You’ll notice that most of the fediverse is talking about Tesseract, not piefed.

Only because Tesseract drama is more recent. People were showing their anger all over the place when both blocklists and vote limits were implemented. A drama there was arguably bigger than the current one.

A prefilled set of defaults

Defaults is something that is easily changed through the same avenue as all the other settings, and comes from technical necessity. This is a deliberate attempt to manipulate visibility of content on the Fediverse, strongarming the dev position.

There is always another instance

For all I know, there is exactly one PieFed instance cleared of this, quokk.au. For that, they had to fork the project, because not all of the changes are as easily reversed as the blocklist. For ideological reasons, plenty of users would rather avoid it, and so boom - they’re out of options. Most PieFed instances wouldn’t be able to maintain a forked project by themselves.

Sane (to most people) starting point for admins

Did you consider the Fediverse demographic? I wouldn’t say most people here necessarily share Rimu’s points, and his attempts to bulldoze it in favor of his views are rightfully seen as a deliberate attack. He uses his power to project his view on a community which, at large, doesn’t stand for the same values.

You still try to build equality between your (and Rimu’s) views and sanity. Plenty here would disagree.

It’s a 3 word SQL query

Which only admins can manage. And let’s not forget the blocklist is not the only controversial decision. As I already mentioned, some require forking the project outright, and it’s a giant mess. Admins do not know what to expect of Rimu next, either.

A) fuck you. B) I’m perfectly happy being hostile to those types.

And this is the gist of it that I was trying to highlight to you. As long as you align in views with Rimu, you don’t see it as that much of a problem. But remember this can be turned against you the second you don’t agree on something. Shutting people up always ends up poorly, especially for those supporting it. Don’t be surprised when it happens.

I find it makes for a much more pleasant fediverse experience.

And that’s why such list should exist. The problematic difference is not the existence of the blocklist, it’s the fact it’s forced upon everyone. A perfect option is making a block list opt-in on a user level. You want to cut out whatever you find unpleasant about the Fediverse? Power to you, here’s a list, just agree to use it and enjoy the same amazing experience. But if you want to see something Rimu doesn’t approve of, you’d rather be able to. Let’s not willfully give up user freedom to the whims of random people.

NOTHING on that list makes the world a better place.

That’s a…heavily opinionated take. To provide a politically neutral example, how did WikiLeaks make it into the list? Did it not do any good, forcing accountability and opening up human rights violations, genocide, and more? There’s so much more to unpack about the list, but it will inevitably result in us going through polarizing political opinions, and, as you mentioned, it won’t get us anywhere.

And if there is one, single take I want you to carry from this conversation: supporting censorship and giving someone to decide what other people can see always ends up very badly, even if that censorship (for now) aligns with your views. People fall for this trap over and over, and never seem to learn.

Farewell.