PieFed API & mobile app dev

PieFed v1.4 (to be released very soon) will have emoji reactions on posts and comments. An emoji reaction can be a unicode character like 😍 or a colon-delineated string like :piefed: which gets automatically converted into an image when the post/comment is displayed.

Setting a reaction uses the same API endpoint as casting a vote (and behind the scenes reactions are federated as Likes, for Lemmy compatibility) but with an emoji element added to the JSON payload.

Also when looking at a post or comment in the API there is an emoji_reactions element that can be used to get a summary of the reactions that have happened so far. Compare https://crust.piefed.social/api/alpha/comment?id=456791 with https://crust.piefed.social/post/84566#comment_456791 to see what I mean.

Do a GET on /api/v3/site to retrieve a list of all the custom emoji (the ones with :something:) that this instance knows about and to find what images to convert usages of them in emoji_reactions to.

/api/alpha/post/site_metadata

e.g. https://crust.piefed.social/api/alpha/post/site_metadata?url=https%3A%2F%2Fedition.cnn.com%2F2025%2F12%2F02%2Fpolitics%2Fsecond-strike-drug-boat-trump-hegseth

It functions identically to Lemmy's endpoint of the same name although embed_video_url is never populated.

Over the last few days there's been a raft of other API changes too, to do with

• The new Gen AI filter (user settings to determine), an AI label on posts, etc.
• Marking comments as an answer. Each comment has an answer boolean on it and there's an endpoint to toggle it. Also you can change whether a community is a Q n A community or not in the community edit endpoint.

GET /api/alpha/search now uses the same full-text search engine as the web UI so you can sort results by relevance. e.g.

https://piefed.crust.social/api/alpha/search?q=test&type_=Posts&sort=Relevance

Also if the q parameter has a value then read posts are included in the results regardless of what the user's setting is for hiding read posts. That is to avoid this problem: https://piefed.social/c/lemmyconnect/p/1502152/is-there-any-way-to-include-read-posts-in-search-results

POST /api/alpha/domain/block

A domain block will stop all posts that links to that domain from being returned by /api/alpha/post/list for that user.

See https://piefed.social/api/alpha/swagger for details.