Fediverse

No! There is a hardcoded instance list to determine whether a piefed instance is considered to have a good “defederation policy” or not. All piefed instances have this if they didn't fork the code.

https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/881a5c95657b03c29e81ac8f619e4d26e4f6973d/app/templates/auth/instance_chooser.html Line 562

       // Handle federation status
        const watchedDomains = {
            'hexbear.net': 'hexbear-status',
            'hilariouschaos.com': 'hilariouschaos-status',
            'lemmygrad.ml': 'lemmygrad-status',
            'lemmy.ml': 'lemmy-status',
            'gregtech.eu': 'lemvotes-status',
        };
        
        const defederatedDomains = instance.defederation || [];

        countDefederated = 0;
        
        Object.entries(watchedDomains).forEach(([domain, elementId]) => {
            const statusElement = document.getElementById(elementId);
            const isDefederated = defederatedDomains.includes(domain);
            
            if (isDefederated) {
                countDefederated += 1
            }
        });

        if(countDefederated >= 3)
            defederationQuality = 'Good';
        else if(countDefederated === 2)
            defederationQuality = 'Ok';
        else if(countDefederated === 1)
            defederationQuality = 'Minimal';
        else if(countDefederated < 1)
            defederationQuality = 'None';

So you could defederate the "tankie triad" but not hilariouschaos.com, lemmychan and whatever else harmful instances and be considered to have a "good" defederation policy. This is what is shown to new users to make a decision which instance to join but it is impossible to find out on what basis this grade is assigned except for diving into the code. And it cannot be altered except for forking.

Precisely. We could point people to the very dictionary definition of the word, but it seems not to change many people's mind who have already decided which "camp" they want to be in, and that they will (attempt to) preempt the word to mean... whatever they feel like.

Hard coding is the software development practice of embedding data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, as opposed to obtaining the data from external sources or generating it at runtime.

Hard-coded data typically can be modified only by editing the source code and recompiling the executable

Therefore, a statement like

IF (instance-set-variable) THEN
{
... implement block
}

is by definition not "hard-coding", bc it asks the instance admin what value it wants for that variable, and then only conditionally runs the code to set the instance block if the admin asks it to.

There are plenty of things to criticize PieFed for, but "hard-coding instance blocks" is not one of them. (~~And now it seems the same error was made regarding Tesseract.~~ Edit: this point is terribly unclear but probably not correct, as in one of the two blocklists is definitely not hard-coded but the other seems to be.)