rimu

Recently there have been two more PieFed instances created, which offer accounts to anyone who wants one:

• https://feddit.online
• https://link.fossdle.org

Feddit.online is hosted in USA which should make it a little faster for people there. It also has a different topic structure at https://feddit.online/topics than PieFed.social has.

Key updates include the addition of community icons for better identification, a notification management interface, and various enhancements to our API for eventual mobile app support. Below is a detailed overview of the changes we've made.

##Jeena

• Community icon alongside name in post teaser. This helps differentiate between communities with the same name and adds visual interest.

##Freamon

• Added a notification management interface to manage notifications from all the communities and posts you are subscribed to - https://piefed.social/alerts
• Soft deletion of comments, so they can be un-deleted again.
• Lots of API work for the mobile app. Lots!

#Rimu

• Generate YouTube thumbnails more reliably.
• Instance overview pages which make it easy to see posts and people from any instance. Start exploring at https://piefed.social/instances.
• FEP-268d: Search consent signals for objects. This FEP is a convention for how instances can signal to other instances which posts should be searchable.
• Track who deleted which posts, for accountability among moderators.
• Refactoring to support API work by Freamon.
• Automatically delete voting data older than 6 months (aggregated totals are unaffected). Voting data consumes gigabytes of space and it only meaningfully affects ranking of posts in the first few days. The only other reason to keep this data is for vote manipulation analysis and 6 months worth of data should be plenty.
• Instances with open registrations automatically close registrations after one week of having no admins log in. This will avoid abandoned instances becoming a vector for spam or a home of trolls.
• Show instance name after display name. If you notice undesirable patterns of behaviour associated with certain instances you can block the whole instance.
• Improve visibility of user-level instance blocking functionality. This is separate and in addition to defederation which is controlled by admins.
• Display PeerTube licence info on video posts. This could be rolled out to other post types in future?
• Topics now have an option to show posts from communities that are in child topics. E.g. https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft only has two communities in it so the number of posts shown there is very low. However it’s child topics (Arts, Craft and Photography) have quite a few communities so to populate the top-level topic it makes sense to display posts from all the child topics too. https://piefed.social/topic/tech/programming is a similar case.

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As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!

We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

Our workflows and productivity metrics regularly ask knowledge workers for things that do not make good knowledge work.

Bloggers on reddit lament how much “meta-work” and “not-work” exists in tech. They kvetch about the conversations and the waiting. They consider the principal engineer’s calendar, packed with meetings, quod erat demonstratum that those roles are “easy” and “airware.” They insist that, if they could manage to not get caught, they could keep several such positions simultaneously and never under-deliver on any of them. None of these jobs, they claim, ask them for all that much code.

Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally.

Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections highlight methane plumes in Pakistan and Texas, as well as a carbon dioxide plume in South Africa.

The data contributes to Carbon Mapper’s goal to identify and measure greenhouse gas point-source emissions on a global scale and make that information accessible and actionable.

We tried to hold back from coding new stuff in order for things to stabilize but it didn't work out. Maybe next month. Instead, we made a whole bunch of cool things:

rimu

• Detect offline instances and stop federating to them until they come back. feamon helped a lot with this.
• Private voting - see https://piefed.social/post/205362 for background.
• Remove moment.js to ease load on clients. We were using a quite heavy javascript library to format dates on the client side but removing the JS and doing it in Python on the backend instead more than halved the amount of JS we need to send (we're now down to 70 KB, gzipped).
• Post teaser redesign - the most significant visual change since the beginning. Image posts now have a much larger preview image and video posts can be played without going to the post itself. YouTube videos are lazy-loaded just before scrolling into view but only if running on AC power. Devices running off a battery (or like Firefox which do not support the battery API) will only load the video once you visit the post page, not while scrolling the feed.
• Use a connection pool for federation - rather than making a new network connection to send an Activity, PieFed will reuse an existing connection where possible. This has less overhead and results in faster federation.

hendrik

• Better notifications about comments buried deep in a thread

freamon

• Better federation of bans from remote admins.
• use HTML portion of Activity instead of Markdown. Lemmy sends Activitys as both Markdown and HTML. For a long time PieFed would use the Markdown and convert it to HTML for display but now it just uses the HTML that Lemmy provides.
• Image alt text federation
• Backfilling improvements especially with image posts.
• Many misc bugfixes

JollyDevelopment

• New theme - "card shadow" - this quickly became a favorite among the dev team and both freamon and myself use it. It's basically the same as the default except there are shadows behind things, giving a more 3D look to the interface and giving a bit more visual hierarchy. It's nice, try it - https://piefed.social/user/settings
• Admin page - instance administration - there is a table showing all the instances you're federating with and stats for each instance.
• Profile export - PieFed has had the functionality to import settings from a Lemmy profile for a long time but now it's possible to go the other way and export settings from PieFed to Lemmy.
• Add remote form - The form for adding a remote community used to require you to type the community as !whatever@instance.com but now you can give the URL as well, e.g. https://instance.com/c/whatever

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As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!

Much more at https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).

As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.

ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.

That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.

To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.

This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967