What features made you choose PieFed over Mbin/Lemmy?
What features do they have that you’d like to see in PieFed?
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Onboarding.
So many people give up on Lemmy because they have login issues and once they’re logged in they don’t understand how things work etc.
PieFed makes it easy to create a account and login, and guides you once you’re logged in
I tried PieFed for ~2 minutes before switching away from it. What didn’t work for me was the theme selection. The default dark theme was too dark & high contrast for my taste, and the other themes were just too bright or colourful for my eyes to rest and read easy.
There was one theme I liked but it introduced a spinning element in the top left corner of the page that kept catching my eye.
Is it petty? Yeah. Could I have mitigated it by installing a browser plugin? Probably.
When did you try it? The spinning thing was removed about 2 days ago. Did you try more recently than this?
That was just about a week ago now, not long after Lemm.ee announced it was shutting down. I was more concerned about a different instance that I immediately could get on with and ultimately I found the theme selection to be a hurdle. Again, yeah I know it’s petty.
The spinning element has been removed recently, there are some cache issues that might explain why it’s still there.
Which instance were you using?
Not really a feature but I like the general look and feel of PieFed. I think the user interface feels polished even though it is still quite early in development.
mbin on the other hand just doesn’t feel as comfortable to use. The layout feels unnatural and the buttons are in unexpected places. Also I really dislike the unconventional terms such as “magazine” and “boost”. (I know they came from kbin)
I hope PieFed will keep the UI clean while adding new features. I am quite confident with the devs based on what I have seen so far.
Thanks for all the hardworking devs providing such wonderful applications.
Edit:
Expanding on what I like about PieFed:- The “new communities” and “active communities” section on the sidebar are more useful than I expected.
- Killer feature: Grouping cross posts and viewing comments from different posts in the same view
- Voting is private. This gives me the peace of mind when I downvote a post from a snowflake.
- Instance blocking that works
votings never private when someone can spin up a friendica instance and see it all, or since its activityhub anyone could make an app exclusively to see downvoters.
It’s private because there are essentially two of you, and your vote is the anonymous you.
https://piefed.social/post/205362
“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 …”
I bet it would be fairly easy to match comments with upvotes/downvotes and get a pretty good idea of who’s ‘anonymous’ accounts are pretty quickly.
It’s already the case when you’re debating with a single person and every of your comment gets downvoted
No it’s not.
I rarely down vote, but when I do, I don’t leave a comment. I can’t be the only one.
Yeah but I bet you upvote or downvote other comments in the thread around the same time you make comments.
That activity would make an educated guess pretty easy.
Interesting. It would probably also depend on the number of other people downvoting and commenting. Also this assumes that someone consistently downvotes and comments on one post.
Didn’t know that. But at least the extra steps make it less convenient I think.
Peertube integration works really well.
The combinational multi communities that it has makes maintaining multiple similar communities much easier.
I really like that the UI has so many options you can chose from.
User flare.
There’s more but yeah I’ve been enjoying it.
I love that images open full width and links are just thumbnails. It makes it much easier to tell the difference.
- Consolidated comments view
- Keywords filter
- Actual instance blocking
- Multicommunities
Please get rid of the trusted instance concept for private voting. Or at least let me lick which instances I trust.
You heard me.
I’ve complained about the ‘trusted instance concept’ too … I’ve a horrible feeling that it exists to protect piefed.social from the DB bloat it inflicts on everyone else, lol.
how does that affect db bloat? or rather, how does it protect from that?
piefed.social is hard-coded in the source as a ‘trusted instance’, so other PieFed instances won’t ever send votes to it using alternative profiles. Untrusted instances that receive traffic from PieFed instances will end up generating one row for the main user, and one row for the alt user. It’s typically only one extra row (per user), but I think that unticking and ticking ‘Vote privately’ in settings generates a new random username for the alt everytime, so it could end up being more.
Is this where that happens? I am having a hard time untangling all the AP stuff in the codebase.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is the case any longer. I have been spinning up new dev instances a ton with docker and the trusted instances list is empty. The one place that piefed.social is listed in the admin panels I found is in the “Warn if new account banned from these instances” box:
I have been on a bit of a mission to try to make a lot of the more opinionated moderation tools in piefed optional at an admin level or remove them (so far rimu has been receptive). So, if this is in the code, I would want to make a PR to remove it.
Is this where that happens?
Yeah. That function is for adding instances as they are encountered. Your dev server won’t initially know about any other instances (‘trusted’ or not), but as soon as it engages with anything from ‘piefed.social’, then it will get added to the instance list and the ‘trusted’ flag will be set to True
at least in lemmy’s db structure, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference compared to other tables that use significantly more space:
The scale of LW is impressive as always.
Is the
post_readtable where info on what a user has or has not read is stored? I am wondering now if a huge db like that is the cost of implementing features like marking unread comments or posts.…not that I have a great idea of how to do that since I don’t know js at all, but db size is something to keep in mind when the intention is to have federated instances, each with their own infrastructure.
yes,
post_readmarks which posts a user has marked as read. it links post ids with user ids and adds a timestamp on top to allow for sorting.edit:
for comments, lemmy only stores the number of read comments per post, which is what goes into
person_post_aggregates. this is a tradeoff, it has some limitations, e.g. when comments are deleted or removed, which affects the total count. as there is also a timestamp attached it might be possible to use that in combination with comment creation times, though this would likely impact query performance quite a bit more.
piefed.social is hard-coded in the source as a ‘trusted instance’,
That’s probably inherited from the past, from a time where Piefed.social was the only active instance around. Quite a few of those settings are being made customizable in the last few days, so that every instance can configure it as they wish.
…diligently taking notes…
I am going to take a closer look at this.
Thank you!
