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
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Question: is PieFed the new kid on the block? Or has it been around for just as long as Lemmy or even longer?
I just love to see these platforms competing whilst working together, in the sense of adding to eachother, making the entire thing bigger and bigger. I’ve known for a long time that this is possible, but to see it happen is beautiful. Surely this allows for way more innovation and customization than closed source apps could ever realize. It makes me confident that the Fediverse will flourish, more than it already is.
piefed is a fair bit younger, the first commitin the git repo was on Fri Jul 28 02:07:44 2023 +0000. it has only in recent months started really picking up some traction with several lemmy instances already creating piefed instances as well.
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.
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few other options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
And you sold me.
Oh, fascinating! I’m going to have to take a look. Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement.
It’s pretty critical to topic feeds. The app I’m using doesn’t understand the link consolidation thing that Piefed offers, so I’ll see 5 of the same post all together in it. Really I just need to start using a PWA instead of the app until Piefed has better app support.
deleted by creator
Reddit could have done this too, but never did. At least to my knowledge.
There must be a reason.
On Reddit, I kinda get it. You wouldn’t want to connect the same link across (for instance) /r/antiwork and /r/conservative; the crosstalk there would get horrifyingly bad. But on a federated platform, when you could have multiple /c/antiworks on different instances, it fragments the conversation.
Reddit sorta half did it with the “other discussions” or duplicate tab.
As an example,
https://old.reddit.com/r/news/duplicates/1lvi6kb/a_clicktocancel_rule_intended_to_make_cancelling/
I never saw any apps implement it, but it does look like it was part of the API, but maybe it wasn’t robust enough.
I also know at one point, and possibly still, is that it lacked URL normalization. So for example, exanple.com/headline and example.com/headline#topstory would be treated as two different articles.
Similarly https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
Would be treated as separate articles.
These are all fixable problems, but require work.
I haven’t been there in years but there used to be a “related discussions” link that would show you a list of other places a link was posted.
Lemmy has that too (depending which app/frontend you use)
Doesn’t PieFed already do this?
Apparently! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Gonna check it out!
How can I subscribe to piefed.world users and communities etc from my lemmy.world account?
lemmy doesn’t support subscribing to users, but you can subscribe to communities the same way you’d subscribe to other communities from other instances.
So, if I understood it correctly, PieFed is simply another platform using ActivityPub, just developed by different people?
pretty much, yeah. different people, different programming languages, some feature differences, etc. but still the same content.
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.
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?
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).
Yeah, nutomic and some of their statements were a significant factor motivating my switch from Lemmy to Piefed. I’m glad we have the option here on Blahaj, and shout out to the Voyager dev for adding Piefed support!
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.
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.
Decoupling identity from the instance is really important. It’s unfortunate that that’s not yet possible…
My identity = who I am. The instances are just services that I use. I should be able to use the same identity while accessing different services.
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.
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
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.
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.
Is there an old.lemmy.world theme?
not that i know of. old.lemmy.world is a whole separate user interface, but a similar look can probably be achieved with themes alone.
The very first page I tried going to off that landing page errored out.
what kind of error did you see and what did you click on? a link to a post?
I clicked on the “Communities” drop down and got a site wide error.
did you see an orange/white cloudflare error page or something else? i tried searching for it in our server logs but i don’t find it.
you may however have hit an outage we had for several minutes around an hour before your comment due to running out of memory on the host.
The communities tab now gives a dropdown menu that appears to be correct.
Can I log in with my Lemmy.world account
no, accounts are completely separate.
piefed does have some social auth support, which is currently also being worked on, but lemmy is not an auth provider that can be used with that. once social auth in piefed becomes more stable we will consider enabling it for supported providers.
Do any fediverse projects currently support social auth?
pixelfed supports signing in with mastodon, not sure about others
(Although adding to the other comment, since it’s federated, you can see and interact with all of Piefed’s content from Lemmy and vice versa)
Interesting that this banana isn’t animated when viewed from Lemmy.
piefed doesn’t support animated media yet, iirc it doesn’t work in posts either
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?
First paragraph of the post states:
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.
I dunno how I missed that. Thank you! I will be avoiding this community then, unfortunately :(
Why, have they done something wrong?
They ban discussion of all kinds of normal things, such as Luigi Mangione.
Some people seem to think that, usually people who do not research things for themselves.
Separately it gets a bit complicated bc it really is healthier for people to be distributed more across a network as opposed to all being on the same node.
Both of these groups push for people to consider leaving lemmy.world, but for entirely different underlying reasons.
I don’t know the details of all decisions lemmy.world instance admins have made, but it seems to me that the #1 instance will always generate the most animosity because it’s far more likely than any other instance to find itself in decisions where they’re pressed to make decisions by their userbase.
Servers with 20% of the users and 10% of the communities, with only like a dozen ‘active’ communities will simply hardly ever be in that position and generate no meaningful pushback so they’ll always look good by comparison. Additionally, even lemmy.world community mods can generate hostility based on decisions they made despite them having nothing to do with the instance management - and since lemmy.world dominates, you’re much more likely to be posting in a lemmy.world community.
This is definitely true. Also some instances like to push the boundaries, while others such as Lemmy.world prefer to “toe the line”. e.g. lemm.ee was notorious for not wanting to defederate with anything unless it was absolutely necessary (like for CSAM, but not for like trolling), a decision which kept burning out all the mods over and over and over and over again, thereby leaving it up to the admins to control that chaos, who likewise got burnt out again and again until… the instance itself finally gave up and closed its doors. But not before putting out numerous calls to have someone, ANYONE step in and actually lift a finger to help? No? Okay then… well good bye and good luck I suppose. Hexbear likewise has somewhat imploded multiple times over the course of its existence, due to “drama” among its internal controlling team. Each instance does as it chooses and Lemmy.World chooses to toe the line and steer clear of illegal content, leaving people free to steer clear of it in return, if that is what they want.
One incident I am aware of wrt to Lemmy.World was when the infamous Luigi incident happened late in 2024 in the USA, the mods decided to pause discussion as to whether outright, literal and irl murder should be allowed, and things related to that such as “jury nullification”. Keep in mind that the entire instance could theoretically have been shut down if the admins - who unlike the rest of us have their irl names and addresses exposed to the legal authorities - had been found legally liable under whatever laws in whatever countries around the world. Faced with this ENORMOUS amount of pressure, not merely theoretical but again threatening the very existence of the instance itself, the admins decided to pause discussions of this matter… for less than a week iirc while they looked into their legal standing. And then they lifted the ban and allowed those discussions (again iirc, though it’s been a minute). But many people about lost their minds that they had to wait a few days to do as they wished.
Tbf that probably had to do more with preexisting chaffing under the dominance of Lemmy.World that while today makes up only ~40% of the Threadiverse, at one point dominated it at ~80%, plus also a pattern of similar events than the singular one I described there (e.g. its decision to defederate from hexbear.net). But it does illustrate how Lemmy.World has to walk that line between allowing freedom to have discussions while maintaining a space to even be able to continue to have those discussions on the open clear internet.
I note the high level of irony that many people left Lemmy.World to the more “open” lemm.ee, which then closed its doors because people refused to volunteer to help clean up the toxic filth that they then generated. Lemmy - as a part of the real world - really can be quite an unwelcoming place. Like if you want to speak, then make your own instance and get to it, but if you want to go into someone else’s house and speak… well then you have to play by their rules, how is that not understandable?
That particular jury nullification decision btw is described in many places but one that I know of is https://sh.itjust.works/post/29086287 , and in general that community !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com is just a fantastic one run by a great mod who somehow manages to avoid the temptation to become a power-tripping bastard himself as he runs that instance and community that helps keep the Threadiverse in check by allowing people to air out their dirty laundry in full view for all to see:-).
Welcome!
Haiiiiiiiii from Blahaj Piefed :3
A day that will live in infamy! But in a good way. A day that will live in famy!
Uhhh, fame?
No, for all of us.
Faus
Comrade.
Congrats .world, here’s to many PieFed updates.
This… is… AWESOME! 😎 And YOU are awesome! You all freaking rock! 🤘
