Permanently Deleted

  • degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io
    2·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • Zoot@reddthat.com
      2·
      4 months ago

      Damn this should honestly be spread and talked about more. I don’t think many people know this is a thing?

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
        0·
        4 months ago

        Considering PieFed users won’t shut the fuck up about how much better and less politically opinionated it is, yeah we should probably shout this from the rooftops.

        Reminds me of Brave browser users a bit

        • pivot_root@lemmy.world
          0·
          4 months ago

          One of PyFed’s selling points was that it was easier to work with than Lemmy. It’s going to be amusing when that takes a 180 turn and people start complaining.

          Python is great for prototyping and iterating on small projects or as glue for modules written in C and C++. What it isn’t great at is linearly scaling on a single node. When the day that throwing more powerful hardware at the problem stops being an option, Kubernetes is going to walk through that door and fuck any semblance of simplicity up.

          • mushroomman_toad@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            4 months ago

            I think Lemmy has some in-memory data structures that limit the backend to a single node, too. Also postgres is great, but Lemmy really fucked up their database performance somehow.

            But yeah large python codebases turn into spaghetti really quickly.

            • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
              1·
              4 months ago

              but Lemmy really fucked up their database performance somehow.

              Can confirm. I spent like 4 hours one day configuring auto vacuum and other shit on my Lemmy DB because it was bloating to hell and eating up resources. Runs much smoother now but it was a massive PITA to get there.

                • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  I can’t remember exactly what I did but enabling autovacuum was one of the big ones. I’ll try to provide some info below:

                  Walks through VACUUM and autovacuum - https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-25-use-vacuum-analyze-postgresql/view

                  How to see if autovacuum is already enabled (these are commands you’d run while in sql):

                  SHOW autovacuum;

                  View current settings:

                  SELECT name, setting FROM pg_settings WHERE name LIKE '%autovacuum%';

                  Monitor which tables need attention:

                  SELECT schemaname, relname, n_dead_tup, n_live_tup 
FROM pg_stat_user_tables 
WHERE n_dead_tup > 1000 
ORDER BY n_dead_tup DESC;

                  I wish I had documented it at the time because info about this for Lemmy specifically is pretty lacking. I was in kind of a dire situation though because my disk space had filled up quickly and my system was struggling. A lot of what I did was basic PostgreSQL maintenance stuff, so you should be able to find some general guides for that.

                  EDIT: I had Claude help me corral some optimization stuff into a PDF. This is along the lines of what I did to get my db back under control. Make sure to always backup first! https://u.orca.casa/1771250081

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      kind of content they dislike

      Or they like it and e.g. want just one strong 196 community.

    • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered an extremely pointed line of code in piefed meant to fuck over one person specifically. It’s very concerning now that it’s a pattern.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      They also put “memes” and “enoughmuskspam.”

      The latter I guess could be used to stop Musk spam (since the community is literally nothing but Elon Musk news) but not allowing the word “memes” in a community name?

      Utterly stupid.

      But they do appear to be fans of Carlin based on the first 7 banned words.

      There’s no racial slurs in there either. I might have assumed this was merely an example an operator is meant to edit themselves, but these are some weird ass choices for even that.

  • freamon@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 months ago

    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.