It's me! I'm the propaganda! How dare I read the code and tell you all about it.

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.

The fact that censorship of that sort is even there in the first place is the problem. If you wanted people to be able to modify the software like that it should be separated from either the main code base or even just in a different namespace.

Now I will say Rimu is good at what they do. I had an issue where I couldn't load my main feed and there was nothing I could do client side. They had it fixed within 2 hours of me raising an issue on codeberg. That was great. But their skill isn't the issue. Its them choosing to inject their opinions in a social media software that has the effect of controlling what everyone using it sees that is the issue.

Sorry for preaching to the choir. Its just after interacting with hexbear quite a bit, I don't see the bad wrap unless someone is misunderstanding what "death to america" means.

Write shit code.

Gets called out.

IT'S A SMEAR CAMPAIGN.

for fuck's sake

We don't engage in any "campaigns"

What is with lemmy instances and their insisting that we do this?

I didn't know what piefed was, so I took a peek at a repository

A Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask. Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to. No fancy design patterns or algorithms.

That's all I need to see to know to never touch that software.

Why is being mad about Rust so often correlated with reactionary opinions?

well commented

must have been reading a different piefed repo than I was

The 1984-style gif filter function that fails to parse for markdown that would be necessary for the links to appear as gifs is hilarious

Holy fucking shit lmao. I am actually speechless.

extremely detailed, sourced comment detailing various problems with piefed

That intentionally leave out most of the picture. This is how propaganda works; not by lying but by spreading selective truths.

The Piefed dev has by the way also responded to these allegations: https://slrpnk.net/post/33525301/20457257

That said, I do think some of these optional features are somewhat misguided. However, in the past the main Piefed dev has had an open ear to such concerns and did end up removing several half-baked features again when people explained why those seemed like bad ideas.