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.
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.
This is a weird standard to hold, and certainly not something anyone on here holds.
No-one thinks Lemmy/Piefed or theFediverse more broadly has the logistics, funding or capacity to supplant them.
I've answered this on a sibling thread. I think that the problem is ideological than of resources. Most people here will proudly claim they prefer to have a "small" Fediverse over an "universal" one. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mastodon had three big waves of people that wanted to leave Twitter but were met with hostility by a loud minority. There are people here who still think that the Reddit mirrors were bad because "if I wanted to see reddit stuff, I'd go to Reddit" and completely miss the point that the mirrors are a tool to get people out of there.
Plus, we shouldn't need to "supplant" them. It would be enough to simply "disrupt" the model. Reddit still is in an incredibly fragile position. Twitter is a zombie network. Social "media" is in a overall declline. Instead of emulating these dying platforms, we should be skating to where the puck is heading and use the open protocols to build the Next Big Thing.
No, I want the Fediverse to get bigger. I don't necessarily think its desirable to become anywhere near the size of Reddit though.
Nor do I think its even possible. I don't know anyone here who has arrived who has been met with "hostility" just for arriving so I have no idea what you're talking about.
You are kind of arguing my case here: I think that the "Fediverse" should be lilke "The WWW". Universal. The majority of people might use mobile apps for day-to-day things, but we can pretty much bet that the absolute majority of the billions of the connected people use web browsers.
So, when you say "I don't think it is desirable for the Fediverse to be anywhere near the size of Reddit", and knowing that Reddit is one of the smallest social networks out there (less than 100M MAU, mostly US-focused), to me it does sound like you are on the "Small Fediverse" camp.
Yeah, Reddit is oversized itself. I think there's way more advancements and functions that should take priority over outreach specifically anyway. It needs a lot more tools if it was to become a broadly much busier service.
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.
I am not talking in a piefed-owned channel and afaik you have no authority to give me "options" here. You may not like how I expressed my opinion, but that doesn't mean that I need to agree or comply.
You do know that I'm running a hosting provider for the Fediverse since 2019, right? I've done a lot more than just complained about the state of current projects. I've done my share of "IRL" marketing, promoted FOSS alternatives to companies, set up demo instances for prospective customers, set up free accounts for my friends, put up a Matrix room for my college buddies to show them an alternative to WhatsApp...
When I talk about the shortcomings of the Fediverse and the lack of ambition of the developers, it's because I've already got lots of people in here, but the overwhelming majority of them ended up going back to the proprietary platforms because there simply isn't enough interests/interesting people. It tries so hard to reject mainstream and "normies" that it ends up feeling hostile to them. The majority of people are not interested in being lectured 24/7 by patronizing tweenies.
Well that's part of the problem and i'm just doing my job. I don't expect you to change that quickly. It's not my thought alone
Well i had the same experience and i'm older than twenty year old. :)
My role isn't to force them using free software or being part of the fediverse movement. I present software, show them how it works. I contact association, governement...explain them the problem, show newpapers, present solutions and it's up to them to change their habits. We can't change people habits except if governement decide to takes actions to protect our freedom and rights.
You don't have to take it personally. They prefer big tech, so let them use big tech.
It's not about "preferring big tech". It's all the societal harm that big tech causes on everyone because their source of profit is not aligned with the interests of their direct customers.
I don't care about "changing habits". I just don't want people that I care about being exploited and manipulated like that.
I will say something that I know will be grossly misunderstood, but I will try to make the case: I want to have influencers on the Fediverse, I want to see corporations setting up their instances and pushing their stupid corporate PR bullshit. I want to see phone companies selling data plans with ActivityPub accounts. I want to have the equivalent of LinkedIn lunatics, and personal coaches and all that crap that one can find on Instagram/TikTok/Facebook.
You know why? Because that would mean that the Fediverse is relevant. It would mean that we have enough people here that it can not be ignored anymore.
If ya want people to stop using big tech, you have to change their habits. You can't change it, they have built their network, found old friends...maybe one day but most of them aren't attracted by the fediverse.
How do you handle this part with the above one (exploited, manipulated) ? I don't want them. I will leave or ask for defederation.
I enjoy this place as it is. It doesn't need to be bigger. Once you remove it, i think plenty people will leave and create their own forum elsewhere as we did for Reddit.
It's one thing to have systemic corruption and exploitation (what Big Tech does), it's another to have endemic issues (bad actors, small-scale scammers, etc). The former can not be neutralized by individual/localized action, the latter can.
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?