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List of blocked words in community names:
shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits memes piracy 196 greentext usauthoritarianism enoughmuskspam political_weirdos 4chanSeems like one of the PieFed devs has some opinions about the kind of content they dislike, and are unilaterally forcing that on every PieFed instance. I can somewhat understand filtering out curse words, but specific communities should not blocked by default, and definitely not hidden in a hardcoded list in the source code.
Edit: Important context here: https://lemmy.world/comment/21323475 Seems this blocklist is more limited in scope; it’s not blocking federation entirely, just blocking (from what I can tell) their appearance in search and automatically federating with them when adding an instance. Still problematic to exclude specific communities in a non-configurable way with little justification IMO.
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Got any other specific examples?
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Ok thats based af. It’s not about stopping one idiot, it’s about saving thousands of people from being subjected to discussion-derailing derailing drivel.
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George Carlin would be amused.
usauthoritarianism
People were rallying on piefed on resentment from tankie Lemmy devs. But this explains where the piefed devs bias is.
Seems like the intentions are to limit the reach of content critical of a certain country. Hmm…
unsurprising
They’re pretty explicit about what they don’t like when you sign up. That’s why I joined it
Each instance should be free to set their own rules. Individual instances blocking those communities is fine, but the PieFed devs hardcoding a blocklist that applies to all instances (especially one as opinionated and arbitrary as this) is absolutely not.
Each instance should be free to set their own rules.
They… are though? Maybe I am dumb, but I do not understand why each instance setting its own rules would apply to all other instances? Say if you made your own instance, you would set your own rules, but the other instances are free to set theirs as well? Like if you want to allow communities such as “4chan”, then go ahead, but if others want to block that, then why shouldn’t they be allowed to?
Definitely agree that this issue should be made much more transparent and easier to change, like not hard-coding it.
This filter is not part of any specific instance, it’s hardcoded into PieFed’s code. That means it applies to every PieFed instance unless the instance admin explicitly patches the code to remove it.
As mentioned elsewhere, it’s just a convenience function - anytime after starting up the instance, the admins can always pull in those communities manually. Or change this part of the code beforehand. So it’s not a hard-coded “block”, just slightly less convenient for it to not automatically pull in those communities during the one-time initial setup for an instance.
But anyway you are right that this should not be a hard-coded list.
Edit: it’s also worth mentioning that the way that Lemmy does this is via a direct pull of communities from Lemmy.ml. What I am reacting to here is not so much to say that PieFed’s method is perfect, but that both suffer from flaws, and that PieFed’s is relatively benign, at least in comparison to Lemmy’s. Lemmy uses an extremely authoritarian approach whereby Lemmy.ml is the sole and invariant arbiter of what communities are allowed vs. not during that initial one-time setup, and there is no way to change that, whereas PieFed uses a list that the instance admin is capable of changing. On the spectrum of authoritarian control, PieFed’s level here is like a 1 out of 100, whereas Lemmy’s is… well, it’s still not much in this exact situation, but it’s definitely way more. Sorry for being confusing initially in the way I worded that.
Isn’t there a Java based Lemmy compatible thing too? I forgot what it was called but I think there is one.
Sublinks. It’s currently in a hiatus, I think.
Duke, the Java mascot, says “Thanks!”
Edit: this image looks weird on a pure black background lol. Amogus.
kind of content they dislike
Or they like it and e.g. want just one strong 196 community.
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That could be the point. No such community on a new instance can be found by others so the original community receives all the attention.
That doesn’t make any sense because it doesn’t block the new 196 community because it uses letters
What do you mean? 196 is part of the list in degenerate_neutron_matter’s comment so a new 196 channel would be blocked.
Do you mean that the official 196 channel uses words and if somebody copies that it is not blocked? True but who would do that?
This isn’t a “block” as such. You can still view meme and 196 content and 196 from piefed.social. As another user said:
"The code that OP has linked to is part of a convenience function for admins to add content to their new instances. It can query individual remote instances (e.g. lemmy.world), or it can query lemmyverse.net, and fetch communities that look to be popular and active.
It’s completely unrelated to routine federation, and doesn’t prevent anyone subscribing to communities that may have those words in their names."
What is a “196” community? I tried looking it up and there’s only astrology stuff coming up.
- !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- !196@lemmy.world
- !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone (not affected by check because of the letters)
To add to the other responses, it was the very first community I blocked upon moving from Kbin.social (when it died) to Lemmy, since while the content is not so much “bad” it is just so… MUCH.
And I’ve heard the same story from so many others. It makes browsing All - particularly by New - very difficult by overwhelming the space.
As already mentioned, it moves around a lot - there are at least three communities here now, and also on Reddit before there was a r/196 there was a r/195, so it moving and splitting and continuing on is kinda its thing - sorta exactly like the Fediverse itself!:-)
Damn this should honestly be spread and talked about more. I don’t think many people know this is a thing?
They also put “memes” and “enoughmuskspam.”
The latter I guess could be used to stop Musk spam (since the community is literally nothing but Elon Musk news) but not allowing the word “memes” in a community name?
Utterly stupid.
But they do appear to be fans of Carlin based on the first 7 banned words.
There’s no racial slurs in there either. I might have assumed this was merely an example an operator is meant to edit themselves, but these are some weird ass choices for even that.
Well, it seems specifically 196 just got removed: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/b7a9ea0eea3a80f710e0b5b63cf0bbecde60f8bf
I wonder why the dev had an issue with 196
If I had to guess, 196 is more queer positive.
That still makes no sense
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Never meet your heroes
Never read the code of a project you respect
That is some nasty code.
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it
-devs of PieFed
Oh wait no, that’s the devs of Lemmy when asked the same request. (edit: ‘asking’ to ‘asked’)
Hopefully Rimu will be more accommodating when you ask him? (codeberg issue creation prefered)
It might be time to move this away from a hard-coded list now, if the expectations that someone installing an instance is going to read through the code is lower now than previously.
I mean, if I read the thread correctly they did end up making it optional…
No clicking the link to show it was about removing racial slurs! Only out of context snippets!
Eventually, but only reluctantly and after first telling the userbase to simply piss off and stop asking.
In contrast, the PieFed devs seem to have edited their codebase within mere minutes of this discussion having started to have already started changing things in highly positive directions, even prior to being officially asked on codeberg.
The contrast there is eye-opening, and I hope indicative of what the future holds for the Threadiverse. There are far too many LONG-STANDING issues remaining in Lemmy that only continue to get ignored as the years drag on… Lemmy is their codebase, you exist at their leisure, whereas PieFed is ours, able to be modified in ways that we collectively want it to. Obviously I mean on the spectrum, aka “PieFed has highly responsive devs”, who not only receive but even outright ask for advice on things like prioritization (see e.g. last year’s !piefed_2025@piefed.social, although nowadays they are doing that via codeberg issue tickets).
on free and liberated piefed we can use slurs freely and liberally
tankies btfo
wow. blocking slurs. oh no thats terrible lmfao
maybe they should expand that list
Wasn’t that only blocking slurs and not specific communities?
These aren’t specific community *blocks (they’re not blocks as such). They’re keywords. It jus so happens that “196” was a community as well, although that has now been removed.
Yes they’re keywords, but they also happen to be the exact names of threadiverse 8 communities, so that’s pretty specific to me.
Wait until you see what is coming up next in Lemmy:
latest case in point: the next version will hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities
it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that
(Edit: I forgot to add the link to source)
At least PieFed allows you to edit the list. I still agree that it should not have been hard-coded, but this is not a case where Lemmy is a shining beacon of all goodness and PieFed is pure shit - both have their flaws, and Lemmy’s is MAJOR (and unchangeable) whereas by comparison, PieFed’s is fairly minor as these things go.
Plus haven’t the PieFed devs already changed the code in response to this very thread? (In 2 of the 3 places, but I haven’t taken time to actually look directly myself, and the 3rd place should also be changed too, if it hasn’t been already, to remove the list from being hard-coded.) The PieFed devs, instead of telling the userbase to piss off and only reluctantly change things after a large outcry, are (especially by comparison, but also very much objectively too?) VERY responsive to feedback? I bet you will even be thanked for bringing this to their attention… though in the future you could also try submitting a codeberg ticket:-).
Anyway, you are helping make the installation experience more streamlined and smooth for future users, so (while I have nothing whatsoever to do with the devs), I will say thank you just by myself!:-)
The code that OP has linked to is part of a convenience function for admins to add content to their new instances. It can query individual remote instances (e.g. lemmy.world), or it can query lemmyverse.net, and fetch communities that look to be popular and active.
It’s completely unrelated to routine federation, and doesn’t prevent anyone subscribing to communities that may have those words in their names.
The admin function could potentially be used to fetch hundreds of communities. It runs as a background process, so you don’t know what they were until after they’d been followed. The “bad words” list acts as a safeguard against bringing in things you might not want or expect. One reason is that you may want to curate the first impression you give new visitors, as there as some that will be put off by the “fuck this” and “shitpost that” reddit-isms. Another is that you don’t typically want communities that are disproportionately popular than others (e.g. if you bring in the default 25 communities, and one of is 196, then it completely dominate your front page).
If there’s a particular community that you are interested in (e.g. because you moderate it), using this function isn’t an efficient way to add it. In addition to the “bad words” filters, it will also exclude communities that are NSFW, or below thresholds for popularity and activity. Rather than fetching a bunch of communities at the same time, and hoping that the one you want is included, it’s better to just add it manually (via a
!link or by using the “Add remote community” link) in much the same way as you would on any other platform.All of this would perhaps be already known to OP and other people, if the code had comments. This is where the adage comes in that the comments should explain why the code does what it does.
As the code currently is, anyone trying to fiddle with it would have no idea why large swathes of it are there. And it generally could use more than a bit of organizing.
It’s completely unrelated to routine federation, and doesn’t prevent anyone subscribing to communities that may have those words in their names.
99% of commentors here seem to have precluded this as even being remotely a possibility. Sadly, much of what happened on Reddit seems to have followed us here. I suppose it’s just basic human nature.
Looks like I’ve been spreading misinformation, whoops. Edited my comment to clarify.
Why the fuck can pyfed instance admins impersonate others?
Was this written by Spez?
If they have DB access they already can.
But this makes it as easy as surfing to a url
Not without a lot of manual work or noticeably resetting a user’s password. Distributing these tools as a feature is asking for abuse.
Huh, so thats why i havent seen greentexts in quite some time.
Side note: lmfao wtf is this Mickey Mouse block-quote-but-not-really bullshit?
AI code or someone who doesn’t understand python well
what seems to be the problem here?
That’s interesting. I understand not wanting to fed some of those communities.
I definitely understand wanting to filter out obscenities, but I think the filtered communities should be a seperate configurable list.
As a mod of !fuckcars@lemmy.world, I’m kinda upset about the “filter out obscenities” part.
Now you mention it, I haven’t seen your community either.
EDIT: It was also filtered out, I had to add it manually
Is this the “shit piss fuck” list?
Yes, it starts with swear words, the names of some communities are also thrown in.
What, why 196? Actually why any of these? I get 4chan and greentext sort of(?) but even ignoring the terrible programming practices here, this is really stupid.
Edit: actually almost makes me regret switching to Piefed
I know the feeling (over here on .world)
