PieFed Meta

We've brainstormed a few ideas for where we could focus our development efforts this year and created a post in a community for each idea.

Have you tried it? It got merged 3 weeks ago and is a bit hidden. You have to go to a user's profile page, click "More" and then "Edit note".

December was a big month for us, it took quite a while to write this up.

Looking at installing piefed on a pi 4. Is there a script I can use to get it up and running? I found the official instructions, and while I can go through it, its most likely going to take some time. Thought I would ask before I get too far along in the process.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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:

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.

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).

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.

A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:

Hello everyone,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here's some development highlights from the last 3 weeks and who contributed:

Thanks to amazing work by @andrew_s@piefed.social, PieFed can now federate with PeerTube - channels from a PeerTube instance show up as communities in PieFed and each video is a post which can be voted on and commented on.

Here's some highlights from the last 3 weeks and who contributed:

Both kbin.social and lemmy.ml are out of order as for now. (At least there are other ones)

Lemmy 0.19.x added a data export function that produces a file containing a list of all the communities you've subscribed to and communities and people you've blocked. As of now, PieFed can import that file!

There's been a lot going on lately. Here's some highlights from the last 4 weeks and who contributed:

I noticed responding to posts in communities hosted at lemmy.ml gives the following warning:

Until now, development has proceeded pretty loosely - we work on whatever seems cool at the time. This is fine but if we collaborate on a decision about priorities then perhaps we'll all be pulling in the same direction a bit more often. If the decision is made in public with all stakeholders, perhaps we'll get some buy-in.

Moderators can:

There's more than one way to do this, of course. For group-based forums like piefed, I think the most promising way is to automatically create a local community for each person that someone wants to follow. Incoming activity is then put into the appropriate community, and so you have a consistent UI of UserA has posted to technology@wherever, and UserB has posted to [UserB's community]@piefed.social. This avoids the '2 websites in 1' look that can happen when a site wants to display both lemmy-like communities and mastodon-like microblogs.

I put together a nostalgic theme, in the style of 1980s monitors. It uses the same font that the Hercules graphics adapter had. Try it out by choosing "Hercules 1982" at https://piefed.social/user/settings.

Lemmy's spoiler format is ::: spoiler VISIBLE HIDDEN 1 HIDDEN 2 :::

In honor of Trans Visibility Day, I've made a theme for PieFed inspired by the trans pride flag and set it as the default theme.

I've been thinking about what to do about cross-posts (e.g. where the same link is uploaded to both fediverse@lemmy.world and fediverse@lemmy.ml).

For me personally, it makes sense to have one 'announcement'-style community per software as part of the main Fediverse topic, instead of delegating it to a subtopic

As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content. This change appeals to a larger audience interested in such content, creating a vicious cycle where valuable discussions are overshadowed and marginalized by the platform's primary demographic.

I'm excited to see the new meme browsing interface feature in PieFed. I expected PieFed to be yet another Reddit clone using a different software stack and without any innovation. I believe there's an opportunity to take things a step further by blending the best elements of platforms like Reddit and image boards like Safebooru.

Discord is a very popular chat application which has a business model that is partly based around the concept of Server Boosts. In this model, people "boost" (sponsor) the "servers" (chat rooms) they are part of. They do so by paying Discord the parent company, but it unlocks benefits for both the chat rooms they are a member of and want to support (enabling more features for all users of the chat room) and for themselves (they get more features as well as labels that show they support a particular room). Discord is targeted at gamers and therefore Server Boosts are heavily gamified and commercialized, however the core is clever and based around solidarity for the common space that people create, and something other projects could draw inspiration from. Having a way in which people can materially support the communities they are part of can possibly be a path to financial sustainability either for pyfedi the project or for individual instances.

Or both?

PieFed seems to be the only fedi software that allows you to automatically receive notifications on a post when you comment on it (which i love!) so I'm wondering if this was something custom you built since no one else has been able to ship this.

Good luck with the project!

This is probably just me, but I found INSTALL.md to be a bit confusing.

The last week has been all about email.

PieFed can now send messages to other people on the same instance as well as people on Lemmy instances.

NSFW should federate but no other threadverse platform supports NSFL so I doubt you'll see many of those. On other platforms they use nsfw for anything objectionable, including gore, intense war footage, gross medical conditions, etc whereas on PieFed we have the option of making a distinction.

Hi,

In grey text on each post is the domain name of the content being linked to. Clicking on that takes you to a list of all posts that link to that domain, such as this one: https://piefed.social/d/3909

One of the issues with joining the threadverse is that until you subscribe/join some communities, the Home feed is either very sparse (because they couldn't find the right communities) or flooded with random garbage (same reason I guess).

In PieFed, communities are grouped under topics . Some of these topics are becoming quite big already (e.g. Technology and could perhaps be split up while there are probably very important topics that escaped my attention.

Wondering if the roadmap for PieFed includes being able to use Lemmy mobile clients like Boost and Liftoff? Its running ok as a web app in Android atm.

There are quite a few communities that are entirely image posts so presenting them as a vertical list of thumbnails doesn't really make the best of what is there.

I've just added a new section in the sidebar, the right-hand column. It's titled 'Rational Discourse Toolkit' and shows a random selection of links to resources that are intended to encourage mindful and informed discussions rooted in awareness, critical thinking, and the well-being of the community.

If we're going to make it through 2024 with our sanity intact, we need to be able to filter out certain repetitive topics that keep coming up again and again.

One of the more interesting threadverse instances is beehaw.org, which holds it's members to higher standards than most places. It wants people to be nice to each other. Imagine that!

I'm not adding it as an issue because I don't know if it is intended as is, so I prefer to ask it here. On post lists in a community, on't be helpful to see last poster and date?

Congratulations on having made such a great tool, even in its early phase! It seems very solid.

New feature: with that checkbox ticked, nearly all images are removed and most of the Javascript.

There's a bit of maths that goes into the 'hot' sorting method... PieFed's code is based on this medium post. (NB there are different algorithms for posts and comments).

Assuming the name is a play on Python since those are the building blocks of the app. But do the creators also like pie? Any specific flavor? Will the mascot be a pie, or maybe a baker of pies? These are the important questions about a new federated platform that we all need to know.

Hi!