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

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    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.

  • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.spaceEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).

    A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!

    • Rooki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      I had sadly the opposite experience as a developer. He bends the rules, the code of conduct to his will so that he stays in the “right”.

      He disregards any improvements to the codes style ( formatting, styling, linting ) and when you point that out you just get the lemmy devs treatment. I mentioned, the code is a mess. He went on rampage declining any attempts to “untangle” or format the code. And he simply said “Go away and dont come back”.

      One example: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/b341c2d4adf40147c34b100fbace886862d8ddc8

      • Jerry on PieFed@feddit.onlineEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        This is all sour grapes.

        I’ve read your interaction with him, and, frankly, if I were moderating a community where you incessantly carried on over insignificant details, continuing to question things after you got your answer (sea lioning), insisting on focusing on nothing, and never ever stopping, I’d block you too, and I’ve only blocked 2 people in my entire life as a mod.

        Now you’re in here trying to malign him, for revenge, for shutting you down so he could get work done and he can focus on important work instead of debating you over never-ending trivial topics.

        He is the opposite of the image you are trying to give him.

  • Syrc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    So, if I understood it correctly, PieFed is simply another platform using ActivityPub, just developed by different people?

    • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      pretty much, yeah. different people, different programming languages, some feature differences, etc. but still the same content.

      • Syrc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        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.

        • buddascrayon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          02·
          12 days ago

          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?

          • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 days ago

            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?

            • buddascrayon@lemmy.worldEnglish
              01·
              9 days ago

              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

          • Syrc@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            11 days ago

            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).

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              2·
              11 days ago

              I would argue that their authoritarian preferences get baked right into the codebase: e.g. there is a modlog but no notification of a moderation event, no modmail to contest or at least discuss such an event, no ability to DM or even be aware of which moderator performed the action (it used to say the mod name, but now it merely says “mod”), and deleted or removed posts disappear as if they never existed, ironically with the message to check back in later, as if it might come back but of course it never will.

              The “rights” of someone being moderated are either to spin up their own instance or to not and just suck it up and take it, or else leave Lemmy entirely. Unsurprisingly, we see people leaving Lemmy in droves (and some, such as those who went back to Reddit, we don’t see so clearly, only being able to read their complaints about Lemmy if we go to Reddit to do so).

              And yes the codebase is open, but it’s also complex and written in Rust. It is just easier to write an entirely new application of the ActivityPub protocol in a more comfortable language than to work with the Lemmy codebase, people such as the developers of Kbin, now Mbin, Sublinks, and PieFed seem to feel. And now these have a chance to do differently.:-)

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            11 days ago

            For one thing if you Google search (we are talking mainstream normies here) for Lemmy, it pulls up Lemmy.ml as the first hit to an instance. And then that in turn, to an anonymous guest without an account, it shows posts solely from Local, rather than All. So a visitor does not see the part of the Threadiverse that is ignoring the tankies, they see the tankie home environment in full glory. There they talk about such things as beheading people who have bank accounts. Mainstream normies nope out fairly quickly… and then get mad at me for even having mentioned “Lemmy” to them in the first place.

            It is easy for us who know how to ignore the propaganda, but we do quickly forget - I did for sure - just what kind of place this is, as in how it appears to others who have not put in the time we have to so heavily curate our experiences.

            I am saying that we are a Nazi bar: we allow it, even while we ignore it, but it makes others uncomfortable so they leave.

  • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    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?

  • FenderStratocaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      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.

    • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      Use of PieFed is optional though, only for those who want it?

      Though as app support improves, like Voyager, more people may choose it to take advantage of features that Lemmy lacks. The list is quite extensive but includes categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs, both user and post/community, hashtags, keyword filters, true blocking of instances, and so much more. Plus being written in Python, that list will only continue to be added to as time passes, taking days to weeks to add them rather than years.

      • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        I’d rather see feature parity so that Fediverse and Threadiverse in particular won’t EEE itself.

        Longer translation without commonly accepted terms:

        I’d rather see Lemmy/PieFed/Kbin/Mbin have the same features overall, so that there wouldn’t be one of them trying to extend on others and then make it standard so that others die out because they lack something that is now important

        • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          That seems to me to be akin to saying that you would like everyone to use Windows? Or less insultingly, only a single distro of Linux:-). Indeed, not everything needs to be a competition, but if someone wants to write code and make a better thing, and then turn around and allow everyone else to use it for free, then I for one am all for that!

          But I do see your point, e.g. in how there are all these apps, making it confusing how people will view content when they differ in even fundamental things like how images are displayed or markdown syntax. It seems just the nature of the world, even FOSS where new features could theoretically be applied to all apps, if only people weren’t as lazy, as to e.g. not integrate the new freely offered feature, or to continue to use an app long after it ceases to be updated routinely by its cohort of devs.

          • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            11 days ago

            Of course we should only use one distro of linux, as long as it’s the one I use

        • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          11 days ago

          There’s two factors to this. Lemmy has been slow on developing new features. Eventually people give up despite all the promises. This sort of competition was inevitable, and two - and this cannot be changed - there’s a lot of resentment and resistance to using their software for political reasons.