Having features does not make it good software. It remains true that the code quality is abysmal and there ARE hardcoded blocks based on what the dev(s) dislike.
What we see from time to time is people spreading literal misinformation about Piefed, saying that those filters can’t be disabled by an admin (they can), and/or that a fork is needed to do so (it’s not) .
I hope I am not spreading any misinformation. If any of my complaints is factually incorrect, please point it out.
That contradicts what @skavau@piefed.social told me.
Did you put the right URL? That URL links to a comment about the 4-chan image blocking and reputation loss.
If this is the feature you consider to be missing from Lemmy, then yes, please let it remain missing. I definitely don’t want anything like it.
I just want to make sure people know what they’re getting into before they decide to use PieFed. If you know about the issues and decide to use it, I totally respect that decision.
So there are two purposes for this “bad list”
correct?
The federation filtering is blocking IMO. It affects what comms users of the instance can find (via search).
Anyway maybe in Your PR You should make a separately configurable list for each purpose. I don’t see a reason why it should be the same list.
That’s what I thought. Thanks for confirming.
Okay. It’s still unclear to me why piracy was not picked up by default. It’s a very big comm.
Anyhow, good luck on the merge request! Would be great to let the admin decide what to block instead of the weirdly random selection of comms and words on the list now.
Piefed.co.za is less than a day old and likely has done no federation at all yet.
That cannot be true. I can see a bunch of communities federated on that website. For example, search for ‘news’: https://piefed.co.za/communities?search=news&language_id=0
In it, he excluded federation from communities with certain keywords that you have already bought up.
Okay. I call that a hardcoded block (that can be manually worked around).
Just to confirm, did You find the ‘piracy’ comm in the search menu (like I was trying to)? Or did You have to manually type in the URL and subscribe first for it to federate?
If You found it in the search menu, then my understanding of the code must be wrong. In that case would You please explain.
PS: The musk community is against musk. Apologies about not using Your pronouns earlier.
Can you explain what it does then? Below is my understanding. Correct me where I am wrong.
The “bad list” blocks any community with that name from being federated. So for example if I go to a random PieFed instance and search for the ‘piracy’ community, I get no results
https://piefed.co.za/communities?search=piracy&language_id=0
The admin can circumvent this by manually adding the community. Some big instances (including yours) have done that, but smaller ones (like the one I linked) haven’t.
I know what the code is for. And I know that your instance manually exempted the block for ‘memes’ (or perhaps your instance imported the memes community before the block came in place, idk).
Can you view any ‘piracy’ or ‘enoughmuskspam’ community on your instance? I can’t
http://multiverse.soulism.net/communities?search=piracy&language_id=0
http://multiverse.soulism.net/communities?search=enoughmuskspam&language_id=0
New users joining from Reddit aren’t dealing with self-hosting - they’re just using it.
Yes, and so I am concerned they might not know what “bad list” might be hardcoded into the software they’re using.
I will also add I have seen a lot of praise for how easy it is to host piefed from other instance owners.
Yeah, I think Lemmy needs to be made easier to selfhost. From the choice of programming language, the Lemmy backend must be more efficient and secure, so it should be the better choice for most selfhosters (exceptions being the active ones who are interested in patching the stuff they host and want to do so in Python).
To me, the sloppy codebase means I wouldn’t want to selfhost it. And the presence of hardcoded filtering of things the devs dislike (even if it can be manually worked around) is for me a very good indicator that more shenanigans will come along the line.
If you have no problems with what I mentioned then I don’t think we have much in common ground to argue on. You can enjoy PieFed and I will continue to enjoy Lemmy.
I just want people to be informed about these things that I find highly problematic before they decide to use or selfhost PieFed.
What are they in for? The site seems to work fine from a user perspective.
Fox News would seem like a perfectly fine source of news if you get all your news from Fox News, wouldn’t you agree?
Any community can still be manually added.
And you can still manually get any news you want from other channels, Fox News just won’t show them.
(I am not saying PieFed is as bad as Fox News, just trying to make an analogy to show that something that “seems to work fine” can be pretty bad for the users nonetheless)
BTW, !enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world (with the exclamation mark up front) to correctly refer to communities. Without the ! that’s an email address.
The version from 10 years ago, yeah. It’s here https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit.
There’s a modern and production-ready open source alternative. It’s called Lemmy. You can find the source here https://github.com/lemmynet/lemmy
If the code is bad, you realise only coders would notice it from reading that?
That’s what makes it particularly sad. The people who didn’t read the code have no idea what they’re in for.
What hardcoded bans are you referring to here? The 4chan one that can be disabled?
How about this one? ‘enoughmuskspam’, ‘political_weirdos’, ‘piracy’, ‘memes’ are hardcoded banned. 196 used to be banned to but they removed it from the “bad list”.
Also “can be disabled” does not excuse hardcoded filtering. If they’re serious they could implement a config system in an hour.
Chromium is a well-organized and mature codebase, which makes syncing changes relatively easy (also Brave’s chageset is limited in scope, so less conflicts to worry about). PieFed is neither mature nor well-organized. Maintaining a downstream project from it would be a nightmare.
I wonder, would these users still use PieFed if they have seen its codebase? Maybe it can be one day but right now it’s 100% not production-grade software. Nonsensical hardcoded bans and blocks everywhere. >1000 lines of Python in a single file. Uses regex to parse HTML. The list goes on…
Usually 0/0=NaN and NaN compared with a number would be false.
Maybe the (up-down)/(up+down) is just what AmazingWizard summarized from the code. But from what we have seen of the quality of that codebase I won’t be surprised if it’s literally this expression, division by zero and all. Lol
Hardcoded means the filter is in the source code (as opposed to being in a config file or database). Whether or not it can be disabled/circumvented is a different matter.