cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/237378
Hello World!
We’ve recently added PieFed.World to the Fedihosting Foundation portfolio.
PieFed.World is still in its early stages, and we still need to port some of our automations we already have in place on Lemmy.World. This includes functionality to inform people about moderation actions taken against them, as well as some other moderation tooling. Administration is currently done by the same team responsible for Lemmy.World, and the same rules that apply to Lemmy.World also apply to PieFed.World.
What is PieFed?
PieFed is a Fediverse/Threadiverse platform similar to Lemmy or Mbin/kbin. You can find a description and feature comparison with Lemmy on their website.
While PieFed has a range of features currently not present in Lemmy, it also is a a lot younger and isn’t quite as robust as Lemmy currently is. There are still many bugs and missing features that you will likely run across compared to Lemmy, which will take time to be addressed. PieFed has fairly active development and is seeing a lot of issues addressed fairly quickly, which is especially important recently, as the number of active PieFed instances and PieFed users increased significantly with a range of Lemmy instances opening up PieFed instances as well. PieFed currently does not have proper “stable” releases and no test suite, so it’s not unlikely for things to break from time to time. Although 1.0.0 has already been released a while back, there are still too many issues addressed in more recent commits to stay on that version.
As PieFed is part of the same federated network as Lemmy and Mbin, all PieFed communities can be accessed from Lemmy and Mbin, as well as other Fediverse platforms. Likewise, PieFed can access communities from Lemmy, Mbin and other Fediverse platforms. Whether you use a PieFed instance, a Lemmy instance, or an Mbin instance, it does not matter what type of instance the community is on. The software affects your own user experience, but the content is available regardless.
Creation of communities
Creation of communities will be limited to admins for the first week of the public launch. We will reserve this time to allow community moderators of established communities to claim the name on PieFed.World before we open community creation to the public. We will limit this to communities with the same name and at least 2k monthly active users. In case of multiple qualifying communities with the same name on different instances expressing interest, Lemmy.World communities will be given preference, afterwards the number of monthly active users. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss an exception. Requests can be posted in !support@piefed.world. After the first week, community creation will be available to anyone.
Migration of communities
PieFed has a feature to migrate communities to a local instance. We will not be offering PieFed’s community migration feature initially.
We still need to research the details of how this works and the impacts this has on federation before we will make a decision on whether will support this in the future. If requested, we may reserve some names for potential future community migrations until we have made a decision to allow community migrations.
This does not prevent you from moving communities in the classic way, by opening up a new community and posting in the old community that people should move over.
Private voting
We had previously disabled private voting for PieFed.World before opening the instance to the public, as the original implementation has a range of drawbacks when it comes to federation, and our team overwhelmingly believed that the individual benefits of private voting did not outweigh the impact this has on the Fediverse beyond the user’s instance. Additionally, due to the implementation of that feature, it was also trivial to identify the original voter, which significantly limited the promises of this bringing actual voting privacy.
Since then, the implementation of private voting has been changed to provide the option of federating or not federating votes. While this is more likely to result in vote differences across instances, it does not feed bad information to other instances, which could make it a lot harder for other instances to identify manipulation.
Non-federated voting is available for all PieFed.World users.
Topics
Topics are a kind of “starter packs” or collections grouping multiple communities that people can follow, curated by the admin team. We don’t have a clear vision for the structure of these yet.
You can see an example structure on piefed.social.
Feel free to let us know your thoughts on this.
Feeds
PieFed supports feeds, which are user-created groups of communities, similar to topics. These are currently in a global namespace and all users can create public feeds in the same shared namespace.
Reputation and vote weight
PieFed has options for admins to treat certain types of content differently for “reputation” calculation, as well as options for weighing votes of specific instances differently compared to others. We currently have all options for treating certain content, communities or instances differently disabled.
How does PieFed compare to Lemmy?
PieFed has various features not present in Lemmy, check out their website!
There is also various functionality that Lemmy has, which you may be missing currently with PieFed for now:
Limited API support
In Lemmy, the default web interface relies entirely on the Lemmy API. This has the major benefit of all functionality available in the default web interface also being available to all third party clients. PieFed currently uses separate code paths and implementations for the default web interface and its API. To make it possible to access functionality in third party apps, dedicated API endpoints have to be created, even if this functionality is already available in the default web interface. This also includes alternative web-based UIs.
Multiple developers of alternative UIs and mobile clients are already working on PieFed support, some already released experimental versions.
Limited availability of Markdown previews
Markdown previews are currently only available in posts. There are many other places that accept markdown, but you can’t preview the rendered comment before submitting it. This is tracked in #532.
Image uploads only on post creation
Images can’t be uploaded to comments currently. You’ll have to host them externally for now. This is tracked in #768.
Autocompletion of users/communities
Usernames and communities can’t be autocompleted when typing their names currently. This is tracked in #799.
Limited availability of modlog
Modlog is currently very limited. While there is an instance modlog, there are currently no filters available, so it’s not possible for users to see actions taken against a specific user or within a specific community. Community modlog exists, but it is currently only available to community moderators and admins. Filtering modlog is tracked in #846.
Moderator hierarchy
Lemmy has a moderator hierarchy based on the time a moderator was appointed, relative to other moderators in the community. This allows moderators to add other moderators, but they can only remove moderators that were added later than they were. There are a few other actions that check moderator hierarchy as well, including deletion only being possible by the top mod. In PieFed, communities have one or more owners, who can add and remove moderators, while all other moderators are currently on equal level. Community owners currently cannot be changed without editing this directly in the database, if you’d like to change owners in your community please reach out in !support@piefed.world.
Donations
Similar to Lemmy, PieFed development is supported by donations. You can donate to PieFed development through Patreon.
Additionally, we would appreciate donations towards the Fedihosting Foundation, the non-profit organization operating PieFed.World, Lemmy.World, and a range of other Fediverse platforms.
Problems and questions
Please report any issues and questions about PieFed.World in !support@piefed.world.
For topics about the software PieFed, please visit !piefed_meta@piefed.social.
Bugs can be reported on Codeberg.
TLDR: New platform with similar functionality available, Lemmy.World will continue to exist.
edit: reordered sections and minor wording changes
edit 2: updated community owner information
I dunno how I missed that. Thank you! I will be avoiding this community then, unfortunately :(
Why, have they done something wrong?
Some people seem to think that, usually people who do not research things for themselves.
Separately it gets a bit complicated bc it really is healthier for people to be distributed more across a network as opposed to all being on the same node.
Both of these groups push for people to consider leaving lemmy.world, but for entirely different underlying reasons.
I don’t know the details of all decisions lemmy.world instance admins have made, but it seems to me that the #1 instance will always generate the most animosity because it’s far more likely than any other instance to find itself in decisions where they’re pressed to make decisions by their userbase.
Servers with 20% of the users and 10% of the communities, with only like a dozen ‘active’ communities will simply hardly ever be in that position and generate no meaningful pushback so they’ll always look good by comparison. Additionally, even lemmy.world community mods can generate hostility based on decisions they made despite them having nothing to do with the instance management - and since lemmy.world dominates, you’re much more likely to be posting in a lemmy.world community.
This is definitely true. Also some instances like to push the boundaries, while others such as Lemmy.world prefer to “toe the line”. e.g. lemm.ee was notorious for not wanting to defederate with anything unless it was absolutely necessary (like for CSAM, but not for like trolling), a decision which kept burning out all the mods over and over and over and over again, thereby leaving it up to the admins to control that chaos, who likewise got burnt out again and again until… the instance itself finally gave up and closed its doors. But not before putting out numerous calls to have someone, ANYONE step in and actually lift a finger to help? No? Okay then… well good bye and good luck I suppose. Hexbear likewise has somewhat imploded multiple times over the course of its existence, due to “drama” among its internal controlling team. Each instance does as it chooses and Lemmy.World chooses to toe the line and steer clear of illegal content, leaving people free to steer clear of it in return, if that is what they want.
One incident I am aware of wrt to Lemmy.World was when the infamous Luigi incident happened late in 2024 in the USA, the mods decided to pause discussion as to whether outright, literal and irl murder should be allowed, and things related to that such as “jury nullification”. Keep in mind that the entire instance could theoretically have been shut down if the admins - who unlike the rest of us have their irl names and addresses exposed to the legal authorities - had been found legally liable under whatever laws in whatever countries around the world. Faced with this ENORMOUS amount of pressure, not merely theoretical but again threatening the very existence of the instance itself, the admins decided to pause discussions of this matter… for less than a week iirc while they looked into their legal standing. And then they lifted the ban and allowed those discussions (again iirc, though it’s been a minute). But many people about lost their minds that they had to wait a few days to do as they wished.
Tbf that probably had to do more with preexisting chaffing under the dominance of Lemmy.World that while today makes up only ~40% of the Threadiverse, at one point dominated it at ~80%, plus also a pattern of similar events than the singular one I described there (e.g. its decision to defederate from hexbear.net). But it does illustrate how Lemmy.World has to walk that line between allowing freedom to have discussions while maintaining a space to even be able to continue to have those discussions on the open clear internet.
I note the high level of irony that many people left Lemmy.World to the more “open” lemm.ee, which then closed its doors because people refused to volunteer to help clean up the toxic filth that they then generated. Lemmy - as a part of the real world - really can be quite an unwelcoming place. Like if you want to speak, then make your own instance and get to it, but if you want to go into someone else’s house and speak… well then you have to play by their rules, how is that not understandable?
That particular jury nullification decision btw is described in many places but one that I know of is https://sh.itjust.works/post/29086287 , and in general that community !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com is just a fantastic one run by a great mod who somehow manages to avoid the temptation to become a power-tripping bastard himself as he runs that instance and community that helps keep the Threadiverse in check by allowing people to air out their dirty laundry in full view for all to see:-).
They ban discussion of all kinds of normal things, such as Luigi Mangione.