If the code is bad, you realise only coders would notice it from reading that?
That’s what makes it particularly sad. The people who didn’t read the code have no idea what they’re in for.
What hardcoded bans are you referring to here? The 4chan one that can be disabled?
How about this one?
‘enoughmuskspam’, ‘political_weirdos’, ‘piracy’, ‘memes’ are hardcoded banned. 196 used to be banned to but they removed it from the “bad list”.
Also “can be disabled” does not excuse hardcoded filtering. If they’re serious they could implement a config system in an hour.
Hardcoded means the filter is in the source code (as opposed to being in a config file or database). Whether or not it can be disabled/circumvented is a different matter.
What are they in for? The site seems to work fine from a user perspective.
That is from an auto-federation system for instances to bulk add new comms across instances. Any community can still be manually added. And I think most of those may have been removed now a few weeks ago. I can literally access [email protected] from piefed.social and all those other terms.
All new admins need to do to change things is to untick boxes.
What are they in for? The site seems to work fine from a user perspective.
Fox News would seem like a perfectly fine source of news if you get all your news from Fox News, wouldn’t you agree?
Any community can still be manually added.
And you can still manually get any news you want from other channels, Fox News just won’t show them.
(I am not saying PieFed is as bad as Fox News, just trying to make an analogy to show that something that “seems to work fine” can be pretty bad for the users nonetheless)
BTW, !enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world (with the exclamation mark up front) to correctly refer to communities. Without the ! that’s an email address.
I don’t get this comparison. You are scrutinising the code here as if people coming here without knowledge of how awful it apparently is will apparently be in for a rough ride. That the code excludes communities with certain keywords from being automatically added by the mass federation tool used only by instance owners (many of which have been removed now - as much of it was a copy and paste job from communities designated to shed content after 6 months) doesn’t actually impact the user experience just using the site.
To me, the sloppy codebase means I wouldn’t want to selfhost it. And the presence of hardcoded filtering of things the devs dislike (even if it can be manually worked around) is for me a very good indicator that more shenanigans will come along the line.
If you have no problems with what I mentioned then I don’t think we have much in common ground to argue on. You can enjoy PieFed and I will continue to enjoy Lemmy.
I just want people to be informed about these things that I find highly problematic before they decide to use or selfhost PieFed.
New users joining from Reddit aren’t dealing with self-hosting - they’re just using it. I will also add I have seen a lot of praise for how easy it is to host piefed from other instance owners.
New users joining from Reddit aren’t dealing with self-hosting - they’re just using it.
Yes, and so I am concerned they might not know what “bad list” might be hardcoded into the software they’re using.
I will also add I have seen a lot of praise for how easy it is to host piefed from other instance owners.
Yeah, I think Lemmy needs to be made easier to selfhost. From the choice of programming language, the Lemmy backend must be more efficient and secure, so it should be the better choice for most selfhosters (exceptions being the active ones who are interested in patching the stuff they host and want to do so in Python).
You have already completely misunderstood this “bad list” that you referred to here. It isn’t and even at its peak before 196 mods complained, a block on all communities with those keywords.
Memes is a banned url, huh? Okay, let’s test this scientifically. After I make this comment, I’m gonna go to [email protected] and see if I get any posts.
Huh? You just linked a community on lemmy.world. That’s a lemmy instance. The person above you is referring to piefed. You don’t understand the code.
Piefed has all the shit code that bans a bunch of stuff. They also delete your comment if it starts with a gif link. And then put your social score down one. They also block you from downvoting if your votes are negative (more downs than up). There so much dumb shit because there are against actual free speech.
The code doesn’t actually parse the markdown in the post at all, so it only censors your comment if it’s a link to common gif hosters, and posted in a way that doesn’t actually render the gif.
It’s laughable because it’s both attempting to be draconian and implemented poorly
Woah, I see lots of posts on [email protected], and some of them have more than a thousand upvotes. I guess there’s no hardcoded bans on meme communities. You must have misunderstood the code.
Maybe that filter is the one missing, if that’s the case, that will be changed soon, as it always has been for every time a similar issue was raised
the thorn character filter
196 and other memes communities not being federated by default
the “this filter” being configurable
My personal stance is that Piefed has several features that Lemmy has been lacking for more than a year, and that prevent the Threadiverse from growing
multicommunities
onboarding process asking new joiners what they are into
crossposts comments consolidation
communities moderation features
posts and user flairs
keyword filters
None of the Piefed users ever said Piefed was perfect, that the code was elegant, or that there were no issues with filters such as the the three examples I listed above.
What we see from time to time is people spreading literal misinformation about Piefed, saying that those filters can’t be disabled by an admin (they can), and/or that a fork is needed to do so (it’s not) .
That’s why I created that post, because for whatever reason Piefed seems to now have haters, which seems counterproductive as it has the unique features listed above.
I personally would prefer people to say “Lemmy is fine, PieFed is fine too, both can operate with each other, my personal preference is X” rather insulting Piefed or Lemmy devs.
Having features does not make it good software. It remains true that the code quality is abysmal and there ARE hardcoded blocks based on what the dev(s) dislike.
What we see from time to time is people spreading literal misinformation about Piefed, saying that those filters can’t be disabled by an admin (they can), and/or that a fork is needed to do so (it’s not) .
I hope I am not spreading any misinformation. If any of my complaints is factually incorrect, please point it out.
I know what the code is for. And I know that your instance manually exempted the block for ‘memes’ (or perhaps your instance imported the memes community before the block came in place, idk).
Can you view any ‘piracy’ or ‘enoughmuskspam’ community on your instance? I can’t
Try [email protected] from MULTIVERSE again, I just subscribed to it. You can’t manually trigger federation if you don’t have an account on MULTIVERSE. Thanks for the recommendation, I definitely want piracy on My instance. But I won’t be subscribing to the Musk community, I’ve had enough of that Nazi.
By the way, I use capitalised pronouns in all three grammatical persons.
And there’s no block on memes or piracy or the space pedophile. I can tell you what that code actually does if you ask. It doesn’t block federation to the communities.
Just to confirm, did You find the ‘piracy’ comm in the search menu (like I was trying to)? Or did You have to manually type in the URL and subscribe first for it to federate?
If You found it in the search menu, then my understanding of the code must be wrong. In that case would You please explain.
PS: The musk community is against musk. Apologies about not using Your pronouns earlier.
I used the federate remote communities page on the web UI, but I could also have typed the ! notation into a comment. I didn’t try using the search to find it, but I don’t think it would have worked. When I used the federation machine two weeks ago, I only grabbed communities over a certain size on certain instances. MULTIVERSE has to be told to look for smaller communities.
Still, communities like femcelmemes and dankchristianmemes and lemmyshitpost (shit is also on the list) were picked up by the community federation machine with no tinkering.
So here’s what the code does. That list you found, of the seven_things_plus, it’s Rimu’s idea of “low effort communities”. As an admin, when I click on a user, I can see their “reputation”, which shows if they’ve been getting lots of downvotes or lots of upvotes. And I also have a checkbox that says something like “ignore reputation from low effort communities”. It’s designed to prevent karma farming. Rimu designed it so if a robot posts a lot of memes to 196 to farm karma and then starts posting ads for RAID SHADOW LEGENDS, I have the option of ignoring the meme reputation and still seeing that the bot isn’t contributing anything of value. But I have the checkbox turned off because I like memes.
This week I’m gonna try making a PR to change that list’s name to something more descriptive and make it configurable by admins. I’ve never contributed to PieFed before so we’ll see if I can understand enough of the code to do it. Wish Me luck.
Okay. It’s still unclear to me why piracy was not picked up by default. It’s a very big comm.
Anyhow, good luck on the merge request! Would be great to let the admin decide what to block instead of the weirdly random selection of comms and words on the list now.
Not block. Just karma-devalue. I’m gonna rename the variable to something like “unwanted reputation sources”. If an admin doesn’t want people farming rep by posting porn, they can put porn on the list. That’s not blocking, it’s just a data filter for admin eyes only.
If the code is bad, you realise only coders would notice it from reading that?
And most people are not coders. What hardcoded bans are you referring to here? The 4chan one that can be disabled?
That’s what makes it particularly sad. The people who didn’t read the code have no idea what they’re in for.
How about this one? ‘enoughmuskspam’, ‘political_weirdos’, ‘piracy’, ‘memes’ are hardcoded banned. 196 used to be banned to but they removed it from the “bad list”.
Also “can be disabled” does not excuse hardcoded filtering. If they’re serious they could implement a config system in an hour.
obviously not that “hardcoded” since piefed.zip can access these things just fine
https://piefed.zip/c/[email protected]https://piefed.zip/c/[email protected]0.compiefed.ca too
https://piefed.ca/c/[email protected]Hardcoded means the filter is in the source code (as opposed to being in a config file or database). Whether or not it can be disabled/circumvented is a different matter.
irrelevant when it can be disabled anyways
Defaults matter. We always complain about that when it comes to eg.: Firefox, no sense in being a hypocrite here and letting Piefed do just about.
What are they in for? The site seems to work fine from a user perspective.
That is from an auto-federation system for instances to bulk add new comms across instances. Any community can still be manually added. And I think most of those may have been removed now a few weeks ago. I can literally access [email protected] from piefed.social and all those other terms.
All new admins need to do to change things is to untick boxes.
Fox News would seem like a perfectly fine source of news if you get all your news from Fox News, wouldn’t you agree?
And you can still manually get any news you want from other channels, Fox News just won’t show them.
(I am not saying PieFed is as bad as Fox News, just trying to make an analogy to show that something that “seems to work fine” can be pretty bad for the users nonetheless)
BTW,
!enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world(with the exclamation mark up front) to correctly refer to communities. Without the ! that’s an email address.I don’t get this comparison. You are scrutinising the code here as if people coming here without knowledge of how awful it apparently is will apparently be in for a rough ride. That the code excludes communities with certain keywords from being automatically added by the mass federation tool used only by instance owners (many of which have been removed now - as much of it was a copy and paste job from communities designated to shed content after 6 months) doesn’t actually impact the user experience just using the site.
To me, the sloppy codebase means I wouldn’t want to selfhost it. And the presence of hardcoded filtering of things the devs dislike (even if it can be manually worked around) is for me a very good indicator that more shenanigans will come along the line.
If you have no problems with what I mentioned then I don’t think we have much in common ground to argue on. You can enjoy PieFed and I will continue to enjoy Lemmy.
I just want people to be informed about these things that I find highly problematic before they decide to use or selfhost PieFed.
New users joining from Reddit aren’t dealing with self-hosting - they’re just using it. I will also add I have seen a lot of praise for how easy it is to host piefed from other instance owners.
Yes, and so I am concerned they might not know what “bad list” might be hardcoded into the software they’re using.
Yeah, I think Lemmy needs to be made easier to selfhost. From the choice of programming language, the Lemmy backend must be more efficient and secure, so it should be the better choice for most selfhosters (exceptions being the active ones who are interested in patching the stuff they host and want to do so in Python).
You have already completely misunderstood this “bad list” that you referred to here. It isn’t and even at its peak before 196 mods complained, a block on all communities with those keywords.
Memes is a banned url, huh? Okay, let’s test this scientifically. After I make this comment, I’m gonna go to [email protected] and see if I get any posts.
Huh? You just linked a community on lemmy.world. That’s a lemmy instance. The person above you is referring to piefed. You don’t understand the code.
Piefed has all the shit code that bans a bunch of stuff. They also delete your comment if it starts with a gif link. And then put your social score down one. They also block you from downvoting if your votes are negative (more downs than up). There so much dumb shit because there are against actual free speech.
See this for proof: https://lemmy.ml/comment/23662293
Me shocked to learn that PieFed (the software I am currently using) will delete My comment if it starts with a gif (like this one does)
The code doesn’t actually parse the markdown in the post at all, so it only censors your comment if it’s a link to common gif hosters, and posted in a way that doesn’t actually render the gif.
It’s laughable because it’s both attempting to be draconian and implemented poorly
Woah, I see lots of posts on [email protected], and some of them have more than a thousand upvotes. I guess there’s no hardcoded bans on meme communities. You must have misunderstood the code.
Can you show me Reddits code?
The version from 10 years ago, yeah. It’s here https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit.
There’s a modern and production-ready open source alternative. It’s called Lemmy. You can find the source here https://github.com/lemmynet/lemmy
Lemmy is missing several features that Piefed has had for more than a year now: https://piefed.zip/post/1008300#comment_3561702
Did you put the right URL? That URL links to a comment about the 4-chan image blocking and reputation loss.
If this is the feature you consider to be missing from Lemmy, then yes, please let it remain missing. I definitely don’t want anything like it.
Copy pasting the comment content just to be sure
Edit : asked Rimu, here’s the answer:
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic//near/10529
–
Maybe that filter is the one missing, if that’s the case, that will be changed soon, as it always has been for every time a similar issue was raised
My personal stance is that Piefed has several features that Lemmy has been lacking for more than a year, and that prevent the Threadiverse from growing
None of the Piefed users ever said Piefed was perfect, that the code was elegant, or that there were no issues with filters such as the the three examples I listed above.
What we see from time to time is people spreading literal misinformation about Piefed, saying that those filters can’t be disabled by an admin (they can), and/or that a fork is needed to do so (it’s not) .
That’s why I created that post, because for whatever reason Piefed seems to now have haters, which seems counterproductive as it has the unique features listed above.
I personally would prefer people to say “Lemmy is fine, PieFed is fine too, both can operate with each other, my personal preference is X” rather insulting Piefed or Lemmy devs.
Having features does not make it good software. It remains true that the code quality is abysmal and there ARE hardcoded blocks based on what the dev(s) dislike.
I hope I am not spreading any misinformation. If any of my complaints is factually incorrect, please point it out.
Hardcoded configurable blocks disabled by default.
Those features might not be for you, but from experience trying to get new people onboard, they help a lot. I made a detailed post about this there: https://piefed.zip/c/fedimemes/p/1012596/not-sure-where-all-of-this-come-from
Okay so I actually read the code just now, unlike you, and now I know what that list is for. It’s not a ban. You wanna hear what the list is for?
I know what the code is for. And I know that your instance manually exempted the block for ‘memes’ (or perhaps your instance imported the memes community before the block came in place, idk).
Can you view any ‘piracy’ or ‘enoughmuskspam’ community on your instance? I can’t
http://multiverse.soulism.net/communities?search=piracy&language_id=0
http://multiverse.soulism.net/communities?search=enoughmuskspam&language_id=0
Try [email protected] from MULTIVERSE again, I just subscribed to it. You can’t manually trigger federation if you don’t have an account on MULTIVERSE. Thanks for the recommendation, I definitely want piracy on My instance. But I won’t be subscribing to the Musk community, I’ve had enough of that Nazi.
By the way, I use capitalised pronouns in all three grammatical persons.
And there’s no block on memes or piracy or the space pedophile. I can tell you what that code actually does if you ask. It doesn’t block federation to the communities.
Just to confirm, did You find the ‘piracy’ comm in the search menu (like I was trying to)? Or did You have to manually type in the URL and subscribe first for it to federate?
If You found it in the search menu, then my understanding of the code must be wrong. In that case would You please explain.
PS: The musk community is against musk. Apologies about not using Your pronouns earlier.
I used the federate remote communities page on the web UI, but I could also have typed the ! notation into a comment. I didn’t try using the search to find it, but I don’t think it would have worked. When I used the federation machine two weeks ago, I only grabbed communities over a certain size on certain instances. MULTIVERSE has to be told to look for smaller communities.
Still, communities like femcelmemes and dankchristianmemes and lemmyshitpost (shit is also on the list) were picked up by the community federation machine with no tinkering.
So here’s what the code does. That list you found, of the seven_things_plus, it’s Rimu’s idea of “low effort communities”. As an admin, when I click on a user, I can see their “reputation”, which shows if they’ve been getting lots of downvotes or lots of upvotes. And I also have a checkbox that says something like “ignore reputation from low effort communities”. It’s designed to prevent karma farming. Rimu designed it so if a robot posts a lot of memes to 196 to farm karma and then starts posting ads for RAID SHADOW LEGENDS, I have the option of ignoring the meme reputation and still seeing that the bot isn’t contributing anything of value. But I have the checkbox turned off because I like memes.
This week I’m gonna try making a PR to change that list’s name to something more descriptive and make it configurable by admins. I’ve never contributed to PieFed before so we’ll see if I can understand enough of the code to do it. Wish Me luck.
Okay. It’s still unclear to me why piracy was not picked up by default. It’s a very big comm.
Anyhow, good luck on the merge request! Would be great to let the admin decide what to block instead of the weirdly random selection of comms and words on the list now.
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1618
Already passed it on, and it’s in the pipeline now.
Not block. Just karma-devalue. I’m gonna rename the variable to something like “unwanted reputation sources”. If an admin doesn’t want people farming rep by posting porn, they can put porn on the list. That’s not blocking, it’s just a data filter for admin eyes only.
The search menu on a piefed instance isn’t going to find and federate new communities. It has never worked like that.
That’s what I thought. Thanks for confirming.
So there’s an “Add remote community” button that you use to individually federate comms. You may only see this logged in.
Or if you manually put in the url as it would be seen from that piefed instance, it will federate that way.
It won’t populate the added communities with new content AFTER federation though until they have a local subscriber.