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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected].
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 [email protected].
For topics about the software PieFed, please visit [email protected].
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enjoy!
Also
https://quokk.au/ - if you want a smaller community.
And you sold me.
That is amazing!
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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!
Interesting that this banana isn’t animated when viewed from Lemmy.
piefed doesn’t support animated media yet, iirc it doesn’t work in posts either
Ugh…this one still frustrates me a lot. If I could wave a magic wand and have a different contributor do two things for the project, animated gifs would be one and a more consistent compact layout would be the other.
Edit: Just want to add that when I was working on the gif problem, I got it working for posts…but you have to click through into the lightbox or to the complete image url…the thumbnail isn’t animated. So, I got partway there, but ran into technical limitations of the specific python library being used. Relevant issue.
Haiiiiiiiii from Blahaj Piefed :3
So, if I understood it correctly, PieFed is simply another platform using ActivityPub, just developed by different people?
pretty much, yeah. different people, different programming languages, some feature differences, etc. but still the same content.
I see, that’s nice. I know a LOT of people were turned off by Lemmy because of the .ml devs, hopefully PieFed is more appealing to them.
Yeah, nutomic and some of their statements were a significant factor motivating my switch from Lemmy to Piefed. I’m glad we have the option here on Blahaj, and shout out to the Voyager dev for adding Piefed support!
I have not found it hard at all to just ignore the .ml devs and people in general. Why is this such an issue for literally anyone?
Some users don’t want to support a project that’s being developed by people they don’t like.
It’s kind of how some people left Reddit because of Spez, even though the amount of money Lemmy devs make doesn’t remotely compare, and the risk of enshittification/powertripping is minimal due to the whole project being open source.
I personally don’t see it as a huge issue, but I can see why it would be for someone (and I’d definitely see it differently if I was actively supporting the platform through donations).
I would argue that their authoritarian preferences get baked right into the codebase: e.g. there is a modlog but no notification of a moderation event, no modmail to contest or at least discuss such an event, no ability to DM or even be aware of which moderator performed the action (it used to say the mod name, but now it merely says “mod”), and deleted or removed posts disappear as if they never existed, ironically with the message to check back in later, as if it might come back but of course it never will.
The “rights” of someone being moderated are either to spin up their own instance or to not and just suck it up and take it, or else leave Lemmy entirely. Unsurprisingly, we see people leaving Lemmy in droves (and some, such as those who went back to Reddit, we don’t see so clearly, only being able to read their complaints about Lemmy if we go to Reddit to do so).
And yes the codebase is open, but it’s also complex and written in Rust. It is just easier to write an entirely new application of the ActivityPub protocol in a more comfortable language than to work with the Lemmy codebase, people such as the developers of Kbin, now Mbin, Sublinks, and PieFed seem to feel. And now these have a chance to do differently.:-)
Eh, just the fact that a modlog exists (and that you can effectively see which moderator performed the action through filtering by moderator) is something I’ve never seen in any other online platform, the lack of a notification could not even be intentional (there’s even an open issue in GitHub by dessalines himself).
I’m glad the PieFed devs put the matter in their own hands since, as I said, it’s not a huge issue for me but I can understand why it would be for others.
(As in, I can understand why people would move to PieFed, Mbin, or any other fediverse alternative. I’m seriously confused at people who don’t like Lemmy for being too authoritarian-adjacent and move back to freaking Reddit)
is something I’ve never seen in any other online platform
It’s not that common, but I’ve seen it in other forums. One example would be Somethingawful, it even has a comedic bent to it.
I am assuming the modlog concept for lemmy was taken from SA.
Lemmy offers a great deal of freedom - to an instance admin, and to a lesser but still high degree a moderator (e.g. their decisions are immediate, final, and unquestioned unless overturned by a higher authority) - though a lot less to an end-user. Reddit offers things like the modmail, notifications of events, and I can only guess that people are not aware of the level of censorship that has become more common lately. Meh, but if that’s how they want things, then perhaps we here would prefer that they remain over there as well:-P.
As in, perhaps they simply prefer the gilded cage to the level of effort required here to be truly free.
no notification of a moderation event
lemmy.world has notifications for local users or users in local communities for removed content.
I have not found it hard at all to just ignore the .ml devs and people in general. Why is this such an issue for literally anyone?
I am Ukrainian. I hope the lemmy devs and all tankies get to experience russian genocidal imperialism firsthand.
Do you see why this is “literally” an issue?
I think you have misunderstood something. I do not agree with .ml people(tankies and such). And the issue is whether or not a person can just ignore their rantings and simply enjoy Lemmy.world
You most definitely can.
But that doesn’t change the fact Lemmy’s devs are a bunch of degenerate tankies.
Not all instances of Lemmy are run by tankies. Many are run by just Linux enthusiasts.
For one thing if you Google search (we are talking mainstream normies here) for Lemmy, it pulls up Lemmy.ml as the first hit to an instance. And then that in turn, to an anonymous guest without an account, it shows posts solely from Local, rather than All. So a visitor does not see the part of the Threadiverse that is ignoring the tankies, they see the tankie home environment in full glory. There they talk about such things as beheading people who have bank accounts. Mainstream normies nope out fairly quickly… and then get mad at me for even having mentioned “Lemmy” to them in the first place.
It is easy for us who know how to ignore the propaganda, but we do quickly forget - I did for sure - just what kind of place this is, as in how it appears to others who have not put in the time we have to so heavily curate our experiences.
I am saying that we are a Nazi bar: we allow it, even while we ignore it, but it makes others uncomfortable so they leave.
INTERESTING! Indeed I was relating a story from the past, although occasionally I kept confirming that it remained true, and today is the first day that I see that it is no longer. Like on page 1 I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network), then several pages later (on mobile) I see lemmy.world, but no lemmy.ml up top, anymore.
Thank you for telling me - I’ll stop telling this story or else make sure that I say that it describes the past rather than present.
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
Famus
Congrats .world, here’s to many PieFed updates.
Nice !
This… is… AWESOME! 😎 And YOU are awesome! You all freaking rock! 🤘
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?
it’s the software, similar to how you’re using lemmy right now
Just another way of entering these federated online spaces
I feel like all of this federation is a double-edged sword. Constant evolution and development isn’t bad, but maintaining active users while constantly moving from one platform to another is probably going to be difficult too. I know I’m starting to get overwhelmed with it.
nobody needs to move to another platform. both lemmy and piefed show the same content, think of it more like using a different client that also has different features. both lemmy.world and piefed.world will continue to exist.
Decoupling identity from the instance is really important. It’s unfortunate that that’s not yet possible…
My identity = who I am. The instances are just services that I use. I should be able to use the same identity while accessing different services.
Yeah. Piefed seems like a better client, but I just really don’t want to make another account.
Use of PieFed is optional though, only for those who want it?
Though as app support improves, like Voyager, more people may choose it to take advantage of features that Lemmy lacks. The list is quite extensive but includes categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs, both user and post/community, hashtags, keyword filters, true blocking of instances, and so much more. Plus being written in Python, that list will only continue to be added to as time passes, taking days to weeks to add them rather than years.
I’d rather see feature parity so that Fediverse and Threadiverse in particular won’t EEE itself.
Longer translation without commonly accepted terms:
I’d rather see Lemmy/PieFed/Kbin/Mbin have the same features overall, so that there wouldn’t be one of them trying to extend on others and then make it standard so that others die out because they lack something that is now important
That seems to me to be akin to saying that you would like everyone to use Windows? Or less insultingly, only a single distro of Linux:-). Indeed, not everything needs to be a competition, but if someone wants to write code and make a better thing, and then turn around and allow everyone else to use it for free, then I for one am all for that!
But I do see your point, e.g. in how there are all these apps, making it confusing how people will view content when they differ in even fundamental things like how images are displayed or markdown syntax. It seems just the nature of the world, even FOSS where new features could theoretically be applied to all apps, if only people weren’t as lazy, as to e.g. not integrate the new freely offered feature, or to continue to use an app long after it ceases to be updated routinely by its cohort of devs.
Of course we should only use one distro of linux, as long as it’s the one I use
There’s two factors to this. Lemmy has been slow on developing new features. Eventually people give up despite all the promises. This sort of competition was inevitable, and two - and this cannot be changed - there’s a lot of resentment and resistance to using their software for political reasons.
Fair. But standards need to be made eventually based off something, or Fediverse will fail to deliver on its promise.
At least, same things should be able to be displayed.
But standards need to be made eventually based off something, or Fediverse will fail to deliver on its promise.
That’s what the FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) system is for.
Piefied is the only project among the three (Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed) to give a list of supported FEPs.
Nice! A worthy initiative
Piefed and Lemmy can mostly communicate with each other. In any case, you can’t really compel Lemmy to update as fast as Piefed is.
Wow. Let’s gooooo!!
Thanks for making this happen!
PieFed private voting is just sad as well as toxic. Inevitably PieFed instances will be abused to facilitate manufactured downvotes from instances due to their inherent anonymity. We are already blind enough online, not being able to see upvotes or downvotes does nothing. Being able to go to mbin and see the way people vote hasn’t resulted in some huge controversy. Even the most recent controversy involved admins shouting brigade due to downvotes they didn’t like, and PieFed does nothing to prevent it.
I’m not saying people wouldn’t react to being able to see who downvoted or upvoted them, but I would liken it to a toddler phase getting used to socialization. Once people get acclimated to it, it essentially adds transparency that can explain trends, reveal stalking and remove suspicions. Without it, people just get fed up and make their own assumptions, which just feeds toxicity and division without any real awareness.
The fediverse is prone to manipulation, and PieFed makes it more so with this change without really providing a reason except that people feel uncomfortable standing behind their downvotes. Downvotes (or upvotes) from the people who can’t stand behind them shouldn’t count. The whole reputation system also sounds a bit like a love letter to reddit karmawhores, and the whole design seems to be designed to take away power from users and move it to particular instances admins to curate content through things like visibility.
as explained in this post, the original implementation of “private voting” has already been replaced with non-federated voting, which addresses the abuse concerns, as it’s then limited to just the instance the votes are cast on.
Thanks for the correction, I was going off of the FAQ page, https://join.piefed.social/features/, that had a post to a thread that has not been updated.
So in that regard, is it what lemmy instances already do when they don’t want instances like mbin to see downvotes? Or does it completely eliminate federation of votes and only shows tallies from the host instance? Either way, the decision is taken from the user and basically undoes the federated aspect of the platform for a dubious concern. At the very least, it should be up to the user.
lemmy currently doesn’t have granular federation controls. the only option right now is to defederate from mbin instances, but other instances might still announce your users’ votes to mbin instances. the more hacky way would be to also block federation related http requests from mbin instances to prevent them from retrieving user profiles, which is probably the most effective method that could be used.
piefeds non-federated votes are a user setting for the default value and users have the option for each vote whether it should be federated. see also https://piefed.social/post/982478
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.
Nice!! Woo hoo!
