this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

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230
PieFed 1.4 is released - emoji, federated stackoverflow and AI content filters (codeberg.org)
submitted 18 hours ago by perishthethought@piefed.social to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This is our biggest release yet, including more finished tasks than any of our previous ones. Below is a summary of the highlights:

What's new

Posts & communities can be labelled as AI-generated and people can choose to hide all posts tagged that way. Very similar to how NSFW works.

Comments can be marked as an Answer, like on StackOverflow.

React to posts and comments with an emoji.

Hide an individual post from yourself, without blocking the author.

PieFed is now in the Yunohost app store, making initial setup easier.

When banned from a remote instance you cannot make local-only posts in their communities.

Honeypot to automatically IP ban badly-behaved crawlers.

https://lemmy-federate.com/ integration, making PieFed communities get more exposure.

"Share on Mastodon" menu item on posts.

Vastly improve docs for new developers, see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs.

Language selection is more visible during post creation.

Tag clouds can also be viewed as a list of tags.

View post/comment markdown.

Bot accounts are not included in community statistics.

Footnote support in markdown.

Polish translation.

Better HTTP caching, which reduces dependence on Cloudflare.

Bugs

Passkey fixes.

Polls can now have up to 15 options.

User profile performance improved.

Don't allow bypassing minimum username length and post title with whitespace.

Polls and Events can no longer be posted into Lemmy communities.

API

Additional user settings can be set through the api, including Extra Fields.

Fetch url metadata.

Sort comments by controversial.

Comment search now works.

Hashtags.

Events.

Polls.

Emoji reactions on posts and comments.

See https://piefed.social/c/piefed_api for more details.

To upgrade

To upgrade from 1.3.x:

git pull  
git checkout v1.4.x  
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

There is a big database migration that will take a few minutes to run. How long will vary depending on how old your instance is - older instances will have more content to process. It took ~25 minutes on piefed.social so expect it to be less than that.

Donations

PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.

Donations can be made via Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 15 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

It's this kind of thinig that makes me think of PieFed as just a pile of hacks with no serious consideration for the Fediverse

Designating which comment is an answer involves federating a new Activity:

{  
         "id": "https://piefed.social/activities/answer/hgb4iO4b8UAFRTn", 
         "type": "ChooseAnswer",  
         "actor": "https://piefed.socialz/u/rimu", 
         "object": "https://piefed.ngrok.app/comment/224",  
         "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "https://w3id.org/security/v1"],  
         "audience": "https://crust.piefed.social/c/linux_questions",  
         "to": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],  
         "cc": ["https://crust.piefed.social/c/linux_questions"]  
}

There are at least three different ways to implement this in a way compatible with ActivityPub:

  1. Send an "as:accept" activity with the comment as the object.
  2. Add an attribute for the comment indicating that it has been selected.
  3. Create a collection for chosen answers, add to the post object.

And even if this type of new activity was a necessity, they could add their own extensions via a proper JSON-LD context definition. But they completely disregard JSON-LD, which means that they expect other servers to either (1) adopt their ad-hoc vocabulary or (2) ignore it completely and keep this idea that "Only PieFed has these features".

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Feel free to open a PR: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi

[–] rglullis@communick.news 12 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

This is not a matter of "opening a PR". The fact that they are adding features in this completely ad-hoc manner shows that they are prioritizing features for piefed over interoperability with the wider Fediverse. If my job was to go around convincing every AP developer that their approach is flawed and to fix their mistakes, I'd be doing nothing else with my life.

What I can do though is to create a framework that makes it easy to work with JSON-LD and occasionally file bug reports.

An aside: this "feel free to open a PR" - without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand - is the standard passive-aggressive response from every developer who is not interested in making the change. It's sad to see that it's also becoming the go-to retort for the project cheerleaders...

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

"feel free to open a PR" - without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand - is the standard passive-aggressive response from every developer who is not interested in making the change.

Man, the entitlement. Especially coming from the only person I know of who is here with the explicit goal of monetizing the platform.

There's a way of voicing concerns and criticisms in a way that is constructive, helpful, and in good faith, inviting to an open discussion with concerned parties. Yours is not that.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Believing that the we need professional hosting providers to have a sustainable Fediverse != "Monetizing the platform".

Besides, I've already voiced similar concerns through different venues. The devs made it clear they are not interested in developing software with a focus on standards compliance. They care about throwing as many features as possible to their system.

It's fine, it's their project, they can do whatever they want. It doesn't mean that I don't have the right to have an opinion about it.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 12 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

How is creating a new Activity type preventing compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse? Is there any other Fediverse platform that has a similar feature that Piefed could have been replicated?

When you're the first one doing something with ActivityPub, you have to create it yourself. This is not perfect, and you raise valid points, hence my suggestion to engage on the Codeberg.

On the other hand, for other Piefed features inspired by existing implementations such as the emoji reactions, the feature is compatible with those platforms which already supported the feature.

Regarding your last paragraph, picking the one feature for which the implementation can be improved and saying "It’s this kind of thinig that makes me think of PieFed as just a pile of hacks with no serious consideration for the Fediverse" while it's clearly not true seems fully aggressive.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Because there is no real need for Piefed to create their own activity type besides it being slightly easier for their devs to do everything exactly the way they want.

But this is very detrimental to the fediverse because it means that everyone would have to change their software to suit the needs of Piefed.

This could be warranted if there was no way to do it with existing protocols. But as the other user stated above there is no real need for the way they are doing it. It is very hacky and prevents the rest of the fediverse from viewing this Piefed specific content unless they implement this unnecessary message type.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

How is creating a new Activity type preventing compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse?

If they chose to use any of the 3 solutions I described, there would be no changes on the other servers to receive and parse the message. But because it uses a different type, now those serves that want to store the information about an answer being accepted have to write code specifically to handle messages from PieFed.

It also works in the other direction: if I want to send an "accept" activity for a comment, I could do it from my server and PieFed could easily understand it as well. But because they want to create their own ad-hoc solution, then they won't be able to.

When you’re the first one doing something with ActivityPub, you have to create it yourself.

No, you don't. The whole point of Linked Data and RDF is that nodes can send data to each other without having to agree on any new protocol

Piefed features inspired by existing implementations such as the emoji reactions

You are only making my point. Emojis have already a defined extension, this is why it's easier to adopt it.

picking the one feature

It's not just that. They also proposed some ad-hoc activities for moderation in the past and their "import community" works by taking posts and rewriting them as if they originated in the piefed instance. These are all signs that the devs either don't understand or don't care about JSON-LD as an standard.

[–] FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 3 points 1 hour ago

This is just my personal opinion, so feel free to disregard.

But I feel you raise some decent points. But you‘re commenting them in such an adversarial manner that it makes it unlikely the piefed devs will take you seriously.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

What ad hoc activities?

And community migration being fully realised has massive fediverse support.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

'ChooseAnswer' is not an object type defined by activitystreams, and the json-ld context provided by PieFed server has no extension referring to it.

This means that any server ingests messages to an inbox using RDF will see this document and think "this is invalid" and drop it. If it sent as:accept instead, it would work without any modification.

Re: community migration, there is at least one other person besides me that said "when I post something to one community, and PieFed says that I also said that on another place when I didn't, then the server is fabricating Information".

To illustrate the point: if suddenly we adopted JSON-LD signatures as a message authentication system, then all messages from imported communities would fail.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, there are some people against it. But the majority of the fediverse support the idea of modular communities.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

You can have "modular communities" without violating basic compatibility with the standards. But it is harder to do it and the end users don't see the potential issues, they will gladly cheer you to do it in the easiest way.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Yeah, but if I recall you specifically - in the past (activitypub issues aside) - took specific issue with the concept of moving a user's posts, subscribers etc to another instance via hypothetical community migration.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

No more time for this today.

Merry Christmas everyone.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

There are people whose concerns it is worth listening to. I'm sure they will show up eventually.

Happy holidays!

[–] The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world 37 points 17 hours ago

So many features!

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 hours ago

Is it me or does PieFed sound like a horse's piaffe?

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 5 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Comments can be marked as an Answer, like on StackOverflow.

Was anything changed about how this federates? If no, what protections are in place against someone just patching their instance software to always return an "answer": true on Notes?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 10 points 11 hours ago

That won't have any effect unless the author of the Note is the same as the author of the original post. You're welcome to try it.

The json structure used during federation does not limit the kind of access control checks we can do.

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 8 points 11 hours ago

I don't think so, but I wasn't working on it. Tagging @rimu@piefed.social for awareness.

To do this, they would need to be an admin running a modified version of the software no? If that was really happening with any kind of regularity, it would surely be grounds for defederation.

In any case, if this were to become an issue, then I am sure we can change it. We have already had to change how community flair federates a few times to try to keep up with lemmy's PRs on the feature to try to make sure it is compatible.

[–] Aids@lemmy.ml 12 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

I’m on voyager app signed in to Lenny.ml how would I go about using this ? Or would this have to be incorporated by the admins if Leyte.ml ?

[–] Zombie@feddit.uk 4 points 4 hours ago

How I imagine everyone dresses on Lenny.ml

[–] Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 8 points 9 hours ago

I use Piefed on Voyager, they don't really support any of the major features of Piefed.

I still use the mobile WebUI mostly.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 39 points 17 hours ago

Piefed is an entirely different software. You would have to sign up to a piefed instance.

[–] SatyrSack@quokk.au 18 points 17 hours ago

These also mostly look like things that Voyager would also need to add support for on their side as well. Voyager definitely supports signing into a PieFed account, browsing, commenting, and other basic features, but not all PieFed features currently work.

[–] Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 17 hours ago

I can’t wait for my instance to update, this all sounds great!