I'm happy to explain. You could have just asked, though.

During initial installation PieFed downloads a big list of 3000 right-wing domains from https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon and blocks them all. Admins can unblock them if they want but they would need to do them individually so I bet none do.

The list includes things like fox news, breitbart, etc. Before starting work on PieFed I spent 3? years studying right wing disinformation - qanon, antivax, all that and that blocklist is an output from that. Every site on that list was reviewed personally.

So.

Additionally, I have manually added these warnings (not blocks) onto some domains, for piefed.social only. You can download a list of those warnings from https://join.piefed.social/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/warnings.ods

Most of them are tabloids, AI slop farms and a handful are authoritarian government mouthpieces.

So there's 3000 right wing sites that simply can't be linked to and 47 sites with warnings, about 10% of which are left wing. There's no need to warn for fascism because posts that link to them are not displayed in the first place.

There's an ideological slant to PieFed for sure, and it's very much in favor of the left. That could be why maga.place and lemmychan.org use Lemmy and not PieFed.

I'll take another look at peoplesdispatch and see if there's a less triggering warnings I can put on it.

But why? I don't understand why you want to make your software politically charged. I'm left leaning, but I believe in free speech for all. This makes piefed a censored platform by default. You are manufacturing an echo chamber.

I don't want fascists to benefit from my work. But it's FOSS, so anyone can download and install it, so I made it extremely unattractive to fascists.

There are plenty of other places where people can have "free speech".

Facebook, or reddit, for example. /s

To clarify: you say that by default all PieFed instances don't even allow to link resources considered "right-wing", without an easy way to disable such anti-feature?

If so, it's basically a centralized point for censorship in a decentralized system, which is very antithetical to the spirit of the Fediverse and is something even the very left Lemmy devs prefer to avoid. I see it being very detrimental in its own right.

Shouldn't it be an offered setting instead? Like, "if you want your instance to avoid certain topics, here are filter lists to freely enable or disable"?

Much can be said about the definition of left and the way Marxists you are addressing don't see "liberal" as "left" to begin with.

What matters, though, is that you end up projecting a certain personal, even if somewhat educated, bias onto both PieFed as a project (banning right-wing outlets from even being linked to, globally), and the flagship instance (making warnings about Marxist-inclined outlets). This is very unwelcome for many, myself included, and, as previously mentioned, antithetical to what Fediverse is and what it stands for.

Heh, this puts Piefed in the same basket as Reddit, Facebook etc. for the same reasons you dislike them.

It depends on your definition of easy. Here is the admin UI for unbanning domains.

Also they can go into the database and empty the domain table.

Fork PieFed and remove the 4 lines of code involved in doing this, then. See cli.py, line 160.

IDGAF.

You can't fork Reddit or Facebook and then federate with them.

Pievolution is a Piefed forks that removes this feature (as well ad other stuff)

https://codeberg.org/Situation0262/Pievolution

It's not completely ready yet.

By the way, thank you for your work on lazysoci.al

I've rarely seen a crashout so spectacular. Piefed going from the new darling to pariah software in the blink of an eye.

Can you imagine the shitstorm MOG would have raised if the same blocklist was hardcoded in lemmy?

Easy as in "there is a UI button/switch during initial setup". Essentially, not banning all these domains should be equally as easy as banning them.

All the bullshit they say about silencing and 1984 is as always, a classic case of projection.

Please enlighten us on where we should be getting the full objective unbiased reality from, the New York Times maybe?
God forbid a media takes a pro working class / global south bias instead of the usual neoliberal status quo ideology.
Call them out on it and they'll deny they even follow any ideology, they're just being Objective.

Are you sure this is a "warning"? /s

Sounds like an indicator of quality, instead. Even the icon is in red, the color of hope.

You can't fork Reddit

There's an archive of an old version of Reddit's code available on Github, so theoretically you can fork it, just not the latest version.

And nobody used that as a Reddit alternative, due to missing the federation aspect.

What I should have said above is: you can fork Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, use that fork on an instance and connect to the Fediverse. That's the major difference with Reddit or Facebook.

The difference between a proprietary, politically charged, censored echo chamber and an open source "do whatever you want" platform should be obvious though.

Free speech is about the right to say what you want, meaning the government isn't supposed to repress you for it, but it doesn't guarantee the opportunity to do so on other people's private platforms. However, in this case, you're free to host your own platform where you can say what you want.

As an aside, I'd like to point out the "Paradox of Tolerance" and the proposed resolutions: If you're an advocate for free speech, extending that freedom to those seeking to undermine it empowers them to use it against that freedom. That way, "free speech for all" is a good intention paving the road to authoritarian hell.

Hence, it is reasonable to deny a platform for those hostile to your principle. Popper frames it as a form of self-defense, to compromise part of the principle to protect the rest. Others frame it as a social contract of mutual respect, whereby the people violating it also forfeit their own right to demand it.

Either way, if "free speech for all" is a self-defeating principle, an open society needs to accept some measure of illiberty for its enemies if it is to be defensible.

I don't believe software can be neutral. By making banning them equally easy as not, we're saying that those choices are of equal worth - doing that is taking a side and it's the side of giving fascists an easier way in. Nope! That's how Mastodon gets forked into Truth Social.

Interesting how this thread started out about me being too right wing and now for other people it's about me being too left wing. Heh.

Can't please everyone and I'm not trying to.

This is a strong and succinct argument, cheers.

We need peoplesdispatch.org I think it's valuable thing to have a take on events from their angle. Yet it needs to be read with an understanding that they have an angle. Using the warning icon to provide that understanding is clunky and wasn't really intended for that purpose. There has been some drift in the usage away from the original idea behind the feature.

One day it might be good to have a different icon for providing context, separate from providing warnings.

Will you provide context for state run Zionist propaganda like the BBC?