PieFed Meta

One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from linux@lemmy.world, linux@programming.dev, linux@lemmy.ml, etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it's a bit less obvious because there's a wider range of subjects involved.

Except now, it doesn't, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.

We're still figuring out whether it's a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It's a tricky UX and social question.

I've held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it'll be added soon.

I've finally been able to compile an APK for Android, which is downloadable from https://codeberg.org/freamon/pferd/src/branch/develop/releases/pferd.apk

In addition to the APK, the repo provides the opportunity to build a version of the app to run natively in Windows, MacOS or Linux, or to run in an emulated Android environment. If you want to build your own APK, I'll try to help with all the magic incantations that are seemingly required for Google's ecosystem.

I don't have the means to provide anything for iPhones.

Things to note:
The app is intended for use with https://preferred.social/. Other PieFed sites don't have the API enabled, so won't work. It can't be used for Lemmy sites, and - likewise - Lemmy apps won't work with the site.
If you have the app, and want to do things for which you need an account, you can create one at the site using the code ZeXJkmS46l2h0SiE.
~~The API has a rudimentary rate-limiter, initially restricting post and comment creation to need a 10 minute gap. There's 2 communities for which it doesn't apply though (a local one at 'local_testing', and a remote one at 'remote_testing@pytag.net') because they both don't federate any further than themselves.~~
~~Like a dickhead, I created a site in the UK, so it doesn't federate with lemmy.zip. If more sites follow their lead, it'll just be me and feddit.uk in our own private Fediverse.~~
I've already discovered some issues with the app, but I doubt they'll be the only ones.
If other people are able to help out with testing, and it goes well, then we can start taking steps towards enabling the API at other PieFed sites, and distributing the app via recognised channels.
Moreover, if the testing goes well, then the API can be properly documented, and a JS client created, so others can develop their own apps (~~an 'official' PieFed app would ideally be fully FOSS, which this app isn't, 'cos it was made with Flutter~~).

Thanks.

(edited to cross out some bad info)
(edit 2: lemmy.zip's Admin made some changes and got in touch, and I can now federate with lemmy.zip!)
(edit 3: the basic rate limiter has now been replaced by the more sophisticated Flask-Limiter)