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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Welp, I tried. Doesn’t work with Firefox relay masked email addresses. Not giving them a real email, so no thanks.
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
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.
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.
register form tripped me up. 3rd time worked; https://piefed.world/u/m3t00
Yea, had to go to the laptop to do it. Phone wouldn’t let me.
desktop website. confusing because had to actually read to figure out what the boxes were for. lol my reading skills have declined
I feel that!
like the organization better so far. multi group feeds is nice;
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 :(
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.
(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)
Thanks for making this happen!
Welcome!
The very first page I tried going to off that landing page errored out.
what kind of error did you see and what did you click on? a link to a post?
I clicked on the “Communities” drop down and got a site wide error.
did you see an orange/white cloudflare error page or something else? i tried searching for it in our server logs but i don’t find it.
you may however have hit an outage we had for several minutes around an hour before your comment due to running out of memory on the host.
The communities tab now gives a dropdown menu that appears to be correct.
I have a novice question that wasn’t addressed in the FAQ: is piefed.world associated with/run by the same people/computers as lemmy.world? Or are they unrelated?
100th comment :)
