My Ph.D. is in rheology and material science. One of the craziest papers I ever remember reading was about the non-Newtonian behavior of frog tongues and saliva. I still think about this paper from time to time. There was a sequence of pictures showing a frog tongue (removed from the rest of the frog) lying on a table, and then somebody touching it with an ungloved finger and showing how sticky it was as they retracted their finger. What they won’t get poor grad students to do…

Link to the paper (pdf warning).

Been a bit since I last popped into one of these threads. The main thing that happened recently was that we wrapped up the Anime awards for last year (post here). I definitely need to do some rethinking of how that was run, because participation was way down compared to a year prior. To the community’s credit, there was lots of good feedback in that thread.

Otherwise, the !anime@ani.social community is getting ready for a new season to come in April.

My other communities:

• !manga@ani.social - Has managed to stay somewhat active despite my not being able to read/post much in recent weeks.
• !gundam@ani.social - Not too active since there aren’t any active gundam series going right now. We do get occasional history/lore and gunpla posts though, so that is fun.
• !nokotan@ani.social - Pretty dead…but that is to be expected really. The show has ended after not really living up to its own hype and the manga doesn’t really have a consistent release cycle (at least in English), so it has been some time since there is any new content.

tl;dr - You can force-federate older posts and comments. See steps at bottom of long post ahead.

As Jerry mentioned, when a new remote community is added by PieFed (more or less the same in lemmy too), it will try to fetch the most recent posts. If the remote community is also on a PieFed instance, it should be able to grab the most recent 50 posts. If it is on a lemmy instance, I think lemmy only provides the most recent 20.

That is how it is supposed to work. However, that initial retrieval process can be kind of buggy and not always work right, especially when crossing between lemmy and PieFed (I haven’t personally worked on this section of the code at all, just my experience). Also, that process does not retrieve any old comments or votes (so, all the scores will just start at 1).

After a community has been subscribed to (in this case, by you), your instance will get each new activity in the community from that point forward (posts, comments, votes, etc.). So, from this point forward, you should be all set.

If you want to force-federate over old content that existed prior to your subscription to the community, it is possible. If you go to the community’s page on your instance, in the sidebar, you will see a link that says Retrieve a post from the original server. If you click that, it brings you to a form where you can pop in a post’s or comment’s url.

To get the proper url for a post/comment, in lemmy, you need to make sure that you are using the link that the fediverse icon points to on that post/comment. This little symbol is what you are looking for in the lemmy ui:

Copy that link from the post/comment on lemmy and then paste it into the form on feddit and it should go fetch the post/comment for you and backfill it. A caveat is that votes are not fetched, so scores will just be at 1. Also, fetching a comment will fail if it is a response to another comment that hasn’t been fetched yet.

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 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;
}

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.

€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. 😜

I can confirm that this is something @Skavau@piefed.social has brought up in the past on multiple occasions. It’s an issue that I am sympathetic to, but so far it hasn’t been a high priority for us to take the time to try to address. One of the biggest complaints we see people have about the threadiverse in general is that there isn’t enough content; that their feed gets stale too quickly. So, having more subscriptions hasn’t necessarily been seen as too much of a “problem” from my perspective.

What I did work on was making it easier to unsubscribe from communities. If you filter the communities page to just communities you are subscribed to, it should be a simple matter of clicking the buttons to unsubscribe to undesired communities. It used to reload the page each time, which made that task immensely tedious.

Frankly, now that Skavau has a third party backing up their position, they will be insufferable about it until we try to fix it 😜

The ~ symbol is how you prefix a feed in piefed. Just like you use an @ for users and a ! for communities.

More recent versions of piefed should have a much improved compact mode. I basically made the thumbnails for image posts render just like thumbnails for link posts when in compact mode. It was a pet peeve of mine too that compact mode said it was thumbnails, but it still put images on a whole separate line which made them much larger than other thumbnails.

PBZ is on 1.3.0 now, so it should be available if you want to give it another go. Just make sure that your UI option is set to compact mode. This setting is per-device, so you might need to reset it for different browsers/phone/etc.

I’ve never used the baremetal setup, so I can’t speak to that. However, I actually agree with your points on the docker deployment. It’s something I have spoken about to some length with people in our matrix channel as well. There are a couple things that I don’t love about the current docker setup process, but just don’t know docker or linux stuff well enough to fix:

• Needing to set up external cronjobs like you mentioned
• Needing to exec into the container for initial setup
• Not having pre-built containers that we can put in a container registry to make things easier

Docs are an always evolving thing and we have been fortunate enough to have some other admins go through the setup process and provide feedback, which has helped flesh the docs out some more. However, there is always more that can be done.

This is probably true for anonymous (not logged in) users, but might not be if you are logged in. Things like user/community/instance blocks, votes, read/unread status, etc. need to be accounted for when generating the main feed for logged in users, and those are dynamic. It might be cached for some time, but the retention time would likely be short (a couple minutes maybe).

I haven’t worked too much with the caching that piefed does, but I know it keeps some info in a redis cache to help speed things up (blocks, votes, etc.). That way getting all that info doesn’t need to be a new db query every time except maybe the first time. Some pages also make use of etags so that if the content is unchanged, the request doesn’t need to hit the db at all. I imagine lemmy has some mechanisms to do caching as well, but I am unfamiliar with the code at that level.

This is pretty much always going to be the case because the database query is much more complicated to filter by your subscriptions rather than the completely unfiltered views that are just sorted a certain way.

I don’t have direct experience working in the lemmy codebase, but I do in piefed, and this is just an inherent limitation of how databases work. Basically, there is a big table in the db with all the posts that the instance knows about. As an example, let’s say that you want to look at your Subscribed feed and sort it by New. First, the database sorts all the posts by newest first (this step is very quick). Then it will filter out all the entries that are not in a community that you are subscribed to (this step is a lot slower). So, views where the database doesn’t need to do that filtering step are a lot faster than others. There are other things that slow down queries as well like blocks or keyword filters.

Smarter admins than I can employ strategies to tune their database for better performance. I don’t have any knowledge in this area though, so others would be able to provide more insightful answers.

It’s stuck way down at the bottom, but the ActivityPub Fuzzer project looks really interesting. I have accounts across so many different fediverse platforms just for testing piefed interoperability and it is kind of annoying. Being able to simulate different kinds of activities from a range of platforms without managing so many accounts and doing things in a local environment would be a game changer for interop testing.

Looking forward to the public release @darius@friend.camp

More people need to make use of the curation tools available to them in my opinion. Too often I see people browsing /all and then complain about seeing tons of stuff that they don’t like. There are tools that are available to them to help them create a more pleasant experience that they just aren’t using. The fediverse doesn’t have some algorithm that learns the type of content that you most often engage with and feed it to you, you have to more proactively do the curation yourself.

Just as an example, I was in a conversation with one of the lemmy.world admins a while back. We were talking about instance blocks and how infrequently users actually use them. Across all of the users on lemmy.world, only about 700 of them actually created an instance block for the most-blocked instance (lemmynsfw). Only two instances had more than 500 users block it.

In Skavau’s defense, they aren’t a programmer, but are probably one of the most active people on piefed’s chat server/matrix room as well as the codeberg repo providing ideas and feedback. So they are volunteering time that way (in addition to being site staff for piefed.social).

Some of the ideas in this post are good imo, but are currently not possible yet using the piefed api due to it being much less complete compared to lemmy’s. So, it helps us figure out prioritization on what kinds of endpoints would be useful to flesh out next.

As somebody that has made contributions to improve the PWA responsiveness, the difference between touch and cursor controls can be tough sometimes. The css framework we use (bootstrap) generally handles it well, but the pop-ups are one area where I’m not really happy with it, but I don’t have a better solution yet.

I just want to point out here that this blog post is old at this point (published February 2024). I believe that mbin in particular has made improvements in this regard. Also, we have added some features to piefed, and introduced a little bit of new Javascript/css. I am not sure exactly how this would compare today.

I mean…that doesn’t really seem that bad? Also, asking for the whole community to be nsfw is a wild overreaction looking at the other pictures in the community.

If you browse the all feed, expect to see some things you don’t like/enjoy. It’s a fire hose of content by design. Learn to curate your subscribed feed and stick to it. Frankly, lemmy doesn’t have great filters/blocks to do what you want, and expecting the whole rest of the internet to abide by such strict standards of nsfw isn’t going to happen.