wjs018

I haven’t seen anything, but I am not in any mander-specific rooms. The above is what Sal posted to #lemmy-support-general:discuss.online after somebody had asked about it.

From Sal on matrix:

From what I can find, the managing director of the company that runs serverspace.io (ITGLOBAL.COM NL), which is the company that rents me the VPS space, was arrested by Dutch authorities. The infrastructure in Amsterdam was disconnected without warning when this happened. Since my latest database backup is unfortunately not very recent, and because there is still hope that the severs will come back up, I am waiting and hoping that I regain access to the data. They originally published some somewhat optimistic message, but as of today their website is inaccessible.

https://www.comnews.ru/content/247454/2026-09-21/2026-w39/1007/globus-dlya-itglobal-umenshilsya

https://theins.ru/news/297340

I could not find any statements from Dutch police or really any source other than IT Global themselves. But, this event may be related to “Dmitry Gachko” (owner of ITGlobalcom Rus) being added to this sanctions list: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec/2024/1484/2026-07-13

I recieved no warning, and I did not know about the ownership structure of serverspace and did not consider that the infrastructure was exposed to this risk. I figured “VPS in Amsterdam from a Dutch company” was rather safe. But “Dutch company operating in NL” does not mean the same as Dutch owned…

FYI, next version of PieFed has an “Unban All” button for clearing all domain bans to try to make this easier.

Screenshot from my instance:

PieFed has a default list of domains/instances that are blocked when you do a fresh install for a brand new instance. A critical difference between PieFed and the Tesseract blocks is that any of the blocks in PieFed are completely visible to, and under the control of the admins of the instance. So, ultimately, it is just an out-of-the-box default, but the instance admins always have ultimate control over moderation/federation choices. This Tesseract stuff is taking those powers away from the admins.

there is a work-in-progress page for Piefed that a contributor is working on

Yeah…sorry for the delay on this one. I have been absolutely slammed with irl work and haven’t had time to do much of anything recently. This is also why my actual contributions to PieFed have dried up the past couple weeks. I swear I haven’t forgotten about this, and I think the new structure will make this contribution a lot easier as I don’t have to replicate a lot of what existed for lemmy already.

Yeah, there was recently a case where somebody was doxxed in the modlog. At that moment, there really wasn’t anything that you can do about it. So, being able to have some control over modlog visibility is a way to prevent abuses like that.

I don’t think the privacy issues here are too salient. Pretty much everything on the fediverse is public already and have likely federated outside any particular region like the EU, so GDPR doesn’t really have any teeth. The exception to that would be if instance admins are using database access to also feed private messages to an LLM (especially a corporate LLM). I know that the “private” in private messages on the fediverse can be conditional…but it should at least be considered private from LLMs as an expectation since those messages are inaccessible to things like scraper bots or listening instances designed just to harvest data.

My biggest concerns here would be twofold:

1. False positives - LLM sycophancy is a thing. So, I worry that if you ask an LLM to dig through a big pile of text looking for a thing, that it will tell you that it found that thing…even if it is completely removed from context or completely made up. The false positive rate might be low (I have no idea), but I guess I just don’t trust the LLM enough to let it take the wheel with stuff like this.
2. Outsourcing moderation - LLMs are not going to be up to the task of moderating everything, just ask digg. However, tools to help moderators effectively do their jobs are helpful as well. There is a balance to be struck here. I think, for me, something like asking an AI essentially, should I ban this person, just feels like you are outsourcing your decision making too much. It is too far on the automation side of the scale for my tastes.

All that said, people can run their instances how they want. I don’t really have strong opinions on LLMs/AI in general, I just kinda hate big tech companies. That is my foundational belief in the work that I do for the fediverse - fuck big tech and the oligarchy they have built/funded in my country. That is really the only axe I have to grind in all this.

Some instances have used it to do something like a dynamic message of the day. That is the most I have seen it used for so far.

Edit: See the top of the main content pane of anarchist.nexus as an example.

Previous threads about these filters were people complaining about them being hardcoded, completely ignoring that they are completely optional and off by default. It would go something like this:

Look at this awful thing PieFed does!

def do_the_thing():
    # relatively simple code that does the thing

It completely ignored the context that the do_the_thing function is only called if the admin wants to do the thing.

They’re just making shit up. In their mind I guess Javascript that is intentionally included by an admin to customize their instance counts as ACE. In that sense any webserver you ever browse to is capable of ACE.

arbitrary

You mean the Javascript that would need to be written and added by the instance admin? Something that any admin with infra access could do anyway? Hardly seems arbitrary at all. ACE usually means something not intended.

I’m sure you will be pleased to know that the filter this post is about and most of the others mentioned in this thread are, in fact, off by default.

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/b168820a089ff6e835059f0d806f81b612987a79/app/models.py#L3513

It’s also a checkbox on the admin/misc settings to make it easier to disable.

I know the blocking stuff is actively being worked on as we aren’t happy with it yet. However, that is an issue where it would be literally impossible for every user to be happy with whatever end state it results in. That is an area where the different software platforms can offer people different experiences so that they can seek out the type of experience they are looking for.

Almost everything else you listed here can be turned on/off by an admin. I didn’t know about the 8-character username thing, probably worth revisiting that. The downvotes being disabled with low attitude is one I don’t see being removed, but could be an admin-set threshold (or disabled) in a future version. In fact, I suspect that the formula was written this way to make the threshold more well bounded instead of a simple up - down calculation.

If you are seeing those on lemmy or in a different client than the web ui, that would have to be something else. The red triangles don’t federate at all, nor are they in the api, they are just based on the local content of a user on that instance.

the whole þ fiasco

That has since been removed. Yeah, rimu is certainly opinionated and passionate about what he believes in, but has also been pretty receptive to feedback, both from users and from admins (like in the private voting case). Fortunately, there are alternative threadiverse platforms out there for people that want them. Both lemmy and mbin do some stuff better than PieFed, and that’s ok. The different projects have maintained working relationships at the dev level to try to make sure interoperability outside the base activitypub spec doesn’t completely break (the post-moving feature/FEP was a collaboration between PieFed, lemmy, and NodeBB for example).

I don’t necessarily disagree. I haven’t really taken a close look at how this is implemented, but it also hasn’t really been a high priority to revisit, at least not for me. There are still plenty of more fundamental features to get right first in my opinion. The big one I have worked on for the next piefed version is to get local sticky posts working for example.

My experience from working with rimu though is that he has been pretty receptive with contributions to make it less opinionated in these kinds of ways. I have removed or made optional tons of stuff that he spent time coding and I haven’t really gotten any pushback from him over it. I know it kind of makes me sound like a douche to just say open a PR, but if somebody out there feels strongly about this filter, that is probably the fastest way to get it changed.

Also fun fact, you can probably upload it to most other piefed instances just fine.

rimu has pretty strong opinions on social media. This filter is optional and can be turned on/off by an admin. Some of my contributions to piefed have been to make filters or features that are strongly opinionated like this optional. For piefed.social specifically though, rimu has all of them on because that is his instance and he runs it the way he wants.

Interstellar has a standalone desktop app and supports all three threadiverse ecosystems (lemmy/piefed/mbin).

I don’t think so, but I wasn’t working on it. Tagging @rimu@piefed.social for awareness.

To do this, they would need to be an admin running a modified version of the software no? If that was really happening with any kind of regularity, it would surely be grounds for defederation.

In any case, if this were to become an issue, then I am sure we can change it. We have already had to change how community flair federates a few times to try to keep up with lemmy’s PRs on the feature to try to make sure it is compatible.