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!:-)
Yeah the search is not very intuitive, I agree with that. Not sure how to search for users, but to get the specific post you go to Search and then all the way down is a button called “Retrieve remote post” which will lead you to a new form where you can put in the full URL and get it.
Oh my gosh that’s… WAAAY down there isn’t it? (and requires a login for some reason? - why, just to see the post, couldn’t an anonymous user do this action? unless “retrieve” means more than simply view?) But thank you, I am glad to know that!
The polish will come in time I am sure - with feedback and tweaks and much effort, but already it looks so wonderful, it’s a great start! :-)
It does. It actually tries to backfill that one post into the instance - sort of a poor man’s federation, if you win.
Since we’re talking about an operation that modifies the database of the instance, rather than just a mere view-only sort of deal, I think it’s not reasonable to require a logged in user here as a way to track and prevent abuse.
Oh yes absolutely. But what if the post is already federated, and you just wanted to find it? Like being able to search for a user account, this too would be a great function to add.
I found out today that Tesseract will do this on-the-fly now, for cross-postings https://dubvee.org/post/2083858.
Thank you for the answer:-).
Oh yeah, so in that case it would just take you to the already federated local copy of that post. (Every post has a unique activity pub id so that’s how it realizes that it already has a copy.)
Oh yeah, agreed. So the retrieve remote post is definitely not a search thing. To use it you have to pass in the original instance’s url and only that. Which looks something like https://lemmy.world/post/576735 - so not very searchable.
Tbf the fact that it doesn’t look very searchable is shared in common with Lemmy, but at least it works in the latter, and it sounds like it works in PieFed as well, though only for people who have accounts. The ideal ofc being to have clickable links that take federation into account, just as with user accounts and communities, but even Lemmy does not have that yet so it is understandable that PieFed does not yet.