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.
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 enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world 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.
Can you explain what it does then? Below is my understanding. Correct me where I am wrong.
The “bad list” blocks any community with that name from being federated. So for example if I go to a random PieFed instance and search for the ‘piracy’ community, I get no results
The admin can circumvent this by manually adding the community. Some big instances (including yours) have done that, but smaller ones (like the one I linked) haven’t.
Memes is a banned url, huh? Okay, let’s test this scientifically. After I make this comment, I’m gonna go to !memes@lemmy.world 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.
Woah, I see lots of posts on !memes@lemmy.world, 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.
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 !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.
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.
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 enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world 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.
Can you explain what it does then? Below is my understanding. Correct me where I am wrong.
The “bad list” blocks any community with that name from being federated. So for example if I go to a random PieFed instance and search for the ‘piracy’ community, I get no results
https://piefed.co.za/communities?search=piracy&language_id=0
The admin can circumvent this by manually adding the community. Some big instances (including yours) have done that, but smaller ones (like the one I linked) haven’t.
Memes is a banned url, huh? Okay, let’s test this scientifically. After I make this comment, I’m gonna go to !memes@lemmy.world 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)
Woah, I see lots of posts on !memes@lemmy.world, 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
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 !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.
So there are two purposes for this “bad list”
correct?
The federation filtering is blocking IMO. It affects what comms users of the instance can find (via search).
Anyway maybe in Your PR You should make a separately configurable list for each purpose. I don’t see a reason why it should be the same list.
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.