Developer of PieFed, a sibling of Lemmy & Kbin.
It’s difficult. Lemmy doesn’t supply a list of replies when we retrieve the post over ActivityPub, nor votes. We could probably get that data by calling their API but that feels wrong.
The fediverse has developed a convention of pasting urls into the search function in order to retrieve a post but I don’t think it’s intuitive for new users to do that; a search tool is for searching, not importing. It’d be great to find a better way to integrate this feature.
I’ve merged the communities now, by moving all the posts from the new copy into the old one and then deleting the new one.
This bug used to occur several months ago because of some mixing of with upper and lower case AP IDs but it hasn’t been a problem until just now.
Thanks for pointing out the ‘open signups’ on fediverse observer - I’ve fixed that up on the PieFed side just now and it’ll flow through to that database in due course.
While I am technically an admin on feddit.online it was just for some initial debugging and setup support - it’s entirely separate from piefed.social and I don’t have the level of access needed to update it’s code. I don’t know how often Jerry updates his instance but I can tell you piefed.social is absolutely bleeding edge.
Welcome aboard! As well has https://piefed.social there is also https://feddit.online. All other instances I know of are single-user ones.
I’m pretty keen on blocking, in general, so if you have more ideas along these lines they’ll get heard.
As another blocking example, if I post something then not only do I not see replies from people on instances I’ve blocked, but also my post will not be federated to blocked instances in the first place. So they won’t be able to reply to the copy of the post on their instance as it won’t exist.
This only works for local communities - ones hosted on the same instance as the one you’re using as that’s the only time we get to decide where to send posts to. Currently PieFed.social has almost no local communities.
Yeah I’ve been wanting to add the instance name for a while now. Knowing that someone else wants it too increases it’s priority, thanks :)
It includes comments as well :)
…and just now I made it hide communities at https://piefed.social/communities too.
Hmm yeah it IS a bit weird to have the post title in the breadcrumb, huh.
There are personal instance blocks - when viewing a post by someone from that instance, click/tap the 3 dots which gives you additional things you can do with the post. One of those is “hide every post from author’s instance”.
Arguably there should be a button on user profiles that lets you do that too, it’ll probably easier to find there. Also another button on instance profiles… I’ll add that soon.
Wake me up when they implement FEP 1b12.
Really great tool, thanks! A few questions…
In the commands, will {instance} always be rss.ponder.cat?
Is the full process:
Or do you make the communities and then we add feeds to them?
Does each message need to have only one command?
We’re working on it :)
I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:
fostering genuine connection
protecting privacy and enforcing consent
championing accessibility
I think she’s obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There’s certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they’re constructed I don’t feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
It’s hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that’s a value tho - diversity.
There’s a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it’s best, this is a “people before economy” value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.
The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?
Hi Jerry,
All good questions which reveal holes in our documentation! Quite a lot of the contents of .env are optional.
There is no S3 support yet. You might not need it though - after almost 1 year of operation piefed.social only has 14 GB of media saved. I’ve put a bit of thought into how to minimize disk usage with good results.
Yes if you leave BOUNCE_ADDRESS empty it’ll go back to the sender instead.
It’s configured in the .env file. You need an IMAP email inbox somewhere, which is outside of piefed’s scope to provide. The BOUNCE_* stuff is for logging into that inbox, which you won’t need to provide if not using BOUNCE_ADDRESS.
Yes, set MODE=‘production’, case sensitive. AFAIK anything other than ‘development’ will cause production mode to be used.
That’s used to connect to https://sentry.io for debugging purposes. You won’t need that.
MAIL_ERRORS=True will cause piefed to send you an email whenever a bug occurs. I don’t recommend using this unless you’re doing development work. You also need to have MAIL_* all set up nicely for it to work - it needs a SMTP server to connect to.
I’m guessing it’s a PeerTube thing. It started happening to me after I scrolled past a few dozen videos which makes me think it’s a rate limit with a misleading error message.
There is one community with lots of .mp4 videos - https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]. These seem way way more efficient than YouTube so I haven’t seen the need to get too clever with lazy loading those, although it’s doable if necessary.
Yes I put a bit of effort into the multiple-video issue, with low powered devices in mind.
The biggest win on that front was lazy-loading the YouTube embeds. Also I found that Chrome can handle quite a lot of videos at once while Firefox gets overwhelmed pretty easily. In my testing with Chrome on my 2012 Macbook https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] performed okaaay. The tab used only 90 MB of RAM, surprisingly.
Videos in communities are only loaded if running on AC power and the way that is detected is using a fairly recent browser API that is only provided by Chrome (and derivatives). I’m not simply using loading="lazy" on the <iframe>, I’m using JS to add extra logic to do with the battery. Browsers that don’t have the battery API (Safari, Firefox, 10 year old Chrome) load an image instead. Even Chrome will use an image instead if running on battery power (e.g. on a phone that is not charging).
I think I’ve been pretty conservative in this regard.
Very extensive background saga, if anyone is interested: https://hackers.town/@lori/110656825941689147
Good find!
Yes I sometimes miss it too. On a device with a mouse you can hover over the score and two numbers will appear as a tooltip. The numbers are upvotes and downvotes.
Maybe the compressed form with only one number could be used on mobile and on tablets and larger show both numbers.
I’ll continue to experiment with the voting elements.
That’s weird - I use PieFed with FF on Android daily and haven’t seen this. Can you do a screen shot?