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

top 50 comments

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[–] rustyfish@piefed.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Ah shiet. I have to block the tankie stuff all over again. Well, better get to it!

[–] iamdefinitelyoverthirteen@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Welp, I tried. Doesn't work with Firefox relay masked email addresses. Not giving them a real email, so no thanks.

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I think it depends on the Piefed instance; it's up to the Admin.

It should work on, for example, feddit.online. If not, something is broken.

[–] iamdefinitelyoverthirteen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I just used the link in this post.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 1 points 31 minutes ago* (last edited 31 minutes ago)

That link is for Piefed.world; run by the same team that run Lemmy.world

There are other piefed servers which may have different email requirements. But the most likely reason Piefed.world requires real emails is to prevent bots making fake accounts and also reduce the risk of bad actors making numerous accounts to avoid bans. As it's hard to get multiple real emails it makes it hard to make multiple anonymous accounts which is unfortunately a tactic of trolls.

You can of course create a dedicated "private" email account on an official service and use that to sign up if you're worried about sharing your primary email account. A lot of people do this online to have a legitimate email but essentially in it's own silo separate from other personal emails.

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.world 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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@feddit.online 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean i gave him the changes to his feet and he kicked them away. I know it were small changes but if i have to argue around for 4-5 session to implement basic formatting ( a one and done thing ). I would blick him too.

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

My understanding is that your one PR broke logins, and it took maybe 5 days for someone else to fix the code? Maybe your changes that were kicked away just weren't so good after all, or trusted?

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

Got any links where we can see this happening? (I'm just curious - though maybe it's easy to look up on Codeberg...)

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Ahh yes, that is another risk factor of him. He never tests it. I guess he always goes for guts instincts. ( As there is no CI tests or any type hints ).

And again we speak of FORMATTING pr's those risky formatting pr's i guess he tested that? and somehow found that it didnt worked?

Just to be clear, i fixed a lot of bugs already too. E.g. Mastodon login never even worked ONCE, i implemented that to the end.
With his merge first fix later attitude, for little bit more established servers its killing argument: Oh yeah feature X broke because no one tested it before.

My PRs were in good faith. I was ok with constructive feedback ( e.g. change this, change that ) but dismissing ones PR MULTIPLE times. With almost none real reason other than "Opiniated Formatting" ( where none exists )

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.

As only an amateur coder, I can't weigh in how serious the issue is, but I'm gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it'll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I hope that too for Piefed. But if he continues his disregard of developer. He should have kept it close source.

[–] TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

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

[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

like the organization better so far. multi group feeds is nice;

[–] phillycodehound@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yea, had to go to the laptop to do it. Phone wouldn't let me.

[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

desktop website. confusing because had to actually read to figure out what the boxes were for. lol my reading skills have declined

[–] phillycodehound@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

I feel that!

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 90 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (12 children)

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.