cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299

I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it’s been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.

Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There’s a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we’ve been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.

This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.

When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is “incompatible with that instance” which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.

Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don’t just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn’t it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think…

Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I’ll doubt I’ll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we’ll bring up mlmym again now that someone’s maintaining it again.

  • Mediaburn@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    And this is a problem because? … I don’t even know what this Tesseract is, but why is evryone always pretending discrimination is “so big”! And “worse than it has ever been.”! It’s not, it’s a small minority and the left and right are both just as guilty. And I tipicaly only see this behavior online. However I kinda touch grass on a daily basis and have noticed the real world is far from what the internet portaits it to be.

    • __hetz@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      I don’t have a clue but here I am spreading my whole ass for the world.

      Since you’re so special and you touch grass, here’s an analogy: Imagine buying a mower whose packaging jerks itself off about how great of a mower it is. It improves on regular mowers in X, Y, Z way. It’s a mower for Lawn Chads with Chad lawns. You fire it up and then immediately it cuts off and tells you “Incompatible lawn detected.” But the reality is it’s lying to you. That fucker could mow your whole lot and ask for a second helping… if it weren’t for the fact the company just has something against Zoysia or Kentucky Blue or whatever.

      Tesseract is a Lemmy front-end doing just as much. Advertised are it’s enhanced admin/moderation features and blah blah blah. Meanwhile it has hard coded filters and retrieves a blacklist not disclosed in the GitHub readme. Not “hidden” per se, because you can dig through the code base, but not made known in an upfront and honest way.

      If they just bothered to disclose their position, it wouldn’t be an issue. I mean, some terminally online justice warrior can go on a tirade about how much of a Nazi they are, how their software isn’t inclusive, blah blah blah. End of the day, if someone wants to write software that explicitly aligns with their positions - so be it. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. However, in that case, at least others will know outright where the developer stands and whether or not they want to use it, manually delete the offending code in their own deployment, or even maintain their own fork.

      When a creator omits the fact that they’ve done such a thing, leaving the end user to figure it out for themselves, it’s just fucking cowardly on their part.

    • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      At the very least, any software that produces error messages that lie is extremely annoying.

  • Elena Brescacin@poliversity.it
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    3 days ago

    @Quokka Wait a moment. Is it the same tesseract that develops the OCR? Because I sometimes use that OCR for NVDA screen reader (non visual desktop access). If so, I’ll take it off immediately! This kind of hardcoded deny list, is an abuse. Worse than the one I noticed 25 years ago on MSN messenger where you couldn’t label yourself as “John Doe - webmaster of [project]” but then if you named yourself “I’m the drill for young asses” (said it less rude than it was), Msn messenger let you place that display name upfront.
    Let me say that if you develop a software where you deliberately block pro-trans, pro-sustainability or topic you dev potentially dislike, your software shouldn’t be distributed to the public.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      2 days ago

      No, Tesseract is a Lemmy alternative front-end UI, it has nothing to do with the OCR, besides sharing the same name.

      Also, Tesseract does not actually use a hard-coded list - that turned out to be misinformation by the LLM-written OOP. In actuality, there is a “toxicity filter” that admins can toggle on or off as they please - the polar opposite of a hard-coded feature.

      Don’t believe everything that you read on the Internet - it is not all true.

      That said, Tesseract is quite opinionated in its views, and instance admins who hold different ideologies than its author might want to actually read about which settings they want to have toggled or not, rather than merely accept the defaults.

      • mathemachristian [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        Apparently it does use a hardcoded list. The list db0 discovered was hardcoded it was not possible to circumvent it. This second list, the one that gets pulled from dubvee’s server can be disabled by the end-user that is if they somehow realise this antifeature even existed and went through the code to find it.

        • OpenStars@discuss.online
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          The first list is not hard-coded, as it depends upon an instance-set environmental variable. (Edit: I retract this statement as I may have gotten confused between the differences between the two lists.)

          This other, hidden list though… that one is a lot more dicey. It can also be disabled wholesale, but is not easily discoverable nor editable, it is essentially his personal blocklist shared with everyone who uses Tesseract. (It could be nice to open that up as a more fully fleshed out feature where instance admins can more readily control whose personal blocklist gets pointed at, or even allow an individual end-user to input one?)

          Though his latest manifesto says that it can be disabled, both by instance admins and by individual users.

          Anyway since it can be disabled, it’s not a “hard-coded block list”, as in mandatory.

          • mathemachristian [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            Though his latest manifesto says that it can be disabled, both by instance admins and by individual users.

            No he even wrote it into tesseract himself apparently, taken from what you called his manifesto:

            Tesseract does not, and will not, allow for disabling the filters by default; it will only allow users to opt in to the toxic crap and violent whack-a-doos rather than making people opt out. So don’t go complaining to the {instance} admins about this.

            and readily admits

            the fine print buried at the bottom of the advanced settings isn’t the most upfront place to put [the option to disable that filter]

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              1 day ago

              Yes, I am glad for db0’s correction. I already edited my comment that you replied to here but our messages got crossed while you were typing, anyway thank you for this clarification as well.

              It seems like instances on ptz’s personal shitlist need to use db0’s fork from now on, or like blahaj just abandon Tesseract altogether (as you pointed out, the author even asked for thus:-P).

      • Elena Brescacin@poliversity.it
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        3 days ago

        @Quokka Sorry, and thanks for explanation. It’s a serious situation anyways. This kind of devs shouldn’t be accepted into open source community; maybe I’m too extremist

        • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          No you’re absolutely not. Allowing this in a community is tacit agreement with discriminatory attitudes against queer people.

  • kepix@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    if you block all the commies, gays, software pirates, plis you individually block people one by one…sooner or later there wont be anything left. maybe just a few nerds fighting over linux ricing.

  • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    What a crazy coincidence. I was just checking out this GitHub today. It has a project called Anewbis which is

    A fork of Anubis without the cringey anime catgirl. This fork provides no other changes. It just updates from the main project and removes the stupid catgirl.

  • als@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    Doesn’t piefed also do OCR on every image to try and detect if it’s a 4chan screenshot and then pretend it had an error when uploading? Sneaky lil shits.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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      Tesseract is a Sublinks/Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content.

      Because you mention OCR; people seeing this: it’s not the OCR tool.

    • Nindelofocho@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I keep hearing so much shit that piefed does but also see a ton of people either ignoring it or praising it. Does piefed have some sorta propaganda team or something?

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        2 days ago

        It does not help that for that issue, as too for this OP, a lot of misinformation is spread, which obfuscates the truth.

        e.g. in both situations, people claimed that something was hard-coded when in fact it was not.

        That doesn’t mean that PieFed isn’t actively censoring content (it is, and misleadingly so too), or that you should use it (use whatever software you want), but it does mean that the people criticizing it, having cited that specific “alternative fact”, were spreading lies. Probably without realizing it, yet they certainly don’t seem all that concerned about actually reading sources in order to find the truth. Which, yeah, complicates people’s decisions about what services to use.

          • Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zip
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            2 days ago

            As far as I understand it, it’s not “hardcoded” in the sense that all piefed instances have it (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to respond to you).

            From what I understand, there is a default list, but this can be edited by any instance admins.

            • mathemachristian [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              No! There is a hardcoded instance list to determine whether a piefed instance is considered to have a good “defederation policy” or not. All piefed instances have this if they didn’t fork the code.

              https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/881a5c95657b03c29e81ac8f619e4d26e4f6973d/app/templates/auth/instance_chooser.html Line 562

                     // Handle federation status
                      const watchedDomains = {
                          'hexbear.net': 'hexbear-status',
                          'hilariouschaos.com': 'hilariouschaos-status',
                          'lemmygrad.ml': 'lemmygrad-status',
                          'lemmy.ml': 'lemmy-status',
                          'gregtech.eu': 'lemvotes-status',
                      };
                      
                      const defederatedDomains = instance.defederation || [];
              
                      countDefederated = 0;
                      
                      Object.entries(watchedDomains).forEach(([domain, elementId]) => {
                          const statusElement = document.getElementById(elementId);
                          const isDefederated = defederatedDomains.includes(domain);
                          
                          if (isDefederated) {
                              countDefederated += 1
                          }
                      });
              
                      if(countDefederated >= 3)
                          defederationQuality = 'Good';
                      else if(countDefederated === 2)
                          defederationQuality = 'Ok';
                      else if(countDefederated === 1)
                          defederationQuality = 'Minimal';
                      else if(countDefederated < 1)
                          defederationQuality = 'None';
              

              So you could defederate the “tankie triad” but not hilariouschaos.com, lemmychan and whatever else harmful instances and be considered to have a “good” defederation policy. This is what is shown to new users to make a decision which instance to join but it is impossible to find out on what basis this grade is assigned except for diving into the code. And it cannot be altered except for forking.

              • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                1 day ago

                Thank you, this is an extremely helpful description.

                Btw neither fedinsfw.app (with 2.4x higher number of MAUs than PieFed.social, making it by far the #1 most-used PieFed instance), nor PieFed.zip (with self-reportedly 541 MAUs, making it the clear #3 PieFed instance) show up in that instance picker list.

                I tried viewing the list from multiple instances including from PieFed.social itself. So I’m not sure how much people actually make use of that picker, and it seems buggy as hell (unless both of those instances have intentionally decided not to be listed?). Though even more confusing is how PieFed.zip also does not report onto https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list (though Lemmy.zip does appear at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list).

                Anyway, it’s good to know that while PieFed does not have a hard-coded instance blacklist - nor are those 4chan filters hard-coded either iirc - it does have an extremely odd and unhelpful depiction of what constitutes a “good” level of defederation on that instance picker list.

                And now with the highly controversial and extremely bad roll-out of the vote quota issue, while I would not go so far as to recommend that people steer clear of PieFed itself (instances like PieFed.zip and quokka and blahaj seem to be doing just fine with it, e.g. maintaining a watchful eye on the opinionated additions to the sourcecode), I would unequivocally recommend avoiding trusting the instance picker at this point. As you showed and I piled onto here, it is just an absolute mess (and Rimu is showing strong signs of burnout so unlikely to be fixed anytime soon).

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              2 days ago

              Precisely. We could point people to the very dictionary definition of the word, but it seems not to change many people’s mind who have already decided which “camp” they want to be in, and that they will (attempt to) preempt the word to mean… whatever they feel like.

              Hard coding is the software development practice of embedding data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, as opposed to obtaining the data from external sources or generating it at runtime.

              Hard-coded data typically can be modified only by editing the source code and recompiling the executable

              Therefore, a statement like

              IF (instance-set-variable) THEN
              {
              ... implement block
              }
              

              is by definition not “hard-coding”, bc it asks the instance admin what value it wants for that variable, and then only conditionally runs the code to set the instance block if the admin asks it to.

              There are plenty of things to criticize PieFed for, but “hard-coding instance blocks” is not one of them. (And now it seems the same error was made regarding Tesseract.)

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        It has a few evangelists, but I’m not sure I’d call them a “propaganda team” as I don’t think they get paid to do so.

        • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          a Lemmy alternative, which based on their blocklist puts more empasis on the “fed” part than the “pie” part

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          A platform similar to Lemmy, but with an explicit ideological stance against communists, who are the main Lemmy devs (and the Lemmy devs, because of their belief in communism, adhere more closely to FOSS and federation, with less hard-coded bias as PieFed).

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  2 days ago

                  If I were to give my own definition of what constitutes a tankie, I’d say it’s anyone who defends existing socialist states, past or present. Those socialist states are generally understood to be the USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, GDR, etc. The defense tankies give is not in accepting both bourgeois historiography as accurate but justified, but instead in directly combatting bourgeois historiography. Tankie is also a pejorative for these people, used to convey the strawman of the person that believes the lies of the Red Scare but believes them to be justified.

                  In that case, I am definitely a tankie. I spend a good deal of time talking about socialism both past and present, and arguing for how we can expand that movement and carry it to the future. I am definitely a defender of socialist states, I just don’t believe the common allegations such as “100 million were killed by communism” are at all accurate. I don’t think you’ll find someone who believes the 100 million number but also thinks it’s good and justified.

                  It’s also useful to understand it in this manner because it explains why even anarchists and liberals are called “tankie.” The throughline about defending existing socialism is the central identifier of a tankie, and the use of tankie to dismiss those who defend socialism as it exists in the real world is also covered by this understanding.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  2 days ago

                  There have been a few fiascos about it. It isn’t exactly unknown, but it isn’t exactly advertised either.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      3 days ago

      Oh if they do that’s great, the main dev of piefed went on a hissy fit because other instances used AI tooling, for them to be doing the same is just perfect. Gotta love hypocrites

        • Elena Brescacin@poliversity.it
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          2 days ago

          @null @fediverse I’m blind and have used OCR systems since 1990s. Computer at first, with scanners. Then camera-driven devices.
          OCR products pre-llm, were very poor - it’s not the first time they detected “O” letter instead of “D”, “m” in place of “rn” and vice-versa, Llm has brought some improvements in that approach. The one I’m currently using, called “BeMyAI” inside the “Be My Eyes” desktop and mobile app, provides better information; it’s OpenAI API trained with blind people’s need and it corrects possible errors. Is it always right? No. It always needs human verification especially for sensitive data. But to read names of a food or a medicine they’re OK. Never used those, to read a paper book. It’s not worth the effort, buying paper when there’s a high risk of error, if there’s the digital.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    From a purely software engineering point of view, I don’t understand why they feel the need to hardcore such a list. This is precisely the kind of thing that should be a configuration file, not code.

    • 𝙈𝙞𝙖@quokk.auOP
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      It also displayed bogus error messages, as if to appear to be a technical issue with the community instance, while hiding the black list deep in code. So the point here was to deceive and manipulate.

      If it was a toggleable and customisable list that would be a good feature for instances.

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        Actually… it is toggleable, though not customizable, and for @theacharnian@lemmy.ca I will also add that it is separated into a different file, not hard-coded.

        from src/lib/policies/system.ts:

        export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() {  
            if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) {  
                SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)  
                return  
            }  
           // auto-update of blocklist continues below  
        

        - source

        This feature definitely needs greater transparency, and people can debate whether and how offering a “toxicity filter” at all offends them (especially if they are caught up in it), or the way it was implemented, but the reporting on this issue could also definitely stand to be more rooted in facts as opposed to tribal politicking. The fact that the OOP gives extremely strong indications that it was written by an LLM also does not help matters any.

        I am not saying that this is a nothing-burger, but I am saying that I see an awful lot of posturing and opinions shared vehemently but exceedingly few people (including those cross-posting widely across the entire Threadiverse) actually opening up and reading the code to look at the facts.

        I would think that people would be in a better position to judge, after first-hand reading an actual source of knowledge rather than merely the title and enormously biased summary? (Which has turned out to be incorrect in several places, notably in CRUCIAL details that it has left out - which wouldn’t you know it, sounds just like an LLM to me… - not everyone that I see on the internet is a bot, but then again some text undoubtedly is directly written by a bot.)

      • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        Therefore the “deception” would be discovered the moment anyone tried to debug exactly those error messages in this …open source application.

        Bike fall meme material.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      There is also a penchant amongst some tech types to force their worldviews. Look at all the AI people, Zuckerberg, and so many other tech leaders.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else?

    Same folks that complain endlessly about Far-Left censorship and militant authoritarianism, no less.

    I wonder how many of the developers on these projects are spill-over from the reactionary shitholes of Reddit.

  • altkey (he\him)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    One of their last changelogs they posted on Lemmy 11 mounths ago (halfa year before injecting said blocklists) considers content filtering: https://lemmy.world/post/35006054 They wrote it was a huge undertaking for them to rewrite the filtering engine specifically. Welp, it went out of hand.

    Also:

    Please do not take anything personally if you show up in the screenshots of my filtering preferences. These were either chosen at random because they were at the top of the feed at the time of testing or were chosen because they have both Lemmy and Piefed versions/alts and were used to test wildcard and regex based filtering.

    It’s funny to read it alongside their pretty opinionated commentary in blocklists.

    ☆ I want to log it: at the time of writing, no one brigaded the linked post or sub, upvotes on old 8mo old posts were in positives, lets not interfere with what’s already dead.

  • klu9@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    I noticed this post on Mastodon, wanted to open it in the threadiverse, which nowadays I usually do through Piefed.social.

    • Copied link
    • In Piefed, Search > Retrieve remote post
    • Post not found”. Me: what? Did the author or mod delete it already???
    • Clicked on the link to try, it opened on the native instance (lemmy.world) just fine! Neither author nor mod has deleted it. I read the article.
    • After, I investigate a bit more. On Piefed.social, I am subscribed to !fediverse@lemmy.world , I can open that /c & can see posts there. But not this post. It’s missing.
    • Come to my Lemmy instance (lemmy.ca) with Alex front-end, confirm I can see the post from here. Twice even.

    So why can’t I see it on Piefed.social??? Can I not rely on Piefed.social? Censorship, or just an innocent federation issue?

    Piefed.social - "Post not found"

    Fediverse@lemmy.world viewed via Lemmy.ca/Alex frontend - post present, twice even

    Fediverse@lemmy.world viewed via Piefed.social - post missing

    • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Oh you didn’t know? Piefed is an extremely censored and politically biased platform lol. The main dev has made it his own little authoritarian platform. It blocks all sources that don’t align with his political beliefs and ideologies, and auto blocks/tags users that he doesn’t like because they disagree with his ideologies.

      It’s disheartening to see more and more people using Piefed.

    • MonaySimpson@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      I can see it on the NZ PieFed instance. Interestingly on Lemmy/Voyager I can’t see that it’s a cross post, nor the original post text UNLESS I go to reply to the post.

    • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      Piefed has a shadowban/defederation tool. Like, I can post in piefed.social communities but they don’t federate for anyone to see except for the individual user responded to. It’s a way of moderating without it showing up in modlogs.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        My strong guess would be that the turbolib Zionist mods/admins of lemmy.world are at it again.

        lemmy.world of course being… you know, mostly ex reddit power mods, from the US.

        On an unrelated note: We all know Ghislaine Maxwell was also a reddit power mod, right?

        • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Shitty Piefed dev -> lemmy.world mod -> ex-reddit power mod -> Ghislaine Maxwell

          makes about as much sense as

          “We shouldn’t have people starving in the streets or paying $35,000 to visit the emergency room” -> socialism -> USSR -> Stalin -> Holodomor

          Sure, the links are there, but what a silly series of connections to reach to in order to paint your target as the worst possible thing to confuse the impressionable.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Sure, the links are there

            I mean, we had Joe Biden force the sale of TikTok to a cartel of Silicon Valley fascists based on some spurious links to Chinese communism. If you can get from “Tankie TikTok Post” -> “President Xi Jinping undermined US electoral security” and enshrine that belief in federal communication policies, I don’t think “Shitty Piefed Dev” -> “Ghislaine Maxwell” is that big of a joke.

            Double, extra, plus, too, you need to keep in mind how much influence Steve Bannon had back in 2016, largely by organizing and deploying white nationalists out of 4chan and the grosser corners of Reddit. And Bannon was bosom buddies with Epstein.

            • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 days ago

              Moot met with Epstein, and shortly after, /pol/ was created. Coincidence?

              Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was instrumental in establishing the abusive scientific publishing model we all suffer from today.

              The facts of these despicable people wanting to shape and control societal thought in surprisingly diverse and far-reaching ways - that evidence exists. Benefit of the doubt is a foolish thing to apply to these folks.

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              I honestly don’t see how those two are related but I do think it is interesting that the person I replied to insists they were joking while you insist they were not.

              Schrodinger’s Douchebag at play.

              • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                I honestly don’t see how those two are related

                They’re both (ostensibly) oligarchs and political insiders dictating the operation of mass media.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 days ago

            I think its pretty obvious that I’m just throwing out something that is almost certainly not related, at the end.

            I did literally say its ‘unrelated’.

            Because sometimes I’m a petty little bitch, just like you’d have to be to surreptitiously write an ideological ban list into some open source software.

            I’m just illustrating a similar level of dirty play here… if that confuses idiots, I don’t care, in fact that’s part of the point.

            Also, why am I talking to a throwaway acount right now?

            Too cowardly to say something on your real account?

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              You were obviously being sarcastic with stating it was “unrelated” and you’re obviously playing dumb, also in bad faith now.

              You’re deliberately trying to confuse the “idiots” that agree with you, not the idiots that support this ridiculous move.

              My username is a pun. You’re welcome to get bent out of shape over it if you want, but I hope people reading this realize you’re doing further bad faith tactics by tossing in this Red Herring as a cherry on top.

                • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  I was curious to see if you were simply so passionate about the issue you were accidentally commenting in bad faith because you lost your cool or if that’s just something you double down on because you’re a troll.

                  Given it’s the latter, enjoy the block!

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        Lead Dev is a crusader for establishment liberalism, essentially. Hates conservatives but also hates leftists. This puts them at odds with much of the fediverse, who lean more left than liberal.

          • doben@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            Extremism is a matter of perspective and has no quality other than „far away from this arbitrary fix point“.

            Why don’t you call all capitalists and their liberal enablers extremists for enslaving and annihilating the world and its inhabitants?

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            Yes, unironically. The communists are correct, even if we are far from the liberal establishment politically.

        • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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          3 days ago

          It’s definitely funny in an ironic kind of way that Piefed began as at least partly a reaction towards the politics of the Lemmy devs, but ended up themselves doing the very thing they feared (ie: letting politics affect the code). Meanwhile Lemmy still has never suffered from this, as far as I know.

            • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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              2 days ago

              Could you point me to the places in the Lemmy code where these examples have been incorporated? You realise we are talking about the actual software here, right, not the way they run their instance? Exact lines of code would be ideal, as they have done above/elsewhere with Tesseract and Piefed.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            I’m definitely biased as I’m a communist myself, but I’d argue this is more reflective of the politics of both sets of devs. Lemmy devs truly believe in the communist principles underlying the FOSS, federated project they have, while Piefed is unapologetically biased against that and towards liberalism. In other words, the principles speak for themselves in both projects.

            • deafboy@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              I’m a communist myself

              Well fuck you. May all the people who died in the concentration camps, in famines, cultural purges, or just simply shot dead at the border crossings, haunt you tonight.

              • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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                3 days ago

                I’m no expert, but it sounds like they were killed by authoritarianism, not communism. I don’t think communism requires concentration camps, famines, or cultural purges.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  3 days ago

                  Deafboy dramatically and intentionally misrepresented the point, but all states are monopolies on violence, all are “authoritarian.” The excesses committed in socialist States are genuine excesses of socialism.

                  That being said, “concentration camps” is a bit disingenuous. No socialist state has had industrialized mass murder like the Nazis, UK, US, etc. Most deaths in prisons in the Soviet Union, for example, happened due to starvation during World War II, after the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket.

                  Contributing famine to socialism is even more disingenuous. In all instances of famine in socialist countries, these have been in countries historically food insecure with common famine, and the socialists were the ones to end the cycle of famine. Socialism did not cause the famines, weather disaster and underdeveloped agricultural forces did. Mismanagement often played a part, but not in a way intrinsic to socialism nor in a manner that would have made capitalism preferable.

                  As for cultural purges, this is more vague. The cultural revolution in China, for example, is recognized as a mistake by the CPC. This is all I can really think of, though, when it comes to “cultural purges.”

                • deafboy@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  As established in the other thread here, state-wide communism can only be achieved by the violent means.

                  What needs to follow is for the people to willingly forget some of what they know, uninvent the market, money, and give up every possesion that’s of any significant value. That is not going to happen without violence either.

                  And to keep the society in this state, you need an aparatus that will constantly keep them in fear, or ar least apply some kind of double-think. A dictatorship is the only way to do that.

                  This is how the soviet style communism has been brought to my city:

                  Communism is inherently authoritarian.

                  And to that I say: Authoritarians of the world, gurgle my balls!

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                3 days ago

                While excesses have been committed in socialist countries, they absolutely pale in comparison to the atrocities committed for capitalism and colonialism. I won’t weap for landlords, capitalists, and fascists that were killed or imprisoned for their crimes against the working classes, and I will celebrate the immense gains made by the working classes after successfully gaining political power.

                Everywhere the working classes have taken power, life expectancies, literacy rates, housing rates, and more have all dramatically climbed, while food insecurity and poverty dramatically declined. Every single time. The sheer effectiveness of socialism in uplifting the people is undeniable, and while it’s unfortunate that this can only be successfully established via revolutionary and therefore violent means, this violence is a response to the daily brutalization of the working classes

                • deafboy@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  they absolutely pale in comparison to the atrocities committed for capitalism and colonialism

                  Colonialism is colonialism. No matter the color.

                  I won’t weep for landlords, capitalists

                  Then weep for the workers who were denied education because they refused Leninism. Weep for those who has been sent to work in the uranium mines. Weep for those persecuted for their faith. Weep for those who has been put to a fucking jail for watching a Knight Rider on TV.

                  working classes after successfully gaining political power

                  What you call a working class has never achieved political power. Only the chosen faithful families could ever get anywhere near the office desk, not even mentioning a political function. Without pledging you allegiance to a one of the worst dictators who ever lived, you were not even considered.

                  The sheer effectiveness of socialism in uplifting the people

                  Yes. The toilet paper outages and bribes for the butcher so you can skip the line were certainly very uplifting.

                  it’s unfortunate that this can only be successfully established via revolutionary and therefore violent means

                  And here we are. You’re openly advocating for death and destruction to follow some kind of a fairy-tale. You’re no better than an american soldiers leveling a primary school to the ground, or a russian soldier executing civilians in Butcha.

                  daily brutalization of the working classes

                  Open your fucking eyes. You can no longer see the real wold for the veil of victimization you have put upon yourself. There is no class.

                  And most importantly, stop scheming about some great revolution and CREATE the means of production!

                • toomanypancakes@crazypeople.online
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                  3 days ago

                  I won’t weap for landlords, capitalists, and fascists that were killed or imprisoned for their crimes against the working classes

                  Well, yeah. Those are among the groups you said you explicitly want to mass murder. Why would you weep for them?

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                3 days ago

                Yep, one of those moments that feels pretty validating for my worldview, and proves the Lemmy approach to be correct.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      Piefed.social is run by an admin with similar views on censoring leftists as the Tesseract devs. There was a whole fiasco about it a few months back, where the lead Dev of Piefed kept lists of Leftists and other users they permabanned for pointing out issues with Piefed’s code.

      OP is on that list.

      • Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        I’m glad you’re not getting downvoted for this. When I pointed this out, people yelled, “BUT YOU CAN DISABLE ALL THIS!”

        What’s the point of defaults even being there if you can disable them?

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          Honestly it can be a coin flip, but I’m also banned from many of the instances that agree with Rimu thanks to the fiasco. That’s also why I tend to not be downvoted so much anymore, they literally cannot see my comments from Piefed.social.

      • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Censoring leftists? No, he censors anything to the right of left more than anything. Maybe he censors the faaaar left as well, but anything “conservative”, right wing, or centrist is censored.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          Liberalism is right wing, and is allowed. Anything to the left of liberalism, from anarchism to socialism to communism, is censored. It’s clear as day that Piefed is right-wing at the developer level. The fact that the far right is also censored does not make it left wing.

              • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                The New York Times is a left wing publication through and through, what are you talking about?

                The BBC is centrist but left leaning. Definitely not right wing.

                • Count042@lemmy.ml
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                  1 day ago

                  Which wars have the NYT’s been against, again? Which policy of W’s were they against again?

                  I agree with Cowbees definition, but the NYT’s isn’t left wing BY YOUR OWN DEFINITION of left wing.

                • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  2 days ago

                  New York Times is precisely as left wing as liberalism. You’ve been raised to implicitly think of liberalism as the “normal amount of left”, and that is not accurate. That’s my assumption at any rate, because I was raised that way and carried around a similar misconception.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  2 days ago

                  Both are right-wing. Both uphold capitalism, imperialism, and Zionist genocide. Leftism begins at socialism.

  • TheFrirish@tarte.nuage-libre.fr
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    3 days ago

    Honestly after looking at the list aside for blahaj (wtf I know) most of it is basically internet hygiene. Please look at the full list I wouldn’t be surprised if the dev got in a fight with someone from that instance and childishly just black listed the whole instance.

      • TheFrirish@tarte.nuage-libre.fr
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        3 days ago

        I’ve seen quite a few trolls coming from those instances. Yes dbzer is odd but I understand that the red line was crossed with the blahaj one I’m surprised I didn’t quokk on it (or maybe missed it?). A lot of odd things are happening on the threadiverse lately and it seems like some groups are trying to deive wedges between us.

      • dil@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        dbzero has always been very pro ai maybe thats why, odd that they blocked it tho, main one for piracy

        • blartcap_@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 days ago

          It’s not very pro AI, it’s just not rabidly anti AI. There have been too many pitfalls with AI causing major issues in the piracy world to be very pro AI as pirates.

          Either way, nothing on this list seems to be for AI acceptance reasons.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      It’s a deliberate hate list for queer folk and leftists, pretty nakedly obvious. Calling that “internet hygiene” is a bit ridiculous.

        • 𝙈𝙞𝙖@quokk.auOP
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          3 days ago

          Yeah, I learnt that after this interaction with them. Ended up de-federating their instance entirely, can’t see anything good coming from them in the future. And to think this is the sort of person moderating piefed.social’s Fediverse comm.

          • Draconic NEO@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            3 days ago

            Good call, I don’t see anything good coming from them in the future either. It’s definitely concerning that this person is a mod on piefed.social, makes me feel like people need to stay away from that instance and its communities. Also I wonder if Ada should be made aware of this person, considering their prolific history of acting in bad faith.

            • null@piefed.nullspace.lol
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              2 days ago

              What moderation have I done on that comm. Can you tell me?

              Do you have anything to back up your slander?

            • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              3 days ago

              Looks like deeply agenda driven anti-cognition with a side of insane respectability politics in an effort to appeal to other people who already think like them. It’s really too bad you can’t truly block people on fediverse, because that seems like the exact type of goal that, even if you don’t feed that troll, it still gets a quip in that appeals to their audience, energizing it and stroking the fire.

        • 𝙈𝙞𝙖@quokk.auOP
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          4 days ago

          You can see the list, you focused on one shitty instance and ignored countless leftist and trans friendly ones in attempt to discredit the issue.

          • null@piefed.nullspace.lol
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            4 days ago

            The fact that it’s on the list debunks your implication that it was an anti-leftist and anti-trans block.

            I wasn’t ignoring anything. But you have a history of maliciously labelling people as anti-left and anti-trans, so worth pointing out that you’re doing it here too.

            • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Sorry they blocked the maga instance you agree with about everything at all times in addition to the left and trans instances you hate.

            • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              3 days ago

              The fact that it’s on the list debunks your implication that it was an anti-leftist and anti-trans block.

              Explain how blocking a single instance means someone is incapable of making a different block for transphobic reasons.

            • 𝙈𝙞𝙖@quokk.auOP
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              4 days ago

              It’s a crosspost, I didn’t make the post nor the title.

              Make up all the excuses and deflections you want. There is zero reason for Blahaj.zone to be on this list except blatant transphobia.

              Having a look, your mod log is pages long of bad faith and trolling. Seeing as you’re a single user instance and defending transphobia right now it’s probably best to just go ahead and not with bother with your nonsense any further.

              • null@piefed.nullspace.lol
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                4 days ago

                defending transphobia right now

                It is amazing that you offered up a textbook example of what I accused you of right here.

                Absolutely nowhere have I defended transphobia. It’s disgusting how often you try to discredit people using that tactic.

                • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  It is amazing that you offered up a textbook example of what I accused you of right here.

                  You’re accusing them of telling the truth about you.