Permanently Deleted

  • degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io
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    8 months ago

    List of blocked words in community names:

    shit
    piss
    fuck
    cunt
    cocksucker
    motherfucker
    tits
    memes
    piracy
    196
    greentext
    usauthoritarianism
    enoughmuskspam
    political_weirdos
    4chan
    

    Seems 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.

    • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      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…

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      They’re pretty explicit about what they don’t like when you sign up. That’s why I joined it

      • degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
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          8 months ago

          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.

          • degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io
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            8 months ago

            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.

            • OpenStars@piefed.social
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              8 months ago

              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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Isn’t there a Java based Lemmy compatible thing too? I forgot what it was called but I think there is one.

    • plyth@feddit.org
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      8 months ago

      kind of content they dislike

      Or they like it and e.g. want just one strong 196 community.

        • plyth@feddit.org
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          8 months ago

          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.

          • qaz@lemmy.worldOP
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            8 months ago

            That doesn’t make any sense because it doesn’t block the new 196 community because it uses letters

            • plyth@feddit.org
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              8 months ago

              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?

              • Skavau@piefed.social
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                8 months ago

                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."

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
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          8 months ago

          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.

          img

          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!:-)

    • Zoot@reddthat.com
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      8 months ago

      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.