PieFed looks so amazing! And it is fantastic how it continues to be developed more all the time.
Though it still lacks numerous features found on Lemmy - e.g. being able to search for users (I tried searching for one of my favorite people to talk to, lvxferre, and many variations such as @lvxferre@mander.xyz, but piefed.social came up with nothing - it seems to search only within the text fields, and I saw nothing in any of the dropdowns to look for a “user”, or a “community”, etc.). Likewise I tried to find existing posts in that search bar - e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/21055894 “Lemmy’s gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.” but again could not. Another one is that the frontend UI needs some polish, e.g. on this post I literally cannot see the name of the community (no matter how far I zoom out), only that it begins with “[META] Piefe…” (oh wait no, now I see, at https://ponder.cat/post/326806 - that’s the name of the post? but then why is it repeated like that, in tiny font, right next to / above the huge font, and also cut off - wouldn’t it make more sense to just stop the list at “Communities@ponder.cat”? or if it is important enough to add, then not to cut it off?)
Minor issues of polish aside, the USA election season is coming up so… this makes me wonder: can you block users from a given list of instances using PieFed? e.g. if I wanted to block users, and I mean all of communities, posts, comments, even voting if possible - basically I want a defederation action, but will take a user-level block if that is all I can get. People might be able to engender this behavior with keywords, but the key would be to allow things like a discussion of the firefox@lemmy.ml community name, while blocking the users from that instance name - and yet given the above issue of not being able to search for users at all, my guess is that keyword-based blocking would do the exact opposite of that? (cutting out posts that just happen to contain the instance name, while allowing the users free reign so long as their posts do not contain the instance name)
Either way, I do so look forward to the development of this fantastic Lemmy alternative, which nonetheless federates with it plus so much else besides!:-)
So is PieFed.social open for signups? https://fediverse.observer/search?query=PieFed.social says it is not - if you are wanting more people to join then you may investigate how to get that changed.
I guess I should measure ping for PieFed.social vs. feddit.online, which I note is geographically close to me, but then again it probably has a longer delay for software updates that PieFed.social would not - except it lists you as an admin there too, do you deploy updates to both frequently?
I used to be proud of how I could talk with anyone on Reddit. Now… I know better, that some people are simply trying to waste your time (like sea lioning), whether they even are aware of that themselves or not. So now I’m switching to the good fences make good neighbors approach:-).
Even Dessalines is doing some great work that is highly useful to the worldwide community, to help break people’s dependency upon corporate Reddit - so in that sense, an ally in that fight against misinformation. Although… there are downsides to those efforts as well, both in the Lemmy.ml instance itself and the codebase pushed out, which makes it hard to avoid the nonsense spouted by its users across the Fediverse, among other things. Almost nothing is fully good or fully bad, afaict, though bad-faith trolling seems the closest to the latter.
I love (from https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/) PieFed’s focus on not simply banning an instance or two or three (they’ll simply spread as a result of that anyway), but on using algorithmic approaches to identify the patterns that bad actors tend to take, and then provide labels based on that. Which preserves freedom of choices while also allowing maximum guidance that anticipates what someone would eventually choose, if only they had the time to research each individual item in as great a depth as would be needed to accurately judge.
Thanks for pointing out the ‘open signups’ on fediverse observer - I’ve fixed that up on the PieFed side just now and it’ll flow through to that database in due course.
While I am technically an admin on feddit.online it was just for some initial debugging and setup support - it’s entirely separate from piefed.social and I don’t have the level of access needed to update it’s code. I don’t know how often Jerry updates his instance but I can tell you piefed.social is absolutely bleeding edge.
Thank you so much for this fantastic conversation, I learned so much and it has been very pleasant:-).