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:
@edie@lemmy.encryptionin.space 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:
(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 testing@piefed.social from my account testingpiefed@piefed.social, replied to it from my other testingpiefed@piefed.zip 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!
All this to say. Piefed is a silly place, and no one should bother using its software.
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.