Some time ago some fascists took a copy of Mastodon and made Truth Social with it. Arguably the damage caused by Truth Social to the world is greater than the good Mastodon brought to a few of us.
This is my greatest fear, for PieFed. I can’t stop fascists from using software I made but I can make that software so repellent to them that they look elsewhere instead. So far, they have.
Making it repellent requires a pretty good understanding of fascism. Behold, my diagram:
We can see that there are many parts to it and they all inter-depend and support each other. The best interventions will take this holistic picture into account. Some of the rest of this article would seem weak or tenuous without bearing in mind the part it plays in the bigger picture.
Ok, let’s dive into the list of features.
Fascist web site block list
When you install PieFed for the first time it comes with a blocklist of 3000+ fascist, conspiracy theory and fake news websites. Admins are told about this during the installation and removing the entire block list can be done with one click.
Before starting work on PieFed I spent years doing disinformation research and that list is the result. Prior to that I was working at the parliament of my country surrounded by the inner workings of politics. All that is to say: this is a high quality block list made by someone who deeply understands the subject matter.
4chan filter
Some people like to take screenshots of funny posts on 4chan and then share those around, perhaps not appreciating how by doing so they are portraying 4chan as a fun and interesting place that people should go to. In reality 4chan is a cesspit of the worst people on the internet and a hotbed of fascism. PieFed detects and reports those screenshots for admin action (usually deletion, but it’s up to you).
This detection is off by default and needs to be enabled in the admin area before it’ll do anything.
Pronouns and more
PieFed includes some trans-friendly features which fascists would find annoying.
- Pronouns
- Transphobia reporting
- Trans flag theme
Refer to the ‘sexual anxiety’ part of the diagram at the top to see why I’m leaning on this so heavily.
Rational Discourse Toolkit
In the sidebar of every page is an ever-changing list of links to resources about deradicalization, fact-checking, fake news, conspiracy theories, media literacy, and more.
I doubt many people click on those links – rather than provide direct utility or benefit to people they mostly serve as examples of the kind of thing that would irritate fascists by their presence and make them feel enough cognitive dissonance that they don’t stay long.
This feature can be turned off in the admin area if its earnestness is too cringy or whatever.
1488 easter egg
The numbers 14 and 88 are of special significance to fascists and are often used together.
Bug reports and discussions in our coding workspace are automatically numbered sequentially so when issue # 1488 came up, I made sure it was used to document how lacking in manhood Hitler was. It’s true, he did have one, look it up.
AI content labeling
It can be argued that AI is a fascist technology being used for fascist ends – decreasing the power of workers, destroying our ability to know truth from fiction, flooding our noosphere with trash. See the ‘Anti-intellectualism’ part of the earlier diagram. Accordingly we need to keep AI-generated content to a minimum or at least let people opt out of it.
Every post can be labelled as having AI content, and people can filter their feeds to exclude it. Just like how NSFW content works.
Community standards
The PieFed project has rules for its flagship instance and contributor guidelines that are anathema to fascism. See https://piefed.social/rules and https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/project_management/contributing.md
Easily find LGBTQ and Activist content
Care has been taken to collate communities which celebrate the diversity and progressive nature of the fediverse. See https://piefed.social/topic/society/lgbtq and https://piefed.social/topic/society/activism. In PieFed topics are presented to new users during onboarding, like Mastodon’s collections feature and are part of the main navigation.
Admins can create the topics that suit what they’re trying to foster and on piefed.social I’ve made a point of choosing a few areas that fascists won’t like.
Managing conflict
There’s no point having good rules if there’s no way to enforce them and PieFed has a bevy of ways to spot bad actors and excellent moderation tools. See https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Also if you make a big mistake and the crowd has taught you a hard lesson you can do a public retraction and move on:
This works better than deleting your post because if you delete it people won’t know you’ve learned and changed. A lot of people need to learn and change.
In conclusion, enjoy this Pixelfed post I made 3 years ago about fully automated luxury gay space communism – https://pixelfed.social/p/rimu/549149551792993094