Yoooooo thank you Slrpnk for this thread because I totally missed that earlier thread criticising parts of Piefed's code and OMFG it's bad and full of shit that is the dev's personal feelings deliberately hidden and it deliberately gives misleading errors to prevent you discovering what it's actually doing.
If a dev is deliberately obfuscating their errors to hide what their fucking service is actually doing you should run the fuck away. That is not a good or honest dev.
Like, I wouldn't have used it to begin with but having your code do one thing and then telling the user it's doing something else screams malicious developer.
EDIT:
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)
This enables deeply deeply malicious behaviour not to mention being malicious in its own right. One blocked user is blocking ALL users. You could make an account on piefed, block the entire fediverse, and Piefed will then drop all of it lmao.
The ideological purpose of this that the dev has is so that the invested people who actually take time to learn this (anticommunists) can block any leftists across the fediverse and function as a secret and hidden element of blocking left wing content.
Deeply malicious developer is an understatement.
If you're an anarchist or a socdem or a whatever don't think this doesn't apply to you and that it will only be used against communists, anyone even vaguely leftwing will be blocked by people who know this function exists and all of your shit will never appear there. It is a platform that will make the left completely invisible if you do not exist directly on it. But you better bet that if you exist on it and say the wrong thing that's slightly further left than what they approve of they'll come down on you too.