11
But why
You’re nothing but a rat bastard who is scraping piefed.social to fill your own site with content so you can monetise it, all while driving up their hosting costs for your own benefit. That’s pretty low—have some shame....
Hey, just so you know this is legally iffy.
PieFed.social is hosted in the EU, and this amount of scraping can fall under the Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC and the Database Directive 96/9/EC.
Even if the content is public, EU law can restrict bulk extraction and republication. Especially if you’re mirroring a substantial part of the site or making it available through your own frontend.
Might be worth reconsidering what you’re pulling and how you’re using it, or atleast making sure it's legal.
edit: I'm obviously not a lawer, this might have no problems related to that, but I would make sure if I were you.
It’s just the UI I cloned, content is curated by me and my team
So, good news: Since you apparently aren’t scraping the content, only the UI, my first comment is irrelevant. And this probably doesn’t break AGPL.
Bad news: If I'm understanding you correctly you are copying and re-serving someone else’s page design and layout, which might fall under reproduction of copyrighted material and may be an even bigger issue than what I said in my first comment. Especially since your Terms of Service appears to claim ownership of the design.
If I were you, I would really make sure you aren't breaking law with this. Seems like something that could come back to bite you very easily.
Sloppy copy pasta of other people's content to serve your ads.
That's what is killing the internet.
Sir, you are polluting our internet, stap!
We need to bring back calling people slurs on the internet.
But Piefed is federated? Also it seems kind of dickish to simply copy content with the intent to host it yourself with ads.
Are you aware of the Piefed API? It's provided specifically to allow building front-ends and bots while avoiding scrapping.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
What do you even mean?
Have you heard of Floof? It's a cryptoshare claoudeservice from zink that unifies beek and fraw to make a new service called zwroak (pronounced croak)
I have forked Floof and integrated it with Qak on a b0rf backend. It's called √πy (pronounced âèk)
Just a FYI: Qak was forked into wR8vl last week because the main developer had a racist meltdown on Blopr.
Mmmh, technobabble
So it's... A mirror of piefed.social with your own frontend?
Why?
Was looking for a hobby, something I could work on for a long time then eventually put ads. No pop ups just banner ads at the appropriate places
Great idea, thank you for your effort! We need more people like you, websites without ads suck
Piefed is free of ads, why would anyone choose to use piefed with ads?
Have you actually thought this through?
That you don't see the ethical and moral problems with that plan is highly concerning.
It’s my own backend, written in FastAPI The frontend was just copied and upgraded.
Why don't you just implement federation normally instead of taking this roundabout way of doing things? As long as your site contributes content back, and makes it clear where content is from, other projects like piefed and lemmy would be happy to have your project join the network.
Continuing like this will likely get you IP blocked from wherever you're mirroring content from.
Also these platforms are open source. You are allowed to copy and modify things for your own projects, as long as you follow the basic rules in the license.
But you're scraping piefed.social to fill your site with content so you can monetize it, while increasing hosting costs for piefed for your own gain.
Naaaah I only scraped the design, the content will be curated by me and my team
This should be in your title. Your title sounds like you're ripping off user data from Piefed in order to put ads on it.
This is why you have 60 downvotes and all these people calling you an unethical jerk.
I think you are confusing terms. Scraping a website means to download copies of its pages. Mirroring means taking those scraped page copies and re-hosting them on your website. Since you said you were doing both of those things, that would mean you would be mass scraping the site to rehost (mirror) on yours.
If you are not doing either of those, then you are not mass scraping or mirroring. It sounds like instead you just scraped a few pages of piefed, and then modified the CSS/HTML of the page itself for your own purposes?
If so, that's not as bad as I thought.
However, I can guarantee you that no one here is interested in joining an isolated reddit clone that isn't federated with Piefed or lemmy, and which is explicitly designed to eventually allow you to throw ads on it for passive income. That is precisely what we all were trying to escape when we left reddit for the fediverse.
Social media is the current hotly contested battle ground for hearts and minds for the next few generations and it looks like you're experiencing what happens when you accidentally barge into it w good intentions from the people that want you to stay out.
20ish years ago people would have been idly curious at the most about your hobby; now they're trying bully you into giving it up.
What kind of hobby is "injecting ads into soweone else's community platform that you've rebranded as your own"?
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
11 points (100.0% liked)
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