases are, rather than writing it off completely and potentially missing out on actual information. You don’t just block every source you disagree with.
Sometimes I feel like liberals fundamentally misunderstand how sources work, sorting them into “good” or “bad” and leaving no room for nuance. Sources can be reliable about one thing but not another, and there’s no such thing as a source with no bias.
I notice you didn’t answer the question.
I notice you haven’t apologized for removing the people calling out bad faith users on .world but didn’t remove the people spreading misinfo about the people calling out bad faith users.
Because it doesn’t matter.
A source that provides exclusive, true information about politicians, but that also has a political bias, is not something that should be blocked outright as though it were misinformation. Otherwise you’d have to block just about every source.
I mean, hell. I sometimes watch John Oliver despite disagreeing with some of his politics and considering him to present a biased or incomplete picture of certain subjects, because I sometimes learn about true things I would not have otherwise been informed about. I’ll criticize him, but I’m not going to call for him to be blocked, especially not in the code like this.
At a certain point, you’re just censoring proven facts, just on the basis of who said them.
Yes, because Fox News is known for their facts. (No one mention the court case.)
Who was talking about Fox News? I thought we were discussing WikiLeaks.
Given that many “right-wing” sites are full of lies, bigotry, and hate, I think I’m quite fine with this.
