This release saw contributions from some new people, which is great to see.
In this release you can now follow other people, not just join communities. When you follow someone their posts will show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of whether you have joined the community it was posted in or not.
You can also follow Mastodon+ accounts. Getting Mastodon integration working really well is going to be a long journey but this release gets us headed in that direction. Eventually I hope that this integration will provide a steady source of timely content to cross-post into threadiverse communities as well as being a peer citizen in the Mastodon-flavored parts of the fediverse.
New:
- You can follow other users and their posts will always show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of the community they were posted into. Following Mastodon users works also but should be considered as very experimental. This will improve soon.
In the future you will be able to upload a list of people that you exported from your mastodon profile and follow them in one go. And add people that your instance doesn’t already know about - but not yet. These features will be rolled out in future versions once the dust settles on this version.
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Mastodon posts have a new design that is distinct from threadiverse posts - there is no post title and larger author profile pic.
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Communities can be marked as being a favorite, which makes them more prominent in the ‘Communities’ menu.
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Clicking anywhere in a post teaser takes you to the teaser - you don’t need to aim for the title
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Dramatically improved page load times on Chrome-based browsers (Speculation Rules API).
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Little spinner thing while a vote is being cast
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Updated translations
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Preview markdown when editing a wiki page
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RSS feeds on the home page, including a feed of posts from your subscribed communities
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Topic selection during onboarding looks way nicer now.
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Accessibility improvements to headers.
For Developers:
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Massive CSS reorganisation by travis-jeans. Lots more usage of CSS variables. Improves maintenance and accessibility.
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API: Users can now log out
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API: Follow and unfollow users
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API: video file upload works now
For Instance Admins:
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Communities where every moderator is a bot or inactive are flagged as un-moderated. Reports about posts in un-moderated local communities go to admins.
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Warnings on domains can be 3 types instead of only a warning - the other two are ‘helpful context’ and ‘recommendation’
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Send a DM to a user asking them if they are a bot, with 1 click. If they do not respond their account is automatically flagged as a bot
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Email bounce inbox can now be accessed through POP3, not just IMAP
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Tokens used by mobile apps can be set to expire, using the JWT_EXPIRY_DAYS environment variable
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More accurate tracking of when a user was last active. This will significantly increase your MAU stats.
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Strict allowlist mode to reduce attack surface exposed by federation
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/admin/federation form split up into 3 separate pages rather than one long confusing page.
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Option to disable DM sending for individual users if they lack the self-control to use it responsibly.
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compose.yaml has changed a bit: For most containers the build target is now "runtime’ instead of ‘builder’.
For example
celery:
build:
context: .
target: runtime
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Topics can be associated with countries, for more targeted onboarding suggestions based on the viewer’s location.
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To reduce server load and network traffic, a maximum number of votes that can be cast each day has been set at a level that will only affect the top 2% of voters, leaving the bottom 98% unaffected. This quota can be altered with an environment variable. View a profile to see how much of their daily quota has been used.
To upgrade from 1.6.x
git pull
git checkout v1.7.x
At this point you might see an error message about a merge conflict with compose.yaml. To preserve your custom compose.yaml you will need to copy it somewhere else, then git checkout compose.yaml then git pull again (or use git’s stash feature). This time the pull will succeed so after that copy your custom compose.yaml it back, overwriting the one from git.
Then,
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh
If you had to do the compose.yaml fix up earlier then you might want to compare what you have with https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/compose.yaml and manually copy and paste some improvements in particular the target: part of the db container.
Donations
PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.
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- Send a DM to a user asking them if they are a bot, with 1 click. If they do not respond their account is automatically flagged as a bot
This is dumb, I don’t respond to my DM’s at all, especially if someone is asking me if I am a bot out of no where.
Even worse, it’s an automated question, so it’s a bot asking a human if it’s a bot!?
If you say “yes” though… then that is what a bot would say, no? 🤪
I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I was one that asked for Favorites in the Community tab. I’ve got it working, and I’m really grateful to Rimu for implementing it! I’m still loving PieFed and appreciate all his hard work on it. I also put my money where my mouth is and donate a few dollars every month to support him. It’s not much, but if everyone that uses it gave a little, he’d be in great shape.
Thanks :)
I love the favourite communities feature.
Once again, thanks the devs for the hard work.
Wonderful to see such changes continue to be made to advance PieFed and thereby the Threadiverse/Fediverse overall!
a maximum number of votes that can be cast each day
I don’t get this one though - isn’t voting an actual contribution, alongside commenting and posting, which makes the place feel more welcoming and active? Is the fear that some are making an outsize amount compared to others, perhaps especially a bot-net rather than actual human activity? We need people to post more, to comment more, and to not merely lurk but vote more - I’ve been trying to push myself to vote more, as nobody wants to keep posting to a place that offers <10 votes to a post, and only one or two upvotes per comment. Mind you, I doubt I am one of the top 2%, but even losing access to some of those contributions (PugJesus?:-P) seems naively to me like it would impact us all, making the place seem less active?
Besides which, enforcement seems an issue: anyone who truly wanted to vote more often could simply make an alt and keep right on going, especially if they did so on other instances then it wouldn’t be readily detectable, and wouldn’t the total number of votes that ends up having to be processed still remain the same in that case? (Though perhaps it’s easier to process in batch from other instances?). But more to the point, I wonder even if for like the bottom rather than top 2%, will this send a message to users that voting is less of a desirable activity, that they should be sparing and only dole those out for things that they feel are truly worthwhile… and thereby vote 10x less often, making the network overall that much less active?
If this restriction was due to technical limitations, then I’d love to see a rate-limit of any form of contributions - e.g. at most one or two per second, rather than a public statement that voting is now encouraged less than it was before. But again, I am not sure I understand this to begin with so it’s just a thought!
According to Rimu this voting quota will affect 2% of users. To me it looks to be high enough that it will mostly serve as a way to discourage voting warfare (upvote everything you agree with, downvote everything you don’t like). If you limit your downvotes to things like offtopic, rule breaking content and bad faith actors I doubt you’ll run out of votes and I hope that was the intention behind implementing it.
Rule breaking and bad faith actors / trolling should instead be reported and handled via moderation. Downvotes should simply be the opposite of an upvote.
This approach of using downvotes for everything you want to reduce visibility of results in a situation where groups of users engage in the voting warfare I was talking about. It’s cancer that invites more and more escalation until everyone has to vote on everything just to have their voices not buried. It’s a bad user experience for everyone except most fanatical.
I cannot recall the last time that I downvoted something - I do it exceedingly rarely, and only as you said to indicate irrelevance; although technically for rule-breaking content, shouldn’t reporting+removal be more of a consideration? (for e.g. disinformation removal would seem preferable, whereas for misinformation mere downvoting may be sufficient)
To give a specific example, I was looking recently at the posts in !lotrmemes@piefed.social and noticed how over the last week several posts have <10-20 upvotes (I can’t easily tell how downvotes factor into this), and keep in mind this community has existed for 11 months already. New posters will stop bothering to contribute content unless they receive positive feedback, which puts the burden of content generation upon the most prolific posters who are able to specialize in doing so, having optimized their procedures. This leads not only to lesser activity overall, but a heavily concentrated set of posters and seems naively to me like it would trend towards encouraging people to lurk more rather than engage, both by sending the subtle message that voting is not desirable while also causing content to receive fewer upvotes than it otherwise would.
If true, then this affects the entire network - even Lemmy + Mbin & now Mastodon (+nodeBB, etc.). Of course I could be very wrong: perhaps votes being a limited resource could encourage people to vote MORE than they otherwise would, or to vote differently, like with greater intentionality (rather than merely smashing a “like” button, sending a signal that it would be desirable to see more of similar content in the future in that community). Though… I would have thought the opposite actually? In the past, in communities that I help moderate or want to see grow, I have upvoted every single comment within them, not to signal “agreement” in that case but “this comment is welcome, it is good for it to have been added here”. If it makes people feel good to feel welcomed, then why not upvote MORE?
But perhaps this is a different model for upvoting - a more "feels good’ social media one than a news aggregation one? I actually have quite a few thoughts about that!! One being that you can’t really trust votes from unvetted accounts in the first place, so for certain situations where votes actually matter beyond merely sorting within the various Feeds (Subscribed, Local, All, Topics, etc.) then we would really need a whole new type of vote class than a mere “standard upvote”, which can be botted and also influenced by drive-by non-community members who browse there by All. I am so enthused to see Piefed moving in what I consider great directions there!! Allowing a community to restrict voting to solely members helps with both of those aforementioned effects (nothing will ever entirely be a defense, but by placing a barrier it does help, and the barrier could always be raised further if the need arises, e.g. introducing a delay of one week before someone who signals intent to join a community before they can begin voting in it, to prevent drive-by All browsers from joining for the explicit purpose of influencing a specific vote than they would lack the proper context for anyway).
So here I just meant the standard, social media-esque upvote, of posts and comments. Though without numbers or the context to compare them, I am just thinking in terms of general principles here.
It helps that this will be able to be set by an environmental variable, so that different instances can tune it towards however they want, although then my concern turns towards transparency - how could someone know what this variable is set to, as they consider which instance they want to join? Or if the thought is that this number is SO exceedingly high that a normal human would not likely reach it, then… well no, because it’s already been stated that this definitively overlaps with the range of human interactions right now, and will most definitely impact some people - 2% of them, to be precise.
Did I miss something - is this not an instance setting but something that the users can opt-out of by changing their personal account settings, hence is a measure to help curb someone’s social media addictive behaviors?
Thank you for your feedback.
We have rate limits (a quota by another name) on posting and commenting. Why not on votes? Casting a vote causes as much network activity as posting a comment.
On everyone’s profile is a bar showing how much of their quota has been used. I’ll be monitoring this to see what happens. If it’s cramping everyone’s style too much then it’ll be removed.
I wouldn’t mind a per-minute rate limitation of anything - posts, comments, even voted, though a per-day one feels weird. Without that immediate feedback it is something that someone impacted by it would need to expend effort towards tracking, as if those additional votes were arguably somehow “bad” (otherwise why limit them at all? I mean for a normal human, even the top 2% of us, but obviously a superhuman bot level of activity would be something else entirely - and in fact in that case, could rather be handled by banning the account rather than merely limiting its contributions?) rather than contributions made to enliven a social media network that by most accounts (e.g. posts to various Fediverse communities) already lies more on the spectrum towards the fairly dead side, rather than being too active.
That said, I recognize that this is an incomplete, even arguably naive perspective since I am unaware of the technical hurdles being faced. Which raises difficult questions: if Lemmy is able to handle not only the current scale of tens of thousands of users but another order of magnitude or so beyond that, then is Piefed unable to do so? (Again, I do not know the answer here nor would be much help in finding one, just stating the questions that will arise from this, especially from the ML crowd looking for any excuse to criticize what they stubbornly see as solely a competitor rather than ally against corporate interests.)
A per-minute rate limit wouldn’t work here because people go through bursts of activity - I might do 50 votes in 3 minutes, then none for 10 hours. If the rate limit was 50 votes per 3 minutes then people would still be able to cast thousands of votes per day.
is Piefed unable to do so
PieFed is able to do so, and has been doing so.
But I don’t think think it should have to and I don’t think we should let a handful of people have the amount of influence they have been having. Did you see the graphs I shared in the matrix room?
for e.g. disinformation removal would seem preferable, whereas for misinformation mere downvoting may be sufficient
This is what I half-suspected as the reason for why some feel so attacked by this change. What is disinformation is quite ephemeral in this post modern era and in the end it means that you’re downvoting things you disagree with. And unfortunately that usually means things that don’t match people’s pre-existing beliefs.
Hrm, personally I just unsubscribe or at worst even block a community or account rather than feel the need to downvote every single thing across the entire Internet. Though I suppose downvotes could play a role in combating it, it seems preferable to me to disengage entirely - e.g. when Hexbears refuse to play by the rules, even when pleaded to by their own admins (yet with zero enforcement enacted on their part), then defederate entirely, or if the instance admin refuses to - which is worth consideration as to whether you want to remain on such an instance - then ban the instance yourself personally.
It is called the Intolerance Paradox. There is no scenario in which feeding the trolls will ever work out well in the end. Appeasement never works.
All that said, I would have no problem with a quota specifically for downvotes, if the rationale is that people sometimes misuse them but that such a quota would help steer them towards a better understanding of alternative actions they could take to enjoy their time on the Fediverse without such tension.
Just for the record, the official text is:
To reduce server load and network traffic
I did see that, and at the end of my comment offered an alternative that would reduce the load on the servers even more - i.e. instead of total votes per day, limit instead to votes per second or per minute or some such.
This would still allow people to contribute votes, so long as they are offered at a pace that is sustainable for the recipient machine?
No idea.
Sounds groovy in theory, but in terms of actual micro-transactions’ load per second, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue.
Cool thanks! How do we follow Mastodon users?
There’s a follow button on each account’s profile. So first find one of their posts/comments and then go to the author of it.
Also if you go to https://piefed.social/instances, find the instance you like and then go to the people in that instance, there are Follow buttons everywhere.
I’m not making this slick and easy to use, yet. I don’t want everyone to suddenly follow tons of people and cause the server to melt or whatever. This following functionality could increase the federation work the server needs to do in unpredictable ways so I’ll be monitoring things and dealing with issues as they arise for a while, before going big on it.
If you look at Phanpy, they use colors to delineate the origin of posts (boosted, hashtag, follower, etc.). Would be neat to see a similar approach here. I realize this is still early days but maybe something to add to the roadmap.
It worked
There’s a follow button on each account’s profile. So first find one of their posts/comments and then go to the author of it.
Okay, I’m trying to figure out how to specifically get that done. My first idea was to cruise Mastodon and find someone I wanted to follow, hover over their name, then click that “follow” button.
Then I get taken to an M sign-in box which wouldn’t accept my PF login.
So I figured I’d paste their M-user’s ID address in to PF search, but it couldn’t find it. And now I’m all out of idears…
Yeah, ya can’t do it that way. That’s how you follow Mastodon users from Mastodon.
You have to use the link Rimu shared to search for their instance, and the scroll through the people on the instance. This is inconvenient. It’s supposed to be, for now. If you look for someone on a small instance with not many users, it will be easier.
That being said, I’m not seeing this particular guy’s account from here either. I can only even see a handful of the 586 users on that particular instance. It may be a federation issue there.
You’re only seeing a handful because those are the ones who posted in a community at some point or replied to a post in a community. The vast majority of Mastodon users have never interacted with any threadiverse content so they won’t show up on piefed.social.
Obviously this is very limiting :) Intentionally, for now.
Okay I followed a few Mastodon Fediverse people. Looking forward to seeing them show up.
I’m looking forward to when you add a frontend for following arbitrary users. I’m gonna follow the brigdy bluesky relay and I’m very curious to see how Bluesky users are gonna react.
@rimu@piefed.social Okay, I’m missing something trying to follow someone from Mastodon. I went to their profile using my Mastodon instance, but I’m already following them there, so there’s no option to follow them on PieFed. I went to my PF instance and searched for instances, and I found mastodon.social. I clicked on “Users” to look for the person I want to follow, but I couldn’t see a way to search users, so I would have to go manually page after page looking for one person. There’s hundreds of thousands of users on mastodon.world, so I would never find them!
What am I missing?
Yes, I haven’t made it easy to find people yet, intentionally.
Mastodon is 20x bigger than Lemmy, in terms of the amount of people using it. So once they start sending us their toots in earnest, we could be looking at a 2x increase in federation load, easily. Could be 10x within a few weeks.
So I’m not keen to unleash that flood all at once. I’ll adjust PieFed to cope with it as it builds up slowly.
Okay, gotcha. So I’m not actually missing anything.
Cool update!
Looking forward to applying it later today.
this is great! it says followed users posts will appear in Subscribed but will they also appear in All? some of us only browse All
Not currently. But that could change!
I’m pretty sure that on shared instances with more than a few dozen users All would become swamped with trash from Mastodon and basically unusable. But maybe the Hot sort would cope, if Mastodon posts had few likes…
This is one of those things that can only be found out once it’s in production and the feature is being used a bit. So far https://piefed.social/c/microblogs?sort=new is pretty tame but it could become a flood, easily.
Sometimes development is like feeling your way through a dark room.
All would include only posts from people we follow though not everyone
Would you expect all fediverse users to appear in All?
No, only users i follow
“All” in PieFed (and Lemmy) speak means “all stuff that this server sees”, which means "all stuff that at least one user on this server has subscribed to. So it’s a valid question, I think.
Does a followed account show up in all? And do they show up in All for all users, or just for users who follow that person?
I would not expect to see any individual users in the All feed, which is why I was curious to learn what you might expect. I don’t really browse All, and I am often surprised by what folks who browse All expect, and how they choose to express those preferences.
I don’t browse all, either. I’m just pointing out that it’s a valid question. It’s a new feature and nobody has much time to explore the inner workings. PieFed is made by people, and people often have different opinions on what software should do.
Yeah I’m not even sure which I would prefer
Congrats!
