This is our biggest release yet, including more finished tasks than any of our previous ones. Below is a summary of the highlights:
What's new
Posts & communities can be labelled as AI-generated and people can choose to hide all posts tagged that way. Very similar to how NSFW works.
Comments can be marked as an Answer, like on StackOverflow.
React to posts and comments with an emoji.
Hide an individual post from yourself, without blocking the author.
PieFed is now in the Yunohost app store, making initial setup easier.
When banned from a remote instance you cannot make local-only posts in their communities.
Honeypot to automatically IP ban badly-behaved crawlers.
https://lemmy-federate.com/ integration, making PieFed communities get more exposure.
"Share on Mastodon" menu item on posts.
Vastly improve docs for new developers, see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs.
Language selection is more visible during post creation.
Tag clouds can also be viewed as a list of tags.
View post/comment markdown.
Bot accounts are not included in community statistics.
Footnote support in markdown.
Polish translation.
Better HTTP caching, which reduces dependence on Cloudflare.
Bugs
Passkey fixes.
Polls can now have up to 15 options.
User profile performance improved.
Don't allow bypassing minimum username length and post title with whitespace.
Polls and Events can no longer be posted into Lemmy communities.
API
Additional user settings can be set through the api, including Extra Fields.
Fetch url metadata.
Sort comments by controversial.
Comment search now works.
Hashtags.
Events.
Polls.
Emoji reactions on posts and comments.
See https://piefed.social/c/piefed_api for more details.
To upgrade
To upgrade from 1.3.x:
git pull
git checkout v1.4.x
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh
There is a big database migration that will take a few minutes to run. How long will vary depending on how old your instance is - older instances will have more content to process. It took ~25 minutes on piefed.social so expect it to be less than that.
Donations
PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.
We are talking past each other by now...
My point, in one sentence: it's not up to the developers of a project building on ActivityPub to define policy regarding "exposure".
ActivityPub is a protocol for public social networks. It's not about private communications. Anyone looking for privacy should be told that and instructed to not post on a server if they are not willing to accept that will be public.
It's as simple as that. If the developers of PieFed do not understand the basic principle of "use the right tool for the job" and keep trying to replicate anti-features from centralized websites (such as the fake-privacy that is provided by closed networks), then I will have no trust on their ability to design a good ActivityPub system.
This is a good example of selection bias. You are getting most of your feedback from other PieFed users, who clearly are not aware of the implications of such implementation.
Yes, I am opposed to any functionality being added to the server when it can be solved at the client. Content discovery can be done by the client and using a separate service like Fediverser, fedidb, or anything else. It makes no sense to have this built-in into the ActivityPub server. It is one of the many examples where the piefed devs are adding a feature because they can without thinking whether they should.
As someone who actually opposed the initial implemention of Piefed's voting being made non-public to non-instance admins (as much as possible) to other users, I completely disagree. Some people don't like it and don't want their votes to be easily accessible to the wider fediverse. The only way that can be implemented currently is by removing federation. Rimu serves that.
No, I've seen this opinion from others. It's also a wider criticism of the viability of the fediverse long-term in that communities are only as long as their hosted instance. This does a lot to mitigate that.
Can you tell me exactly what harm this does to the mythical ActivityPub, beyond an instance owner toggling it on in ignorance to their own detriment.
Then why restrict this logic to "like/dislike" activities, and not extend to any type of activity?
A mitigation is not a proper solution, even less so when it violates other principles in distributed systems.
The harm itself will be for the instance admin later on. Still, the larger point is this solution is a workaround that does not bring any meaningful benefit for others in the Fediverse.
To be honest, though: I don't know what we are arguing about here. I've already said it: I am not here to gate-keep anything. If this the way that the PieFed developers want to do their thing, more power to them. But it's like you expect me some kind of approval from me. You don't need that. I may not like 90% of things that Rimu and others are doing, but they don't owe me anything.
Some communities are also, or can be set to local only. What other activities do you have in mind?
So far as I can see, that's up to the collective fediverse population. You done a poll on this?
It's not supposed to in this context. It's for an instance admin who wants to populate the content of their own instance. Although it could be beneficial if it's an instance for others that is not personal in scope and is supposed to be a wide-use instance.
Any and all of them? What is so special about
as:likeandas:dislike? There is nothing on ActivityPub preventing users to create posts or announce activities for a different target audience.This is tyranny of the majority. If one person is out there saying "I don't want to have the data I've posted on server A to be presented as if I posted on server B", then this person will be right to complain if they see their requests being respected.
(And before someone comes up and points fingers at me saying that Fediverser was also copying user posts without their consent: it's true that the bots were recreating the posts and comments, but they were not publishing information on the Fediverse with "actor ids" from Reddit. There is a subtle, but important difference)
Anyway, can we move on from this conversation, please? I am not going to change your mind about it and I don't want to re-hash past discussions. I'm also not particularly interested in any of the current server-centric Fediverse projects, so you will have a hard time convincing me that anything being done on PieFed is worthy of praise.
Well we already have 'tyranny of the majority' here regarding a whole host of functions on the fediverse. On reddit voting is entirely private, mod-logs hidden and people now can even hide their posting history. I am sure a non-zero amount of people here object to that (I know some do). But there's no support for changing that due to the belief prevalent across the fediverse that these being publicly accessible keep the fediverse honest.
Maybe one could have an opt-out toggle in users profiles for potential community migration. Ultimately, I'm in favour of (if this functionality ever actually exists to completely move a community) being widely known. People would join the fediverse knowing that there's a possibility that the community they're posting on could, down-the-line, move to another instance and thus 'move' their posts and comments within that community.
And I'm just replying to your points from a community perspective. You're welcome to reply or not.
Go to Reddit with a bag of money, get the voting history of whoever you want... how is that for "private"?
If we are talking about building an "open" web, then it makes no sense to justify any design based on how the "closed" web works. The incentives are different, the use-cases are different and in the long run it will be detrimental to the open web if we keep trying to mask away the differences.
More than that, I think that the biggest mistake being done by current fediverse projects is that they keep trying to emulate the proprietary networks. Social media "platforms" are bad by its very nature and chasing this idea that we can "fix" them by making open source versions of them is a fool's errand.
Well, the fediverse is already beyond proprietary platform :
The threadiverse is already beyond proprietary software thank to those many people building the fediverse.
why can't we duplicate well loved proprietary platform ? We are following people needs and also slowly try to create something different by listening to people feedback. For example : we can watch peertube video. Later we will be able to use mobilizon, funkwhale...
Lastly, please, i understand that you are passionate about it but i don't want to see this kind of critizism for any software, whatever they are :
It's rude toward peopke who invested so much effort and gave their time to build it. It is inconsiderate. You can write a critize but without insulting people and convey your thoughts.
For example :
(Sorry, i'm bad at understand technical detail, i can discuss over these matter)
And why i insist telling you that ?
That's the key are in argument, discussion : people will listen to your point.
Lastly, the hardest part is also to listen what the other side say about this. It's very difficult to listen even for myself as part of piefed's staff. It's not black and white, there is lot shade of colors :)
All of the "features" you are giving as "superior" are meaningless, if the Fediverse is only interesting/useful for 0.1% of the overall population. I don't care about moral superiority. I will not consider the Fediverse "beyond" anything on any front until TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, et al are irrelevant as tools for mass communication.
I am not insulting people. It might be a harsh criticism on the product of their work, and I do understand that it's human nature to be defensive when their work is criticized and how hard it is to separate ourselves from the things we do out of care.
But this is not a personal attack on any of the developers, and I do not think that using a softer tone would help here. Many times in my life I embarked on a project because I was riding high on some ambitious/virtuous goals and I wished I had more people being brutally honestly and calling me out, to bring me back to reality. The worst thing is to when people say they want "feedback", but are only willing to listen to those who validate or fake-support them.
The developers can ignore me and keep working on it however they see fit, or they can stop and see if any of what I am saying has any merit. But just like they don't owe me anything, I do not owe them any validation.
That's nit my point. If anyone were brutally honnest the world wouldn't be better because you do hurt people. They will stop being in contact with you.
So what's the point telling them all this ? You argument fell into a pit. S i gave you some tips to keep interaction with people and sharing your opinion and your technical knowledge without being harsh.
You don't have to be harsh to tell the truth.
So why are you here ? What's the piint of being here if they are "superior". I'm sorry, i disagree with you, it answered the need of bilkions people and i'm convaincing people IRL to migrate on these platform. They are happy to know that there is alternative to gafam.
And lastly, being able to see video from another service wasn't possibke before. It's the first time i see something like this thank to activitypub protocole. It's amazing. So please stop.
My goal is not to convince Rimu or any of the people working on PieFed to change their minds. I know they won't. I'm not trying to win any argument here. I'm talking in a public forum, giving my opinion, so that others can have a contrasting point of view.
Because I don't want to keep contributing to centralized platforms?
I didn't say they are "superior", I said they are more useful to more people. "The point of being here" is that I want to make this place as useful and universal as the centralized platforms. But I find this line of reasoning quite strange, to be frank. Do you think that people should only be here if they are willing to conform to a certain set of values?
My goal as a moderator/piefed staff is to make you understand that the way you shared your arguments/opinion is not okay. It's not about telling the truth, the truth doesn't have to be harsh, blunt...that's a false belief. You can be nice and share your knownledge/opinion. And i gave you several options.
Well i'm part of the Kittens : https://chatons.org/ I meet people IRL and tell them about the fediverse, and show them how they work, i did 2 conferences on Piefed to newcomers last summer. I also did the wiki of Piefed.
I'm not only acting in the fediverse and the web but i'm also there IRL, where most of people use big tech. If you want to make this place useful and universal as centralized platforms, i think the best way to change people is telling them about the fediverse IRL, not here beside technical stuff or ui.
Sorry, I meant in the sense of privacy from the perspective of other users. Your voting history cannot be seen by other users on Reddit, and you can hide your comment history from them too. I think these are bad decisions, but at the same time some people on the fediverse have voiced support for them.
If Piefed continues to implement features without considering the ActivityPub protocol and other platforms, much as Mastodon has been criticized for, it will damage the very interoperability that makes the fediverse valuable.
Has that happened yet?
Yes?!
Isn't that my whole complaint about the implementation of "ChooseAnswer"?
Isn't that my whole complaint about the community migration being done in a way that will not work with servers implementing the Portable Objects FEP?