You’re not a leftist.

I will correct the record a little here and say it is not blocked by default, but it IS used to decide if a given instance has “Good” defederation policies or not. When new users, look for an instance to join using the main piefed instance. Which, on its face, is ideologically motivated, especially when you consider it also uses two other publically socialist instances and only one right wing instance to calculate how “Good” an instance’s defederation policies are. So a 3 to 1 ratio according to the team at Piefed, they would take one fascist instance over 3 socialist instances according to their own metric. What’s interesting to me is that Lemmy, as a platform and a piece of infrastructure built and maintained by open communists, has none of these issues. You might take issue with the way Lemmy.ml, or Hexbear, or Lemmygrad manage their instances, but none of that is a result of the codebase.

They did roll this back after people got annoyed with the change. The fact that it was added at all though is very silly! Why should it matter to the project maintainer what some user is doing? Why build a community on a platform that is going to inject such a wildly silly opinion on you? If you don’t think EM Dashes are an issue, you have no choice but to be endlessly pinged every time an EM Dash is detected by the system if you’re a community admin.

Yeah I don’t understand why the project can’t conform to the AP standards. I get the desire to have a blocking feature that’s more robust than just a cosmetic feature. One that actually prevents a user from replying. But they way they’ve gone about it obviously isn’t it. Creating ghost comment chains on other AP services is not good.

Sorry, friend, it is.

I’m happy to help.

There are all kinds of fun stuff in the Piefed code. Allow me to dredge up a comment I made recently:

@[email protected] was looking at PieFed code the other week, and I ended up taking a look at it too. Its great fun to sneak a peak at.

For example, you cannot cast a vote on PieFed if you’ve made 0 replies, 0 posts, AND your username is 8 characters long:

    def cannot_vote(self):
        if self.is_local():
            return False
        return self.post_count == 0 and self.post_reply_count == 0 and len(
            self.user_name) == 8  # most vote manipulation bots have 8 character user names and never post any content

If a reply is created, from anywhere, that only contains the word “this”, the comment is dropped (CW: ableism in the function name):

def reply_is_stupid(body) -> bool:
    lower_body = body.lower().strip()
    if lower_body == 'this' or lower_body == 'this.' or lower_body == 'this!':
        return True
    return False

Every user (remote or local) has an “attitude” which is calculated as follows: (upvotes cast - downvotes cast) / (upvotes + downvotes). If your “attitude” is < 0.0 you can’t downvote.

Every account has a Social Credit Score, aka your Reputation. If your account has less than 100 reputation and is newly created, you are not considered “trustworthy” and there are limitations placed on what your account can do. Your reputation is calculated as upvotes earned - downvotes earned aka Reddit Karma. If your reputation is at -10 you also cannot downvote, and you can’t create new DMs. It also flags your account automatically if your reputation is to low:

PieFed boasts that it has “4chan image detection”. Let’s see how that works in practice:

            if site.enable_chan_image_filter:
                # Do not allow fascist meme content
                try:
                    if '.avif' in uploaded_file.filename:
                        import pillow_avif  # NOQA
                    image_text = pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(BytesIO(uploaded_file.read())).convert('L'))
                except FileNotFoundError:
                    image_text = ''
                except UnidentifiedImageError:
                    image_text = ''

                if 'Anonymous' in image_text and (
                        'No.' in image_text or ' N0' in image_text):  # chan posts usually contain the text 'Anonymous' and ' No.12345'
                    self.image_file.errors.append(
                        "This image is an invalid file type.")  # deliberately misleading error message
                    current_user.reputation -= 1
                    db.session.commit()
                    return False

Yup. If your image contains the word Anonymous, and contains the text No. or N0 it will reject the image with a fake error message. Not only does it give you a fake error, but it also will dock your Social Credit Score. Take note of the current_user.reputation -= 1

PieFed also boasts that it has AI generated text detection. Let’s see how that also works in practice:

# LLM Detection
        if reply.body and '—' in reply.body and user.created_very_recently():
            # usage of em-dash is highly suspect.
            from app.utils import notify_admin
            # notify admin

This is the default detection, apparently you can use an API endpoint for that detection as well apparently, but it’s not documented anywhere but within the code.

Do you want to leave a comment that is just a funny gif? No you don’t. Not on PieFed, that will get your comment dropped and lower your Social Credit Score!

        if reply_is_just_link_to_gif_reaction(reply.body) and site.enable_gif_reply_rep_decrease:
            user.reputation -= 1
            raise PostReplyValidationError(_('Gif comment ignored'))

How does it know its just a gif though?

def reply_is_just_link_to_gif_reaction(body) -> bool:
    tmp_body = body.strip()
    if tmp_body.startswith('https://media.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media1.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media2.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media3.tenor.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://i.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://i.imgflip.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media1.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media2.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media3.giphy.com/') or \
            tmp_body.startswith('https://media4.giphy.com/'):
        return True
    else:
        return False

I’m not even sure someone would actually drop a link like this directly into a comment. It’s not even taking into consideration whether those URLs are part of a markdown image tag.

As Edie mentioned, if someone has a user blocked, and that user replies to someone, their comment is dropped:

if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id):
    log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier')
    return None

For Example:

• Cowbees comment on lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/post/41587312/23288779
• Non-existent on piefed.social: https://piefed.social/comment/9647830

(see Edies original comment here)

More from Edie:

Also add if the poster has blocked you! It is exactly as nonsense as you think.

Example:

I made a post in [email protected] from my account [email protected], replied to it from my other [email protected] account. Since the .social account has blocked the .zip, it doesn’t show up on .social, nor on e.g. piefed.europe.pub.

I then made a comment from my lemmy.ml account, and replied to it from my piefed.zip account, and neither .social, nor europe.pub can see my .zip reply, but can see my lemmy.ml comment!

[ Let me add more clarity here: what this feature does is two things. On a local instance, if you block someone who is on your instance, they cannot reply to you. However, this condition is not federated (yet, it would seem), and so, to get around this “issue”, the system will drop comments from being stored in the PieFed database IF the blocked user is remote. This means you end up with “ghost comment chains” on remote instances. There is NEW code as of a few weeks ago, that will send an AUTOMATED mod action against blocked remote users to remove the comment. So long as the community is a local PieFed community, it will federate that mod action to the remote server, removing the comment automatically. For PieFed servers, eventually, they would rather federate the users block list (that’s fair), but it would seem this code to send automated mod actions to remove comments due to user blocks is going to stay just for the Lemmy Piefed interaction. I don’t really understand why the system simply doesn’t prevent the rendering of the comment, instead of stopping it from being stored. It knows the user is blocked, it already checks it, it should then just stop rendering the chain of comments for the given user, prevent notifications from those users, etc. ]

But wait! There’s More!

• PieFed defederates from Hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml out of the box.
• The “rational discourse” sidebar that you see on the main instance is hard coded into the system.
• Moderators of a community can kick you from a community, which unsubscribes you from it, and does not notify you. This has been removed actually, the API endpoint is still there.
• I was going to say that Admins had the ability to add a weight to votes coming from other instances, but the videos that showed this are now gone, and as of v1.5.0 they have removed the instance vote weight feature, claiming it was “unused”.

All this to say. Piefed is a silly place, and no one should bother using its software.

The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all. You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account. You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.

It leaves you to wonder how much of what you’re seeing is an accurate tally of votes and score. It seems driven purely to keep out opposing perspectives and stifle thought. None of these “tanky” instances have this level of user and content manipulation at their disposal. The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.

You don’t have a banned tag and there is nothing in the mod logs? What do you mean you were banned?

It really depends on what these reactors are going to be used for. Are they going to be licensed to private corporations to power data centers, or are they going to provide power to citizens homes?

China is the manufacturing heart of the world, everything you would need to make nearly anything you wanted, has to pass through, be processed in, or be manufactured by China. So how exactly do those “raw materials” find their way into the USA? The answer might come as a surprise to you: Fentanyl is smuggled into America for Americans, by other Americans. (CATO Institute, 2022; NY Times, 2024).

Not only are the majority of the traffickers American, but also “over 90 percent of fentanyl border seizures occur at legal border crossings and interior vehicle checkpoints”.

When it comes to sourcing the materials necessary to make Fentanyl, you can thank organizations like the Express Association of America, a lobbying group for FedEx, UPS, and DHL for making it that much easier by lobbing to have the de minimis rule’s value increased.

This change to trade policy has upended the logistics of international drug trafficking. In the past few years, the United States has become a major transshipment point for Chinese-made chemicals used by Mexico’s cartels to manufacture the fentanyl that’s devastating U.S. communities, anti-narcotics agents say. Traffickers have pulled it off by riding a surge in e-commerce that’s flooding the U.S. with packages, helped by that trade provision.
– Reuters, 2024

The de minimis limit was raised in 2016, which is what created the conditions that made transporting these chemical compounds through the US so ideal. There is a clear profit motive in raising that minimum. “The rollback [of de minimis] would snarl supply chains and raise consumer prices” (Reuters, 2024). According to John Pickel, a former U.S. Customs official and now senior director of international supply chain policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, the de minimis rules do not enable smuggling, stating “traffickers would continue to sneak boxes into the U.S.” even without the rule. Though, even Reuters admits that the rout being taken now by smugglers is a “streamlined system”, and that this system is so dense that “just a tiny fraction of the nearly 4million de minimis parcels arriving […] daily are inspected by U.S. Customs.” This motivation is echoed by the head of the Express Association of America, a lobbying group for FedEx, UPS and DHL, stating they “want to keep the [de minimis] channel open for as many goods as possible because streamlined entry saves them money.”

You can see the impact of this desirable, streamlined port of entry by looking at the stark rise of synthetic opioid overdoses (other than methadone) in the US:

This rise aligns with the 2016 rule change, which seems to indicate that a cheaper more streamlined port of entry doesn’t just benefit shippers, it also benefits the manufactures of Fentanyl.

This, however, is naturally just a byproduct of a more profound problem. What drives a maintenance worker from Tucson to “[ferry] about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel”, a quantity of chemicals “sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills”? (Reuters, 2024)

The New York Times seems to have picked up the scent,

A college football star was lured in by a friend after dropping out of school. A mother raising three special-needs children took the job while facing eviction. A homeless man was recruited from an encampment in a Walmart parking lot. […]

“The cartels are directly recruiting anyone who is willing to do it, which typically is someone who needs the money,” said Tara McGrath, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California. “The cartels spread their tentacles and grab ahold of vulnerable people at every possible opportunity.” […]

One woman met her recruiter while in rehab in Los Angeles, where the two struck up a friendship […] The woman, who asked to be identified by her first initial, M., said that her friend started pressuring her to smuggle drugs only after they spent years getting to know each other. When M. resisted, her friend flew into a rage. […]

The job offer reached Gustavo in San Diego after he drank too much beer at a party and confessed to a friend that he badly needed money. At the time, he was the main provider for his mother in their San Diego apartment. His brother had moved out, and his parents were divorced. Gustavo was working at a grocery store, but struggled to pay the bills. “I want to be a boss,” he told his friend that night. “This job isn’t feeding me and my mom.”
– NY Times, 2024

Yet, the New York Times has nothing to say about the conditions that drive these people to risk their lives. Each of them sentenced to jail time. M was sentenced to 18 months in prison, Gustavo spent 32 months in a federal prison. The question always seems to be “Who is providing the fentanyl?”, “How do we stop the fentanyl from getting into the country?”, and never, “how do we ensure citizens are not self-medicating with things like fentanyl?”

The profile of those entangled in this scheme to traffic materials and fentanyl across the boarder seems to be of the desperate and vulnerable type. Those with economic hardships, or battling their own addictions. This whole conversation about China’s role in all this is moot when you get to the heart of what drives people to substances and to quick cash. It is a cyclical demand, where the poorest among us traffic the materials needed to make the narcotics that the rest of the poorest among us used to cope with their material conditions. Statistics from Addiction Group show how bleak this reality is:

• Individuals living below the federal poverty line have about 36% higher odds of developing substance abuse issues than those in the highest income brackets.
• Drug overdose deaths among adults with no college education grew from about 12 per 100,000 in 2000 to 82 per 100,000 in 2021, far outpacing increases among more educated groups.
• 85% of the U.S. prison population either has an active substance use disorder or was incarcerated for crimes involving drugs or drug use.
• Lower-Income Prevalence: National data consistently show that people in households making under $20,000 per year have significantly higher rates of illicit drug use and alcohol misuse than those earning $75,000 or above.
• Poverty Overlaps: High-poverty neighborhoods often see compounded risk factors: poor access to healthcare, elevated stress levels, and limited supportive services.
• Cycle of Financial Strain: Addiction perpetuates financial instability, as funds meant for basic needs may go toward substances, leading to deeper poverty and, in some cases, homelessness.

If China stopped being the most cost-efficient supplier of the materials needed to produce Fentanyl tomorrow, the whole trade would simply find the next most cost-efficient supplier. In a time when car loan defaults are at an all-time high, where 1 in 3 Americans say they rely on credit cards to make ends meet, 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and an estimated 29 million American adults lack the ability to pay for needed medical care, it is no wonder where the Fentanyl Crisis really comes from. It is a crisis of despair, with millions of Americans coping at both ends, creating an interdependency feed back loop, like a snake eating its own tail.

Lol you still won’t admit that you did nothing. Do you know who organizes the door knockers? THE DEMOCRATS. They were door knocking FOR THE DEMS. You go talk to Kamala fucking Harris and ask her why more people were not doing it, you go ask HER why it didn’t change anything, you talk to the Democrats and ask them why they failed you. You couldn’t identify Idealism if it was stapled to your own forehead.

What do you even think I’m talking about here, hmm? Door Knockers are the antithesis of idealism. They are agents in the material world, engaging with people directly, hearing their positions and making real attempts to offer them answers. They’re engaging with the non-voter class and republicans in an attempt to create material change within the electorate. Republicans also door knock, for the same reason. What’s idealism is YOU thinking that somehow people should have just “Done the right thing” and showed up and voted for someone who offered nothing to them. Republicans voted for Trump because he had clear and understandable messaging, Harris had absolutely awful messaging. If you’re a Door Knocker and all you have to work with is garbage, then the only ones to blame are the ones who gave them the garbage. The Democrats.

If you want to “fight fascism” every two years by showing up to vote, you’ll be living under fascism faster than you think. Get out, touch some grass, talk to your neighbors, stop leaving your political life in the hands of people who have no interest in offering you anything, that’s called “Growing the fuck up”.

See, if you had actually done something, you would have just answered that. You did nothing, did you?

I know people who were out door knocking in blue wall states in deeply red counties, as marginalized people, who have more empathy and understanding, and a grounded realistic view of why the Harris campaign failed you and us, than you seem to be expressing here.

If all you did was show up to vote, eat your pride. Now is the time for you to ACTUALLY go out and do something instead of pissing and shitting in the comment section of fucking lemmy.world of all places.

Grow the fuck up.

If you give me your vote unconditionally, then I have what I wanted and give up nothing in return. Even if you stand outside and shout at me after you gave me your vote, it still doesn’t matter because you gave me what I wanted willingly with zero conditions. Clearly, my position on any topic is of no interest to you either, otherwise you would have tried to make a deal with me, but you didn’t.

So how about this: You give me your vote, and I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.

As opposed to?

Actual leftism. Liberalism is a Conservative movement.

So what is your plan exactly? You want to vote for a genocider, giving them the one thing you have in exchange, your one bargaining chip? And then what, write a strongly worded letter? Or are you one of those libs that intends to go back to brunch having “Done your part” in voting for “The lesser evil” who will still genocide the Palestinians? Could you be one of those people who want to “be done with politics” so that it’s “no longer in your face anymore”? You don’t strike me as the “organize my workforce towards collective action centered around Gaza” type.

When you are making demands, you need leverage. The baseline leverage you have, is your vote. You’ve not leveraged a single thing.

No its only for the instance. Lemmy.ee is still federated with lemmygrad.

This dudes account is 2 weeks old.

The mod log is public and federated, so you can go look up what they were seeing… Also, no one says anything like that on lemmygrad, but OK.