PieFed Meta

Recently there have been two more PieFed instances created, which offer accounts to anyone who wants one:

• https://feddit.online
• https://link.fossdle.org

Feddit.online is hosted in USA which should make it a little faster for people there. It also has a different topic structure at https://feddit.online/topics than PieFed.social has.

Key updates include the addition of community icons for better identification, a notification management interface, and various enhancements to our API for eventual mobile app support. Below is a detailed overview of the changes we've made.

##Jeena

• Community icon alongside name in post teaser. This helps differentiate between communities with the same name and adds visual interest.

##Freamon

• Added a notification management interface to manage notifications from all the communities and posts you are subscribed to - https://piefed.social/alerts
• Soft deletion of comments, so they can be un-deleted again.
• Lots of API work for the mobile app. Lots!

#Rimu

• Generate YouTube thumbnails more reliably.
• Instance overview pages which make it easy to see posts and people from any instance. Start exploring at https://piefed.social/instances.
• FEP-268d: Search consent signals for objects. This FEP is a convention for how instances can signal to other instances which posts should be searchable.
• Track who deleted which posts, for accountability among moderators.
• Refactoring to support API work by Freamon.
• Automatically delete voting data older than 6 months (aggregated totals are unaffected). Voting data consumes gigabytes of space and it only meaningfully affects ranking of posts in the first few days. The only other reason to keep this data is for vote manipulation analysis and 6 months worth of data should be plenty.
• Instances with open registrations automatically close registrations after one week of having no admins log in. This will avoid abandoned instances becoming a vector for spam or a home of trolls.
• Show instance name after display name. If you notice undesirable patterns of behaviour associated with certain instances you can block the whole instance.
• Improve visibility of user-level instance blocking functionality. This is separate and in addition to defederation which is controlled by admins.
• Display PeerTube licence info on video posts. This could be rolled out to other post types in future?
• Topics now have an option to show posts from communities that are in child topics. E.g. https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft only has two communities in it so the number of posts shown there is very low. However it’s child topics (Arts, Craft and Photography) have quite a few communities so to populate the top-level topic it makes sense to display posts from all the child topics too. https://piefed.social/topic/tech/programming is a similar case.

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As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!

I have enjoyed PieFed much more from my desktop and I finally figured out why: the theme keeps disappearing, leaving blank white text that is harder to read.

Starting fresh (restarting my mobile device, force-quitting the Firefox app, and loading it again), and starting from the homepage at https://piefed.social, clicking most links will cause the theme to be discarded. On mobile Firefox though not mobile Chrome, nor various desktop browsers. I am using Firefox version 132.0, last updated October 21, 2024, and Android version 14, and this effect has persisted I think since I made my account here last week. Firefox mobile seems an important target for our FOSS userbase:-).

The themes affected include PieFed and Card Shadow, though Hercules 1982 seems unaffected (I did not test that one as extensively). The button links I tried visiting included: the homepage (again, even if already on it), any post, any community, my Account->View profile, the "more communities" button, etc. - even the "back" button, after force-quitting the App and restarting it again. Always the text would switch from blue to white. Reloading the page does not help - only force-quitting the app and restarting it will restore functionality, until a link is clicked that is. Even after the theme is discarded, opening a link in a new tab will restore it to work - only in the new tab ofc, not the old one.

I hope this report helps PieFed to improve!:-)

I gather that it had a use unrelated to Lemmy but for Lemmy posts I make a case here that it is more misleading than helpful. For a moment, please ignore the underlying reasons why things are the way they are and focus on how the issue presents to the end-users.

(1) By pulling in solely the post, but not any of the comments, it at best provides only partial information - which if all you wanted to read was the post, then why bother pulling it here at all? (as opposed to retrieving from its original location - I mean, to do it you already need the full URL...) While if instead you wanted all of the comments... - e.g. to be able to reply to - then too bad, b/c it won't do that?

(2) It also does not pull in any of the old vote counts. So if hypothetically a post had 1000 upvotes, and then after pulling it here it received adjustments +2 from upvotes and -4 from downvotes, then its total would then be 998, right? Except PieFed would instead display "-2", a qualitatively different score for a highly popular post that is a terrible misrepresentation of the actual facts about it.

(3) It conveys a distorted view of things to the end-users. e.g. see !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com where there are 6 posts from the last 2 months, right? Right?! No, there is actually only a single post there in its entirety, then a few more that I and what I assume was Blaze pulled in - note how those other 5 have zero comments, and total scores near zero, due to the aforementioned issues. Really the "earliest" post that PieFed.social reliably has from that community is from 4 days ago, and then beyond that is a scattered, partial mess. There are actually MANY more posts from the last two months, which are not represented here. Ergo, the initial impression that a quick glance at this community offers turns out to be false, due to these federation issues.

(4) showing only partial information is often called a "false positive" or type I style of error, whereas showing nothing at all for those posts that are not fully here avoids that pitfall. If certain content is not here then... well it is not here, and that's that, but for only some of it to be here leads to much confusion, imho.

Almost entirely distinct from this issue, the ability to find an existing post given its URL should be added to the search menu, b/c that is where people will go to find it. But ofc all the more so if the retrieval button is removed or made less prominent, so that that find ability is not lost along with that.

I understand that there are hard limitations of the federated model itself. So if e.g. older comments and votes cannot retroactively be pulled in - or possibly even if so - then maybe this function should just be abolished? Or perhaps a couple more layers of "are you sure you want to do this?" added, or better yet moving it from its prominent place showing up to everyone on almost every page to a more subdued location where only those who know what it is and what will happen if it is used are likely to access it? I now feel that I actively made the situation in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com worse by pulling in those posts, and wished now that I hadn't done so, as it could lead people astray into thinking "this is all the posts that the community has to offer from this time-period" (NO, it actually has MANY MANY more than that, on the original server!?!!). Now that I know this I can refrain from using it, but it would be nice to help others who climb this ladder after me as well:-). So I am sharing my thoughts with you in case that helps.

PieFed is freaking awesome and you all who work on it are magnificently extraordinary to share your knowledge with the world:-).

See e.g. https://piefed.social/communities?search=forward - there are 2 communities listed there, both go to the same place if you click them, and that place has no posts from the last 3 days.

It almost looks like the existence of the second version of that community - changed mere seconds ago at the time of my writing this, except again, when you click the link it doesn't show anything new for several days - is soaking up all the new posts, but since it is inaccessible by the normal means those new entities cannot be accessed.

This is my favorite spot in the Fediverse, so I hope it is addressed soon! That community in particular is doing great work to make the Fediverse fun & welcoming to come to by all us nerds:-).

PieFed looks so amazing! And it is fantastic how it continues to be developed more all the time.

Though it still lacks numerous features found on Lemmy - e.g. being able to search for users (I tried searching for one of my favorite people to talk to, lvxferre, and many variations such as @lvxferre@mander.xyz, but piefed.social came up with nothing - it seems to search only within the text fields, and I saw nothing in any of the dropdowns to look for a "user", or a "community", etc.). Likewise I tried to find existing posts in that search bar - e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/21055894 "Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this." but again could not. Another one is that the frontend UI needs some polish, e.g. on this post I literally cannot see the name of the community (no matter how far I zoom out), only that it begins with "[META] Piefe…" (oh wait no, now I see, at https://ponder.cat/post/326806 - that's the name of the post? but then why is it repeated like that, in tiny font, right next to / above the huge font, and also cut off - wouldn't it make more sense to just stop the list at "Communities@ponder.cat"? or if it is important enough to add, then not to cut it off?)

Minor issues of polish aside, the USA election season is coming up so... this makes me wonder: can you block users from a given list of instances using PieFed? e.g. if I wanted to block users, and I mean all of communities, posts, comments, even voting if possible - basically I want a defederation action, but will take a user-level block if that is all I can get. People might be able to engender this behavior with keywords, but the key would be to allow things like a discussion of the firefox@lemmy.ml community name, while blocking the users from that instance name - and yet given the above issue of not being able to search for users at all, my guess is that keyword-based blocking would do the exact opposite of that? (cutting out posts that just happen to contain the instance name, while allowing the users free reign so long as their posts do not contain the instance name)

Either way, I do so look forward to the development of this fantastic Lemmy alternative, which nonetheless federates with it plus so much else besides!:-)

I've started playing with setting up a "production" version of PieFed. I have a few questions. I'm hoping someone can help.

1. Can I use S3 buckets for media? I use Wasabi S3 for my other Fediverse servers. Can I use them with PieFed?

2. Regarding the BOUNCE_ADDRESS settings in the .env file, what if I leave them all unfilled? Will the email bounces simply come back to the inbox of the sending email address? This is my preferred scenario.

3. The instructions have, "If BOUNCE_* is configured ...". Where is it configured? If I don't provide bounce addresses, do I need to care about this configuration?

4. For production, do I change MODE to MODE='production', or something else? Is it case-sensitive?

5. What is the SENTRY_DSN variable?

6. What happens if I set MAIL_ERRORS=True?

Thanks, much! I'm sure I'll have more questions.

We tried to hold back from coding new stuff in order for things to stabilize but it didn't work out. Maybe next month. Instead, we made a whole bunch of cool things:

rimu

• Detect offline instances and stop federating to them until they come back. feamon helped a lot with this.
• Private voting - see https://piefed.social/post/205362 for background.
• Remove moment.js to ease load on clients. We were using a quite heavy javascript library to format dates on the client side but removing the JS and doing it in Python on the backend instead more than halved the amount of JS we need to send (we're now down to 70 KB, gzipped).
• Post teaser redesign - the most significant visual change since the beginning. Image posts now have a much larger preview image and video posts can be played without going to the post itself. YouTube videos are lazy-loaded just before scrolling into view but only if running on AC power. Devices running off a battery (or like Firefox which do not support the battery API) will only load the video once you visit the post page, not while scrolling the feed.
• Use a connection pool for federation - rather than making a new network connection to send an Activity, PieFed will reuse an existing connection where possible. This has less overhead and results in faster federation.

hendrik

• Better notifications about comments buried deep in a thread

freamon

• Better federation of bans from remote admins.
• use HTML portion of Activity instead of Markdown. Lemmy sends Activitys as both Markdown and HTML. For a long time PieFed would use the Markdown and convert it to HTML for display but now it just uses the HTML that Lemmy provides.
• Image alt text federation
• Backfilling improvements especially with image posts.
• Many misc bugfixes

JollyDevelopment

• New theme - "card shadow" - this quickly became a favorite among the dev team and both freamon and myself use it. It's basically the same as the default except there are shadows behind things, giving a more 3D look to the interface and giving a bit more visual hierarchy. It's nice, try it - https://piefed.social/user/settings
• Admin page - instance administration - there is a table showing all the instances you're federating with and stats for each instance.
• Profile export - PieFed has had the functionality to import settings from a Lemmy profile for a long time but now it's possible to go the other way and export settings from PieFed to Lemmy.
• Add remote form - The form for adding a remote community used to require you to type the community as !whatever@instance.com but now you can give the URL as well, e.g. https://instance.com/c/whatever

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As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!

I saw today that they changed a lot about UI in the timeline. The vote buttons are at bottom instead of on the right side. Images are not tiny thumbnails anymore. Even, the thumbnails feel better somehow. I love all these changes.

The only small nitpick I have is that, the vote buttons are a little small, it feels more so in the main post. And a very unreasonable complaint, that I don't think need to be addressed, would be, the vote buttons are too generic. Would love a little more style and better colour contrast.

During the installation, it is just "Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon" but if we use the link, it becomes "A blocklist for QAnon, conspiracy, fake news, nazi websites.", then "An anti-fascist domains blocklist of QAnon, conspiracy, fake news, far-right and discriminatory websites.". Not a bad thing if there is only that in the list.

In reality, it is also activism against government and the right at least for content from France.

The error message in english :

An unexpected error has occurred

Sorry for the inconvenience! Please let us know about this, so we can repair it and make PieFed better for everyone.

It blocks governmental websites. It should not be enabled by default.

It blocks center/center-right/right party with the comment "Macron démission". It is cleary activism.

It gives to the piefed project a bad image because it is not very serious to include anti feature without documentation to explain it (the error message is not very clear).

How to solve the issue ?
- do not include the blocklist by default
OR
- remove any website which is not "QAnon, conspiracy, fake news, far-right and discriminatory" AND change the error message
OR
- explain the blocklist in the installation informations AND change the error message

I deleted the entire blocklist from my instance.

I appreciate that a page doesn't seem to have to reload when I hit the back button, it remembers the position on the page where I was at before.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate that clicking on the 'comments' button takes a user directly to the comments section of a post and isn't just a duplicate button like most of the other implementations I've seen. Awesome :)

I set up an instance of pyfed at https://eventhorizondataflow.pagekite.me/ but as far as I can tell it doesn't seem to be federating. Subscribing to communities works initially, but no new content comes through. However, I can manually add new remote posts (and added a quick hack to rebackfill a community to keep up to date).

I also tried posting from my instance to c/playground here but they don't seem to be coming through.

I'm not seeing too much in the logs or in the activity page (under Admins). For posting to c/playground for example, I can see the CREATE activity to piefed.social - that is simply marked as a green success.

Looking for ideas on how to debug this further.

Hello everyone! I'm new here... I had been testing Fediverse interoperability on Lemmy but I didn't like what I saw: there were several quirks and flaws that made no sense to me. Several people mentioned PieFed as an alternative and that's why I'm here - I'd like to compare/contrast features and see if PieFed does things differently.

I should mention that I have a blog whose mission is to introduce the Fediverse to non-technical people, to get them to leave the walled gardens of Big Tech: The Future is Federated . I've been doing a show and tell of interoperability between Mastodon and Pixelfed , Friendica and the rest of the Fediverse and I've shown what happens when you federate a Wordpress blog . My new focus in on the "Threadiverse", so Lemmy it is.

I was disappointed when I published my first post on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/post/18635732) and noticed that:

1. hashtags don't work
2. account mentions don't work either (and I was told they do federate in comments, not the first post - whaaaat?!?)

It's cool I was able to find my original post on here (https://piefed.social/post/198179) and I wonder if you have any tips / words of advice regading things that PieFed does and Lemmy doesn't do. I'm really curious.

And please bear with me, I'm going to mention my Mastodon account ( @_elena@mastodon.social ) and my Lemmy account (@elena@lemmy.world) to see if anything happens when I hit post. And bear with me one more time and let me try hashtags here, like #TheFutureisFederated.

Thanks for your patience with this newbie! 😅

Elena

Edit: I included the URL of my Mastodon profile to see if it would federate

A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:

• Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field
• Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.
• Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with
• Added a suggest a topic form

"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.

Also I did a few things:

• Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar
• Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.
• Some mastodon integration bugs
• Wrote a guide about how to install the PieFed mobile app

As you can see we don't have a lot of really big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.

Hello everyone,

As I discovered that Piefed allows to actually have a "New comments" filter (it's "Active": https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/275#issuecomment-2152580)), I have been giving it another try.

It's quite nice so far, but I haven't found how to block a community from the website. The three dots menu for a community allows to block the author, the domain, the instance, but not the community itself. Am I missing something?

Just a quick note to recognize that the first lines of PieFed code were published on the 28th July 2023, just over a year ago. Since then there have been 1400+ changes made by 9 people, involving adding 88,000 lines of code and removing 28,000 lines. The issue queue has 98 open and 99 closed issues.

While join.piefed.social went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that piefed.social went live on 4th January 2024.

Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.

What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!

attempting to make sense of the #Piefed logo

@piefed_meta

People new to federation are wandering elsewhere. If the logged-in screen is anything like what I see as a guest, I'm not surprised. I found this through my own instance's search feature.

Over the last 3 weeks there have been significant contributions from h3ndrik and myself.

H3ndrik

• Many many under the hood improvements. Simplifying code & improving performance.
• Better lightbox
• Improve post teaser layout

Rimu

• Mod log which shows all moderator actions

• The “Rational discourse toolkit” block in the bottom right is now optional - instance admins can turn it off in the settings.

• Staff role - some admin tasks can be delegated to a supporting role which can do limited things. Which operations the supporting role can do can be controlled with checkboxes. This is nearly complete and just needs a bit more elbow grease.
  

• A.gup.pe integration - These are a kind of basic community / group function built on Mastodon. About 20% of new posts on piefed.social are coming from Mastodon, mostly via a.gup.pe. These groups include

  • https://piefed.social/c/photography@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/actuallyautistic@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/auscovid19@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/fedibikes_de@a.gup.pe (German)
  • https://piefed.social/c/classicalmusic@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/histodons@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/actuallyadhd@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/bookstodon@a.gup.pe

• Community wikis - moderators can create pages that serve as a resource for the community. Each page has revisions that can be reverted to. See a demo at https://join.piefed.social/vlog/piefed_wikis.mp4.

A new contributor, h3ndrik, has made significant improvements to the filtering options for NSFW/NSFL content and I've also added some options to the same form which control when comments are collapsed or hidden.

Previously, NSFW was a yes or no option but now you can choose to have it unblurred, blurred, semi-transparent or entirely hidden.

The defaults values for collapse and hide are:

• when a comment has a score of -10 it is shown but in a collapsed state. You can click on it to expand it and read it. This has always been the case but now you can change that threshold.
• a score of -20 means the comment will not be shown. There is no way to make it visible and no indication that it was ever posted and no temptation to click on it.

You might want to review those settings to make sure they're suitable for you: https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters. If you don't want comments hidden then remove the -20 from that field or set it to -1000.

For the last few weeks our focus has been on fixing bugs and improving stability. There have been 3 people who have launched new PieFed instances, bringing the total to 4, which brought up a slew of new issues and feature requests. Close collaboration with those new instance admins yielded many positive improvements and a slew of PRs to merge.

Despite this “under the hood” focus there were a few quite visible features added & changes made:

Bookmark (save) posts and comments

Click the three dots on any post or comment and you’ll see a Bookmark menu item. Access your bookmarks using the menu item on the Account menu. Saved posts are sorted based on when they were saved, not when the post was made.

Announcement banner on home page

I’ll link to this post from the home page so you can see it in action.

Japanese language

Translation is complete enough to be usable, thanks to karasugawasu

Hashtags have a RSS feed

Topics and Communities have had a feed for a while but now hashtags do too. Thanks to Dave Lane for the idea.

Automatic archive.ph link on some link posts

Some websites are especially important and really need an archive link. When the poster does not provide one, PieFed will add it.

Ctrl + Enter to submit a post or comment

While typing a new comment you can hit this key combination to submit the comment. Thanks for reminder about this forgotten issue, Jeena.

“Features for growing healthy communities”

I wrote a blog post describing some of the admin features that are available for rooting out bad apples.

Some people felt I had gone too far, perhaps rightly so.

General thoughts

It is encouraging to see more instances sprouting up and to have code contributions from even more people. Activity in the repository has never been higher and the Matrix channel is becoming quite chatty!

I am traveling overseas while working my day job so it is difficult to put as much effort into PieFed as I have in the past. When I return home in August there will probably be a large chunk of paid work to do alongside my regular job so I expect to be quite busy then too. Fortunately there is a trend towards me doing less coding myself and more merging in other people’s code so PieFed development will continue on regardless.

PieFed is entirely free and open source and has not received any grants or funding. If you find it useful and would like to support the project, please consider donating using Patreon.

TLDR: The main reason was Lemmy hogging sever resources.

Last year, during the Reddit 2023 API controversy I finally deleted my account and moved on to Lemmy. Here’s a look at my experiences and why I eventually decided to switch to PieFed.

Every mod action would automatically create a new post. Anyone could see what is going on and express their approval / disapproval with votes. Maybe even comment on the post.

It should probably be a local-only community (no federation) to avoid clogging up other instance's "All" feed with mod actions?

What do you think of this idea?

When I used to use Reddit, one of my favorite things about it was the design of the navigation. Specifically I am referring to when you open a post, and the only thing needed to go back is to click in the margin.

Alexandrite also implements this same type of functionality.

If it hasn't been suggested already, I'd like to know if this is something that could be implemented here as well.