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PieFedeology - Ideological Purity in PieFed
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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I'm happy to explain. You could have just asked, though.
During initial installation PieFed downloads a big list of 3000 right-wing domains from https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon and blocks them all. Admins can unblock them if they want but they would need to do them individually so I bet none do.
The list includes things like fox news, breitbart, etc. Before starting work on PieFed I spent 3? years studying right wing disinformation - qanon, antivax, all that and that blocklist is an output from that. Every site on that list was reviewed personally.
So.
Additionally, I have manually added these warnings (not blocks) onto some domains, for piefed.social only. You can download a list of those warnings from https://join.piefed.social/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/warnings.ods
Most of them are tabloids, AI slop farms and a handful are authoritarian government mouthpieces.
So there's 3000 right wing sites that simply can't be linked to and 47 sites with warnings, about 10% of which are left wing. There's no need to warn for fascism because posts that link to them are not displayed in the first place.
There's an ideological slant to PieFed for sure, and it's very much in favor of the left. That could be why maga.place and lemmychan.org use Lemmy and not PieFed.
I'll take another look at peoplesdispatch and see if there's a less triggering warnings I can put on it.
Oh they could have asked, could they? Like you asked before spreading disinfo about our instance using GenAI for moderation?
Are we supposed to bring back the whole history every time Rimu comments anywhere?
Now, listen, db0: we've discussed a lot in the past, you know I like what you do, I support you and your instance most of the time. But that's also true for Rimu and Piefed. I think it's pointless to try to count points and see who was wrong when by how much. From my perspective, there were issues from all sides during that whole story.
Bringing it up every time anyone involved comments somewhere doesn't seem relevant, and will just start another round of "you were wrong", "I was wrong because you were wrong" etc. It can be endless, and most of the people are tired of that whole story.
Take care.
Also:
We have bent over backwards to de-escalate the situation, both with L.W. and with Rimu. Our admins have stepped down. People changed their usernames. Our admins overruled our mods. Literally creating tension within our instance to maintain relations with the larger fediverse. On the other hand, rimu's deliberate disinfo is still up to this day, without any statements from our team, or correction to their blatant lies. They've even blocked people calling them out, so piefed users can't see this criticism. So don't try to "both sides" me.
Stop making concessions to them
When he's being hypocritical AF about people "could have just asked", then yes I think I will.
Talk about underplaying the situation...
Rimu spread purposeful disinfo. He never "just asked". He ignored comments from our admins explicitly telling him he's wrong, because it went against his narrative. Was purposefully uncharitable so he could spin it as badly as possible. Crossposted to Mastodon in an attempt to initiate a pile-on. I could go on...
If you're going for the whole history don't forget the nazi smear by some german troll and rimu trying to paint db0 as uniquely ban-happy. Like this has been a busy 10 days or so with shots fired on the FAF day-after-day, this is not history yet but an ongoing barrage from their POV. Also
there was no LLM moderation, and rimu knew this before making his post^[https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/42212552/20361800]
Yes, until he fucking relents.
Rimu started shit and he needs to make amends.
Until Rimu stops acting like this and learns better, yeah.
Plus there's rimu trying to tie lemmy as right wing (to maga and 4chan clones) because they used it as a platform...
Actually rimu is perfect fit with the lemmy.world admins and mods. Try to do the but are just incredibly terrible at messaging.
Yes, it's very important to remind people what sort of a troll Rimu really is.
The omissions in this timeline about brigading sockpuppets and falsified nazi smears...
But to list that timeline and act as though this is out of context or unrelated to an ongoing crashout... we are reaching some Hasan's dog collar level of bullshit.
You think defederating because they call for death upon Zionists is a win?
Apparently piefed smuggles in domains from a completely different repo that clearly isn't just "right-wing domains"^[https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon/blob/master/sources/Fake%20news/README.md] and it requires an admin to unblock them all individually.
so it is a personal semi-hardcoded blocklist, that requires an admin to go through and re-vet every site individually to see if they agree with your assessment or not.
lol. lmao even, you put a warning on electronicintifada.net like come on now
It's not smuggled, during initial setup when installing the blocklist it prints this on the screen:
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanonIf I saw this, I would not assume that Gawker, WikiLeaks, or FOX Weather would be included in a blocklist called "No-QAnon". The list itself might not be smuggled, but it's not accurately representing itself either. If it has simply evolved over time, then it needs to be renamed or split into separate blocklists.
Additionally, if someone installing this changes their mind or realizes that what they received is not what they expected, then requiring them to either directly modify the database or click "remove" over 3000 times is arguably a dark pattern.
The design is very human...
To clarify: you say that by default all PieFed instances don't even allow to link resources considered "right-wing", without an easy way to disable such anti-feature?
If so, it's basically a centralized point for censorship in a decentralized system, which is very antithetical to the spirit of the Fediverse and is something even the very left Lemmy devs prefer to avoid. I see it being very detrimental in its own right.
Shouldn't it be an offered setting instead? Like, "if you want your instance to avoid certain topics, here are filter lists to freely enable or disable"?
Much can be said about the definition of left and the way Marxists you are addressing don't see "liberal" as "left" to begin with.
What matters, though, is that you end up projecting a certain personal, even if somewhat educated, bias onto both PieFed as a project (banning right-wing outlets from even being linked to, globally), and the flagship instance (making warnings about Marxist-inclined outlets). This is very unwelcome for many, myself included, and, as previously mentioned, antithetical to what Fediverse is and what it stands for.
It depends on your definition of easy. Here is the admin UI for unbanning domains.
Also they can go into the database and empty the
domaintable.Easy as in "there is a UI button/switch during initial setup". Essentially, not banning all these domains should be equally as easy as banning them.
I don't believe software can be neutral. By making banning them equally easy as not, we're saying that those choices are of equal worth - doing that is taking a side and it's the side of giving fascists an easier way in. Nope! That's how Mastodon gets forked into Truth Social.
Interesting how this thread started out about me being too right wing and now for other people it's about me being too left wing. Heh.
Can't please everyone and I'm not trying to.
It's not about that, really. You'll always be too left for some and too right for others. The problem is a single person, regardless of their views, policing what others get to see or not to see, on all instances, globally.
Decentralization of power is the name of the game for the Fediverse - that's why most people are here in the first place. They escaped Reddit, with its sweeping bans over the "wrong" opinions. They escaped Xitter, with a megalomaniac policing what everyone can say. They are tired of this, they don't need this, they despise this.
You are the developer of a leading Threadiverse software. You contribute heavily to this world, and your decisions affect not only your project - they ripple through the whole thing. With an open heart, I call you to be open with the community you serve, and to give them what they need - open choice. Stripping them of that undermines trust in Threadiverse, tramples the spirit of freedom and tinkering, and brings drama and division instead.
If you are genuinely concerned about right-wing folks stepping in to destroy the Threadiverse - look around. Lemmy, Mbin have no guardrails, they are open to everyone - and yet, the whole right wing is like two obscure instances, barely known or accessible. Instance admins take great care to curate their instances and purge such spaces, and users double this. The very nature of Threadiverse - a place for the people - makes the very people you align with gravitate towards it. And they know full well what worth there is in each choice.
The reason the decisions of yours got so much resonance is exactly because people care. They care about PieFed, and, at the same time, they care about Threadiverse. They enjoy your work, and it brings unique developments not seen elsewhere. But if it keeps on these rails, as an ideological and opinionated project, it risks falling out of favor and into obscurity. None of us want that, and so, we call again: please, open PieFed for choice. You may suggest blocklists, even offer them as default - just don't bake them in and make a clear option for opt-out. Recognize some people need to make this choice. Hopefully, you trust your very own community to do what's right.
Wait so there is nothing in the code to check if the list on that repo got updated since after the setup? Are the admins supposed to maintain their own list or not?
You're the single biggest troll in the fediverse. Congrats on the dedication to the bit you're doing.
But why? I don't understand why you want to make your software politically charged. I'm left leaning, but I believe in free speech for all. This makes piefed a censored platform by default. You are manufacturing an echo chamber.
I don't want fascists to benefit from my work. But it's FOSS, so anyone can download and install it, so I made it extremely unattractive to fascists.
There are plenty of other places where people can have "free speech".
Facebook, or reddit, for example. /s
Heh, this puts Piefed in the same basket as Reddit, Facebook etc. for the same reasons you dislike them.
Fork PieFed and remove the 4 lines of code involved in doing this, then. See cli.py, line 160.
IDGAF.
I've rarely seen a crashout so spectacular. Piefed going from the new darling to pariah software in the blink of an eye.
Can you imagine the shitstorm MOG would have raised if the same blocklist was hardcoded in lemmy?
You can't fork Reddit or Facebook and then federate with them.
Pievolution is a Piefed forks that removes this feature (as well ad other stuff)
https://codeberg.org/Situation0262/Pievolution
It's not completely ready yet.
By the way, thank you for your work on lazysoci.al
There's an archive of an old version of Reddit's code available on Github, so theoretically you can fork it, just not the latest version.
And nobody used that as a Reddit alternative, due to missing the federation aspect.
What I should have said above is: you can fork Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, use that fork on an instance and connect to the Fediverse. That's the major difference with Reddit or Facebook.
I mean, you can just add the federation aspect. It's opensource, the code is at your fingertips to change as you please.
The difference between a proprietary, politically charged, censored echo chamber and an open source "do whatever you want" platform should be obvious though.
Free speech is about the right to say what you want, meaning the government isn't supposed to repress you for it, but it doesn't guarantee the opportunity to do so on other people's private platforms. However, in this case, you're free to host your own platform where you can say what you want.
As an aside, I'd like to point out the "Paradox of Tolerance" and the proposed resolutions: If you're an advocate for free speech, extending that freedom to those seeking to undermine it empowers them to use it against that freedom. That way, "free speech for all" is a good intention paving the road to authoritarian hell.
Hence, it is reasonable to deny a platform for those hostile to your principle. Popper frames it as a form of self-defense, to compromise part of the principle to protect the rest. Others frame it as a social contract of mutual respect, whereby the people violating it also forfeit their own right to demand it.
Either way, if "free speech for all" is a self-defeating principle, an open society needs to accept some measure of illiberty for its enemies if it is to be defensible.
Here is the (piefed.social only) warnlist in readable format
Reformated it as a table
🤦🏽
That seems to be about the other list. The noqanon one.
I'm not sure. The post was about this list and the warning about a supposed Marxist-Leninist web. How an antifascist list has been created is unrelated, then, the logical conclusion is that was created at the same time or that was a bad faith and manipulative answer.
I love how it's basically a list of all the mainstream non western outlets.
Why is the intercept on there??
Who knows? Only Rimu. Maybe because they blew up the Paper of Record’s disinformation piece that manufactured consent for genocide.
Edit to add (and mentioned recently):
Disputing genocide accusations that the imperial core flings on its enemies, though, that’s his “red line.”
Just log off, please. Nobody likes this shit
Cute, but not enough, not by a mile. Calling Piefed "left-leaning" is a LARP at best.
You’re treating these neoliberal interpretations of bias as some sort of intellectual debate to "inform" folks, instead of the existential threat it is to the nature of online discourse.
Sure, left-wing discussions are "allowed" as long as they wear their scarlet letter and stay in the ghetto where we put them.
Guess some of it rubbed off.