This morning while checking if Quokk.au's new instance logo was federated out, I discovered that overnight we had been shadowbanned from the PieFed.Social Instance Chooser (This is a tool to help spread out users across the platform and help avoid funnelling users into the largest.)
Knowing that Rimu was happy to explain, I just asked for some clarification as we were visible on every other PieFed instance except his.
Apparently for ' obvious reasons ', of which I can only assume is our left leaning anarchist/pro-trans stance we were chosen not be advertised on the PieFed flagship instance and first point of contact for many potential new users. Seeing as a large portion of our new users found us via this method, it will have a tangible effect on a small instance such as ours.
This was a pretty sad sight to see, and reflects the sort of petty drama that is emanating from the PieFed project lately. It's now the third such move to discredit and harm left leaning instances by PieFed's lead developer. This also shows a trend towards autocratic unilateral decision-making on Piefed.social, of which is starting to be run as a personal fiefdom without consulting the team or users.
I must commend Lemmy.ml for remaining neutral and not letting its own political leanings influence join-lemmy.org, while simultaneously condemn PieFed.social for this immature move that is harmful to the health of the Fediverse.
Following this exchange, Rimu announced a new update to PieFed allowing for some rather concerning things.
- Modlog: Reason for the action is only shown from trusted instances, so abusive mods won't have an audience. Admins can still see the reason though. Which instances are trusted is set in the admin UI.
This feature means problematic users can now go undetected, and will harm moderators ability to view their past moderation history. For example PieFed.social runs a 'trusted' list of only 34 instances, meaning any mod action taken by any of the hundreds of instances outside of this will not show up. So for example if Quokk.au was to ban a user for transphobia (our most common ban), this will not be reflected for piefed.social users potentially leading towards more hate speech on the Fediverse.
- Instance silencing similar to Mastodon. A silenced instance is not defederated from but their posts do not show in the Popular or All feeds and their communities are not shown in Starter packs aka Topics. Their communities can still be found in the communities list and joined in the normal way. Once joined, posts in there show up in the subscribed feed as usual.
This is another way to shadowban instances and not 'advertise' them. Surely if an instance is problematic enough that a defederation would be in order rather than this reddit-like move.
What’s the Debian governance like?
I know of one fork in the works, not sure I’ve I’m allowed to share it just yet one.
You can find it here. In a nutshell, it's decentrally organised. Developers have collective ownership and responsibility.
They also got their own social contract.
it read's like congress' super majority rule and it has an electoral system much like the american electoral system; no wonder why debian is such a conservative distro.
They've amended their constitution almost as often as the US it seems
it's making me wonder if easily exploitable electoral systems and super majorities are the reason why institutions who employ them are unable to change.
Oh that is nice, I'll look into that some more.
Important to look for though, would be to establish the community at start as for and by the people.
A left-focused community, by extension can be friendly to all that aren't left - just not those that are assholes (far-right and its allies). And on those, I have two tangents.
On the Left
A tangent... but on marxism-leninism I admit I have my reserves, and I do not support a majority leadership by them. However, I do support them to the extent of dividing up the far-right. I've noticed that fascists often easily switch forth to supporting marxism-leninism.I sometimes have thought of constantly questioning fascists' views directly by alts and bots, to eventually get them to understand ML views.
If the horsehoe theory works, then it's also possible to do a reverse fishhook; hoeing a fascist into MLism, then hooking them into anarchist communism.
On Marxism and Anarchism
Crucially, I think it is possible to have a society, with cooperation between marxists and anarchists, communists and socialists.All wish for a society of social ownership. All agree on a reduction of the state and corporatisation in the end, with equity for all. What we have in common, we must stress; what we differ on, we relax discussion about.
If we wish to avoid a tyranny, it is necessary that all leftists cooperate against the face of fascism (whether red or brown) and capitalism;
embrace communism, accept socialism,
cooperate with social democrats,
tell christian democrats and liberals,
criticise fascism when with non-fascists,
and no podium to fascists.
A state is understood as a centralised entity with a monopoly on violence, by which it exercises the capacity to repress labourers. All who aren't straight up multimillionnaires, are by definition labourers, for they are forced to live to work, rather than to live and work.
We can build this stateless, moneyless, classless, society from both ground up and the top. And that starts with ensuring that basic needs are met.
Off-grid homes w/ beds, worker-owned co-op farms (for food and clothes), water supply, education. Mines (such as Opco) and factories must be worker-owned, which is a second step. We must establish our own communal hospitals, with our own supply of medicine. We exercise and train mutual defence. We best start within clumps of communities near each other, and spread out from there.
Away with "right to work"; all for "right to strike",
away with "freedom of religion", all for "freedom from religion"
away with "right to bear arms", all for "equal arms against tyranny",
away with "private property", it's "theft from the masses"!