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.
Trotsky was never trusted or "Lenin's pick". Lenin's pick is meaningless, unless you believe that Lenin was a literal demigod dictator who could just say "I choose you" like Ash Ketchum chooses a pokemon and the CPSU central committee would make it so. This is contrary to any modern reading of western 'Sovietology' as they call it who recognize that Lenin did not have all powers unto himself, and is not how you can run a state in the modern age anyway.
You seem to be confusing two different groups when you say 'Lenin's pick to color revolutionist overnight'. One part (trotskyists) uphold him as this savant thinker who would have led the USSR to its gilded age and avoided the 1991 overthrow/breakup - which is a huge "what if history happened differently" LARP, because we inherit the history that happened, not the one that we wish happened - and another part (literally everyone who is not a trotskyist) considers him a clear individualist who was trying to split the party if not coup the government entirely, which is contrary to democratic centralism and rightfully got him kicked out. From there, those that delve into Trotsky's actions in the party prior to his membership being revoked in 1926 realize that he was always a huge individualist who would have made the deeds attributed to Stalin look like a walk in the park in comparison. He was the type of guy who wanted to shoot soldiers just because they rubbed his fragile ego the wrong way when he was Commissar of the Red Army.
It's a good thing he got purged and exiled (twice), exactly because he would not stop trying to split the party even after consequences came and he became dangerous to the whole of the USSR's project. By that point everyone in the CPSU was fed up of his shit and wanted him gone.
His idea of permanent revolution, for those that actually looked into it, made no sense and would have completely destroyed the nascent USSR because it relied on the German workers succeeding at their revolution (which they didn't, as we know) and then coming to help the USSR to oppress the peasantry. It was never a real thing.
Secondly you say that our citations will be a wiki we made because the 'woke' mods of Wikipedia (not sure what you mean by woke and why you felt like you had to include this dogwhistle but okay) wouldn't allow a 'self-hosted blog post' as a citation.
There is a contradiction in your words however. You recognize that wikis are not infallible, because as per your claim Conservapedia and ProleWiki are problematic in how they operate. So that means Wikipedia is not infallible either, by definition. Yet you don't extend this criticism to it, which prompts one to ask: what makes it infallible? The fact that it has a lot of people editing it? But how does that translate to policy exactly - Might makes right? Everyone on Wikipedia somehow reaches the correct, objective conclusion through the struggle of their conflicting ideas, whereas any niche wiki is immediately a groupthink project that allows no deviation?
Or is it that getting US government money to make it the de facto 'people's encyclopedia' to the world makes it instantly better than other, grassroot projects? The bigger cohort is automatically the correct one?
Clearly that is what you believe, since you directly oppose the de facto hegemonic wiki against two smaller, niche wikis. To you, it's a David vs. Goliath thing, when in fact these projects just coexist on the wider internet with almost no overlap aside from uncovering some of the same contradictions that all wiki projects (and even online collective projects such as software repos) eventually get into.
Or maybe you know the internal workings of Wikipedia because you've actually investigated the question and can point to something more specific. Because I have, personally. And I can tell you for over 7 years a teenager from the US was defacing the Scots Wikipedia with fake words and stereotypical accents, and it wasn't caught for that span of time. 90% of the editors on Wikipedia are men, and women have found it very hard for over 20 years to even get accepted into Wikipedia, and continue to face sexism and harassment over their participation on Wikipedia. A sizeable chunk of editors are western (white) men. The most prolific editor is clearly a sockpuppet who makes mostly pro-war edits (Stephen Cross), manufacturing consent for war, and is active from 7AM to 7PM every day, every holidays, without ever any break. Someone with enough pull (who is liked by the community admins, in other words) will automatically win edit arguments over a newer user, regardless of whether the newer user is actually correct. Wikipedia doesn't consider what Belgium did in the Congo a genocide because a user who named himself after his Belgian military General family member thinks it wasn't a genocide. That's it, that's their entire reason for not calling it a genocide: some Belgian guy thinks it wasn't one.
There is ample academic evidence and papers that what Belgium did in the Congo was a genocide. But, Wikipedia decided to side with the long-time editor and that was that. It's now considered a settled topic and nobody is allowed to claim that what happened in the Congo was a genocide anymore, or they will get banned from editing. Doesn't sound like all of their conflicting points of view somehow synthesize into the correct conclusion to me.
Yes, the 'neutral point of view' and 'no primary sources' policies have some upsides. They also have a lot of downsides. You are essentially implying that something is only real and actually happened if it was published in a 'trusted' source, such as an academic journal or famous newspaper. But the Jeju Island Massacre, for example, was not publicized or had a name for decades until someone did the research in the 90s. Yet the locals on Jeju Island knew what had transpired in their homes in 1949. Should their stories not be relayed or considered because they are primary sources, and no second-party has written about it yet? That's what Wikipedia would do, by policy. If wikipedia had existed in the 80s, they would have essentially said "the Jeju Island Massacre did not happen because no third-party has written about it, and you can't quote survivors of the massacre because they're not reliable". That's what you are defending here when you defend Wikipedia so shoddily.
Does this strike you as sensible policies to have? And do you think this could be used to immediately silence non-Western victims of western acts?
Nobody is saying that and you know it.
Only comment within 2 years. Try harder next time you shill for a dead dictator.