aka freamon
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/freamon?tab=activity
Anything from https://lemmon.website is me too.
Interesting. Funnily enough, my comments are coming through to Lemmy as 'Undermined' too (just a PieFed bug, easily fixed), so the fact that you saw it (as well as the comments by the others I mentioned) means it's not a language thing. That's good, in a way, because it should be physically impossible to actually de-select it.
So, sorry - at least we can rule one thing out, but I don't have any more suggestions.
That community only accepts posts in 'undermined' language, so if you aren't seeing anything from there, but you can when you log out (to simulate everyone else's view of it), then it's probably a user setting that prevents you from seeing stuff from that language. If you go to the 'collapse' community and posts by 'Midnight' are missing, then it'll be that (similarly there's a comment here from 'originallucifer' - if you haven't seen it, it's 'cos of the language thing).
- JumpRemoved
Can't create a community
Last time that happened to me, it was because the 'name' I was using was too long (I removed some characters and it worked). There isn't the same limitation for the 'display name' field though.
Well, there's the The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities, which suggests:
Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
So whatever number you're looking for, it's 1% of that. Not that subscriber count means much, especially for older communities that have 10's of thousands of subscribers who aren't even using the platform any more.
That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.
You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it's not like there's any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.
I'd be surprised if there's ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it's more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g it'll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn't, and the answer to why are the stuff that 'normies' don't want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they're so unintuitive that that they'll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).
I've just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I've seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real 'web dev 101' shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.
Nope. Just tried on moist.catsweat.com and it says "Please select an item in the list" for the "Select Magazine" box if you try to post something and leave that empty.
I'm assuming that this is about your earlier post that ended up in LW's technology community. Microblog posts like that seem to be more intended for whoever is following you as a user. If MBIN insists that you also have to choose a 'sub' then I think it'd be best to put it in whatever it considers a dumping ground (ideally something that doesn't federate out), so the 'random' magazine sounds about right to me.
The vote count for comments is something I'll work on next. The idea is that if you have a high reputation (your stuff if upvoted more than downvoted), then you get an extra one (your comments start at 2, because it's one from you, and one bonus one). But you're not the first person to question it, and find it counter-intuitive. So I'll probably change it so that a high reputation effects the internal score (which is used for ranking) but not the visible upvotes.
p.s. Lemmy's changes re: batching are to fix its own problems with queues over long geographical distances. It's unrelated to backfilling content from other instances: that'll stay the same - every instance on every software platform will have some stuff missing compared to where it's originally hosted (if it's not because the content pre-dates the federation, it'll be because of de-federation, or bans, or timeouts, or some activitypub mystery (someone was asking the other day about why a post from feddit.org hadn't made it to lemmy.world and there was no real satisfactory answer to my mind)).
What's happening with 0.19.6 ?
You can see the upvotes vs downvotes if you hover your cursor over the score. The old layout displayed both, but there's pros and cons to combined vs. separate vote info. Videos pretty much always attract a disproportionate amount of downvotes, btw - it's just one of those Lemmy things.
I don't know how technically viable a temporary-only retrieval of a post would be. If you look at any given post across multiple instances, every one has its "own truth" for one reason or another, and it's just something that I've started to accept comes with the territory.
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
There are instances like https://soccer.forumhttps://nba.spacehttps://nfl.community
The communities aren't super-active because the idea is that they're remote-only, but that means they don't get the benefit that comes from local users browsing their local feed.
Re: votes and comments for old content - you've noticed the same problems on PieFed as on smaller Lemmy instances, because they have the same root cause: we can only get what Lemmy will give us.
The 'retrieve remote post' function was originally written for PeerTube integration. If you fetch a post from there, you can then query the 'favorites' outbox to get voting info, and the 'replies' outbox to get comments. You can't do that with Lemmy - it considers voting data to be private, and it doesn't provide a 'replies' outbox. The only outbox that Lemmy provides is for posts, that provides the text for the most recent 50 posts, but nothing else (FWIW, the posts outbox for PieFed communities includes the replies along with each post, but - again - not the votes).
When a PieFed or other Lemmy instance first becomes aware a community that's hosted on a remote Lemmy instance, it processes the posts outbox. The 'retrieve remote post' function is there for if you want a post that's older than the ones provided in the outbox, or if someone before you discovered that community but didn't subscribe (the remote community won't send anything to piefed.social if no-one there is subscribed to it, so we can end up with a situation where we have the old posts but not the newer ones).
For votes: the hypothetical scenario of a post having +1000 on its home instance, but -4 on a remote one, is a real possibility, but that's a bigger problem than just PieFed. Using ActivityPub, Lemmy doesn't provide a post score, and even if it did (or you grabbed it using their API), it doesn't say where the votes have come from. You need to know this, because otherwise you've no idea what a future vote will mean (is a 'downvote' reversing a previous downvote, or is it a new downvote?). There's an inconsistency in PieFed, whereby a post retrieved from an outbox starts at +0, but a manually retrieved one starts at +1, but it doesn't really matter that much, because they're both as wrong as the other (we've no idea whether the OP kept the automatically assigned upvote that they got with a new post).
For comments: old ones are a lost cause (even for admins). Lemmy is a bit better at backfilling these - if it receives a vote for a missing comment, it'll fetch it. I'd imagine though there's a complexity limit to this (it'll get a comment if it's in reply to comment or a post it already has, but it's not going to recursively climb up the parent tree to resolve everything if it doesn't already have it). Also, it depends on votes coming through - lemmy.ml probably has about 3 years of comments that lemmy.world will never get, because nobody is going to vote on them. Again, it's a bigger problem than just PieFed.
For UI stuff: I'm not the best person to talk to - I've only just found out that you can swipe about on a Mac desktop, and that's because you've told me. The main websites of PieFed instances are deliberately old-skool (mostly just HTML and CSS) - this is what a chuck of the Fediverse says they want, but also what a chunk trips up on, because they've been spoiled by the conveniences provided by more modern web interfaces. That's not to say that the problems you've mentioned are insurmountable, it's just that they are best posted as an Issue on codeberg or in a community like !piefed_meta@piefed.social, where folks who've much more web development experience than me will see them.
Re: that post of on "ye power trippin' bastards", those comments will never come through. I'd guess that you pulled that post after the comments had been made, so they won't federate out again, because they only do that when they're originally created (or updated). Leaving and Joining won't make any difference. There's an argument that we should fetch a comment if we receive an upvote for it, but Rimu wasn't too keen on it last time it was raised.
Re: swiping with Mac. I had no idea that was possible tbh, but I just tried it on my old MacBook Air, and it turns out that the two-finger swiping works in Safari, on PieFed as well as any other sites. This suggests that it's a problem with Chrome, but I wouldn't know where to look for a fix (it's not the kind of functionality that websites have much involvement in - they don't need to do anything to enable it, and would struggle to disable it, beyond the usual 'back-button' capture that some dodgy sites do, but PieFed doesn't).
Hello. Hopefully we're in deep enough in the comments for meta-chat not to be too annoying for others. Re: hotlinking from fandom sites - a search around the web suggests that other sites struggle with it too, because it looks like the 'fandom' people try to prevent it, and send a blank image whenever they detect it.
I don't know how Lemmy gets away with it. I tried re-arranging elements the same way that Lemmy does, and it didn't work. However, I have found that if you replace the word 'static' in the URL, with the word 'vignette', then that does work. This is the kind of thing that can be automated, so it can be fixed in a future commit.
Demo below (in spoiler tags to try to reduce the clutter for others):
Edit: I've also been adding an API to PieFed and testing it out with a fork of Lemmy's Thunder app - using this seems to solve both problems: it can render the image without shenanigans, and it provides a preview too (I doubt preview functionality will be added to the main raw website if it requires significant amounts of JavaScript, 'cos we're trying to avoid that).
Here’s a community node for mastodon
Should this be a link to something?
We appear to be at an impasse.
I've recently been adding an API to PieFed and forked the Lemmy Thunder app as way to test things. My position on this comes from tinkering with Thunder - I can't claim to understand it all, but it seems to me that the API and the app are fundamentally interlinked in ways that make being too adventurous with it difficult. For that app, it would break the existing paradigm to do the kinds of things you're talking about. Thunder uses its own version of an API client (written in Dart), but I've assumed that other apps are written in a similar way, and are essentially wrappers around Lemmy's JavaScript client.
Hopefully, someone else with more app development experience will contribute to this discussion, and set one of us right (I don't mind if it's me that's wrong).
Most frontends already display available crossposts so you're not wasting anything more than grabbing all the comment sections as well.
We're talking about different things. I'm talking about the view you get when you first open an app - the 'home' screen that lists the posts. The API response for api/v3/post/list doesn't indicate whether something has been crossposted. You can see for yourself by getting a list of the 2 oldest posts on lemmy.ml:
curl --request GET --url 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/post/list?type_=Local&sort=Old&page=1&limit=2' --header 'accept: application/json' | jq .For those 2 posts, you can only find out if they have crossposts by individually querying each post using the api/v3/post endpoint - the first one in that list would be:
curl --request GET --url 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/post?id=2' --header 'accept: application/json' | jq .where crossposts would be in the 'cross_posts' array.
So for an app to display whether a posts listed on the main feed have crossposts, they'd have to query post/list, and then for each entry, query /post as well. This isn't the way these things typically work - there's normally a 1-to-1 relationship between an API query, and displaying the results of that query on the page. Looping through the list you've been given, and making extra queries adds complexity and delay, when the expectation from the user is that this list should appear pretty quickly.
What you're talking about, is the view once a user has clicked on a post, not the post list. This provides the crossposts info. It's important to realise though, that the cross_posts array provides everything an app could want to display info about the other posts. It's not like they are pulling the data for one post, and then pulling data for each listed crosspost, so if they were to start getting the comments for each crosspost, that would be an extra effort (and a potential waste).
I don't agree at all. There's space for complex frontends which attempt to adjust the feed according to their own logic, as well as minimalistic frontends which follow the backend's design explicitly.
My counter to that, would be that if you aren't using the API in the way the developers expected, your app has ceased to be frontend, and is instead its own program that's scraping data from it. There are already some heavy desktop-orientated frontends, and none of them do what you're proposing. I think that the reason why, is because the proper way to do it is for the Lemmy's backend to be changed to provide the information they need in one go. That's unlikely to happen, but that doesn't mean that hacking away at an improper solution is necessarily the right answer (you just end up supporting a project that isn't supporting you in return).
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
No reason that I can see. Your instance is sending stuff out, LW is getting stuff in, you're not banned on LW (as far as I can see), LW and feddit.org are likely in the same part of the world (so no fed delays). There's been times when LW has received a post and federated it out, but not shown it itself, but that's not the case either.
I don't know. It might be worth asking on LW's matrix channel, to see if an admin will look into it.
Frontends generate the main feed by querying api/v3/post/list. This doesn't provide any crosspost info - for that you have to go into the post itself by querying api/v3/post. As such, frontends would have to do a fair bit of extra work to wrangle the required information for a main feed that combined crossposts. The only attempt I've seen at doing this was in a dev branch of Tesseract.
I'd argue that you have a problem as soon as you start saying 'frontends need to do some extra work' - it breaks the dynamic between backends and frontends. Backends should be big, complicated things, worked on by people familiar with the project, to provide all the logic, whereas frontends should be light, relatively easy to write, runnable on devices with limited resources, and mostly focused on how the information provided to them should be displayed. They should store the user's preferences, and login details, and that's it - everything else should come from the backend.
As for combining comments, this can lead to fraught situations. This link was posted to both 'cars' and 'fuckcars'. This link was posted to both 'taylorswift' and whatever-the-fuck 'barelower4thwomenmusic' is: so the comments for a music video would be from Taylor Swift fans, as well as from people with a foot fetish. Moreover, if this is the expected behaviour, trolls can use it to get up to no good, and make a bunch of comments appear in a new crosspost to a community subscribed to by people guaranteed to disagree with them.
I think anyone trying to 'fix' this issue will run into the fact that certain assumptions have been made in a software's design, and those assumptions determine how database relationships are formed. The real answer may lie in something like 'ClubsAll', rather than an attempt to fundamentally redesign existing platforms.
In the meantime, crossposting is being actively encouraged. Movie news is posted to 5 different communities, open-source news is posted to 8, Taylor Swift music videos are posted to 12. The useful crossposts (one that help you discover a new community) are in the minority - most of it just ends up being annoying. And it's because there this idea, that some time in the future, there'll be a tech solution to make it less annoying, and the suggestion that maybe you should just pick the community you like and post to that, is - to me - surprisingly unpopular. Not only might this solution never come, but anything URL-based can't do anything about the same question being posed to 'nostupidquestions' and both 'asklemmys', or with an image being uploaded and posted to one community, and then re-uploaded to post to another.
This whole thing feels like trying to find a tech solution to what I see as a user problem of mindless posting to as many communities as you can find. To be honest, it's a problem that makes me a bit disillusioned (I saw a post the other day that was posted to both 'interestingasfuck' and 'mildlyinteresting', and thought - if that's the community names we're going with, and this behaviour is apparently okay, then we may as well be on Reddit).
https://literature.cafe/ is still running.