Olio CafePieFed 1.6 is released - pronouns, private communities, quote posts and much more
Rimucodeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/releases/tag/v1.6.0
A big thank you to those who contributed to making this release, translating, writing documentation, providing emotional support and promoting PieFed! None of this would happen without you all.
New hotness
- Pronouns - when you put pronouns into Extra Fields on your profile that is used as a flair in all communities where you haven’t set a flair yet
- Private communities - no federation, only certain roles (depends on the community) can invite new people. Posts inside are only visible to members.
- Mastodon can now quote-boost PieFed posts
- Plain http web UI (no SSL required) with SSL used during federation - see http://retro.piefed.com
- Downvotes can be turned off completely in a community, not just instance-wide
- Admins can sticky a post on the home page, not just mods in their communities
- Auto-delete of replies on remote instances when reply author has been blocked by parent content author (only works in PieFed communities due to a ActivityPub limitation)
- On home page when showing number of replies a post has, calculate the sum of the replies on all cross-posts and display that
- New users can only do 3 posts in their first 24h, to reduce floods of posts by that guy who keeps deleting his accounts and making new ones
More good stuff
- Improve emoji federation compatibility
- Change order of emoji in picker to present most-used ones first
- Daily time limit on usage to help people use PieFed less (released in 1.5.2)
- A way to report posts that need to be tagged as AI generated
- Better accessibility
- Improved handling of bold and italics in markdown parsing
- Don’t accept votes from people the author has blocked
- Admins can resend email address verification email
- Admins can add notes to instances to keep track of defederation reasons, etc
- Search form has been simplified
- Option for admins to disable the em-dash detector
- Multiple minor bugfixes and security enhancements
To upgrade from 1.5.x
git pull
git checkout v1.6.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. 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 command: part of the db container which tunes postgresql for performance. Adjust the numbers for your system.
This time the database migrations will not take long.
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.
89 Comments
Comments from other communities
OmegaI’m super happy about the pronouns addition. It’s super convenient. Thanks a lot. 💖
BTW if you have pronouns in your display name, as you have, the pronouns in the Extra Fields won’t be shown. No point showing them twice!
It might be an inter-instance thing, so it’s gonna get updated soon, but I changed my displayed name right after seeing this announcement to remove the pronouns from it. :3
- Auto-delete of replies on remote instances when reply author has been blocked by parent content author (only works in PieFed communities due to a ActivityPub limitation)
- New users can only do 3 posts in their first 24h, to reduce floods of posts by that guy who keeps deleting his accounts and making new ones
Are these features at least optional on an instance-by-instance basis?
Edit: Didn’t mean to be negative, just had a couple concerns I clarified in a reply below and thought options could be helpful. I appreciate ongoing improvements to Piefed all the same.
People seem to assume that how things are now are how I want them to be. Like I made a decision not to provide some flexibility, intentionally.
It’s just easier and quicker NOT to provide an admin UI for every little thing, then document it, then have 95% of people will just leave it on the default setting anyway, then try to make an admin UI that isn’t cluttered and confusing because it’s full of all kinds of unimportant nonsense.
If you want something to be admin-changeable, have a conversation with us about it and we’ll see how many others want it to be changeable and how it could work. Then if a developer is interested enough perhaps they’ll write some more code for free, for the love of it, and maybe someone will write some documentation of that setting for free because they want to, etc.
That’s how this works.
Sorry if I’m overreacting to your question, there’s been a lot of accusatory questions lately.
Die4Everas a dev I get it, people always say “just make it an option!” to every little thing
but then they aren’t the ones who have to code, write tests, document, and do QA on the quintillions of permutations of options and keep maintaining them as new issues appear with certain combinations
and even if everything goes perfectly you still have a super cluttered list of options and then no one uses any of them because it’s too much to read through them all
Didn’t mean to offend, just providing feedback. Thank you for your continued commitment to improving Piefed.
Currently, no. I’m not sure a block system could work properly with different rules per instance. (Yes, I realise the irony of Lemmy having a different system here too).
New users can only do 3 posts in their first 24h, to reduce floods of posts by that guy who keeps deleting his accounts and making new ones
This is currently universal, but it will likely be added into a specific option at some point.
While increasing the impact of blocks could diminish the risk of harassment, it could also have the opposite effect of preventing users from responding to comments made about them by users who’ve blocked them.
While I personally think manual moderation is a better solution, if a system that blocks users in this manner is implemented, then there should also be an optional toggle for users to hide posts by users who’ve blocked them to avoid having posts that can’t be interacted with in one’s feed.
And while I can see the benefits of preventing potential spam from new accounts, it could also discourage new users from staying on if they are immediately limited in what they can share on the platform; Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin don’t have enough users as it is to be risking losing anyone.
In terms of the other features, I think the addition of pronouns will help Piefed distinguish itself from Reddit by fostering inclusivity.
While increasing the impact of blocks could diminish the risk of harassment, it could also have the opposite effect of preventing users from responding to comments made about them by users who’ve blocked them.
This is true.
While I personally think manual moderation is a better solution, if a system that blocks users in this manner is implemented, then there should also be an optional toggle for users to hide posts by users who’ve blocked them to avoid having posts that can’t be interacted with in one’s feed.
I mean wouldn’t this just mean blocking them in return? As viewed from Piefed, under this system, you can’t reply to a user who has blocked you - so you’ll know that’s happened.
And while I can see the benefits of preventing potential spam from new accounts, it could also discourage new users from staying on if they are immediately limited in what they can share on the platform; Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin don’t have enough users as it is to be risking losing anyone.
In my experience, it’s very rare for a Day 1 account that isn’t a troll/spammer of some sort to make more than 3 threads in the first 24 hours. That said, yes, it should be an optional instance toggle here.
Always in awe at the speed of development of this project.
Thank you for all your hard work.
Nice. Thanks for the hard work. PieFed is great.
Always getting better, by leaps and bounds. Thank you, devs, for all the hard work and great ideas!
Looks like a great update. Very cool that communities have the granular ability to disable down votes.
Nice!
We’ve been using the announcement field, but that doesn’t show up for people on apps. This should be better :)
Swapped it out now: https://piefed.ca/
Odd, I can only see the pinned posts when signed in @rimu@piefed.social
Right now we have two pinned posts, one from lemmy.ca and one from a local only piefed.ca community. Both show up nicely when signed in, neither show up when signed out
The pinned posts still obey some of the visibility rules of any other post. So, in this case, piefed.ca has
Popularas the default sort on the instance. That means that the community that is home to those posts must have thePosts can be popularbox checked in the admin settings for that community:I can’t confirm that this is the issue, but I was able to confirm with a dev instance that local-pinned posts do show up for anonymous users using the popular sort when that box is checked and don’t when it is unchecked.
It could be, where would I find that setting? I didn’t see it in the community settings.
I do see the “popular” column is ticked on
admin/communitiesfor those communities, but I don’t see a page that has something like your screenshotIn
/admin/communities, the far right column has anEditlink. That is where you have some additional settings, including checkboxes that can include/exclude communities from your instance’s Popular and All views. You want to make sure that both of these are checked (they are down below the language settings):Thanks! That fixed it for our
piefed.ca/c/maincommunity. Thelemmy.ca/c/maincommunity’s post still doesn’t show up, but we can plan our announcements to get around that in the meantimeEven logged in and with filters so that the post is visible, I don’t see the post in the piefed community as pinned. Could it have been unpinned when you did your db reload?
If it is pinned on your side, then it must be a bug of some kind.
Thank you for all your work. 1.5 is just three weeks old. Impressive how much development happened since then.
Great updates, especially the pronouns!
@snoopy@tarte.nuage-libre.fr as you requested a while ago
Merci, parfait ! i will desactivate downvote in most of my communities. I hate downvote with a deep passion. :)
I’m glad I made piefed my daily driver. Thanks for all your hard work.
I don’t understand what the purpose of the plain http is, can anybody explain to me please?
For really, really poor internet connections, http can be a lot more performant because it has a lot less handshaking that needs to happen. This kind of use case is something rimu cares a lot about since he has previously had to deal with super awful internet connections in the past. It is a very specific use case and outside of that kind of case, it wouldn’t be recommended. You can see that both http and https versions of the site can coexist, so it is an option for those that need it.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks!
given the terrible signal in my works toilets this is a very welcome development
It’s so LGR can load a website other than google on Windows 9x /jk
Alts Georg is an outlier and should not be included in the average alts per users figure
I don’t really understand this. So if I block Timmy@instance.net and then he replies to My posts on piefed.social, piefed.social will delete his comments? But instance.net won’t?
No. It means future comments by the blocked user would be deleted. This only matters when coming from Lemmy instances as on Piefed, a user being blocked disables that user from responding.
I still don’t understand
It means that if you were to block a user replying to you from a Lemmy instance, any further replies they make to you in any thread would be automatically thrown out by Piefed.
@skavau@piefed.social said in PieFed 1.6 is released - pronouns, private communities, quote posts and much more: > any further replies they make to you in any thread would be automatically thrown out by Piefed.
Padme: “for just you, right?”
Anakin:
Oh, so if Timmy is a Lemmy user and blocks Me, and I reply to Timmy’s posts on piefed.social, piefed.social deletes My comments?
Yes, and for other piefed instances. It is due to underlying differences in how rimu interprets how blocking should work vs. Lemmy
That’s awesome! That means Piefed users can’t follow a person around putting the same reply under all their posts. I wrote about that problem on My blog!
FYI https://retro.piefed.social/ has HSTS enabled, so browsers refuse to load it
Sorry the correct link is http://retro.piefed.com. I’ll update the post. Beware your browser will try to switch to https instead because they prefer it so you probably won’t get the full rawdogging PieFed experience unless you change your browser setting to stop that.
My fingers are used to .social! I also own the .com to stop someone else nabbing it but couldn’t use retro.piefed.social because of SSL on piefed.social…
I still need to finish the Dillo theme, which will make PieFed compatible with roughly Firefox 3+. That’ll compliment the http mode nicely. This is super niche so just something I potter away on occasionally.
@die4ever@retrolemmy.com I assume this is your instance?
no, it’d be part of piefed.social, likely just a different frontend
Oh right, read too fast. Sorry for the ping!
no problem, I’m always on here anyways lol
And it’s always nice to see you around! 😄
No it’s a subdomain off piefed.social and is linked to above, it’s rimu’s i assume
That makes sense, thanks
mmmm. private communities are nice but without federation it means they have to cajole anyone they want to join to make an account on a particular server.
Yes. The intended use-case is something like a community group that runs their own instance, or an admin team coordinating among themselves. Those people are going to be on the same instance.
At least in our case we’re divided about 50/50 between Lemmy and PieFed. I could force people to PieFed by deleting Lemmy, but that wouldn’t be nice 😀
Private federation would be incredible but I’ve already heard you say it would be a large amount of work, so I’m not holding my breath!
This will be really useful for the soulist credit card number sharing group! /funny
Fuck me, I’ve been on Piefed for literally 5 minutes and let me tell you, it’s so relieving knowing that I can write (this comment included) without being traced right down to the marrow in my bones. Coming next month I’ll start to donate, excellent work, guys
Welcome!
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥 thanks
Welcome!
Thank you so much for your great work!
I woul really prefer people I block to not see my stuff as if they blocked me so that they could not vote. I don’t block people needlessly but if I do I sorta want them out of my federated life.
That has serious down-the-line consequences though.
yeah its my pie in the sky want. I know its not easy but since two people can block each other I know its not impossible either.
I meant people will block to echochamber themselves
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
This system exists on Reddit, and this is an example of how it can be gamed.
Oh thats not the same. Its stops replies. I want it to be completely bilateral. I don’t see their posts or replies and they don’t see mine. It only stops replies because they would not see something to reply to. It would effectively make it so if someone blocks someone it effectively shadow blocks them from that person like they blocked them. Mutually assure blockstruction.
Yes, Reddit also blocks visibility too. You would see [unavailable] if someone has blocked you on Reddit. This can cause problems highlighted in that post.
ok because it sounded like it blocked replies which sounded like they still saw the content. I don’t even see how they would make a reply to something they can’t see. maybe im not getting the article. EDITED - you know I should say probably moderaters should not have content of their communities blocked to them but yeah now it sounds real complicated as you would need the shadow block flag but also some sort of mod override flag for posts to their community. actually now that I say it, it does not feel as bad as I thought at first. Still. more complication.
Back when I was involved in sapphic partner abuse drama on Twitter, you could block someone but still reply to their posts, so you could put DARVO under all of their posts and they wouldn’t be able to see it or respond to it or report it.
So NO THANK YOU to being able to block someone and hide your posts from them. Abusers would abuse it so bad.
I don’t have enough background to understand what putting darvo would mean under posts but since its reportable I would assume its bad. I don’t see how they could do this though because by blocking someone they would not be able to see their post or replies to put a reply under.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse/Redirect Victim and Offender.
For example let’s say your newest kitten isn’t turning out to be as pliable as you’d hoped, and they’re getting close to realising that your treatment of them has been less than consensual. If they tell the community, you’re in trouble. But if you simply lie to everyone and say they pressured you into sex, and tell everyone not to listen to their side of the story, your reputation is safe and you’ll get lots of sympathy. First to speak is usually believed. And if kitten tries to tell the truth, you can simply accuse them of DARVO. The sapphic community doesn’t tend to verify claims of abuse in any way, so this stuff is rampant.
And on Twitter, there’s a button you can press to view posts by someone you blocked. It won’t show up in your feed, but you can go to their profile. If they haven’t blocked you, you can spray your DARVO all over the place and they won’t even notice.
I don’t know if they patched that out since then, but it doesn’t matter. You can unblock someone for five minutes, say your harassment, and then block them again. The only technical solution is to put time limits on reblocking someone after your unblock them. But a lot of people don’t wanna do that, and I understand why.
if they did the unblock block thing you would get a notification (in the federation) and could still report it. Honestly it would be sorta a double report as you can point out they are abusing the blocking feature. I certainly don’t think blocking should effect notification which is point in time. It should theoretically be impossible to respond to something and notification not going out. Even when someone deletes their comment I have the notification. Which I have come across.
Hopefully on Piefed, but not on Twitter. I wouldn’t chance it.
Ah ok. I thought this was around piefed or better yet the federation doing it and you where just using twitter as an example why it could never work. Yeah it is definately something which if done has to be done right.
I don’t know how you do, so much so often. Thank you for everything Rimu and other PieFed dev’s who names I haven’t memorised!
Deleted by author
You just posted evidence of yourself compromising an account that is not yours (logging in, and then changing the password).
I screenshotted your comment, which is now deleted. Let’s have a chat on Matrix.
Now at !fediverse@lemmy.world
The password was publicly available until xylight deleted the comment.
i wish we had a live chat to the side
Testing custom emoji :face_with_rolling_eyes: :sweat_smile:
Cool news about private communities! I’d love to unlock inter-compatibility between instances so that can finally be federated… lots to do in between then and now.
Hopefully we can work together on that soon?
I couldn’t think of a way to federate privately, when we don’t know which software is at the other end. In the current political environment there are going to be groups of people who simply can’t take the risk.
For example with mastodon’s followers-only notes - that only gives some privacy because there is massive social pressure on any fedi implementation that doesn’t follow the gentleman’s agreement we have to hide those notes. That fails when implementations have bugs, are under the control of ICE, or whatever.
It’s tricky! Happy to bounce ideas around on it sometime. Maybe encryption…
probably a whitelist of instances (by hostname) is the only way? each community has its own whitelist set by its mods?
DNS is not trustworthy enough, you’ll probably need something like a public / private key pair for each server to verify each other.
heck if I had an instance I would limit new accounts to not posting for a week or a month if I could. I don’t get people feeling the need to start posting like crazy.
User intake would drop through the floor at that point. It’s fine to make a welcome post or a post in a community you’re interested in, but 3+ posts in a single first day is sus as hell - and Lemmy’s ongoing problem here prompted this.
yeah I think its totally a personality thing so for me its foreign to want to engage before getting the lay of the land. Im not sure how long before I started posting on kbin. Now im a hypocrite to because the thing is that once you have been on the federation then it would get quite annoying if I moved to a new account for new hotness or maybe for censorship reasons and then could not post because I would not think of it as a new place but my account would be a newbie account. So yeah my thing was more like about feeling. I could do 24 hours standing on my head though :)