memes

List of blocked words in community names:

shit
piss
fuck
cunt
cocksucker
motherfucker
tits
memes
piracy
196
greentext
usauthoritarianism
enoughmuskspam
political_weirdos
4chan

Seems like one of the PieFed devs has some opinions about the kind of content they dislike, and are unilaterally forcing that on every PieFed instance. I can somewhat understand filtering out curse words, but specific communities should not blocked by default, and definitely not hidden in a hardcoded list in the source code.

Edit: Important context here: https://lemmy.world/comment/21323475 Seems this blocklist is more limited in scope; it's not blocking federation entirely, just blocking (from what I can tell) their appearance in search and automatically federating with them when adding an instance. Still problematic to exclude specific communities in a non-configurable way with little justification IMO.

Jesus that's a lot of spaghetti code, and why are they hardcoding a bunch of terms? Is this just for a public facing site, or does every deployed instance effectively filter these out?

Hardcoded blacklists are never a good idea.

That shit belongs in a config file.

What, why 196? Actually why any of these? I get 4chan and greentext sort of(?) but even ignoring the terrible programming practices here, this is really stupid.

Edit: actually almost makes me regret switching to Piefed

Sir a second hardcoded blacklist hit the fediverse

Never meet your heroes

Never read the code of a project you respect

That is some nasty code.

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it

-devs of PieFed

Oh wait no, that's the devs of Lemmy when asked the same request. (edit: 'asking' to 'asked')

Hopefully Rimu will be more accommodating when you ask him? (codeberg issue creation prefered)

It might be time to move this away from a hard-coded list now, if the expectations that someone installing an instance is going to read through the code is lower now than previously.

The code that OP has linked to is part of a convenience function for admins to add content to their new instances. It can query individual remote instances (e.g. lemmy.world), or it can query lemmyverse.net, and fetch communities that look to be popular and active.

It's completely unrelated to routine federation, and doesn't prevent anyone subscribing to communities that may have those words in their names.

The admin function could potentially be used to fetch hundreds of communities. It runs as a background process, so you don't know what they were until after they'd been followed. The "bad words" list acts as a safeguard against bringing in things you might not want or expect. One reason is that you may want to curate the first impression you give new visitors, as there as some that will be put off by the "fuck this" and "shitpost that" reddit-isms. Another is that you don't typically want communities that are disproportionately popular than others (e.g. if you bring in the default 25 communities, and one of is 196, then it completely dominate your front page).

If there's a particular community that you are interested in (e.g. because you moderate it), using this function isn't an efficient way to add it. In addition to the "bad words" filters, it will also exclude communities that are NSFW, or below thresholds for popularity and activity. Rather than fetching a bunch of communities at the same time, and hoping that the one you want is included, it's better to just add it manually (via a ! link or by using the "Add remote community" link) in much the same way as you would on any other platform.

Dear God, that code! Why is it all in one file? The more I read it the worse it becomes!

Huh, so thats why i havent seen greentexts in quite some time.

Why the fuck can pyfed instance admins impersonate others?

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/5780de95a86ed87b7f88c8570cfd9bb68786f053/app/admin/routes.py#L2227

Was this written by Spez?

Well, like the Lemmy devs, I guess the PieFed devs have decided to plant a flag instead of making a neutral platform for federated communication.

Side note: lmfao wtf is this Mickey Mouse block-quote-but-not-really bullshit?

That's interesting. I understand not wanting to fed some of those communities.

goddamn, asshole, peepee, and poopoo are missing.