PieFed Meta

!piefed_api@piefed.social

This community is for announcements and discussions about the PieFed API - changes, improvements and general co-ordination between the frontend developers and the core of PieFed. If you're developing an app for PieFed, you want to keep an eye on this!

PieFed is now supported by Summit as of release v1.67.1.

Checkout the app here: Summit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33034246

Add support for PieFed.

Full changelog

• Add support for PieFed.
• Fix a bug where when you open a post, the spinner will appear to stutter for a moment.
• Fix a bug where pulling to refresh on the post screen will cause all comments to refresh even if they have not changed.
• Fix a bug where inline images will sometimes not load until the screen is refreshed.
• Fix a bug where "Prev" button doesn't load the page if pressed on page 2 when Infinity mode is off.

Update

Fix some bugs and re-releasing as v1.67.1

• Add some default PieFed instances to the login form auto-complete.
• Fix a bug where you can't log into PieFed with a password with more than 60 characters.

Update 2

Release should be fully rolled out now.

Update 3

Fix more bugs and releasing the fixes as v1.67.2.

• Fix a bug on PieFed where updating a comment/post will not refresh the comment/post.
• Fix a bug where uploading an image will fail with an error.
• Fix a bug on PieFed where opening a comment will sometimes error.
• Fix a bug on PieFed where Webp files cannot be uploaded.

I was looking at Voyager on my phone and saw communities I hadn't subscribed to in my home feed, and upvotes on posts I hadn't voted on (or even seen before). When I tried to remove the upvotes, a message said "problem voting, please try again".

Thankfully, when I view PieFed through Firefox, these problems don't exist, so it must be the app. Not overly surprising since it was initially developed for Lemmy, I believe.

Not sure what changed to cause this problem or whether the change was in Voyager or PieFed.

The other day, it was at 96%. This morning, it was at 88%. Now, a few hours later, it's at 80%. What's going on?

I've started a few communities and like it here. I try to be nice and upbeat. My posts have been received well, not seeing downvotes...

Edit: I'm marking this solved. I understand it now. Thank you all for being so helpful!

Edit Edit: After days of upvoting, I'm back at 96%. I juked the stats!

If one of those posts should be obscured, it's not the one about a strategy game with muskets! :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

If you haven't tried @blorp yet, now is a good time! It just added support for @piefed_meta so now it supports both Lemmy and Piefed!

Wow it’s been a crazy month and a half of working on this. This PieFed update was a doozy (mostly due to code debt in decoupling Blorp from Lemmy), but I’m so happy it turned out as well as it did.

Try it yourself!
You will need to click the user icon (top right cornet), login or add account, then select a PieFed server

• iOS
• Android
• Web
• MacOS

PieFed support is still a little experimental. I’m currently working through some issues with comment loading. But I’ve been using PieFed with Blorp for a couple weeks now, and I love it.

If you decide to check it out, keep the app up to date for latest PieFed bug fixes.

Edit: anyone reading this in the future. The NSFW issue mentioned in the comments has been fixed in v1.9.2.

There have been some exciting new things but I sorta don't want to peanut gallery while things are in motion. Whats a good place to hear about changes and give feedback on the particular thing?

PieFed now includes a simple plugin engine so third parties can extend PieFed functionality without adding their code to the main PieFed project. It's pretty simple and bare-bones at the moment and is more of a 'tech preview' stage rather than something to get too serious about.

Each plugin is a directory under app/plugins and must include a init.py file. In that file there must be a plugin_info() function. Plugins can have their code executed by adding a @hook decorator to a function, as in the image above.

The example plugin that comes with PieFed just prints some debugging messages to the console before and after a post is created but the sky is the limit. Eventually plugins could modify data at any stage of the content lifecycle, react to people joining or leaving a community, votes, send email, etc etc.

What I've built today is just the beginning and I'm hoping other contributors will take this framework and add more hooks and incorporate it into the rest of the system.

Opção de ferramenta de fórum federada, alternativa ao Lemmy desenvolvida em Python com Flask.

@piefed_meta #piefed #python #flask

@altbot
https://piefed.social/f/educational

Tô bem impressionado com o @piefed_meta, achei mais interessante que o Lemmy.

1. I know there is "issues" in the repo
   But I rather aim to bring up a discussion than raise technical issue
2. I know there is the bell button on the post
   But I think it would be QoL if that option was also next to "Comment" button

Sometimes I write a comment on a post that is relatively new. Often, in such cases, I am interested in what others comment. Having a checkbox to get notified of other comments (effectively clicking the bell button via the action of commenting) would be handy

Also, same thing for comment on another comment. I often am interested in what others will write in response to the comment I'm commenting on

So I think it might be a good idea to have not only the child notification checkbox, but also parent notification one

The default position of the checkbox could be changed in settings or just remembered from the previous comment

What does PieFed Meta think of this?

I've been considering making the move to Piefed for a while, but I suppose there are a few things that I haven't been able to find that I was wondering about.

First, what is Piefed.social's structural situation like? After having survived the fall of Kbin (big RIP) and seen Lemm.ee fall because of admins who cannot continue for completely understandable and unavoidable personal reasons, what is Piefed's situation there? I don't see the list of admins on the sidebar like in Lemmy instances, do you have enough admins to weather growth? Is there a broader org you could theoretically cooperate with if there was a sudden need for admins?

Second, what is Piefed's financial situation like? I've seen plenty of sites, though so far no major Fediverse instances, fall because of an inability to keep donations and expenses in order. I see the donation page, but what is the financial health of the instance like? Some instances post monthly or yearly reviews of the financial situation, but if Piefed does, I don't know where to find it.

Third, what is Piefed's position on genocide? I fucking hate that I have to ask this, but having seen too many people on the Fediverse deny the Holodomor, Uyghur genocide, etc, including the Lemmy devs themselves (who are no small part of the reason why I'm considering making the move), I don't want to move here and then find out that the position of the admins is something horrific. I don't expect that the admins intend to play whack-a-mole with genocide deniers themselves, since if anything that's properly the job of moderators and communities to drive the bastards out, but simply knowing that the admins are not supporters of genocide denial would put my mind at ease a great deal.

Fourth, what is the defederation policy of Piefed.social?

Thank you for your time!

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 !

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.

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

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

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.

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.