Edit about the 4chan image blocking, I asked Rimu directly:
I wrote a long message about how that checkbox only notifies about federated posts.
So the difference is for local posts it blocks the creation of the post entirely, but for federated posts it just notifies the admin.
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic//near/10529
– Original message:
A few people in the other thread assumed that it was required to fork the code to disable those filters. That’s not the case, the filters can be configured, and are off by default.
To hide the reputation system, here’s a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
That CSS line can also be used by any user wanting to hide the score at the user level.
Wasn’t the biggest concern and question why it didn’t do an actual error message and is there any notes to say the performance impact having the 4chan filter on?
I’d also argue
To hide the reputation system, here’s a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
Does absolutely nothing to assure people concerned about it being a thing. Like hiding it doesn’t do anything about it being a thing
Yeah it reeks of “you can complain about CCP-like behaviour but not in a way that actually effects any change”.
Those checkboxes have been there since version 0.9. Ages.
The problem with grabbing small snippets of code is a lot of context is lost. Don’t trust anyone who does that. PieFed has 50,000 lines of code so anyone showing you 50 lines is leaving out 99.9% of the picture.
As I said a month ago, anyone with honest questions about how things work who wants to make PieFed better knows where to find us. You don’t have to be a coder, we need translators, designers, documentation writers, bug reporters, community evangelists and all that.
The problem with grabbing small snippets of code is a lot of context is lost.
To me, it was obvious that these parts were configurable. There were literally boolean checks for it.
But these features remind me Reddit. And I’m pretty sure most users simply unaware about these things enabled on the .social instance.
Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to
The problem with grabbing small snippets of code is a lot of context is lost. Don’t trust anyone who does that. PieFed has 50,000 lines of code so anyone showing you 50 lines is leaving out 99.9% of the picture.
These 2 statements are incompatible.
Plus depending on the snippets they definitely can tell how things work
Previous threads about these filters were people complaining about them being hardcoded, completely ignoring that they are completely optional and off by default. It would go something like this:
Look at this awful thing PieFed does!
def do_the_thing(): # relatively simple code that does the thing
It completely ignored the context that the
do_the_thingfunction is only called if the admin wants to do the thing.Most of the issues people have brought up have been about why the snippets are even in the code not trying to obscure what the code does.
It completely ignored the context that the do_the_thing function is only called if the admin wants to do the thing
Again it’s why is this a thing
Simple != few lines of code, nothing incompatible about those two statements
Saying the simple code needs lots of context outside of the code block says it’s either not simple or not easy to understand
« The problem with grabbing small snippets of code is a lot of context is lost.» does not mean that a lot of additional code is required to understand the context, additionally, simple code may require you to read a bit of code to understand it.
Simplicity does not mean small scale, nor that it must be understood at a glance.
Rich Hickey got a great presentation where he discuss simplicity vs complexity. It’s worth a watch if you want to better understand the concepts.
The 99% of the code does not deal with keeping Shadow Profiles on netizens and punishing them (as well as misinforming them about what’s going on). This 50something lines, does, and thus is a weighed key on which to judge the subject.
, we need […] community evangelists
What will they be commenting to the public on the CCP-like thing?
“Shadow profiles”? Huh?
Yeah. You know, Shadow Profiles? Datasets on users collected for the purpose of control and manipulation, basically the equivalent to back when McCarthynism and the FBI had a “dossier” on you. It’s not even that old, Facebook was caught doing it in a big scandal and pretty much every corporate since then (Reddit uses it for shadowbanning Fediverse mentions, etc).
That’s not what’s being done at all here. It’s not that deep. It’s just a number based on downvotes received/given.
Why the constant shitting on “tankies” if you’re gonna have a social credit score?
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get back to work hardcoding censorship and pushing your tankie ideology in your code.
What is wrong with you? Why would you put malicious code into piefed that deliberately misleads users?
This
I want to do the downvote thing but I can’t help but upvote this low reputation comment…
That
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Edit: to be clear, your point is a good one, I am talking below about the discussion going on in the link.
lolz, so much disinformation there though. Like:
What’s sad is that since lemmy.ml is blocked by default, most PieFed users won’t see it.
I think there might be one major instance that chose to do this, and I cannot even recall offhand which one, so obviously it’s not THAT major. This is some LLM-level of analysis right there (Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net are blocked from many instances, and people often lump lemmy.ml together into a triad, hence lemmy.ml must be automatically blocked as well!).
Funny enough, Lemmy.ml disallows what they consider cuss words, which were even hard-coded, and when asked they told the community to take a hike (“create a fork and stop bothering us about it”), until after a huge outcry they did eventually relent.
Lemmy users be like “why can’t we all get along…”, yet feel absolutely free to criticize every tiny aspect (including - in fact especially - fictional ones) of PieFed, while ignoring how e.g. lemmy.ml kicks people out of communities they’ve never even so much as heard of for not praising Russia, China, or North Korea hard enough.
My side always does good and never bad, other side always does bad and never good. Much tribal, so cringe.
This is some LLM-level of analysis right there (Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net are blocked from many instances, and people often lump lemmy.ml together into a triad, hence lemmy.ml must be automatically blocked as well!).
I’m the author of the comment you quoted, and even though you didn’t reply to me, I’d like to say that I assumed so because of this.
Edit: I was wrong about this, here is the default defederation list. For those who interested in what the linked part does, see https://lemmy.ml/post/42415919/23664761.
Lemmy users be like “why can’t we all get along…”, yet feel absolutely free to criticize every tiny aspect
I disagree with the previous commenter attitude. But personally I don’t think it’s bad to discuss things we don’t like if the discussion is healthy.
ignoring how e.g. lemmy.ml kicks people out of communities
Who is ignoring it? I think it was widely discussed on the Fediverse.
8·1 month agoLMAO! At this point I’m pretty sure OpenStars has all of Lemmy.ml blocked, cuz your comment never showed up!
The quoted comment is for a different post: https://lemmy.ml/post/42339089/23675448
So I was surprised to see it being mentioned here.
No I mean your reply to OpenStars didn’t show up on piefed.social, because OpenStars has Lemmy.ml blocked, see RedWizards comment on how blocking functions on piefed.
Ah, makes sense!
A lot of people looking at the code were saying these things were hardcoded, even after seeing an if statement which checks if the thing is enabled, which is straight up wrong unless you consider it hard coded because its coded, into the codebase.
unless you consider it hard coded because its coded into the codebase
That’s precisely the common definition and understanding of the term.
E: Sorry, I see what you mean in context now. I thought we were talking about a different piefed feature with a similar anti-4chan label that used a set of hardcoded strings to blacklist comments. Yeah, the tesseract image filter isn’t quite what I’d call hardcoded in and of itself.
Where’s the “4chan” one?
That’s an excellent question. Thought it was one of the check boxes but that one is just for adjusting reputation if post something from 4chan (ie thinks you’re naughty)
So what is the lowering reputation part. Are the mods grading your posts and then reducing their visibility?
I was a bit put off with the de federating from some of the other communities, but I had contact with one that I had to admit really needs to be de Federated from. Hexbear, chapotraphouse. Never had s problem with the .ml or whatever.
But I noticed some remove the word cunt too, which is a dealbreaker for me.
The software kind of scores you on a few metrics. Like the ratio of the things you vote up vs down. I’m sure there are others.
No, that’s it. Reputation (how much you are downvoted) and Attitude (how much you downvote)
Aaaah, cool yeah. I never looked too deep at it. Just knew that much.
But just for the mods to know if you are a troll to help moderate better, if they remove posts, do they tell you it is removed or like Reddit does it appear like it is still posted but only you can see it?
Oh no. Actually AFAIK its basically public for everyone to see unless disabled. At least attitude is. Yours is currently scored at 86. Meaning you’ve been 5x as likely to upvote as downvote. I think the rep one is different. Nothing more happening with it ATM than that I think.
No, it should show as removed on here.
If you get reported or post a hot take, admins can look at your karma to see if your takes are usually hot, and at how often you tend to upvote vs downvote. They don’t have to do anything with that information, it’s just to help them tell if a user is controversial
So what is the lowering reputation part. Are the mods grading your posts and then reducing their visibility?
No, it’s just being downvoted negatively contributes to your reputation. Basically heavily downvoted accounts.
But I noticed some remove the word cunt too, which is a dealbreaker for me.
I don’t know what you mean here. Who is “some” here?
Some of piefed instances put removed in italics where the word cunt was. Obviously that would only be a deal breaker for the ones that do it.
I only remember Lemmy forcing its hard coded “slur filter” on all instances. It took a lot of backlash to get them to make it optional.
That was a temporary measure very early in development, when moderation tooling was still very incomplete. This was to avoid ending up like Voat. Once mod tools were implemented, the slur filter became optional. Simple as that.
To be clear, defederation has nothing whatsoever to do with PieFed.
Defederation happens on Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, nodeBB, and every other type of software across the entire Fediverse. It is even an absolutely crucial tool to prevent CSAM which depending on the locality of the affected instance could get it shut down and potentially the instance owner exposed to actual criminal charges. (There are other ways, but typically defederation is the easiest.)
Likewise, lemmy.ml famously censors what they consider cusswords on their instance - with a hard-coded list even, iirc, at least it was at one time, years ago - but then after much outcry this censorship was made optional in the code.
So defederation is a reason to not join an instance in favor of some other one, but has nothing to do with wanting to either avoid or preferentially pick an instance running PieFed. In fact the opposite is true, as the PieFed software allows additional options beyond simply federate vs. defederate, allowing instance admins choices between those two extremes. This finer granularity is so helpful! e.g. the PieFed.zip instance blocks Hexbear.net by default for new users, but explains how to remove that, thereby offering hexbear as opt-in content, rather than having to choose between treating it identically the same as all other instances or else cutting it out entirely.
PieFed also allows notes to be placed onto content, which is particularly helpful for places such as Beehaw where their stated ToS differs from the usual across the rest of the Threadiverse.
In fact I am not aware of any particular reason to avoid running PieFed, but anyway even presuming that such exists, defederation is definitely not among them.
In fact I am not aware of any particular reason to avoid running PieFed, but anyway even presuming that such exists, defederation is definitely not among them.
The injection of the developers biases into the software, the misleading error messages, and the block behavior behaving like a shadow ban are more than enough reasons to not touch the software.
Link to the comment for more context: https://lemmy.ml/post/42339089/23619001
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Sounds like these settings are very reasonable to have turned on. Although I would be cautious of how the “4chan” filter is implemented, it sounds easy to overdo.
it ocr’s the image and checks if it contains a long number and the word “anonymous”.
yes really
Can I as a user see which of these settings an instance has enabled?
Hi! What’s up?
just wanted to show you this post, for piefed.blahaj.zone
These have been our settings pretty much since we set up pbz
nice
I get that many people are concerned about is scoring systems, but it seems a lot more worrying to me that it allows arbitrary code execution.
arbitrary
You mean the Javascript that would need to be written and added by the instance admin? Something that any admin with infra access could do anyway? Hardly seems arbitrary at all. ACE usually means something not intended.
I too think the top commenter here hasn’t quite understood what they are seeing in this picture. 😅
Well, just copy and pasted rather than written. I would have hoped that infra read-level permission, infra write-level permission and admin interface permissions were all separate to begin with, even if the person who spun up the instance obviously has all three.
You do need a level of trust in an admin, of course, but wide open text boxes for putting in code are a questionable system design choice, in my opinion. It adds an extra point of possible entry that then relies on the security of the overall admin interface instead of limiting it to what should require highest level infra admin permissions to access. And if it is something that would be limited to someone who has those, then what is the actual utility of having a textarea for it in the first place?
Oh, I love it. So much freedom to customise our instance without having to rebuild the Docker image or fork the codebase.
Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.
Some instances have used it to do something like a dynamic message of the day. That is the most I have seen it used for so far.
Edit: See the top of the main content pane of anarchist.nexus as an example.
So far I’ve only changed the colour theming, but I like freedom in general. One thing I want to do at some point is change the font of any instance of the string MULTIVERSE, My partner suggested it as a cool branding idea
Wait what? I read in other threads the code was bad, not I didn’t think it’d be this bad.
They’re just making shit up. In their mind I guess Javascript that is intentionally included by an admin to customize their instance counts as ACE. In that sense any webserver you ever browse to is capable of ACE.
Any webserver you browse is possibly capable of ACE depending on the implementation. When it starts to hold user data is when that starts to be a big concern. The more points of entry, the more that needs to be secured.
I don’t have any experience with piefed admin, or any opinion on piefed itself, just too many years of web admin experience. And as soon as I see intentionally made doors that allow code input, I start to worry about how much experience the devs who made it have with web admin.
Booo. Here I was hoping for something serious to spice up the news and it just turns out it’s “it runs on a browser”.
Sorry, pal. It’s a good software.
I’m not a spice merchant, and most exploits rarely involve a single step. This screenshot is just a system design red flag.
You’re free to examine the repo yourself and find your own spice, my 5 min look tells me that piefed needs to expend a significant amount of effort on infosec to maintain user trust in the longer term.
As others have pointed out, it does still require (with some caveats about the infra setup) the user to be an admin. But if someone manages to get in to the interface, or another person is granted admin access who shouldn’t have been, it makes it more risky than it needs to be. It also for me is a design choice that indicates other parts of the system should be carefully examined for how they’re handling and sanitizing input.
I’m in, anything with less Tankies and less channers is good.
What’s the best instance to use, I assume I can keep my current user and just view posts via piefed.social
Well if you specifically want less 4chan adjacent content, piefed.social.
