- cross-posted to:
- piefed_meta@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- piefed_meta@piefed.social
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/538685
No more duplicate posts
One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from linux@lemmy.world, linux@programming.dev, linux@lemmy.ml, etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it’s a bit less obvious because there’s a wider range of subjects involved.
Except now, it doesn’t, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.
We’re still figuring out whether it’s a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It’s a tricky UX and social question.
I’ve held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it’ll be added soon.
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Every time I hear about PieFed it’s because a feature that Lemmy should have was already implemented on there…
This seems like such a useful feature and I hope lemmy brings it. What else does piefed do?
As is mentioned in the post, PieFed has Feeds. They’re really cool! There’s also the topics system, which is great if you want to browse specific categories without necessarily focusing on any one given community.
ALso… KEYWORD FILTERING! Super cool.
I just put together my first feed today, collecting more than 60 US protest communities into one feed: https://piefed.social/f/50501
In the drop-down menus on top I can choose between either the communities I’m subscribed to, or the feeds I subscribe to. I can subscribe to public feeds compiled by other users, including users on other PieFed instances. I can also make a private feed if I don’t feel like sharing it.
It’s pretty great. Would absolutely recommend.
There are two main instances:
https://piefed.social/ and https://feddit.online/
There’s no mobile app/APK support at the moment, but it’s coming soon.And the filtering isn’t just yay vs. nay, you can also select a little bit of filtering as a third option for that.
At this point it probably would be easier to list the things that PieFed does not do:-P
Lets you block a whole instance including users.
If I may use reddit parlance, be cause that’s all I want to do with threadiverse personally, on piefed topics are auto multireddits, and feeds are multireddits I can choose myself?
Yes, pretty much
I remember seeing that meme, I just didn’t get it at the time
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I kind of hate this? I think most communities are lazily moderated and I don’t want to have every goon’s unmoderated takes on whatever the topic is forced in front of my eyeballs.
If that is the case, then wouldn’t you want to block that community? In which circumstance its comments would not pollute other posts. I confirm that at least for the situation where you “block all users from instance” (I did this for lemmy.ml), those don’t show up in these additional comments, and surely the same is true for blocked communities as well.
Two reasons:
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There are many steps between “I never wish to see any unmoderated content ever again” and “I wish to see unmoderated content in my feed every day”. I don’t want to block Lemmy.world communities but I also will go insane if I read those comments every day.
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I can’t know what those communities are in advance of their being inserted. I don’t want the default option for content in my main feed to be “opt out”.
If you will, allow me to attempt a friendly rebuttal?
You aren’t on PieFed right now anyway? So maybe you mean that this is a reason to not join it? “Soon” the Thunder app will officially support PieFed and that will offer additional options for an interface.
A new feature just dropped where you click on the words and it takes you to the original community. Yes, I mean that the new feature was added to the new feature, just in the time that we’ve been having this conversation, started 13 hours ago on this post from 21 hours ago. THIS is the pace of development of PieFed, compared to Lemmy. I’m not suggesting that you not offer feedback - conversely, I’m saying that there is a VERY high chance that it will be heard, considered, and possibly implemented all within the space of mere days.
For instance I’d love to see an option to skip past one comment section to the next one, for situations like this. That way you could read “some but not all” of such comments, from such communities as you do not enjoy as much as other communities, but not have a hard time moving on to the next.
Everything is optional here: when you click on a post it shows up as the “main”/OP, and then other cross-posts are indicated, and their comments appended to the END of that conversation thread. Therefore you can read all the OC’s comments and then simply stop before reading the next ones from other communities. But yeah, this could definitely be improved & streamlined as mentioned above.
To your first point, Lemmy offers very few to no options to implement that ideology - you either are subscribed to something or you are not (unless you are willing to brave looking at All, which I did but those who do definitely seem to be in the tiny minority, to the point of being made fun of to admit it, sadly). PieFed offers many, Many, MANY choices in-between, for posts, and so it would very much be in the same spirit to add some additional options as you alluded to regarding comments. Perhaps “only show top comments (rather than all)”, maybe even an exact (edit: I meant to add “user customizable” here) limiting threshold specified like first 20 comments, using whatever sorting method (Hot/New/etc.). Of course, someone would have to do that work to make it happen! PieFed being written in Python rather than the super difficult and unfinished language Rust makes that much easier, i.e. far more people are capable of such, if only they are willing! Perhaps you’ll add it even:-). If not, then it’s still great that you are offering suggestions:-).
But this is a very new feature, and yeah it’ll take time to perfect. Your second topic seems a tiny little bit to go against the spirit of your first, where you didn’t want content to be opt-out, yet you also wanted to be exposed to new things that are in-between never see it vs. always see it. It will take time to discover the UX needs and then implement it in a UI. I hope my suggestions above help the devs a little to explore that - like top 20 comments rather than “all the comments” vs. “none of the comments”.
Don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Piefed overall. I think you misunderstood my second point a little, I don’t want to be “exposed to new things” in my social media per-se, I want to read my chosen subscriptions (with my chosen social groups) and move on.
I see the “issue” of “divided” communities coming up a lot. But to me, the variety of perspectives and moderation styles on the same topic is a major benefit of the Fediverse (to the point I might describe it as its greatest strength) especially when it come to non-technical or social topics like politics. For example Lemmy.ca users are going to have very different perspectives about US politics than Lemmy.us (hypothetically). I’m not sure that it benefits those users to centralize the discussion (not saying that’s what’s happening exactly but it is something I see come up a lot).
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Comments are seperated by the community theyre posted in with a big headline displaying which community theyre from
How does it handle posting comments, deciding where to put them?
Like normal - the comments are not actually merged, they are still in reply to separate posts. The appearance of merging is just at the user interface level.
My question is more, if I want to comment, how do I decide where it goes? I assume if I’m replying to a specific comment on a post, my reply will just show up there, but if I’m making a top-level comment, can I choose which community it goes in, or perhaps send the same comment to every community? Maybe a comment is appropriate in one community but not another.
PieFed accounts are free and take 2 mins to create. Check it out :)
That makes sense. The only thing that might get confusing would be referencing a comment from a different thread.
That’s true - it would be useful to have a “copy direct link” option in the menu bar for each comment. @rimu@piefed.social
The link that says the time does than. So e.g. your comment that I’m replying to says “10 minutes ago” (for me, right now:-) and resolves to https://piefed.social/post/571276#comment_5293979.
Oh damn, you’re right!
But sometimes on the fediverse there’s a “copy link to post/comment on original instance”, which I sometimes find to be useful. But this is already pretty great!
Oh yes, I really miss how ubiquitous that rainbow Fediverse icon is readily accessible. There’s ways and means to find an original for some things on PieFed - notably a community or user account or an actual post - but it does make things more difficult, e.g. to look at a comment that is on a different instance than the OP or the community that it was submitted to. That would indeed be a useful addition to make it so accessible as it is on Lemmy!:-)
What happens if a thread is crossposted into another community that your instance knows about, but which you are not subscribed to?
I think it would be good to only display comments from communities you are already subscribed.
That’s not really how PieFed works - it takes awhile to adjust, but having a separate Subscribed feed from the Topics areas can be quite useful, allowing you to have your cake and eat it too. e.g. you could not subscribe to any Politics communities, but then if you rarely wanted to catch up, everything would be visible in a News & Politics feed.
So I’d rather see an option to control that, rather than work according to the “Lemmy” style.
Fwiw, I do note that comments do not show up from instances that you have actively blocked, and therefore presumably from communities that you have blocked as well.
We are talking about a feature that makes it easier to view comments, so general concerns about the feed concept aside (I find it a bad idea), it seems like forcing people to block communities so that their comments are not inserted into threads they are otherwise interested in seems counterproductive. It would be better to only show comments from communities that the user has actively subscribed to before.
Like for example I might be interested in the discussions happening on politics@instance.world, but the comments in threads at politics@instance.ml is something I would rather avoid. So this feature would force me to block politics@instance.ml which is the opposite of making it easier to read the comments from communities I am actually interested in.
It sounds like the current issue depends on what you think of having “subscribed” to content. So, I’m digressing here to talk about it first.
On Lemmy, there’s only the Local, Subscribed, and All feeds - that’s it, no more options available. And Local is virtually useless for someone who isn’t on a highly active generalized instance (like Lemmy.world) or else a very active special purpose one (like slrpnk.net or startrek.website, although even the latter would not offer the extremely active !tenforward@lemmy.world community). So for many of us, e.g. my alt account on discuss.online, and probably still most of the time for you on srlpnk.net, Local just doesn’t cut it.
While All has… issues. People report anime spam (unless you are on an instance that doesn’t federate?) and porn (this is unfair imho bc it depends on one’s NSFW setting, so gigo - Lemmy I feel like is extremely respectful of this setting), and ofc so many political and news and USA focused content. So the model is to block things that you don’t want, bc otherwise it makes All virtually unbearable to try to use. Like for me, I blocked all sports, any specific location (cities, states/provinces, nations, etc.), and other stuff that I knew for certain that I didn’t want (edit: which btw I felt was unfortunate, bc I actually would have liked to keep tabs on things happening around the world, even in places that I have never and will never visit, yet I HAD to find SOME way to reduce the flood of content on All, by focusing it a bit). And the majority of the time I browsed All actually. (Edit: one reason why is that less popular communities, such as poetry, have little chance of showing up in your Subscribed feed, so browsing All by New shows so much that Subscribed just won’t really offer, especially by Hot or Active)
But from the downvotes I often got whenever I said so, I see that the majority of people browse Subscribed (and dislike any other way that may work for others?🤪). This requires knowing about a community in order to add it, so e.g. if a community were to move, you might never know unless the mod allowed a post to state that fact (tenforward is a great example of that), and possibly not even then if you missed that post (even if it was pinned, you’d have to go there, and even then many sorting options won’t show it, like Top Six Hours).
So for Lemmy, “subscribing” means an ENORMOUS deal, basically to the point that you either see such content or else you are unlikely to ever see it - short of visiting an individual community explicitly to check it out (which I also often did:-).
But in PieFed it does not mean that at all. The model here has so many different options to expand one’s capabilities. Here, “subscribing” merely means for content to show up in the “Subscribed” main feed, but since there are multiple other avenues to be directed to content, it doesn’t have the enormous implications that subscriptions do on Lemmy. For example, if I was mod of a community or wanted to be alerted to every single post made in a community (usually those with low-volume content 😁), I can click one button to receive automated Notification alerts for that. And there’s also the default Topics as well as the user-customizable and also shareable Feeds. As well as, ofc the Subscription default main feed. But bc there’s so many more options, someone could, for instance, not subscribe to political communities or others like !askusa@discuss.online, if you wanted a reduced amount of USA-related content. And yet, that content is still accessible, bc you haven’t quite blocked it, merely not subscribed to it.
I think more choices = better. Ngl it took me over a week (maybe more) to get used to this new model, during which time I often reverted back to checking stuff on a Lemmy instance. But when I finally had it arranged how I wanted, now I REALLY appreciate these additional options!
And I don’t have any comments from anyone on Lemmy.ml showing up for me - bc I’ve blocked all users from that instance. Lemmy’s instance blocking is misnamed and nonfunctional as it does not actually “block” the “instance” as it says, but PieFed’s “block all users from <this instance>” works exactly as advertised!
Sorry this is long, but I hope offers that insider’s perspective of how PieFed works differently, bc it offers MANY different choices and options that are not available to people using Lemmy, which affects the implications of certain words like “blocking” (becoming true blocking) and “subscribe”/join (meaning merely to show up in the default Subscribed feed, but no other implications beyond that).
Good point, yep.
On the other hand it would also help people find communities they are interested in but haven’t subscribed to yet.
I am not against showing cross-post links like Lemmy currently does. That helps finding communities that you have not subscribed to yet (but are already known to your instance). But automatically loading all the comments as well seems a bit too much to me.
Also I wonder how it handles reposts, i.e. the same link multiple times in one community
Awesome!
That seems pretty logical
I would love to see this expanded, with at minimum a link to the community so that someone could read its rules, and ideally perhaps a hidden-by-default (collapsed?) type of pop-out that displays the community rules right there on the page, as exists (without being hidden) for the main community that a post is in.
But even as it is now, this is such a fantastic feature to see live already!:-) Not only does it save time but it increases the feeling of connections between communities and overall sense of welcomingness to people browsing the (Threadi-)Verse:-).
Just FYI: If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood piefed: https://www.patreon.com/PieFed
Its actually kinda amazing how much the dev(s) do with what they are given.
I thought everyone was aware, !piefed_meta@piefed.social is a cool place!
Commenting without the link markdown so it opens in Voyager
One day those links will work for everyone,one day…
This is exactly what I wanted. I might make the switch now.
Nice feature!
Oooooo this is compelling.
Oh shit is there an app?
Edit: doesn’t work too well with Lemmy instances yet
Double edit: apparently it does…?
Not “fully”, but testing is underway for Thunder (a FOSS Lemmy app) - https://piefed.social/post/484755.
Why do you say that it doesn’t work well with Lemmy instances yet? I’ve been using piefed.social for ~5 months now, and while I do often see connection issues (maybe once a month?), I likewise experienced first-hand many, Many, MANY other connection issues on several Lemmy instances (StarTrek.website got so bad that I left it for Discuss.Online, which I would say has such issues only exceedingly rarely) plus constantly hear about many issues on other instances (Lemmy.world delays with many other instances especially aussie.zone, programming.dev database corruption, images not showing on Lemmy.cafe, etc.).
The connection issues on PieFed.social in particular I believe may have little to do with PieFed as software in general and rather much to do with PieFed.social in particular being a bleeding edge testing ground for new features. Which I knew and consented to as I made my account (and advise people to keep a Lemmy backup alt, although that’s just good advice for any Lemmy instance too), but there are other instances running PieFed that someone can choose if they want greater stability - notably feddit.online as the largest one.
So that’s my take, but perhaps you have more details you can add? If you were referring to this old post, that was only referring to someone starting up their own instance using PieFed, and they said themselves that the issue resolved itself in half an hour after posting.
TLDR: you’re not exactly wrong per se, but it comes across as cherry picking to imply that Lemmy has no such issues working even with software on both sides being Lemmy. But perhaps I am missing something and I’d love to read more if you have any details you’d like to share:-).
Let me see if I can find the link that I found
Yes, please do!
Come to think of it, I am aware of one issue where PieFed won’t automatically pull in content when it receives a vote for it - but I discount that as being a problem bc that’s a major issue even among Lemmy instances, just in different ways. I could show you some examples where my votes on a post vary from like 200 to 0 or anywhere in-between (that particular issue was from the post being locked, which ofc I received no notification of that happening, it just screwed up the federation of it across the entire Fediverse).
Also, the issue I’m thinking of would only affect a brand-new PieFed instance, not an established one that receives the post content as it federated out. And too, the way that Lemmy would handle this would lead to improper vote counts: imagine hypothetically that a post got +1000 upvotes and only 10 downvotes, but then the moment your brand-new Lemmy instance goes online you start to receive exclusively new votes for this post, and let’s say that it receives +2 more upvotes and another 10 downvotes. In this (hypothetical) scenario, the vote counts are MAGNITUDES off from what they should be - instead of showing +983 it would show as -7, thus misrepresenting a “highly popular” post as a “fairly unpopular” one. Lemmy’s approach is to have the post but allow the vote counts to be incorrect, whereas PieFed’s approach is to not pull in the post in the first place (unless someone manually makes that determination to override - which anyone can do, though I’ve argued that this should be a feature that is slightly more hidden or at least not as readily shown to users who, like myself at the time, could unknowingly cause spread of misinformation by not knowing all of these technical details).
So it’s not that Lemmy’s way is “right” and PieFed’s is “wrong”, but rather both are kinda wrong, iirc, and yet only affecting old posts that brand-new instances are trying to work with, so very much an edge scenario.
But if there’s something I missed, yes please send me the link - I would like to be informed!:-)
I believe I saw this
https://piefed.social/post/484755
Other PieFed sites don’t have the API enabled, so won’t work. I**t can’t be used for Lemmy sites,**
Did I read this wrong?
I believe I understand it. To clarify:
The normal Thunder app works perfectly with Lemmy instances. I’ve got it and while I haven’t registered my account with it yet, it works very well even as a guest to read content - it’s a great app!:-)
There is also a fork for the app, designed specifically for testing purposes, which only works atm (iirc) for a single PieFed instance. This fork no longer works with any Lemmy instances, nor any instances of PieFed either that aren’t running the API code. So it’s testing the backend and frontend connections, requiring specializations on both ends to work at all.
When all of that is done, the fork can be requested to be merged into the main branch, and become a standard feature of Thunder, to work either with Lemmy or with PieFed instances.
But notably, getting to what I thought you meant: PieFed itself still connects perfectly to Lemmy, due to its implementation of the ActivityPub protocol (and Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, and whatever else may also use that same ActivityPub protocol to share content).
I hope this explanation helps at least a little!:-)
ah damn they arent even developing an ios version so this platform stays irrelevant to me
What do you mean?
First, there’s a version of Thunder available on the App Store.
And second, PieFed offers better service in its web browser interface than any Lemmy instance I’ve seen, and most apps too. Like, Voyager is pretty awesome and a strong contender for best Lemmy app (especially among FOSS options), but it doesn’t have categories of communities, hashtag support, user customizable and shareable Feeds (like multi-Reddits), cross posting that shows all comments merged into one view, etc. and a lot of features that it does have can be quite buried within the interface. e.g. to read the rules of a community you have to navigate to it, then click the hamburger menu and choose the side-bar option, whereas on PieFed the rules are displayed directly underneath every single post, so all you have to do is scroll.
Now, mind you, the standard Thunder app won’t work yet for PieFed - it’s still being tested in a forked version of the code, not committed yet to the main branch of the code. So if that’s a deal-breaker for you, then yeah you should stick with Lemmy - FOR NOW!:-D - but there is movement towards supporting that, which i think is fucking awesome 😎. Lemmy is so slow to add new features, while we get them here on PieFed basically weekly at this point.
The app or piefed as a whole?
