1mo ago

What are your ideas to improve PieFed? Vote for your favorites!

I'm super impressed by the features I'm discovering using Piefed! I'm going to be experimenting a lot with the keyword filter particularly. Here are some ideas we might add to make Piefed even better. Share you own in the replies.

Some of these options where too long to make it a poll.

117 comments

One vote action for all cross-post posts
- Hmm, that is an interesting idea...
  I might look into this one. Would something like voting buttons in the crosspost dropdown be an acceptable alternative? I think I would prefer to keep 1 action (click) means 1 vote, but making it easier to vote on crossposts makes sense with the way that piefed consolidates comments.
  So, voting buttons here maybe? (no promises, just an idea) -
  
  That's a fair point. I think in most cases I would want to be upvoting a post and all of its cross posts, but there are cases where I wouldn't want to upvote it in other communities.
  For instance, a post that you like might get cross posted to something like c/facepalm. If you disagreed with that assessment, you wouldn't want your vote to be applied in that way.
  
  That would be pretty cool.
  Probably just upvote, though? Don't want to encourage drive-by downvotes, really.
  
  Yes, I think that would be an acceptable implementation

👀

Easily upload and include images in comments. Right now you have to use a third party image hosting site, and add the URL in order to put images in comments.
- Not sure about other apps, but Summit has an image upload button. They go to media.piefed.social
  
  I would imagine hosting images would cost a fair bit. Perhaps they can have a premium option to fund it.
  The website / PWA can't currently upload images.
  Summit doesn't have deduplication yet.
  
  Voyager can do it too, via PWA even. Don’t even need to press the upload button, simply copy and paste the image, it gets uploaded and included in the comment automatically.
  
  I think with file size limits it's not really so bad for cost. Lemmynsfw proves that.
  
  Add image hosting with an ephemeral approach like 4chan, where posts older than a day get little interaction and low-quality content is deleted after a month. This keeps a long-term archive of high-quality content without clutter.
  
  Summit also has the setting to use imgur instead in cases where the instance upload rules are too strict.
- I doubt Rimu wants to host pictures
  
  I don't think that's the issue since you can upload images for an image post. It's more the effort of doing file uploads from a dynamically inserted part of the page (the reply box). I don't know enough Javascript to be able to do that.
  
  I think on order for this to happen, we (the collective we) would need to donate far more than current levels.

Allow restricting posting and commenting to subscribers: https://lemmy.world/comment/18549782
- My ideal default would be, users have to subscribe to vote, because drive-by downvotes are very common, and keep niche communities from getting anywhere in the All feed.
  
  Another reason is to avoid the Reddit problem of people upvoting of off-topic posts by people who don't pay attention to what community it's posted in. I don't think Piefed/Lemmy/etc. has those kind of users (yet) but it's good future-proofing.
  
  I think maybe only subscribers should be allowed to downvote, but anyone should be able to upvote
  
  On the other hand, sometimes posts get traction because a lot of people upvote them from All
  
  Why not just remove down votes from the post ranking algorithms entirely, since they seem to be the cause of a bunch of consternation anyway?
  
  Eh, a good community owner will catch the repeat downvoters and ban them. It does exist, but if you're on top of your community you will be able to stop it.
- Oof, I knew what this link was gonna be before I clicked it. Maybe even the option to restrict up/downvotes to subscribers as well - the pile-on the OP was getting there was ridiculous (although tbf their post was not within the community in question)
  If PieFed is going to hide things that get heavily downvoted, then avoiding brigading seems necessary.

Bring back pseudonymous voting agents. Literally the killer feature of piefed, killed by stupid forum politics.
I do not give a single goddamn fuck about brigading or vote manipulation whatever nonsense the fediverse admin cabal has convinced themselves matters on their discord stovepipe. Vites are not real. They cannot hurt you. I do not want my plaintext voting activity to be hoovered up by anyone listening to the activitypub feeds, which is already used to foster censorship and will inevitably be used to enable targeted astroturfing. Rimu, please be more brave about this.
Mark my words, this will be the "hindsight" issue a few years from now. "How the fuck did anyone think public voting was a good idea" will be the postmortem of the fediverse.
- Hmm. In a sense, votes aren't real, but if that's true, then why do they exist at all?
  And if you don't like that your votes are public, then perhaps simply don't vote, since the votes aren't real anyway?
- Any instance implementing this is going to be defederated quickly by other instances due to the ease of vote manipulation.
  
  One voting agent per user. Banning the voting agent is as easy as banning the user. There is literally no difference here in terms of combatting vote manipulation besides the "feels" of not knowing a particular text string. This is literally just politics and has no basis in any real problem. I could just as easily make my own second "voting user." The only difference is the ergonomics of that workflow.
  "Vote manipulation" doesn't even matter since there is no karma. Just remove down votes from rank and engagement metrics. Problem solved. I really cannot believe how much y'all are twisting yourselves in circles to make this seem like a bad idea. Again, fuck the politics, I thought we were focused on the tech?
- People have deluded themselves into thinking that the Fediverse is so small no government entity cares enough to set up a simple instance that just sits there and sucks up data. It might not even be being used at the moment but the moment they want to it would be easier than most people realize to connect their account to an individual.

Please put the bookmark/save button on the thingy down there. There's plenty of room.
Other than that and some kickass themes, I think PieFed is ahead of the curve in the lemmyverse ATM.
- Do you mean on the bar with the voting buttons instead of being behind the three dots menu?
  
  Yup. We could make more room there by moving the collapse icon up to be near the author name?
  
  Yes.

Create a clear description of Piefed on the about page or another relevant page to direct users there instead of the code repository or specific instances.
- is https://join.piefed.social/ not open source?
  
  That's what I meant, I hadn't seen it before.

Many posts don't have a language selected so 'content language' preference should either allow selecting those, or a setting to reverse it turning it into a block list with all languages automatically selected, then allow the user to deselect his language to block the rest.

Allow user to view only votes from the instance they are using
- Somewhat related, it would be super interesting to get a breakdown of what the votes are like on a per instance basis. Maybe some sort of pie chart.
  
  Oooh, vote stats. How many from community subscribers vs. not, from each instance, perhaps a timeline of when they came in, etc. Reddit had something similar.
  
  That would genuinely be a killer feature for piefed.

Allow voters to write their own choices in polls
- If you implement the poll like this one, then they already can 😉
  
  But it allows downvotes, which isn't supposed to be allowed in a poll.

Cross-posting text-only posts
- This is planned for the 1.2 release (at least it is on the kanban board).
  
  And will those post merge comment ?
- 👆 Yes please

Browse a list of communities sorted by their Monthly Active Users (MAU). It could make discovering popular or active communities a bit easier. Just a thought! It's not something I'm really missing.

User-created sorting methods: If the API exposes post metadata (e.g., timestamps, tags, upvotes, etc.), and the plugin system allows client-side scripting (e.g., JavaScript plugins), users could fetch post metadata and experiment implementing their own custom sorts in the browser.

Thanks devs for making piefed first of all I love the alternative.

I really disliked these two options being enabled by default without informing me at the very least. I ended up subscribed to a bunch of stuff I didn't want to be subscribed to before I figured out what caused it initially when I first signed up.
Honesty I don't know why anyone would want that as default behaviour?
I'd like to sort communities by Top X amount of time, IIRC that was already in the works.
Native image upload support so I don't need an app / uploading to imgbb manually sucks on a phone.
Edit: if it's cost prohibitive to store media uploads even with file size limits I'd like more external options for image hosts than for example Summit app who only offers imgur as an alternative. Or let users enter a custom image hoster url or something.
- I'd like to sort communities by Top X amount of time, IIRC that was already in the works.
  This is already live. If you are viewing a community, click Top in the bar and it should be a dropdown menu where you select the timerange:
  
  If you are on a small mobile screen (like using the PWA), the different time options are listed out with the other sort options:
  
  Sweet! Thanks for that.

A user setting to customize vote display: users could choose to see only upvotes for their own content, while viewing others' content by upvote percentage, or only upvotes, or see both upvotes and downvotes, instead of only total votes.

Add the ability to manually add a user, community, domain or instance block in the user settings like lemmy has.

Watch tags from mastodon, even if no community was pinged. "Tag as community" so to speak
- that would require PieFed users to follow many many Mastodon users, that's the only way for Mastodon to alert PieFed about the posts
  
  When I view a tag on my mastodon account, I see posts from people I don't follow because someone from my instance is following that person?
  
  After thinking a little bit more about it, would it be possible to add a follow to a mastodon user, as if they were a community?
  Kind of similar to how federation to peertube works
  Mastodon user -> community
  A post without a reference up -> PieFed post
  A post referencing another post -> PieFed comment
  boost -> ???

Firm up the foundationals: proper parsing of complex formatting (e.g. a bolded section within an italic section), which reminds me: enabling a Preview ability for comment replies to posts not just to existing comments. Also, the former might have already been done though I definitely recall instances in the past where it did not work.
Clean up notifications: e.g. if a post is deleted after you receive a notification about it, then either delete the notification also or at least let us see the post - it's super annoying to have a notification that goes nowhere.
Also, notification links should always actually go to the things they point at. On some posts the comments are now loading separately for some reason (perhaps if there's a lot of them? but even then why not load them at page start rather than delay?), which breaks the Notification links. Many things break those notification links actually. Another one is people from instances that you have blocked - you can't see the comment that the link tries to take you to anyway, so what use is the notification at that point? Either remove the latter or... something, maybe show the comment after all in that special case (except wait no, if you blocked everyone from an instance then likely you did so for a reason, and do not want notifications from them?).
Edit: here is an example link, where it looks like the Continue thread breaks the link to go where it needs to on the page.
These kinds of "polish" features that are still lacking are annoying and I for one would love to see them worked on, before adding all kinds of other features that I'll likely never use - whereas typing out comments and viewing notifications are the top 1/2 of all things that I do on PieFed (besides look at posts and vote on them:-P) so these would highly benefit from being polished! 😄
Though I still love PieFed even while having to wait for them too. 😊
- I've done a lot of work on the markdown to html edge cases. So, I think things like bold and italics intermingling and garbling each other shouldn't happen any more. If it does, feel free to let me know!
  
  Oh that's wonderful! I tried to test out bold within italics and italics within bold and both worked... this time. Thank you for your efforts, they are super appreciated!
  More generally, I love being proven wrong about PieFed. On Lemmy if you say "this feature does not exist", then five years later it's still an accurate statement, whereas on PieFed... it's so hard to keep up with because it's so readily changed, by such dedicated fans like... well, YOU! 😊🎉💪🤩

I thought of another one. In this age of decreasing digital freedom, PieFed (and every other website) should allow people to register multiple email addresses, in case a user suddenly loses access to one.

I don't know if these already exist, but thinking long-term of how to prevent Reddit-like problems:
An option to move a post to a different community (with the agreement of the other community's moderators) if the post is in the wrong community, but otherwise seems valid/good-faith/high-effort/etc.
And for the opposite situation where the post is just garbage, but highly upvoted by bots/brigading, there could be a "nuke it from orbit" option that not only deletes it and bans the poster, but also bans everyone that upvoted it.
- Moving a post would be great, yep.
  Not all votes are intentional, I think there needs to be manual review in there. Will look for opportunities to add some kinda feature called 'nuke from orbit' though...
  
  Good point about the unintentional votes. Maybe just a temporary suspension then.

ability to mark a reply as a answer

UI: instead of Lemmy-like main view, offer a list of selected feeds as tabs in the main view
- Like this? https://piefed.social/topics
  
  No, like having my feeds instead of "subscribed", "local", "popular". Ideally with a way to mark which feeds I want on the list

What do you think about a "Share" button on posts? Might also go in the three-dot menu if there's not enough space. Right now you'd have to "manually" share/copy the link to a post, which isn't a huge deal, but I think a button would be a nice QOL improvement. :) On mobile, it might even integrate with native OS-specific share menus.

Add ability to use keyword filter on community names and instance names. For example I want to filter out all meme communities.
- Add ability to use keyword filter on community names
  This should already be live. In your user settings on the Blocks & Filters page, you will want to look for these options:
  
  Since you are on piefed.social, rimu has tried to designate basically all the meme communities as "low quality" so that they are easily filterable by checking that box (new ones pop up all the time though). Additionally, the text box below lets you filter based on community name.
  
  I tired adding tumblr as the keyword but still see c/curatedtumblr in my feed.

I would like to suggest modifying the collapse button to feature a right arrow symbol (🞂) on the left side of the name to indicate a collapsed thread, and a longer down arrow symbol (🞃) for an uncollapsed thread. The thread delimiter line would go up just to the symbol. This change would replace the current two diagonal arrows that are located to the right of the votes, which I hadn't even noticed before today, and I thought that functionality was missing.
I'd also suggest enhancing the visibility of the thread delimiter line. I suggest making it grey and of the same thickness for most of its length, and then thickening it, and increasing its opacity, and adding color only at the level of the comment.

A real 'block' option would be nice on the threadiverse. Right now all we have is a glorified 'mute' button. A block, to me at least, implies that the blocked person can't see or interact with my posts or comments (and not simply that I can't see their posts/comments).
It might complicate things if people who block each other post the same link to a community though. And I assume that federation likely makes implementing this more difficult as well ... but still, it would be nice!
- On the same Piefed instance, the block is two ways
  Last time I tried, it didn't properly federate yet, but it's a start
  
  Ah - thanks, it's great to hear this is being worked on!

Ok so here's my pitch:
So far I really like PieFed, and I'm hoping to set up some kind of online forum as an adjunct to an in-person discussion group in my city.
For now, I expect it will probably be non-federated, and invite-only.
Those things are already features in PieFed as far as I can tell (well, maybe not invite codes exactly, but using approved signups would work roughly the same way in this case).
Looking to the future though, here's what I'd be super excited to see: the option to make some of the communites visible to non-logged-in visitors, and/or federatable with other instances, while still keeping most communities semi-private; that is, only visible to registered & logged-in local server accounts.
Bonus points if some of those semi-private communities could instead be even more private, i.e., posts only visible to approved members of that specific community. To be fair, maybe the chat functionality is good enough in those cases, I dunno :)
I'm guessing this is a big ask. However, this particular group may not need those functions near-term, so I'd be especially eager to spin up a PieFed server if I knew those kinds of things might be in the pipeline.
My other viable choice right now is Discourse, but like, it's kinda corporate, and it's really JavaScript-heavy, which to me is kind of an equity issue when it comes to data plans and user device speed etc.
Thanks!

117 comments