This morning while checking if Quokk.au’s new instance logo was federated out, I discovered that overnight we had been shadowbanned from the PieFed.Social Instance Chooser (This is a tool to help spread out users across the platform and help avoid funnelling users into the largest.)
Knowing that Rimu was happy to explain, I just asked for some clarification as we were visible on every other PieFed instance except his.
Apparently for ’ obvious reasons ', of which I can only assume is our left leaning anarchist/pro-trans stance we were chosen not be advertised on the PieFed flagship instance and first point of contact for many potential new users. Seeing as a large portion of our new users found us via this method, it will have a tangible effect on a small instance such as ours.
This was a pretty sad sight to see, and reflects the sort of petty drama that is emanating from the PieFed project lately. It’s now the third such move to discredit and harm left leaning instances by PieFed’s lead developer. This also shows a trend towards autocratic unilateral decision-making on Piefed.social, of which is starting to be run as a personal fiefdom without consulting the team or users.
I must commend Lemmy.ml for remaining neutral and not letting its own political leanings influence join-lemmy.org, while simultaneously condemn PieFed.social for this immature move that is harmful to the health of the Fediverse.
Following this exchange, Rimu announced a new update to PieFed allowing for some rather concerning things.
- Modlog: Reason for the action is only shown from trusted instances, so abusive mods won’t have an audience. Admins can still see the reason though. Which instances are trusted is set in the admin UI.
This feature means problematic users can now go undetected, and will harm moderators ability to view their past moderation history. For example PieFed.social runs a ‘trusted’ list of only 34 instances, meaning any mod action taken by any of the hundreds of instances outside of this will not show up. So for example if Quokk.au was to ban a user for transphobia (our most common ban), this will not be reflected for piefed.social users potentially leading towards more hate speech on the Fediverse.
- Instance silencing similar to Mastodon. A silenced instance is not defederated from but their posts do not show in the Popular or All feeds and their communities are not shown in Starter packs aka Topics. Their communities can still be found in the communities list and joined in the normal way. Once joined, posts in there show up in the subscribed feed as usual.
This is another way to shadowban instances and not ‘advertise’ them. Surely if an instance is problematic enough that a defederation would be in order rather than this reddit-like move.
Not directly related, but many different instances are very buddy-buddy and share user info. Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works and discuss.social for example all share information like user emails, etc. this leads to shadowbans, defedding, and all sorts of privacy offenses.
Likely quokk is cause up in that.
This is why it’s important all users use a VPN and unique burner/alias emails.
LW and discuss.online are ran by the same team.
Ahhh that would explain it
SJW doesn’t ban email domains, IPs nor VPNs.
To my knowledge, we’ve alsp never shared specific details about users with dotworld or other instances for that matter.
I myself would take offense about leaking any of this info.
The only thing I can even think of is we might have shared something like this once or twice during bigger spam attacks:
Edit:
I don’t know about dotworld, but at least on our end, there’s only TheDude and me who even have access to see a user’s email address.
The only other times we’ve really even checked one was before 2FA & password reset worked properly.
We even have users who didn’t want to provide an email at all which we’ve verified manually through matrix.
Right. Are you an admin?
They are an admin. You can check if you go to their original profile on sjw
Uh oh, I’d better be careful ;)
Realistically, not really.
To be honest, these days, most bans are for obvious spam, *phobes or the occasional CSAM.
Just don’t post dentist adspam (which is oddly common) or be that one person who posts their cartoony-kiddie-diaper-fetish thing.
I usually get banned for calling for the death of Donald Trump, and the rest of the global billionaires.
AdVoCaTiNg vIoLeNcE and other lame excuses.
This is something different. The PieFed dev is simply being a massive jerk lately and declaring war on the left.
Well, the reason those did this was because my content is too… far left. Antifa, even. And World, SJW, and DS are all pretty conservative these days.
That anti-left mentality is pretty wide spread in the tech industry—surprisingly. If the PieFed dev is in that circle, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Not surprising. The dot-com boom was mostly libertarian techbros vying for their stock options to go stratospheric, and many in the industry today are still temporarily embarrassed billionaires. The industry’s origins were in the US military-industrial complex. There’s still a visible Western male chauvinist, imperialist through-line.
that explains why my account got banned before i had a chance to use it.
atleast it ended up working out in my favor: i had intended to switch away from lemmy.word and the ban led me to lemmy.ml; where my social media diet hot a million times better and it made me stop doom-scrolling all the time.
Well, on ML they just ban you from ML when you don’t agree with the hive ;)
They ban you when you make it clear that you’re unwilling to learn how to deprogram yourself.
Lol, no. They ban anyone not willing to buy the building propaganda they spew
history’s full of empires that swore they were the only ones without propaganda; you’re just repeating their script wo knowing it.
I never said anything about anyone else’s propoganda.
It’s ironic you’re saying this while Whatabouting away criticism of the propoganda you’re covering for.
And you’ll plug your ears and cheer when I get banned for saying this here.
I never cheer when they get banned; I feel like each one would be me if life hadn’t kicked my ass hard enough to force me to learn that western/capitalist contradictions are everywhere.
The fact of the matter is that the western hegemon – our hegemon – has been legally forced to admit that they fabricated their propaganda in writing thanks to the freedom of information act since the 1980’s yet westerners – Americans in particular – cling that that proganda nonetheless. (And the fact that you can learn of this propaganda just as easily as reading the Epstein files is icing on this cake).
The worst part is that they use the propaganda to defend their world view wo ever knowing it.
Sorry bud, China is a capitalist country. Just like all the rest. ✌️
Funny how ‘just like all the rest’ still manages to shrink billionaires instead of worshiping them or letting them control the gov’t; but sure, totally the same. Lol
Yawn. The billionaires control all the governments. Keep on showing us how you simp for the billionaires.
project harder. i just pointed out one system actually restrains the rich — you’re the one who needs all governments to look identical so you don’t have to update your tired, lazy worldview. now go tuck your billionaire boogeyman back into bed and maybe read a book.
You just simped for the billionaires while trying to get out of being accused of simping for billionaires.
“Noo don’t look at the executions of billionaires and corrupt officials, they’re fake! Better things aren’t possible! I’m not listening lalalala you’re a simp.”
Woooo dogpile!
All that data sharing and sh.itjust.works mods and admins still haven’t removed the links to CSAM websites that I reported and messaged them about several months ago. They aren’t directly hosting CSAM, but the fact that they ignored the requests to take down the links in question is not particularly pleasing. (not sharing details publicly for obvious reasons)
Edit (1778443722): I messaged them on Matrix. The report was through the default reporting interface.
You didn’t message me afaik.
@imaqtpie.communick.com
Also why does your edit have that number in parentheses?
That number was the timestamp (since I didn’t know whether or not time of edit is federated) and if you want,
I can directly message you on Lemmy (since I deleted my Matrix account).I am creating a matrix account to message you.Sure
I have sent you a message under the name clean cation. Please verify whether you have received it. Thanks.
I didn’t receive it. I’m going to send you a message and maybe you can respond to me more easily.
Edit: Ok nvm I see it. I thought you sent it on Lemmy, I see it on Matrix.
I removed those posts. But I am reluctant to follow the Tor links to verify that they are what you claim, for obvious reasons. I’ll take your word for it.
Assuming that’s the 2 recently removed posts in the modlog, I’ll check if I can see what happened to those reports.
The post themselves were to our “test” community and first seemed to me like they were just random strings, but from the context I’m reading they might have been part of some onion link?
Yes, apparently they were links to Tor websites according to clean_anion
Is there any documentation on how they share user data like emails? That sounds super wild to me
Super wild? They are just people. Neckbeards, if you will.
I got banned from .world once, then accounts on the others that used the same email that had not ever been used got banned too.
All I have to offer is my experiences, you can choose to disbelieve me—I don’t care.