FOSSDLE PieFedPieFed development update August 2024 - prepping for 1.0 release
submitted by
Rimu
A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:
- Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field
- Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.
- Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with
- Added a suggest a topic form
"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.
Also I did a few things:
- Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar
- Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.
- Some mastodon integration bugs
- Wrote a guide about how to install the PieFed mobile app
As you can see we don't have a lot of really big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.
Amazing!
@rimu for now we can't selfhost piefed yet?
You can! See https://join.piefed.social/docs/installation/ and https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/INSTALL.md
@rimu awesome!
There are about 5 PieFed instances that I know of.
The installation instructions don't mention it but there is a docker config that comes with the source code, which should work if you know your way around docker.
@rimu great! I prefer to use docker when possible.
Can you explain what these new options are? I have ideas for how I'd like sorting to work, but I'm not a programmer.
I'm unclear what the new way is, as I still see popular and all. So I'm guessing these changes haven't been published yet. I like popular and all....but I also don't know what the new thing is. So I'm unsure if I should be happy or upset that they're gone.
Good question and one that has been asked before.
I've just written this - https://join.piefed.social/docs/user-guide/, please have a read and let me know if you have any more questions.
I'm reading this user guide after you posted, and I was LITERALLY in the process of asking one of the questions that was covered.
So, I guess the next question is, if you go to any community on Lemmy, it shows the number of subscribers, number of posts, number of subscribers per day/week/month/6months, and a modlog. It's in the sidebar.
Even when viewing Lemmy communities from on piefed, I don't see that on the sidebar anymore. Do I need to do something to enable it? Or is it just not available. I'd like to see that. Not only does it link to the modlog, it also shows how many subscribers and posts a community has.
Also, is there a way I can see if any communities/instances have defederated from piefed? On Lemmy I can see !batman@lemmy.world has many posts, and many users. On piefed it claims to have no posts yet. Even though I DO see the community itself. Is that defederation, or have I done something wrong?
No, we don't have any stats on the sidebar yet. It's certainly doable but no one asked for it until now.
When a remote community is added for the first time PieFed tries to retrieve some of the old content but it pretty often fails to do so and it looks empty. If a single piefed account joins the community then new content will start to flow from the remote instance as it is posted there. I've just joined Batman but it's not a very busy place so it could take a few days before anything appears.
PieFed.social is not defederated from by any other instances as far as I know. See https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/piefed.social. Account registrations are manually approved so the spamminess is very low.
I'd also like to see the voting be more like Lemmy in the sense that if a comment has 4 likes, and 1 dislike, you can see that it has 4 likes, 1 dislike, and an overall score of 3. Whereas now, you're using reddit style of showing the likes. Which is just the 3.
Although, speaking of reddit, the one thing I do like is that they have overall karma. Post and comment scores in the profile. THAT I like.
I'd also like to do away with this grey box that minimizes the comment until you click to expand. Or maybe an option to just always expand everything.
I'm going to either be your favorite user with requests in the short term, or your hair pulling out frustrating user. It just depends on how much is on your plate, and how easy these fixes are. As I have no idea if I'm asking you to push a button, or write 17,000 pages of code by hand. It's probably somewhere in between. But I have no context for how difficult it would be for you to get rid of the grey box, or make an option to do so.
Previously I went from newborn baby to elderly man on earth....or we'll call that reddit. Who in 2022 was in the 1% of karma for the entire site of reddit. Then I became a newborn baby crawling 4 months ago on Lemmy. We'll call that the moon. I got somewhat of a grasp on the fediverse as a whole. I may not be an expert, but I know enough to figure out some basic things.
Then I heard that you guys are able to integrate with peer-tube, and I could use one account here on piefed for Lemmy, Peer-tube, Pixelfed, Mastodon, probably a few others I forget. And so now I'm like a new born baby crawling again here......on mars. Ok, my planetary analogy doesn't quite work, but you get the jist.
So yeah, I'll be pointing out things that are like the rough edges, without any context for how difficult that is to fix. I'll also be posting with questions for things that I may just be niave on how to do the thing, and piefed is very very undocumented on search engines. So I can't just search it. And I'm sure as I look into peer-tube, and mastodon integration, I'm sure I'll have questions.
OH! And I have ideas. Like you know how you can sort by "Local" and "All" and "Subscribed"? Well what if each user can create lists of things to sort by. Like a pulldown menu. And things could be named whatever we want. And you could put things in multiple lists.
For example, Maybe Nintendo just had a Direct at 11am eastern for whatever reason. And I'm at work. I don't want to come into contact with anything Nintendo related. Well, seeing as I know that's an issue on a recurring basis, I've created lists to sort by. I have one list called "Subscribed", and it's just as it sounds. Then I have another list "Subscribed - Nintendo" (as in Subscribed minus Nintendo). And I've already added every single community in my subscribed list EXCEPT for anything Technology, or Video Games, or Nintendo related. So when I scroll by Subscribed - Nintendo, I can see pictures of cats. I can see news stories. I can see comic strips.....but I've excluded any communities I think will lead to spoilers. And since it's user based, each individual user can set it up for themselves in their settings to cater to their interests and needs.
Maybe I just want to focus on the war in Ukraine. Maybe I have 8 or 9 communities I follow from across the fediverse. Well if I click the list I've created with JUST the Ukraine communites, that's all I'll see until I switch to a different sorting list.
Do you think this is possible?
Yeah that 'lists' idea keeps coming up. I've been swatting it away with "topics are enough" but I guess not. I think this feature is going to have to be a higher priority than it has been.
There are lots of other ideas under discussion at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues if you'd like to discuss any of those, or add new issues. Add the 'idea' label to new issues unless it's something obviously not working as intended then use 'bug'.
Funnily enough, I brought that topic a few days ago on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
https://piefed.social/post/215996