PieFed Meta

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Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.

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founded 8 months ago
1
 
 

I saw today that they changed a lot about UI in the timeline. The vote buttons are at bottom instead of on the right side. Images are not tiny thumbnails anymore. Even, the thumbnails feel better somehow. I love all these changes.

The only small nitpick I have is that, the vote buttons are a little small, it feels more so in the main post. And a very unreasonable complaint, that I don't think need to be addressed, would be, the vote buttons are too generic. Would love a little more style and better colour contrast.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by administrateur@tarte.nuage-libre.fr to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
 
 

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.

In reality, it is also activism against government and the right at least for content from France.

The error message in english :

An unexpected error has occurred

Sorry for the inconvenience! Please let us know about this, so we can repair it and make PieFed better for everyone.

It blocks governmental websites. It should not be enabled by default.

It blocks center/center-right/right party with the comment "Macron démission". It is cleary activism.

It gives to the piefed project a bad image because it is not very serious to include anti feature without documentation to explain it (the error message is not very clear).

How to solve the issue ?
- do not include the blocklist by default
OR
- remove any website which is not "QAnon, conspiracy, fake news, far-right and discriminatory" AND change the error message
OR
- explain the blocklist in the installation informations AND change the error message

I deleted the entire blocklist from my instance.

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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.

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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 :)

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by elena@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
 
 

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.

I should mention that I have a blog whose mission is to introduce the Fediverse to non-technical people, to get them to leave the walled gardens of Big Tech: The Future is Federated . I've been doing a show and tell of interoperability between Mastodon and Pixelfed , Friendica and the rest of the Fediverse and I've shown what happens when you federate a Wordpress blog . My new focus in on the "Threadiverse", so Lemmy it is.

I was disappointed when I published my first post on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/post/18635732) and noticed that:

  1. hashtags don't work
  2. account mentions don't work either (and I was told they do federate in comments, not the first post - whaaaat?!?)

It's cool I was able to find my original post on here (https://piefed.social/post/198179) and I wonder if you have any tips / words of advice regading things that PieFed does and Lemmy doesn't do. I'm really curious.

And please bear with me, I'm going to mention my Mastodon account ( @_elena@mastodon.social ) and my Lemmy account (@elena@lemmy.world) to see if anything happens when I hit post. And bear with me one more time and let me try hashtags here, like #TheFutureisFederated.

Thanks for your patience with this newbie! 😅

Elena

Edit: I included the URL of my Mastodon profile to see if it would federate

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A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:

  • Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field
  • Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.
  • Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with
  • Added a suggest a topic form

"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.

Also I did a few things:

  • Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar
  • Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.
  • Some mastodon integration bugs
  • Wrote a guide about how to install the PieFed mobile app

As you can see we don't have a lot of really big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.

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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.

While join.piefed.social went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that piefed.social went live on 4th January 2024.

Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.

What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by rimu@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
 
 

A new contributor, h3ndrik, has made significant improvements to the filtering options for NSFW/NSFL content and I've also added some options to the same form which control when comments are collapsed or hidden.

Previously, NSFW was a yes or no option but now you can choose to have it unblurred, blurred, semi-transparent or entirely hidden.

The defaults values for collapse and hide are:

  • when a comment has a score of -10 it is shown but in a collapsed state. You can click on it to expand it and read it. This has always been the case but now you can change that threshold.
  • a score of -20 means the comment will not be shown. There is no way to make it visible and no indication that it was ever posted and no temptation to click on it.

You might want to review those settings to make sure they're suitable for you: https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters. If you don't want comments hidden then remove the -20 from that field or set it to -1000.

9
 
 

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.

To get things started I've done a bit of crowdsourcing and added all the interesting, active and cool PeerTube channels I could find! Check these out:

Linux

https://piefed.social/c/thelinuxcast_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/linuxuserspace_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube
https://piefed.social/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/linuxappsummit@tube.kockatoo.org
https://piefed.social/c/hacker_culture@kolektiva.media

Other

https://piefed.social/c/blitzcitydiy_channel@makertube.net - electronics and music

https://piefed.social/c/simon.caine_channel@tilvids.com - general technology

https://piefed.social/c/thunderbird_channel@tilvids.com - thunderbird email client

https://piefed.social/c/ewen@makertube.net - photography

https://piefed.social/c/icesheets_climate@tilvids.com - climate

https://piefed.social/c/shifter_cycling@video.canadiancivil.com - cycling

https://piefed.social/c/transit@video.canadiancivil.com - transit

https://piefed.social/c/urbanism@video.canadiancivil.com - urbanism

https://piefed.social/c/coreyartusimagery@makertube.net - art

https://piefed.social/c/dot_social@flipboard.video - fediverse podcast

https://piefed.social/c/thegiddystitcher@makertube.net - crafting

https://piefed.social/c/linuxappsummit@tube.kockatoo.org

https://piefed.social/c/submedia_channel@kolektiva.media - anarchy

https://piefed.social/c/solarpunk@kolektiva.media - documentaries

https://piefed.social/c/boilingsteam@peertube.linuxrocks.online - gaming

https://piefed.social/c/justsomeguy@comics.peertube.biz - comics and movies

https://piefed.social/c/comicuno@comics.peertube.biz - comics

https://piefed.social/c/blender_channel@video.blender.org - blender

https://piefed.social/c/4742f338-1ded-4798-bd85-93e8de367476@peertube.touhoppai.moe - krita tutorials

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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.

Imagine that an instance can set up an Open Collective / Patreon / Liberapay to receive donations ( a practice which is already relatively common for Mastodon instances). Individual users of a pyfedi instance can support the instance or community with financial contributions and then connect their profile (using oauth) to Open Collective / Patreon / Liberapay to establish a link. Instance admins or community admins can then configure their instance or community to translate those contributions in to particular perks. For instance a label that shows the supporter level on the profile or something that enables more features (character limit? creating communities? posting to exclusive communities? unique emoji? ability to bookmark posts? immedately get rid of "new user" status? allow profile verification like mastodon?).

The model is nested: if a community receives multiple contributions the community management interface could show that and say "hey, pay some of it forward to your hosting instance". Similarly, the hosting instance would have an interface that says "hey this instance is sponsored by x amount, pay some of it forward to the project".

Pyfedi already has a relatively flexible model for "roles" which could be tied to community membership. Similarly, it already works with a gradual permissions system which would make this a good fit. At the same time, this is not only a model towards financial sustainability, but some long-running platforms use paid membership as a way to keep low-quality contributions at bay. See for instance MetaFilter's one time fee.

The crucial thing here is that communities or the software do become proprietary / exclusive necessarily, but that it provides a flexible model to support the work at various levels. It can also be designed in such a way that it is not a "freemium" model, where "advanced" but necessary functionality is pay-walled. Instead, it could be done in such a way that all the necessary features are available, but that additional features that allow the creation of a community identity are unlocked through material support for the project.

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

So, for a fresh install of Ubuntu in a Windows Hyper-V VM, this is the list of steps I took to get something that at least looks like it might be the right thing:

remove unattended-upgrades, and clean up after OS install

(nothing to do with PieFed, just some necessary Ubuntu weirdness)

sudo systemctl stop unattended-upgrades
sudo apt-get purge unattended-upgrades
sudo apt autoremove

install postgresql 16

sudo apt install ca-certificates pkg-config
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libpq-dev postgresql

install python libs

sudo apt install python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev python3-psycopg2

install redis server

sudo apt install redis-server

install git

sudo apt install git

set up database

sudo -iu postgres psql -c "CREATE USER pyfedi WITH PASSWORD 'pyfedi';"
sudo -iu postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE pyfedi WITH OWNER pyfedi;"

clone PieFed

git clone https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi.git

cd into pyfedi, set up and enter virtual environment

cd pyfedi
python3 -m venv ./venv
source venv/bin/activate

use pip to install requirements

pip install wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt

edit .env file

cp env.sample .env
nano .env (change SECRET_KEY to some random sequence of numbers and letters)

initialise database, and set up admin account

flask init-db

run the app

flask run
(open web browser at http://127.0.0.1:5000)
(log in with username and password from admin account)

Maybe this will help someone else (or maybe someone has spotted something that I missed - like I say: it looks right when loaded in a browser, but I'm not 100% sure)

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by cabbage@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
 
 

Hi,

The CSAM scandal the other day got me thinking about the (often lacking) capability of the Threadiverse to deal with quickly with content moderation, and since PieFed has already been a bit experimental in this regard, I figured maybe this is a place where I could ask if an idea is feasible. Sorry if it's a bad match!

The idea is to identify trusted users, in the same way that PieFed currently identifies potentially problematic users. Long term users with significantly more upvotes than downvotes. These trusted users could get an additional option to report a post, beyond "Report to moderator": Something like "Mark as abuse".

The user would be informed that this is meant for content that clearly goes against the rules of the server, that any other type of issue should be reported to moderators, and that abuse of the function leads to revoke of privilege to use it and, if intentional, potentially a ban.

If the user accepts this and marks a post as abuse, every post by the OP of the marked post would be temporarily hidden on the instance and marked for review by a moderator. The moderator can then choose to either 1) ban the user posting abusive material, or 2) make the posts visible again, and remove the "trusted" flag of the reporting user and hence avoiding similar false positives in the future.

A problem I keep seeing on the threadiverse is that bad content tends to remain available too long, as many smaller instances means that the moderating team might simply all be asleep. So this seems like one possible way of mitigating that. Maybe it's not technically feasible, and maybe it's just not a particularly good idea; it might also not be a particularly original idea, I don't know. But I figured it might be worth discussing.

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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.

If you'd like a new topic, please suggest it in the comments below. There needs to be at least 3 reasonably active communities (active enough to have had a post in the last week) that can be put into the topic, to make it worth it.

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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.

To improve on that I've made use of the common web design pattern called 'masonry', where the images are arraigned like bricks in a wall. Check it out:

https://piefed.social/c/aww@lemmy.world

https://piefed.social/c/artporn@lemm.ee (wide tile - best on large monitors)

On each tile there is the title of the post at the bottom which can be clicked on to view the post and it's comments. This footer could be improved with voting buttons and perhaps the number of comments, in future.

This doesn't work as well for meme communities as memes often contain a lot of text, which gets squished. Perhaps there needs to be a 2 or 3 column version with larger thumbnails.