wjs018

Some of the other bigger instances out there federate with one or both just fine

I mean, the same is true for other PieFed instances. piefed.zip, for example, is federated with both (same admin team as lemmy.zip).

Like I said, this is inherently opinionated as any kind of defaults would be (themes, colors, user settings, etc.). I just don’t agree that just because an instance is old and active means that it is a positive influence on or provides a positive experience for the average user. Just like I don’t think forums like 4chan should be looked at positively just due to its age and activity. I know there are many that disagree with this, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Specifically, the piefed.social instance is a bit more opinionated than most other instances out there because rimu has pretty strong feelings about social media. Some of my contributions to the code have been to make PieFed less opinionated or to take some of those very strongly opinionated options/filters and make them configurable or optional at an admin level. So far, rimu has been pretty receptive to this kind of contribution.

At the end of the day, I am glad that all three threadiverse software platforms exist (people too often forget about mbin) and have been able to maintain a cordial working relationship. They each have different opinions, defaults, and features that might appeal to some users over others.

Here is the list of defederated instances when a fresh install happens. This is editable in the admin UI after installation is complete. So, if you really want your instance to federate with the good folks of cum.salon, you are more than welcome to.

This is really just intended to provide what we think of as a good set of defaults for a typical user. Of course this is somewhat opinionated, just like something like an operating system has a set of opinionated defaults for stuff like default programs, window styling, etc.

For piefed.social specifically, there are some words/phrases in the filter currently. Most of them are malicious links that have been spammed in the past or phrases that have been present among private message spam waves. Only one racial slur that I see in the list.

The language really doesn’t have much to do with things like performance; at least not at the scale that most fedi instances operate at. For PieFed we are using the Flask framework and the overhead of an interpreted language and rendering jinja templates is absolutely negligible compared to the speed of the postgres database. Most of the performance optimizations we have had to make have been related to crafting better db queries or moving things like federation tasks to background workers.

Might Flask have trouble scaling to the size of reddit? Sure, but I don’t think that we necessarily need to optimize for a use case that may never happen and can also be alleviated by scaling out (more instances) rather than up. I know that rimu is already feeling like piefed.social is too big compared to other PieFed instances and has thought about closing registrations because of it. It is one of the reasons he made the built-in instance chooser, to try to move new users to other instances.

I wrote more about my thoughts on the pros/cons of python/flask in another comment.

as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users

Some people seem to find this hard. I might be one of the PieFed devs, but there are certainly reasons that people might want to use lemmy instead and I think they do some things better. No one platform is going to be the best.

In most cases, when bandwidth/latency is not a bottleneck, the thing that limits page load times is the database (in both lemmy and piefed’s case). So, if an instance has a beefy server they are running their db on, then it is going to snappier most of the time.

Looks like this is a feature for most markdown parsers. In piefed, the same thing happens. I wrote most of the customizations for parsing markdown, but nothing to create relative links like this except for footnotes. So, it must be the default behavior of the markdown library we are using.

Where are you even seeing this in PieFed? This is a glyph in the feather font that we do use for our symbols, but we don’t actually use that symbol anywhere in the codebase.

The user in question just switched to a different unicode character that looks pretty much identical to the thorn symbol. AFAIK, we didn’t actually get any complaints from Icelanders, but we weren’t happy with the implementation due to its potential impact on that community. At the end of the day, we decided that this is a user problem where bans and blocks should be used instead of putting something explicitly in the code.

This was a bug just introduced in the past day or two. Since piefed.zip runs the dev version of the code, it caught it. I just pushed a fix to the code, so piefed.zip will get the fix next time they update.

Speaking for PieFed (I have no idea for lemmy, but I suspect it is in a similar situation), this isn’t something the API currently supports, so Voyager would have no way of knowing the save order of your bookmarks unless it is recording the save times for all the bookmarks you are saving from within the app. However, I just had a bit of a look through the code, and we do record the timestamp of when something is bookmarked, so we can sort that way. It would be a bit of work to include the logic for this, but it seems doable.

I just tried to replicate this and I think there is a bug introduced in the past day or two in the PieFed code. Since piefed.zip is running the development version of the code (as opposed to stable), these kinds of bugs are going to happen from time to time. I will try to work on a fix today.

Edit: the fix was pretty easy. I just pushed an update to the code to fix this, so it will start working again whenever piefed.zip updates (I think they automatically update once per day).

This was the best explanation to date I have seen of what Bonfire actually is. I still think that the ratio of marketing speak to features/users is way too high for me to get excited about it yet. I wish them all the luck and hope for the platform’s continued improvement though.

You are on PieFed, so you can always use a bit of custom css to make them go away. Pop this snippet into the custom css field of your user settings:

.comment_time {
    display: none;
}

That explains a lot. I completely forgot about the spiciness factors. I just saw effect in the code and thought it was the instance vote weighting.

100% agreed.

I have contributed quite a bit to the PieFed codebase, but the ActivityPub parts of the code are the main area where I dare not wander unless absolutely needed. Trying to make sense of what AP json should look like for specific actions is basically impossible and each software tends to have slightly different dialects anyway because of the a la carte nature of the FEPs.

To that end, I just saw that you (mbin) just published all of your AP json schema. It is so incredibly helpful to have complete schema in one place for each type of activity. So, thank you a lot! I am sure I will make use of it.

My guess is deleted/banned accounts, but I don’t really have a way to confirm that. Even using my admin powers, I still only see the 12 upvotes and 0 downvotes, and none of those have a vote weight different than 1.

I have been digging into the code, trying to look at where the post.score is updated, which has led me to suspect it is deleted accounts (for whatever reason). When a vote happens, the vote is recorded in a table in the database, and the post score is adjusted based on the vote weight based on the voter’s instance (in practice, this is basically always 1). However, when a user is banned/deleted, the votes recorded in the votes table are removed, but the post score is not adjusted accordingly to account for the now-deleted votes. The score just stays that number saved in the post table of the db.

@rimu@piefed.social - do you have any more insight? I was trying to think of the possibility of duplicate vote actions both contributing to the score, but I don’t think that should happen. I can’t really think of what else could make the score so out of line with the votes.

€30,000! I was stunned when I just pulled up their crowdfunding campaign. Apparently that is enough money for software “maintenance”. I think you have severely underpaid me for my contributions to PieFed if that is the going rate. I was just a sucker doing it for free. 😜

Update: I have added this to the api now. It will be in a future version.

Relevant piefed issue I made for this: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1482