PieFed 1.4 is released - emoji, federated stackoverflow and AI content filters

[perishthethought@piefed.social]

This is our biggest release yet, including more finished tasks than any of our previous ones. Below is a summary of the highlights:

What's new

Posts & communities can be labelled as AI-generated and people can choose to hide all posts tagged that way. Very similar to how NSFW works.

Comments can be marked as an Answer, like on StackOverflow.

React to posts and comments with an emoji.

Hide an individual post from yourself, without blocking the author.

PieFed is now in the Yunohost app store, making initial setup easier.

When banned from a remote instance you cannot make local-only posts in their communities.

Honeypot to automatically IP ban badly-behaved crawlers.

https://lemmy-federate.com integration, making PieFed communities get more exposure.

"Share on Mastodon" menu item on posts.

Vastly improve docs for new developers, see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs.

Language selection is more visible during post creation.

Tag clouds can also be viewed as a list of tags.

View post/comment markdown.

Bot accounts are not included in community statistics.

Footnote support in markdown.

Polish translation.

Better HTTP caching, which reduces dependence on Cloudflare.

Bugs

Passkey fixes.

Polls can now have up to 15 options.

User profile performance improved.

Don't allow bypassing minimum username length and post title with whitespace.

Polls and Events can no longer be posted into Lemmy communities.

API

Additional user settings can be set through the api, including Extra Fields.

Fetch url metadata.

Sort comments by controversial.

Comment search now works.

Hashtags.

Events.

Polls.

Emoji reactions on posts and comments.

See https://piefed.social/c/piefed_api for more details.

To upgrade

To upgrade from 1.3.x:

git pull  
git checkout v1.4.x  
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh  

There is a big database migration that will take a few minutes to run. How long will vary depending on how old your instance is - older instances will have more content to process. It took ~25 minutes on piefed.social so expect it to be less than that.

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.

Donations can be made via Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi.

[rglullis@communick.news]

It's this kind of thinig that makes me think of PieFed as just a pile of hacks with no serious consideration for the Fediverse

Designating which comment is an answer involves federating a new Activity:

{  
         "id": "https://piefed.social/activities/answer/hgb4iO4b8UAFRTn", 
         "type": "ChooseAnswer",  
         "actor": "https://piefed.socialz/u/rimu", 
         "object": "https://piefed.ngrok.app/comment/224",  
         "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "https://w3id.org/security/v1"],  
         "audience": "https://crust.piefed.social/c/linux_questions",  
         "to": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],  
         "cc": ["https://crust.piefed.social/c/linux_questions"]  
}  

There are at least three different ways to implement this in a way compatible with ActivityPub:

1. Send an "as:accept" activity with the comment as the object.
2. Add an attribute for the comment indicating that it has been selected.
3. Create a collection for chosen answers, add to the post object.

And even if this type of new activity was a necessity, they could add their own extensions via a proper JSON-LD context definition. But they completely disregard JSON-LD, which means that they expect other servers to either (1) adopt their ad-hoc vocabulary or (2) ignore it completely and keep this idea that "Only PieFed has these features".

[blaze@piefed.zip]

Feel free to open a PR: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi

[rglullis@communick.news]

This is not a matter of "opening a PR". The fact that they are adding features in this completely ad-hoc manner shows that they are prioritizing features for piefed over interoperability with the wider Fediverse. If my job was to go around convincing every AP developer that their approach is flawed and to fix their mistakes, I'd be doing nothing else with my life.

What I can do though is to create a framework that makes it easy to work with JSON-LD and occasionally file bug reports.

---

An aside: this "feel free to open a PR" - without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand - is the standard passive-aggressive response from every developer who is not interested in making the change. It's sad to see that it's also becoming the go-to retort for the project cheerleaders...

[db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

An aside: this "feel free to open a PR" - without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand - is the standard passive-aggressive response from every developer who is not interested in making the change. It's sad to see that it's also becoming the go-to retort for the project cheerleaders...

That's absolutely not true. I can't speak for all developers of course, but as someone who is juggling multiple large FOSS project, when I give that reply, 99% of the time I would like that feature, but I don't have the resources to do it myself.

[rglullis@communick.news]

I've added the "without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand" as a qualifier...

It's totally fine if you say "yes, this looks cool but I don't have the time to do it", or even "I'm not so sure about it, but if you bring a PR we can take a better look at it".

[db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Yes. I also agree the way you say it can betray the implication. If someone suggest a feature and your only reply is "PRs welcome ;)" it points to it being dismissive. However, after being in the "game" for a while so to speak, I can also understand dismissiveness as well since there's plenty of people who do drive-by suggestions and get upset when the developer doesn't immediately jump to implement them.