cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/237378
Hello World!
We’ve recently added PieFed.World to the Fedihosting Foundation portfolio.
PieFed.World is still in its early stages, and we still need to port some of our automations we already have in place on Lemmy.World. This includes functionality to inform people about moderation actions taken against them, as well as some other moderation tooling. Administration is currently done by the same team responsible for Lemmy.World, and the same rules that apply to Lemmy.World also apply to PieFed.World.
What is PieFed?
PieFed is a Fediverse/Threadiverse platform similar to Lemmy or Mbin/kbin. You can find a description and feature comparison with Lemmy on their website.
While PieFed has a range of features currently not present in Lemmy, it also is a a lot younger and isn’t quite as robust as Lemmy currently is. There are still many bugs and missing features that you will likely run across compared to Lemmy, which will take time to be addressed. PieFed has fairly active development and is seeing a lot of issues addressed fairly quickly, which is especially important recently, as the number of active PieFed instances and PieFed users increased significantly with a range of Lemmy instances opening up PieFed instances as well. PieFed currently does not have proper “stable” releases and no test suite, so it’s not unlikely for things to break from time to time. Although 1.0.0 has already been released a while back, there are still too many issues addressed in more recent commits to stay on that version.
As PieFed is part of the same federated network as Lemmy and Mbin, all PieFed communities can be accessed from Lemmy and Mbin, as well as other Fediverse platforms. Likewise, PieFed can access communities from Lemmy, Mbin and other Fediverse platforms. Whether you use a PieFed instance, a Lemmy instance, or an Mbin instance, it does not matter what type of instance the community is on. The software affects your own user experience, but the content is available regardless.
Creation of communities
Creation of communities will be limited to admins for the first week of the public launch. We will reserve this time to allow community moderators of established communities to claim the name on PieFed.World before we open community creation to the public. We will limit this to communities with the same name and at least 2k monthly active users. In case of multiple qualifying communities with the same name on different instances expressing interest, Lemmy.World communities will be given preference, afterwards the number of monthly active users. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss an exception. Requests can be posted in !support@piefed.world. After the first week, community creation will be available to anyone.
Migration of communities
PieFed has a feature to migrate communities to a local instance. We will not be offering PieFed’s community migration feature initially.
We still need to research the details of how this works and the impacts this has on federation before we will make a decision on whether will support this in the future. If requested, we may reserve some names for potential future community migrations until we have made a decision to allow community migrations.
This does not prevent you from moving communities in the classic way, by opening up a new community and posting in the old community that people should move over.
Private voting
We had previously disabled private voting for PieFed.World before opening the instance to the public, as the original implementation has a range of drawbacks when it comes to federation, and our team overwhelmingly believed that the individual benefits of private voting did not outweigh the impact this has on the Fediverse beyond the user’s instance. Additionally, due to the implementation of that feature, it was also trivial to identify the original voter, which significantly limited the promises of this bringing actual voting privacy.
Since then, the implementation of private voting has been changed to provide the option of federating or not federating votes. While this is more likely to result in vote differences across instances, it does not feed bad information to other instances, which could make it a lot harder for other instances to identify manipulation.
Non-federated voting is available for all PieFed.World users.
Topics
Topics are a kind of “starter packs” or collections grouping multiple communities that people can follow, curated by the admin team. We don’t have a clear vision for the structure of these yet.
You can see an example structure on piefed.social.
Feel free to let us know your thoughts on this.
Feeds
PieFed supports feeds, which are user-created groups of communities, similar to topics. These are currently in a global namespace and all users can create public feeds in the same shared namespace.
Reputation and vote weight
PieFed has options for admins to treat certain types of content differently for “reputation” calculation, as well as options for weighing votes of specific instances differently compared to others. We currently have all options for treating certain content, communities or instances differently disabled.
How does PieFed compare to Lemmy?
PieFed has various features not present in Lemmy, check out their website!
There is also various functionality that Lemmy has, which you may be missing currently with PieFed for now:
Limited API support
In Lemmy, the default web interface relies entirely on the Lemmy API. This has the major benefit of all functionality available in the default web interface also being available to all third party clients. PieFed currently uses separate code paths and implementations for the default web interface and its API. To make it possible to access functionality in third party apps, dedicated API endpoints have to be created, even if this functionality is already available in the default web interface. This also includes alternative web-based UIs.
Multiple developers of alternative UIs and mobile clients are already working on PieFed support, some already released experimental versions.
Limited availability of Markdown previews
Markdown previews are currently only available in posts. There are many other places that accept markdown, but you can’t preview the rendered comment before submitting it. This is tracked in #532.
Image uploads only on post creation
Images can’t be uploaded to comments currently. You’ll have to host them externally for now. This is tracked in #768.
Autocompletion of users/communities
Usernames and communities can’t be autocompleted when typing their names currently. This is tracked in #799.
Limited availability of modlog
Modlog is currently very limited. While there is an instance modlog, there are currently no filters available, so it’s not possible for users to see actions taken against a specific user or within a specific community. Community modlog exists, but it is currently only available to community moderators and admins. Filtering modlog is tracked in #846.
Moderator hierarchy
Lemmy has a moderator hierarchy based on the time a moderator was appointed, relative to other moderators in the community. This allows moderators to add other moderators, but they can only remove moderators that were added later than they were. There are a few other actions that check moderator hierarchy as well, including deletion only being possible by the top mod. In PieFed, communities have one or more owners, who can add and remove moderators, while all other moderators are currently on equal level. Community owners currently cannot be changed without editing this directly in the database, if you’d like to change owners in your community please reach out in !support@piefed.world.
Donations
Similar to Lemmy, PieFed development is supported by donations. You can donate to PieFed development through Patreon.
Additionally, we would appreciate donations towards the Fedihosting Foundation, the non-profit organization operating PieFed.World, Lemmy.World, and a range of other Fediverse platforms.
Problems and questions
Please report any issues and questions about PieFed.World in !support@piefed.world.
For topics about the software PieFed, please visit !piefed_meta@piefed.social.
Bugs can be reported on Codeberg.
TLDR: New platform with similar functionality available, Lemmy.World will continue to exist.
edit: reordered sections and minor wording changes
edit 2: updated community owner information
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What I really want out of a federated Reddit-like service is link consolidation. I don’t want to see the same link posted on five different communities; I want those to be consolidated into one topic, with the OP text and comments from each threaded below it. It’d clean up the interface and make it work a lot more usefully.
In fact, this would make pretty much everything in the Fediverse better. Let me sort my timeline by URL or hashtag, so that I can see what is being said about a certain thing and not make the same observation or joke that a dozen others already have. Put that functionality into an RSS reader, so that I can see the discussion without leaving the article. Or, even better, merge the two into a single feed, tying threads together based on the URL that’s being shared.
Now that would be an “everything app” worth using.
EDIT: Apparently they’ve already made the first leap there! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Looking forward to trying it out.
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few other options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
When I click your first link all I get is “No Comments”.
I just checked, it works on my side.
Does this one work? https://piefed.world/post/253374#post_replies
Works in the browser, although it takes a long time to load. It does not work from within “connect”, perhaps because of the long delay.
Also
https://quokk.au/ - if you want a smaller community.
deleted by creator
Oh, fascinating! I’m going to have to take a look. Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement.
Enjoy!
It’s pretty critical to topic feeds. The app I’m using doesn’t understand the link consolidation thing that Piefed offers, so I’ll see 5 of the same post all together in it. Really I just need to start using a PWA instead of the app until Piefed has better app support.
There is a Thunder fork (not main code last I checked), and experimental support from Voyager and Interstellar, but yeah feature development is so fast that the webpage may be best until more people take the time to add each new feature to each of those apps.
Interstellar is what I’m using. Generally usuable, but certainly doesn’t understand the things that make PieFed special. With so many of the major Lemmy instances spooling up secondary piefed instances, it means it is probably only a matter of time before this issue is resolved.
I would hope so, and yeah when I tried Interstellar with PieFed (admittedly quite awhile ago, and since then I’ve forgotten how to make it connect again) the button placements and such were… far less than ideal, having been designed for Mbin. Also I recall something along the lines of when you switch between looking at a Lemmy vs. a PieFed instance you had to entirely delete all of your app data in order to get it to connect (I submitted a bug report to the dev; well, at least I told them here in the Threadiverse so they know and probably fixed that one by now).
But… I am sure that developing an app is not easy. Which makes me wonder: even when the likes of Thunder and Voyager gain full support for using PieFed the same as Lemmy, will they continue forward and add things such as user & post (community) flairs? And Topics / Feeds? And as you said here the conjoined comments.
And even if the answer was yes, what about the next feature to come along, and the next?
But yeah, with all the major shift to PieFed now, and the most-used apps adding support, it seems only a matter of time before not only the forward development but the pace of that too quickens:-).
Good to know. I want to use webapps rather than native apps as much as possible anyway, so this is probably good.
As somebody that has done a lot of recent work on the UI for piefed, I have tried to make sure that it works even at quite small screen sizes. I actually just submitted a couple commits in the past couple hours to make the navbar across the top of communities/feeds/topics flow smoother across different screen sizes. The PWA is so far my preferred way to use piefed.
And you sold me.
Doesn’t PieFed already do this?
Apparently! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Gonna check it out!
Reddit could have done this too, but never did. At least to my knowledge.
There must be a reason.
On Reddit, I kinda get it. You wouldn’t want to connect the same link across (for instance) /r/antiwork and /r/conservative; the crosstalk there would get horrifyingly bad. But on a federated platform, when you could have multiple /c/antiworks on different instances, it fragments the conversation.
Reddit sorta half did it with the “other discussions” or duplicate tab.
As an example,
https://old.reddit.com/r/news/duplicates/1lvi6kb/a_clicktocancel_rule_intended_to_make_cancelling/
I never saw any apps implement it, but it does look like it was part of the API, but maybe it wasn’t robust enough.
I also know at one point, and possibly still, is that it lacked URL normalization. So for example, exanple.com/headline and example.com/headline#topstory would be treated as two different articles.
Similarly https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
Would be treated as separate articles.
These are all fixable problems, but require work.
Oh, interesting. I honestly just glazed over that every time, but you’re right that that’s a step in the right direction. What I’d really like is for the instance to go the next step further and merge the conversations visually.
So in my mind, at the top of any individual post you’d see the thumbnail and the link title; and then underneath that, as a special-looking top-level comment, it would show the post title and OP text for each incarnation of the post across various instances and communities. The replies to those individual posts are then all rolled up under their top-level comment.
You could roll Mastodon (and other Fediverse) posts in there, too; they would just appear as their own top-level comment, just like replying to Lemmy posts on Mastodon works currently.
That’s exactly what piefed does actually.
I’m really excited to get time to check it out. Maybe this weekend.
I haven’t been there in years but there used to be a “related discussions” link that would show you a list of other places a link was posted.
Lemmy has that too (depending which app/frontend you use)
Mbin has a form of this too. They’re still treated as separate posts, but visually grouped together and minimized.
Is there any plans for yunohost integration?
I’d love to self host piefed just so I can munge my peertube and threadiverse feeds.
Relevant issue: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/252
I have never used yunohost before, but ldap was just recently integrated into piefed (that’s what chat.piefed.social uses for instance). So the main blocker from that issue seems resolved.
Question: is PieFed the new kid on the block? Or has it been around for just as long as Lemmy or even longer?
I just love to see these platforms competing whilst working together, in the sense of adding to eachother, making the entire thing bigger and bigger. I’ve known for a long time that this is possible, but to see it happen is beautiful. Surely this allows for way more innovation and customization than closed source apps could ever realize. It makes me confident that the Fediverse will flourish, more than it already is.
piefed is a fair bit younger, the first commitin the git repo was on Fri Jul 28 02:07:44 2023 +0000. it has only in recent months started really picking up some traction with several lemmy instances already creating piefed instances as well.
What’s a piefed? Is that a particular topic?
Just another way of entering these federated online spaces
it’s the software, similar to how you’re using lemmy right now
How can I subscribe to piefed.world users and communities etc from my lemmy.world account?
lemmy doesn’t support subscribing to users, but you can subscribe to communities the same way you’d subscribe to other communities from other instances.
100th comment :)
A day that will live in infamy! But in a good way. A day that will live in famy!
Uhhh, fame?
No, for all of us.
Comrade.
Faus
Congrats .world, here’s to many PieFed updates.
Nice !
Is there an old.lemmy.world theme?
not that i know of. old.lemmy.world is a whole separate user interface, but a similar look can probably be achieved with themes alone.
I need the old theming, can’t stand the new interfaces :(
This… is… AWESOME! 😎 And YOU are awesome! You all freaking rock! 🤘
Can I log in with my Lemmy.world account
no, accounts are completely separate.
piefed does have some social auth support, which is currently also being worked on, but lemmy is not an auth provider that can be used with that. once social auth in piefed becomes more stable we will consider enabling it for supported providers.
Do any fediverse projects currently support social auth?
pixelfed supports signing in with mastodon, not sure about others
(Although adding to the other comment, since it’s federated, you can see and interact with all of Piefed’s content from Lemmy and vice versa)
Wow. Let’s gooooo!!
Welcome!
Thanks for making this happen!
i just need a good integration between all fediverse services so people would migrate to fedi. lemmy posts with all its replies are still flooding my mastodon timeline rn
Mbin? Its largest instance iirc is fedia.io, which accesses both “Threads” (Threadiverse, so like Lemmy, PieFed, other Mbin instances, nodeBB, etc.) and “Microblog” (Mastodon).
What’s casuing lemmy posts to show up for you? Followed hashtags? Some kind of federation bug?
these issues might explain
I keep thinking that subscribing to communities in mastodon would ideally have the top level posts “reposted” by the community account and the comments on the posts in the replies to the posts. Does it work that way now or no?
still not. that’s what i really sad to see, that fediverse really sells about the connection between services (mastodon, lemmy, etc) but the implementation is still not good enough.
