PieFed Meta

This video demonstrates the process of adding a passkey to your PieFed account and then using the passkey to log in securely and quickly.

Firefox's support for passkeys is a bit lacking, especially on Linux, so this seems to work best on Chrome(ium) at the moment.

What are passkeys? Read on...

Passkeys are a passwordless authentication method for logging into websites and apps. Traditional username and password logins are vulnerable to phishing, reuse, and data breaches. Even two-factor authentication (2FA), which often relies on insecure or inconvenient methods like SMS codes or ever-changing numbers has its flaws. Passkeys eliminate these issues by removing the need to remember or type passwords altogether.

Passkeys are stored securely on your device and verified using biometrics or a device PIN, making them both more user-friendly and significantly more resistant to phishing, credential stuffing, and other common attacks. This makes passkeys a safer and more seamless alternative to traditional login systems. On Mac and Windows passkeys can be synched via the cloud, making logging in from multiple devices easier.

Spammers, trolls, and ban evaders often use temporary email addresses. PieFed now checks a list of known temporary email providers and displays a warning icon next to registrations that use such services.

If registration mode is set to "Open" (no approval needed) then the site admin(s) receive a notification instead.

A throwaway email address isn't always a bad thing but it's one factor that admins might want to take into account.

PieFed uses PDQ hashing to generate a fingerprint of an image and can use that fingerprint to detect other posts that use the same or fairly similar images, for moderation purposes. Hashes are added to a block list which stops the image from being re-posted in future. Demo

PieFed does not generate PDQ hashes itself - it uses a separate service to do it. Several different instances could be using the same hashing service which will be more efficient than everyone running their own. When an image is being federated around the URL of it will be sent to the hashing service by multiple different fedi instances and only the first will be slow as all the subsequent requests will be served from a cache.

Get the code from https://github.com/rimu/pdqhash-python

By doing a GET request for https://yourdomain.tld/pdq-hash?image_url=url_to_image_to_hash you will receive JSON like this:

{
"pdq_hash_binary": "100100100011...",
"quality": 100
}

The quality score (0–100) indicates how well the image content supports a reliable perceptual hash.

Higher scores mean better contrast, edges, and texture in the image. PieFed accepts anything > 70.

Sometimes there are people keen to help run an instance but you don't know them well enough to give them ALL the keys. PieFed lets you control which parts of the admin area you want a 'Staff' role to have access to and then assign accounts to that role.

For now there are just two roles but it would be trivial to add more if there is demand for it (and pretty easy to make a UI to let an admin define as many custom roles as they want). For example, a "Super moderator" might have the "administer all communities" permission only. Can you think of any other variations of the Staff role?

So awhile back viewing a post options and stuff was just one click like what I currently am looking at as I create a post for type of post. It was changed to dropdowns awhile back and I really gave it a shot but ultimately just wish so much it was back to the way it was. For me less clicks is a better interface and this change transformed a one click thing into a three click thing. Before it was click on sort by new. Now its click on dropdown. click on new. click on apply. Im not sure the reasoning behind it. Maybe to make it look cleaner but it does not actually save any space really as the horizontal is just not used now. I mean I may be wrong on that but personally its all about click reduction for me with most interfaces.

When I go to the Bookmarks page - Account - Bookmarks - I see the comments I've bookmarked, but they don't show I've already upvoted them. If I upvote it removes it, then I upvote again it shows green and my upvote.

PieFed uses PDQ hashing to generate a fingerprint of an image and can use that fingerprint to detect other posts that use the same or fairly similar images, for moderation purposes. Hashes are added to a block list which stops the image from being re-posted in future.

Currently each instance maintains their own list of hashes. But in the near future it will be possible to share them so that if I see something horrific & ban it then the ban will be automatically applied to your instance too and then you won't need to see the image at all.

I JUST realized this today. I've started creating posts on Piefed.social and when taken to a Create Post page I'm typing in the upper right it says "Create Post" while "Submit" causes me to scroll down. more than once when I meant to SUBMIT I hit "Create Post" as I'm creating a post right?

That "Create Post" should disappear or move or something when creating a post and "Submit" should be more accessible. H

I'll upload an image to show what I'm seeing, as the Create Post button is clearly visible and Submit isn't.

I'm using Piefed.social, obviously, and I'm getting a LOT of notifications. When I click on the bell I have a massive amount of notifications. Is there a way to mass delete notifications or do I have to do it one by one? Any plans for a mass delete of notifications?

On the surface flair on PieFed functions very similar to how it does on Reddit – on posts they’re community-specific tags that can be used to filter posts in a community. People can also add flair to themselves which is just a piece of text that appears next to their name whenever they make posts or comments in the community. This can be helpful for giving a hint about someone’s background, interests or expertise.

However PieFed is federated and there are copies of the communities on multiple servers (instances). The way to use ActivityPub to create and maintain those copies is described in FEP 1b12 which makes no mention of flair. I have made some minimal additions to that FEP, described in the link.

Instances that are not trying to attract a new audience might want to turn on the new Private Instance setting, which makes everything private. The home page, posts, communities, etc will all require a login to view. Bots and scrapers won't be able to get anything useful from your instance and will stop trying.

Also if a single-user instance is subscribed to mostly NSFW communities, maybe they don't want everyone to be able to see which communities are listed at /communities.

Or it could be used temporarily when a biiig flood of scrapers turn up, then turn it back off when they go away.

Edit: Federation is unaffected by this. For logged-in users everything continues as before.

I've encountered a bug, I think, where in piefed it didn't show the whole content of the post.

Here's the view:

1. From OP's home instance:

2. From piefed:

P.S.: Piefed did show the full image very well. Good job there. The issue is all the other part of the post not showing.

Here's the post:

You can now have 'flair' next to your name, which can be different in each community you participate in. Click 'Set my flair' in the community sidebar.

Each community in PieFed can have it's own set of "flair" options that posters can attach to their posts. Clicking on a flair will filter the community to only show posts with that flair so they function as a filtering mechanism as well as a visual identifier.

Community moderators can manage the flair that are available in their communities:

When creating posts, expand the 'more options' area to assign one or more flair to your post:

See it in action at https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta

Flair doesn't federate yet but it will in coming days.

Another big month.

• PieFed can now store media files in S3-compatible cloud buckets and piefed.social migrated all of it's media to Cloudflare R2 while feddit.online went with Wasabi.
• People can now log in with their Google account. With this one it will be easier to add "Log in with Mastodon" or "Log in with github", etc in future because it's all OAuth so pretty similar.
• Federation is more reliable now because failed sending attempts go into a retry queue and attempts to deliver Activities get made for a few days.
• Any instance can now integrate with Stripe to accept donations, the donate page is no longer hard-wired to donate to my Patreon.
• And lots more, see below.

rimu

User Interface Improvements

• Google OAuth login implementation - "Log in with Google"
• Delete comment and all it's replies
• Compact UI mode - two variants
• AJAX implementation for topics and feeds menus - reduce size of HTML on every page by ~23%
• Feed breadcrumb bugfix
• Show feeds in sidebar when viewing community
• Misc mobile UI improvements
• PWA improvements (install PWA button in footer)
• NSFW content handling (blur NSFW images)

Post/Comment Management

• Show list of comments in a community, as well as posts. Helps moderators have a birds-eye view.
• Reworked comment deletion to use code shared with API
• Lay groundwork for scheduled posts feature (DB migrations)
• Get a notification when a new post is made in a feed - bugfix
• Added support for embedding PieFed posts in other websites - see https://piefed.social/post/679079
• OEmbed support added
• Fixed handling of angle brackets in content

Media Handling

• Use S3 for media storage (optional)
• Documentation about how to set up S3
• Various scripts for migrating existing images to S3
• Image post display improvements

Search and Performance

• Database performance improvements with indexes on various tables
• Avoiding database deadlocks with nested transactions
• Speed optimizations for feeds list and instances list page
• Performance tuning for daily maintenance tasks

ActivityPub / Federation

• Send retry system - when a remote server is down PieFed will retry for a few days (with exponential backoff)
• Move remote community to local instance - see https://piefed.social/post/667044
• Limit who can PM you, to avoid spam - see https://piefed.social/post/633860
• Special WebFinger lookup for feeds so remote feeds with the same name as communities or users still works
• Feed editing debug

Administration & Misc

• Stripe integration for donations. See https://piefed.social/donate for an example
• Field to insert custom CSS without creating a theme
• Save timezone from client side into DB for each user - we'll need this for creating scheduled posts

Documentation

• Added FLASK_APP to dev notes
• Updated documentation for software and hardware requirements (#578, #581)

Tournesol

• Improved content language settings with checkbox interface
• Made content language hint less ambiguous
• Fixed documentation about Unix socket usage

freamon

• API improvements for community, post, and reply features
• Reduce code duplication between web and API interfaces
• Fixed PeerTube video handling for cross-posts
• Fixed thumbnail URL content-type handling
• Added many API tests (api_get_community, api_get_site)
• Fixed validation for remote actors

JollyDevelopment

• Notification system improvements
• Working on adding new notification types
• Converted post notifications to Celery tasks
• API enhancements for user settings
• Feed ActivityPub response implementation

taters

• Updated Forest theme styles

Jeena

• Added cross-post button to video posts

Skavau

• Made sooo many feeds, wow. Check out https://piefed.social/f/forumverse . This renders https://piefed.social/topics somewhat obsolete.

So in the comics topic I don't seem to be able to choose a view type like hot or new or such but when I went to a specific community I see its there but it changed a bit with drop downs sorta off to the left. Was there a change? Is this intended long term or did it just not take for topics?

Click the 3 dot icon on any post, then choose 'Get embed code' from the menu.

You can see the result at https://join.piefed.social/test-piefed-embed/ where I embedded two posts.

When a community needs to move to another instance, it can be a rocky process.

It doesn't need to be, though - as long as someone on your instance has been a part of the community for a while your instance will already have quite a lot of the content from the old community. All we need to do is change our record of which instance the community belongs to and that's what PieFed's new 'Move community' feature does. Check out the video for a quick demo.

The full process is:

1. Ensure the copy of the community on this instance has been active long enough to receive a decent amount of posts. The move process will not copy posts so having an account on this instance subscribed to it for a while is the only way to get old posts here.

2. Lock the old community to by setting it to 'moderators only' so no one else can post in it.

3. Create a post in the old community announcing the impending move to piefed.social. Paste the url of that post into the field below.

4. Submit the 'move community' form (there is a link in the sidebar of every remote community) to send the request to piefed.social admins.

5. piefed.social admins will review your request, turn this community into a local one and contact you.

6. Update your announcement post in the old community to encourage people to join the new community at
   !whatever@piefed.social.

Ok so this is likely one of my wierder experiences with the fediverse and is a bit of a story that ends with something wierd with https://piefed.social/topic/chilling/comics?sort=new&layout=list - So to sorta start this off I rarely post but had taken to posting a comic I like called devils panties to comicstrips@lemmy.world. One day when I clicked on replies to the comic I was getting 404 pages and I could not find the comic anymore. There was no notification or anything that it was removed but I checked the sidebar rules and it did not seem to break any. So I posted again and the same thing came back. I suspected that things can be removed without notice or such or just maybe something was breaking so posted to comics@lemmy.ml and that went fine. I changed to posting to comics@lemmy.ml but then noticed that the comic was being posted by someone else to comicstrips@lemmy.world. It did not show up greyed so it presumably was not a bot. I figured I would bow out as I was going to stop posting once I got a job as when working I tend to not be able to really get to anything even small like this (im not a good waker upper and I tend to be toast after work). The next day though no post was done by the other user so late before I went to bead I did the lemmy.ml post and one hour later it appeared in lemmy.world. Its been pretty consistantly one hour after. Anyway the whole thing made me feel pretty wierd but then today its sorta on another level. When perusing https://piefed.social/topic/chilling/comics?sort=new&layout=list I see the duplicates the user does to lemmy.world but I don't see my original posts to lemmy.ml but I do see another comic posted to lemmy.ml and if I go directly to comics@lemmy.ml I see my post. Anyone have any idea whats going on???

At https://piefed.social/user/settings you can now choose who is allowed to PM you.

The default value is "This instance" which will cut you off from PMs from all other instances. We're currently dealing with a bit of gore spam but once a more long-term solution is found a more relaxed default should be possible.

The link text is: "Please click this like to verify your email address."

I think this was probably supposed to be: "Please click this link to verify your email address."

How do I turn off new post notifications? I checked Settings but can't find anything

One of the things I miss a little from Lemmy is the different Top Hour/Day/Week etc. sort options. The most used one for me was Top Day, it was a nice way to get a suitable amount of doomscrolling each day with mostly new posts.

What's the current logic/timeframe for the Top sort on PieFed?

An absolutely huge month with the addition of Feeds (multi-communities), de-duplicating posts in the timeline, comments on cross-posts merged into one tree, and much more:

JollyDevelopment

• Feeds / multi-reddits / multi-comms
• Added user opt-in/out for feed community auto-follow/leave
• Added action button to feed page
• Fixed feed URL update mechanism for sub-feeds
• Updated feed breadcrumbs to use title instead of name
• Integrate Lemmyverse data to provide real-time search of all remote communities
• Fixed PWA for iOS
• Fixed table name typo in database code

rimu

• Fixed language syntax errors in multiple languages (French, Spanish)
• Improved user interface elements and functionality:
  • Delay in user profile popup appearing so it doesn't pop up when you're just scrolling by
  • De-duplicate posts in home timeline, feeds & topics
  • Display comments on related cross-posts below comments on post
  • Going to the next page never shows some posts from the previous page even if new posts arrive since previous page was loaded
  • Added community block and join functionality to 3-dot menu beside community name
  • Enhanced mobile responsiveness and layout
  • All steps in onboarding process can be turned on or off by admins
  • Hide posts written in languages you can't read
  • Colored bars on the left of comments to improve navigation
  • Scaled sort - similar to hot except boosts small communities
• Added security features:
  • Rate limiting for post viewing to prevent aggressive scraping
  • Country-based registration blocking
  • Blocking for blogspot.com spam
  • No images in DMs, to stop Nicole
  • Filter chats by keywords to stop Nicole and future spammers
  • Login is now case insensitive and email address can be used
• Improved feeds functionality:
  • Tweaks to feeds
  • Fixed auto-follow/leave behavior
• Other misc:
  • Enhanced ETag-based browser caching for better performance
  • Default meta descriptions and OG image support
  • Docker installation instructions improved
  • Changed 'save' to 'publish' when making posts
• Set up weblate instance for translating PieFed
• Rework /communities page filters for mobile
• Home page filters become dropdowns on mobile

freamon

• Added and improved API routes:
  • Created endpoints for editing communities
  • Added image upload functionality
  • Added post/reply fetching with better parameters
  • Implemented rate limiting
• Fixed bugs in comment handling:
  • Improved child count updating when replies are deleted/restored
  • Fixed path calculation for replies
• Enhanced federation features:
  • Improved private messaging to Mastodon
  • Fixed feed handling for communities
  • Fixed community ban enforcement
• Managed pull requests and merges

taters

• Created and updated the Forest theme
• Much simplified docker installation documentation

Jeena

• Added link to "Comments in..." headline for cross-community comments
• Improved user experience after community subscribe/unsubscribe by adding links to flash messages

snoopy

• Translated PieFed to French

fxomt

• Updated the fxomt theme
• Contributed to Arabic translations

Poesty Li

• Contributed to Chinese translations