I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the userās comment history to OpenAI with the question āanalyze this content for evidence of specific political ideology sentiment. Also identify any related political ideology tropesā. (The italic bits are where Iāve redacted the ideology theyāre seeking).
OpenAIās LLM (theyāre using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
and so on, hundreds of comments.
I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Letās focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances and people are using it and maybe weāre ok with that because itās being used by groups we agree with but what if people we strongly disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?
The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of other questions too.
What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.
What safeguards do we need?
Would asking a LLM āplease evaluate this personās political opinionsā give different results than āfind evidence we can use to ban themā (as used in the cases Iāve seen)?
What are our transparency expectations?
Is this acceptable and normal?
Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not ā should it have been?)
If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?
Can we opt out?
Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?
Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?
How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?
Once the userās comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?
What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?
Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?
I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesnāt have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.
And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of workerās rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I canāt see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But itās happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.
What do you make of this?
Are there GDPR implications?
Hahaha. Oh boyā¦
This is amazingly illegal. The emotional damages might be high enough to make it worthwhile to sue. Neither Meta nor almost any of the other companies that users here love to hate, have ever done anything even remotely as bad.
You forgot the /s. Some less intelligent people might mistake you for being serious.
Is this some big brain attempt to discourage people from suing? Thatās no good. The solution is simply to have the hosting and responsibility outside of Europe. No big deal. Mastodon sits in New York.
Aside from the ethical implications of profiling users or of using a corporatly owned server and model to execute this, I see nothing uniquely concerning about this practice that isnt already a risk of federated social media generally.
Every mod on every instance is free to use whatever tools or standards for moderation they want - thatās an intentional byproduct of federation. Similarly, the collection of this data for use with llms is a bygone conclusion at this point - there was never any way of preventing that from happening with a federated network.
I think the only thing here to talk about is the way these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy. We already have communities where moderation abuse can be called out and adjudicated- why pose this as a question of instance administration when there doesnt seem to be any evidence for it?
these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy
I think this is just more of the ongoing controversy being spun up against db0.
This weeks flavor appears to be more data driven, a ājust asking questionsā phase. I guess in hope the whole āfalsifying evidence to make db0 users look like neo-nazisā thing blows over.
Like itās clear thereās an effort to rid db0 from the fediverse, and itās just the pretext hasnāt been sorted out yet.
I donāt doubt it even for a second.
Iām lowkey kind of fascinated this morning with what feels like a moment of real panic among western liberal-democratic institutions (projecting a little from my morning news and coffee). That an anarchist instance is getting this much targeted harassment feels like a microscopic extension of that (if I allow myself to be so bold)
As far as I can tell, dbzer0 isnt even being explicitly called out here, but it has an undeniable bdzer0 flavor to it. If it doesnt come out that this was one of our mods at this point, Iād almost be disappointed.
Yep and it doesnāt help that Rimu himself is a very questionable dude. He says he defederated from lemy.lol over their pepe frog logo but honestly I donāt believe it is the reason/ He hates memes. He said as much to me himself. A while back, someone realized that piefed was hard coded to give negative reputation to certain people, regardless of what settings the admins had made. Piefed is built off of Rimuās opinions and he puts the majority there as an opt-out, not an opt-in. When I made a jokingly apology for all the memes I post, he said āItās not your fault that the lemmy devs didnāt put guardrails in.ā
If heās that opinionated about memesā¦
Combine that with the fact that this post has literally no information other than āTrust me broā? I donāt trust Rimu as far as I can throw his garbage platform and I canāt even throw the thing because its digital code. Hell, Mr. Kaplan even had to do a ton of un-fucking of Piefed to get piefed.world to work and was talking with me about it at the time. Just LITTERED with Rimuās stances.
Not to mention that Rimu routinely comes in with preconcieved notions that others have to point out the bullshit of and he quietly then steps back from it or refuses to engage entirely and dismisses it out of hand.
Likeā¦ the Lemmy devs suck, absolutely. But the only facet in which Rimu is better is heās not a transphobe.
Edit: See below for screenshots. Iām tired of this shit. Yes. Heās wildly opinionated.
Edit 2: Lol this comment is not visible on piefed.social. Rimu out here screaming about fiefdoms and hidin things critical of him.
A while back, someone realized that piefed was hard coded to give negative reputation to certain people, regardless of what settings the admins had made.
Please donāt spread old mis-info or at least back this up with actual links to the source-code (and if we are talking about the same thing, this was clearly debunked).
As for the OP post, this is factually correct and I have seen the evidence. Although maybe Rimu should have been more clear in pointing out that this seems to be not an official instance tool, but rather something some moderators have cobbled together themselves.
Please donāt spread old mis-info
I mean, you just did it. The OP post is not factually correct as he stated that it is at an instance level. It is not. It is at a moderator level.
Please donāt spread old mis-info or at least back this up with actual links to the source-code (and if we are talking about the same thing, this was clearly debunked).
Gotta say though, getting real tired of people telling me that I didnāt understand conversations I was a part of. No. It was not ādebunkedā. It was added under an opt-in toggle after everyone noticed it and called out his bullshit. You might be thinking of something else, but this is what I was talking about.
Piefed is infected with Rimuās extreme opinionated garbage and he only backs down and puts them into a toggle after someone notices it. Thatās not the behavior of a developer that I find personally trustworthy. So when heās out here making a post that is outright false, claiming that instances are doing something that moderators are doing, I donāt trust him. Not to mention the extremely long conversations I had with Mr Kaplan about how Piefed.world needed to be un-rimuād in order to work as LW wanted it to.
Piefed is infected with Rimuās extreme opinionated garbage and he only backs down and puts them into a toggle after someone notices it.
I personally prefer Rimu taking feedback into account and then making changes than Lemmy devs bluntly closing feature requests widely upvoted by the community because āreasonsā
Letās be honest here, itās not like there are so many options we can choose from.
Also, the example you gave about shows more than anything else that Rimu did change his mind.
āAll the settings in this screenshot are off by defaultā
He only changed his mind after someone discovered it. The thing I donāt like is his obfuscating his opinions that heās injected into Lemmy. Having to manually discover them and then bug him about adding an opt out toggle is not exactly trustworthy behavior nor is it something Iām going to applaud. He still tried to sneak it in regardless and only backed down when called out. Iām not giving him props for that.
hates memes
builds reddit clone
Thatās worthy of a meme in and of itself.
Is it not public knowledge that lemmy already gets scraped by LLM bots? Which is why every bigger instance has anti-LLM measures in place now to limit that behavior? To me this just looks like a mod trying to get ai-generated reports which is not a bad idea imo since I know reporting is not often done by users who see rule breaking stuff.
This is AI generated bullshit below, it should be treated as such. I only want to convey the idea that what you do on lemmy is already fed to LLMās.
here is chatgpt's reply for
What do you know about lemmy user and piefed dev rimu?Hereās a grounded picture of ārimuā in the Lemmy / fediverse context:
š§āš» Who ārimuā is
- Rimu (Rimu Atkinson) is the lead developer of PieFed, a Reddit/Lemmy-style platform in the fediverse. (Elite AI Tools)
- Heās also the main author of the underlying software (pyfedi), built with Python/Flask and designed as an alternative to Lemmy and Mbin. (IFTAS)
- The flagship instance is piefed.social, which he runs and develops actively. (IFTAS)
š§© Role in the fediverse
- Heās not just a random userāheās a core project maintainer / ābenevolent dictatorā style lead for PieFedās development. (PieFed)
- Heās fairly active on Lemmy via rimu@piefed.social, with hundreds of posts and thousands of comments across tech, politics, and general discussion. (lemmy.world)
- He moderates multiple communities and participates in meta discussions about federation, scaling, and platform design. (lemmy.world)
š ļø What PieFed (his project) is about
PieFed is positioned as:
-
A federated Reddit-like platform interoperable with Lemmy via ActivityPub (Elite AI Tools)
-
Focused on:
- Simplicity of codebase (easy for contributors) (PieFed)
- Trust/safety features (reputation systems, filtering, anti-spam tooling) (Elite AI Tools)
- Some experimental ideas, like merged cross-posts and AI-content detection (Elite AI Tools)
š¬ Reputation & controversy
Rimu is somewhat known and occasionally controversial in fediverse circles:
-
Supporters see him as:
- A productive solo/lead dev shipping features quickly
- Someone pushing new ideas beyond Lemmyās design
-
Critics argue:
- Some features reflect strong personal opinions embedded in the platform (e.g., moderation logic, reputation systems) (lemmy.world)
- PieFed can feel more opinionated / experimental compared to Lemmyās more neutral baseline
Important nuance: because everything is open source and instance-configurable, many of these behaviors can be changed by instance admins.
š§ What heās like as a user
From his public activity:
- Talks about tech (ActivityPub, scaling, APIs)
- Engages in global politics and news discussions
- Shares design decisions and roadmap thoughts about PieFed
- Generally communicates in a direct, pragmatic developer tone
š§¾ Bottom line
-
Rimu is a real, identifiable fediverse developer, not just a random Lemmy user.
-
Heās best understood as:
a lead dev + active community participant shaping an alternative to Lemmy
-
His visibility comes mainly from his project (PieFed) rather than mainstream recognition.
If you want, I can compare PieFed vs Lemmy vs Mbin in terms of ideology/designāthatās usually where discussions about Rimu get interesting.
Heās not just a random userāheās a ādictatorā style lead for PieFedās development.
š
Chairman Rimu please save us from the memes
Maybe we need a meanwhile on piefed community to talk about drama related to Rimuās flinging of mud and insults, as well as the many additions to piefedās code which make it a much worse platform. It doesnāt get talked about much except in comment chains and Rimu controls most communities about piefed itself. So a community beyond his reach would probably be good.
I think we just need Rimu to stop making so much drama. Things were fine a few weeks ago but something with him changed.
I donāt agree, heās had a history of being weirdly controlling and opinionated. Piefedās codebase is a testament to that. @Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com already pointed out one such malicious change Rimu put in and then decided to add a toggle to when he got backlash for it. He did the thing where meme communities were marked low quality long before this recent drama ark of his.
That comment will be invisible on piefed.social as Rimu has sidestepped the modlog and personally silenced me for criticising him <3
I know, he did it to me too. Heās angry that I called him a Zionist. Which I will continue to do so because itās true. He sticks up for Samskara, a known Hasbara troll.
