PieFed Meta

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32735692

Features

• Added initial support for logging into PieFed instances. Please note that many features (e.g., image uploads, inbox, and moderation) are not yet supported.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed images in post bodies always being blurred

Thank you @innermeerkat@jlai.lu !

https://piefed.social/post/1004382

Same post viewed in Lemmy, it's all squashed into the same space as horizontal text.

https://lemmy.ca/post

Tl;dr: I think we have too much "empty" content and noise here and it drags down the place for 2 years now. Does PieFed include an approach to change the situation?

I'm sorry, this is going to be a bit of a rant. And about PieFed's role in the "Lemmy" community and more broadly, what I think the place should be about. Feel free to skip this, unless you have a good amount of time to waste to read my long post and you want to think about the future of the community here.

To preface this: I'm mainly here on the Threadiverse for the comments. To have meaningful conversations with people. That could be the charm of this place. Yet, that's regularly not what happens here.

The high-frequency posters use Lemmy to dump the news of the day and re-post memes. And that's okay if people want that, I myself try to cut down a bit on news shaped by social media, so again it's mainly the comment thread underneath that I deem useful, not the post itself, since we have the news at a bazillion other places and it's not what sets this place apart. (Plus I think following the outcry of the day is corrosive and usually less informative than it seems, so I went further and actively unsubscribed from many of the big communities here.)

And the now more meaningful (to me) part isn't huge by any means. I comment on things and write answers to questions, some communities work very well and it leads to a conversation or I can help someone with their Linux woes. Half the time at least I type something into the void and it feels like I've wasted my time since I don't get any replies, maybe one or two upvotes at best and not even OP engages. So I wonder why they even made the post. Clearly not because they want to talk about something.

I think the interesting part of the Threadiverse needs to grow so I can have meaningful conversations here. When I look at the user count of Lemmy, I see how it stagnates at about 45k users for 2 years now. Sometimes we get an influx of a few thousand users but we're not attractive to them, so we always lose them again. And the place just stays whatever it is. I think not really attracting people and at the same time losing that many people constantly (who actively volunteered to have a look at the place) tells us something.

I think we could do better than that and set the place apart from countless other platforms in many ways. But that seems to a minority opinion in the bigger Threadiverse. The Lemmy devs regularly say it doesn't need to grow and it'll maybe grow organically (which it doesn't). Most users here tell me we need to dump more posts in an desperate attempt to kickstart engagement. I think we've tried that for 2 years now and it clearly doesn't work. On the contrary, it's kind of empty (or fabricated) content and I'll find out once I try to engage, that these are lower quality, less engagement than some other posts. And it actively drowns the few people talking to each other in added noise. I think the idea to address the issue this way is exactly why Lemmy stagnates and why we always lose all the users that come here, sign up to have a look and then leave again, because this isn't what they've been looking for. (And this is a multi-faceted issue, we have some other drama and issues here as well, but this post is long enough, so I'll skip that here, feel free to add your perspective in the comments.)

Now this week I've complained a bit, since I saw piefed.social communities with really high-quality conversation. And then the same people come, determine we need more content, and they dump re-posts of the lemmy.ml equivalent over their heads. And then I've taken tens of minutes out of my day to reply to posts elsewhere (not a piefed community) and give a nuanced perspective, only to find out it's unmarked Reddit re-posts, and I've basically wasted my time. It wasn't a genuine question in need for my answer, I was betrayed, tricked into increasing the number of comments underneath something that wasn't even genuine. When I could have spent that time interacting with high-quality conversations instead, which definitely exist as well. It's just that those people drain that. And I can't even tell which is which.

So it actively takes away from quality content. And I end up with a feeling like with the Reddit content bots, fabricating engagement. Which I dislike and specifically avoid. And it makes the entire place feel kind of empty to me, despite the many posts we have each day.

I think first of all people really need to stop dumping posts in an ill-conveived attempt to help. It's a misconception. We need more comments here, not posts. Yet they do the opposite and their user profiles rarely have comments, just hundreds of posts. If you want to grow and foster the place, add comments.

PieFed

That's my perspective, feel free to tell me how it feels to you. I'm definitely not against posts, just against fabricating them, and focusing on an unfit approach instead of doing the right thing.

Now my question: Does PieFed want to address that issue (if it really is an issue to more people than just me)? Is PieFed just a piece of technology, connecting me to the same community, just with an arguably better approach? Or does it go further? Push towards a certain atmosphere, change the community and behaviour? Do we do higher quality communities on piefed.social or are they basically the same thing as the ones before, just on a different domain? Do we go as far as to kick the re-posters so at least the posts aren't just exactly the same?

That'd be mainly social engineering. And I'd really welcome if we had ideals and a clear vision of where to go. We kind of have that. In contrast to some other Fediverse software where I can't see a clear vision.

And then we have technology. We could devise tools to address it. And PieFed already is about providing better tools to address some things. We have an ambivalent view of concepts like Karma. And algorithms to steer attention. I could try to address this with software. Calculate scores and devalue everyone who dumps posts and doesn't contribute to the conversation. That's likely going to give some advantage to conversation itself and foster genuine engagement. Do we want to do that?

And as a bonus question: What's with the entire voting system? Seems I deem different things interesting than what's popular. And that's all the scores underneath posts and comments tell us. So it's of little use to me. A post with 5 upvotes could be as interesting as one with 250 of them, and that happens each day to me. Once I switch the sorting method from "new" to something else, what it does is make lots of interesting content disappear from my feeds.

References:

• Are some questions here just to simulate activity?
• Please be Advised for Help Farmers
• Content jacking/reposting is a problem on Lemmy. and this comment highlighting how what makes other places "great is the community and not the posts."
• Statistics for Lemmy on the Fediverse Observer
• PieFed features for growing healthy communities and PieFed Features
• Moderation & the design of social platforms

I've "flaired" this "Feature request". Mind this is an opinion piece containing my perspective (and preaching). I'd like to hear your's and request the name PieFed to encompass a clear vision, to be not just technology but a broader approach to shape the nature of the society we want to create. And put in lots of effort to actively lead us towards accomplishing more than we do today.

And I definitely need some good ideas and tools to turn my feeds into something that caters to my own needs and wants. If there's some overlap with other people, we could talk about some specifics.

I’m not totally sure if this is a Piefed issue or a Blahaj server issue, so sorry if it’s the wrong spot for this.

I’ve noticed that when I try to search for things, the results I get aren’t as expected. If I don’t select to search a community, post, or comment, I get nothing. Searching for posts or comments also pretty frequently gets me nothing.

Random example: just searching ‘signal’ gets me nothing on both posts and comments, along with nothing if I select nothing. But if I search under communities it gives me a community that is already federated and has threads and comments about Signal.

I've been noticing a few broken links like this on PieFed lately. I don't know if it's something new, or just me noticing it now.

The link breaks part way through. Checking the same post on a Lemmy instance, the link is intact.

Maybe to do with Piefed confusing underscores for formatting with underscores in multiword Wikipedia URLs?

• https://piefed.social/post/1004755#comment_6909226
• https://lemmy.ca/post/47353909/17558984

Since https://piefed.social/f/rpggames seems to be mostly about computer games, I created a bunch of feeds for TTRPG

• EVERYTHING
• tools
• GM corner
• general communitiies
• RSS (very WIP)

If you are interested and those don't appear on the list of feeds on your instance, you might need to use "add remote feed". Also, because my account is not on .social, I couldn't make f/entertainment a parent feed for these.

I created those because I felt those were missing. They are in no way definitive, just a hierarchy of what I am subscribed to. I am open to suggestions, discussion, etc.
I guess we'll iron out Piefed etiquette around feeds in the future

Title. Can't figure out how to crosspost anything in Piefed.

tl;dr - Please only upvote this post if you want Summit to support PieFed.

I was supposed to start doing these starting from v1.64.0, but I forgot so apologizes.

I will start creating one of these posts per major release to gauge interest in PieFed. Y'all have until the next major release to vote. If any of these posts reach 200 upvotes before the poll for the next release I will make the next release focused on adding PieFed support.

Thank you.

Votes are no longer using an alt profile so instead you now have the choice of federating your votes or not. Please go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and see the 'Federate votes' checkbox. It should be showing the opposite of what you had for the 'Vote privately' checkbox that was there before, however the behavior and tradeoffs are really quite different so you might want to revisit that decision.

Whatever you choose there, you can still override that on a case-by-case basis by holding down your mouse button on the voting controls ("long press" on a touch device) of a post/comment.

If this is all news to you, please see https://piefed.social/post/979325 and https://piefed.social/post/956572

A way for people to screen out AI generated content, similar how people can screen out nsfw content already.

It works the same as the nsfw filter except underneath it's an integer instead of a Boolean.

Content authors will flag their content as AI-generated, on a sliding scale from 0 (no AI) to 100 (completely AI generated. Intermediate values could be used too although this amount of nuance may be confusing for some.

Users will be able to set a "AI generated threshold" which filters out content above that threshold. At the UI level this could be presented as a checkbox but maybe a slider would be good.

Mods need to be able to set the AI level on content, as they do now with NSFW content.

Communities will have an AI-gen value too, which is automatically applied to all content within. Instance admins can override this value too, for local or remote communities.

Thoughts?

Due to difficulties making private voting a viable reality , we've been playing around with an alternative approach: public/private votes becomes "federated votes" where you can choose whether to send your vote off to other instances or whether it only counts locally and doesn't get federated.

There are obvious drawbacks to casting a vote that doesn't federate. But this avoids all the issues with which instances to trust (and who decides that) and avoids the distrust generated by all these sockpuppets with weird names running around and the need to explain in difficult technical detail why we're doing that, no it's not vote manipulation, don't ban / defederate us, etc etc

The video shows how the user interface could work. Basically there is a setting in your profile that determines whether your votes federate and an optional override you can use on a case-by-case basis.

There is an assumption here that people will generally choose one mode (public or private) and stick with that for most of their votes. The popup will only be used rarely so the extra clicks and the waiting involved won't be much of an issue.

Thoughts?

cross-posted from: https://vger.social/post/20512447

I'm excited to announce that Voyager now has experimental support for logging in with Piefed! You can try it out today on:

• iOS Testflight
• Android Play Open Testing
• beta.vger.app

This will roll out to the official app stores and vger.app soon(tm), once I’m confident there are no major regressions. If you prefer not to switch to beta builds, just hang tight.

Please note that Piefed support is EXPERIMENTAL! There are still many things that don't work quite right, which I'm hoping to improve over the coming weeks.

The basics including scrolling home/all/local, viewing posts, blocking, commenting and voting should work well. However there are some known issues:

• Can't sign up for a Piefed account in-app, only log in with an existing one
• Subscribed communities list is empty (should be fixed soon!)
• Inbox tab doesn't load
• Comment search doesn't work
• Profile upvoted/downvoted doesn't load
• No moderation tools
• Mark as read doesn't persist
• Creating/editing posts is currently untested
• ...probably a bunch of other stuff too, please let me know below!

Behind the scenes, this interoperability is made possible thanks to aeharding/threadiverse, a new library I am working on to normalize various threadiverse-software APIs. It's open source so any project use it, but it's under heavy development right now. What's cool about this is in the future, adding support for mbin, or whatever else is possible!

Again, feel free to try it out and let me know if there are any more issues to be documented and fixed.

Is it possible to add such a theme, or is it doable by adding some css to the additional css option in settings? for comparison lemmy web ui shows images, links, and text posts without any associated image in a consistent fashion

i know i could use the super compact option but that doesn't show any images at all

tia for any advice

See the install instructions to get the latest release. Switch to the "v1.0.x" git branch to run this release rather than the latest code.

Existing instances:

git pull  
git checkout v1.0.0  
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh  

PieFed usage has been growing very fast lately, with many communities moving to piefed.social from lemm.ee and several new instances such as piefed.ca, piefed.blahaj.zone, and more .

With this increased attention a light has been shone on many previously ignored parts of PieFed so we've been hard at work closing the gaps and incorporating new ideas from new people. Also it has become necessary to begin doing proper releases so instances have a more stable place to park themselves without being exposed to the constant turmoil that comes from running bleeding-edge code in production.

Due to feedback from a wider audience than before, some of the idiosyncratic features that I built because of my personal obsessions have been made optional and OFF by default, such as the 4chan meme filter, meme communities being flagged as 'low quality' and so on. Private voting has fundamental issues and could be removed soon, I'll make a separate post about that.

The API is now in use and the mobile app Interstellar works with it well. Other apps are working on PieFed compatibility too. Again a lot of work went in there to get it ready for prime time.

To sum up - leading up to this release the last few weeks have showed intensive development with major focus on performance optimization, UI/UX improvements and enhanced federation capabilities. We made significant progress on API development, moderation tools, and overall platform stability.

Below is an incomplete list of some things we've worked on in June. Sorry to those whose work I overlooked, it's been a deluge.

rimu (178+ commits)

• Performance Optimizations:
  • Fixed slow API comment/list endpoint (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/883)
  • Added community total_subscriptions_count column (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/881)
  • Optimized API user sorting (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/880)
  • Performance improvements for community sorting (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/879)
  • Home page performance improvements - reduce reliance on redis and optimize jinja templates
  • CORS
• Security & Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed find_instance_id bug
  • Added CSRF token protection on various forms
  • Fixed user reputation update DB deadlocks (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/752)
• UI/UX Improvements:
  • Bootstrap 5 upgrade (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/810)
  • Mega menu implementation - merge Topics and Feeds into one huge "Communities" menu
  • Theme updates and CSS improvements
  • Add your own CSS to PieFed - https://piefed.social/c/piefed_css
  • Import latest language updates from translation team
  • Markdown-based CMS so admins can create static pages
  • Make https://piefed.social/rules using CMS
• Admin Tools: Database migration fixes, config checking, various admin panel enhancements

freamon (45+ commits)

• API Development:
  • Implemented resolve_object endpoint for generic object resolution (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/729)
  • Added API rate limiting and verification endpoints
  • Enhanced API comment/list performance work (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/883)
  • resolve_object API functionality (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/729)
  • Lots to do with moderators in the API
• Federation Improvements:
  • Fixed community federation issues
  • Enhanced mod management via API (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/814)
  • Improved ActivityPub compatibility
  • Federate community bans and user blocks
• Database & Infrastructure:
  • Fixed initial DB setup issues (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/862)
  • Improved migration handling
  • Enhanced query performance
• Project coordination and pull request reviews

wjs018 (25+ commits)

• User Interface Enhancements:
  • Blocking/unblocking disambiguation for local vs remote users (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/892)
  • Added seamless bookmark management with HTMX (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/864)
  • Community page redesign and sidebar improvements (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/806)
  • Added domains to posts in feeds (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/807)
  • Communities page redesign
• Content Features:
  • Implemented spoiler flair with image blurring (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/759)
  • Better blockquote and code block styling (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/818)
  • Inline spoiler text support (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/788)
  • Text blurring in post previews
• Admin Features:
  • Community creation restrictions for admins (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/816)
  • Additional admin settings panel (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/797)
  • Low quality community filtering (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/820)
  • Do not automatically add piefed.social to trusted instances

JollyDevelopment (8 commits)

• Moderation Tools: Find and ban user feature for community moderation (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/857)
• Feed Management:
  • Fixed feed auto-follow functionality (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/856)
  • Feed icon upload fixes (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/829)
  • Enhanced feed link handling (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/849)

h3ndrik (12 commits)

• Fix things rimu broke:
  • Restored user notes after rewrite (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/790)
  • Restored user flair functionality after rewrite
• Forms & Security:
  • Added missing CSRF tokens to polls and other forms (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/870)
  • Made donate page editable via CMS (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/830)
• Notifications: Fixed scheduled post notifications (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/867)

Neshura (5 commits)

• More accurate server overload warning (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/871)
• Feed Management:
  • Fixed feed deletion performance issues (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/886)
  • Fixed feed owner unsubscribe issue (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/885)
• Documentation: Updated INSTALL.md

karasugawasu (1 commit)

• Internationalization: Added ruby annotation support for Japanese text (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/865)

sleeping-miyagi (several commits)

• Various video embedding improvements and fixes

quokkau (2 commits)

• UI Fixes: Fixed chat avatar sizing issues (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/825)

supakaity (1 commit)

• Registration: CAPTCHA is optional (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/pulls/735)

fxomt (1 commit)

• Theming: Updated fxomt theme

Hello folks: I'm wondering if there's anything in the UI or API to view the status of federation/list of federated instances. Largely, this is for personal curiosity but, it could be useful for users deciding what instance to join and for quickly detecting odd federation behavior/API compatibility breakages.

I've seen a lot of people say the piefed API is similar to the lemmy api.

Will it become more distinct as time goes on, or do you plan on keeping them similar?

Which version of the lemmy API is it similar to? v3 or v4?

I post things every so often but honetly I understand people are busy and developing is not a cake walk. I am continually amazed as things just show up. Seperating the comments and posts for users is just massive for evaluating a troll user because the posts tend to be more karma fishing while the comments tend to show what its really doing. Im so impressed at how piefed is working to improve so much and kudos to everyone working on it. This is actually why I originally was on kbin as earnest definately was looking to improve, improve, improve. I still worry about what happened to him. Need closure on his situation and I hope its good or at least better.

EDIT: Initial self-votes don't federate, so it seems this specific way doesn't work.

Am I missing something, or is Piefed's private voting kinda trivial to reverse engineer as long as every user by default upvotes every post and comment they make?

If you have a username and want to find the matching private voting ID, search through that user's posts and comments for an entry that only has one upvote. The vote cast on that entry will be the private voting ID.

If you have a private voting ID and want to find the matching username, search through all votes cast by the private voting ID to find a post/comment that only has one upvote. The user that posted that entry will be the original user.

If it really is this easy, it seems like it's sort of a false sense of security. On the other hand, if automatic upvoting of your own content could be disabled by default, that would prevent this from working.

For example, things that are posted in one instance being delayed in the other, things that are removed not being removed, name changes not showing up, being directed to the wrong places when searching things, info not showing up letting people know they are banned, etc.

I have noticed all of these.

What features made you choose PieFed over Mbin/Lemmy?
What features do they have that you’d like to see in PieFed?

I've created !polls@piefed.social. Normally I would go to the big community promo communities on Lemmy and promote it there. But, since this is a polls community and Lemmy doesn't support polls yet, the community is completely empty when viewed from Lemmy.

I don't really know where else I could go to tell people that this community exists. I hope it's okay to post it here.