Thanks for pointing out the 'open signups' on fediverse observer - I've fixed that up on the PieFed side just now and it'll flow through to that database in due course.
While I am technically an admin on feddit.online it was just for some initial debugging and setup support - it's entirely separate from piefed.social and I don't have the level of access needed to update it's code. I don't know how often Jerry updates his instance but I can tell you piefed.social is absolutely bleeding edge.
Welcome aboard! As well has https://piefed.social there is also https://feddit.online. All other instances I know of are single-user ones.
I'm pretty keen on blocking, in general, so if you have more ideas along these lines they'll get heard.
As another blocking example, if I post something then not only do I not see replies from people on instances I've blocked, but also my post will not be federated to blocked instances in the first place. So they won't be able to reply to the copy of the post on their instance as it won't exist.
This only works for local communities - ones hosted on the same instance as the one you're using as that's the only time we get to decide where to send posts to. Currently PieFed.social has almost no local communities.
Yeah I've been wanting to add the instance name for a while now. Knowing that someone else wants it too increases it's priority, thanks :)
It includes comments as well :)
...and just now I made it hide communities at https://piefed.social/communities too.
Hmm yeah it IS a bit weird to have the post title in the breadcrumb, huh.
There are personal instance blocks - when viewing a post by someone from that instance, click/tap the 3 dots which gives you additional things you can do with the post. One of those is "hide every post from author's instance".
Arguably there should be a button on user profiles that lets you do that too, it'll probably easier to find there. Also another button on instance profiles... I'll add that soon.
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon (for free), and you can access many other audio recordings starting at $1/month! In February some years ago, my then-manager surp…
> Our workflows and productivity metrics regularly ask knowledge workers for things that do not make good knowledge work.
> Bloggers on reddit lament how much “meta-work” and “not-work” exists in tech. They kvetch about the conversations and the waiting. They consider the principal engineer’s calendar, packed with meetings, quod erat demonstratum that those roles are “easy” and “airware.” They insist that, if they could manage to not get caught, they could keep several such positions simultaneously and never under-deliver on any of them. None of these jobs, they claim, ask them for all that much code.
It's not so much the hair itself as it being a symptom of god knows what else.
Scalability. Federation adds overhead that increases as the number of instances increases. It is unclear to me when we will hit a wall but it's probably not far off.
How will we pay the bills. Some instances get enough donations to pay server costs but none get enough to pay for staff or developers.
Both of those are only really problems if the fediverse grows, which it hasn't for a while now. But that could change at any moment.
https://bimmerlife.com/2020/10/31/study-bmw-drivers-are-the-rudest/
BMW drivers are the worst. It's science.
The big writing behind him says "TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING", if anyone is curious. They kept it out of the shot when recording the stage but the writing was visible on the screens of the phones the audience were holding up.
More on the treatment here https://www.endogenex.com/recet/
Sounds like they put a tube down your throat all the way to the small intestine and then zap it with electricity which somehow helps.
If only there was a source of young keen workers to fill the gaps.
when used appropriately
...and there's the rub. Far too often it's not used appropriately. And people's ideas of what is appropriate is colored by whether they too were beaten as a child.
My 486. With colour screen and speakers!
I have found ft.com to be very unreliable in the past.
The first couple of nights are the most unsettling but it becomes normal pretty quick. In 3 years of living on the road there was only one time someone spooked us at night and it was just kids rocking the van for a laugh.
Yes. I think something like what Kbin did with it's "Collections" would work fine, where it's basically a crowd-sourced Topic. Currently topics are administered by the instance admin(s) which doesn't scale very well but scaling isn't much of a concern at the moment.
I tried it myself (changing the name and changing the values) but lost interest after 3 attempts and always getting the right answer:
https://chatgpt.com/share/670af65d-da08-800f-8ad4-c67782ee5477
https://chatgpt.com/share/670af672-45dc-800f-ac91-cc2811fa89c7
https://chatgpt.com/share/6709e80b-e5a8-800f-90d0-1af3418675ef
Florentina Holzinger’s bloody Sancta was criticised by Austrian bishops and is now a sellout in Germany
Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.
First Greenhouse Gas Plumes Detected With NASA-Designed Instrument
The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and
The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally.
Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections highlight methane plumes in Pakistan and Texas, as well as a carbon dioxide plume in South Africa.
The data contributes to Carbon Mapper’s goal to identify and measure greenhouse gas point-source emissions on a global scale and make that information accessible and actionable.
U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack
These federally-mandated backdoors were first required on phone systems in 1994 by the CALEA law, then controversially extended to broadband by the FCC in '04.
See also https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/05/china-linked-security-breach-targeted-us-wiretap-systems-wsj-reports.html
World's longest-serving death row inmate acquitted in Japan
After almost half a century on death row Iwao Hakamada, 88, has been acquitted of murder.
An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated.
Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for almost half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.
He was recently granted a retrial amid suspicions that investigators may have planted evidence that led to his conviction for quadruple murder.
PieFed development update September 2024 - not prepping for 1.0 release
We tried to hold back from coding new stuff in order for things to stabilize but it didn't work out. Maybe next month. Instead, we made a whole bunch of cool things:
rimu ----------
- Detect offline instances and stop federating to them until they come back. feamon helped a lot with this.
- Private voting - see https://piefed.social/post/205362 for background.
- Remove moment.js to ease load on clients. We were using a quite heavy javascript library to format dates on the client side but removing the JS and doing it in Python on the backend instead more than halved the amount of JS we need to send (we're now down to 70 KB, gzipped).
- Post teaser redesign - the most significant visual change since the beginning. Image posts now have a much larger preview image and video posts can be played without going to the post itself. YouTube videos are lazy-loaded just before scrolling into view but only if running on AC power. Devices running off a battery (or like Firefox which do not support the battery API) will only load the video once you visit the post page, not while scrolling the feed.
- Use a connection pool for federation - rather than making a new network connection to send an Activity, PieFed will reuse an existing connection where possible. This has less overhead and results in faster federation.
hendrik ----------
- Better notifications about comments buried deep in a thread
freamon ----------
- Better federation of bans from remote admins.
- use HTML portion of Activity instead of Markdown. Lemmy sends Activitys as both Markdown and HTML. For a long time PieFed would use the Markdown and convert it to HTML for display but now it just uses the HTML that Lemmy provides.
- Image alt text federation
- Backfilling improvements especially with image posts.
- Many misc bugfixes
JollyDevelopment ----------
- New theme - "card shadow" - this quickly became a favorite among the dev team and both freamon and myself use it. It's basically the same as the default except there are shadows behind things, giving a more 3D look to the interface and giving a bit more visual hierarchy. It's nice, try it - https://piefed.social/user/settings
- Admin page - instance administration - there is a table showing all the instances you're federating with and stats for each instance.
- Profile export - PieFed has had the functionality to import settings from a Lemmy profile for a long time but now it's possible to go the other way and export settings from PieFed to Lemmy.
- Add remote form - The form for adding a remote community used to require you to type the community as [email protected] but now you can give the URL as well, e.g. https://instance.com/c/whatever
\--
As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!
Rank1 - Such is Life ( Aly & Fila Mix)
Starts pretty heavy on the vocals but gets proper trancy about 1 minute in.
The original mix of this came out around 2000.
Quick-Start Guide to Fediverse Governance Decisions
Much more at https://fediverse-governance.github.io/
Private voting has been added to PieFed
We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.
Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
![[Discussion] Should votes be displayed publicly? · Issue #4967 · LemmyNet/lemmy](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e7d61302-0720-4072-bc4a-848cfefa2a40.png?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
PieFed development update August 2024 - prepping for 1.0 release
A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:
- Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field
- Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.
- Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with
- Added a suggest a topic form
"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.
Also I did a few things:
- Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar
- Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.
- Some mastodon integration bugs
- Wrote a guide about how to install the PieFed mobile app
As you can see we don't have a lot of really big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.
PieFed is 1 year old
Just a quick note to recognize that the first lines of PieFed code were published on the 28th July 2023, just over a year ago. Since then there have been 1400+ changes made by 9 people, involving adding 88,000 lines of code and removing 28,000 lines. The issue queue has 98 open and 99 closed issues.
While join.piefed.social went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that piefed.social went live on 4th January 2024.
Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.
What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!
85% off Battlefield V, let's gooo
Offers available now until August 19, 2024.
Finally time to pull the trigger on this one!
EA has a big sale on lots of other titles, too.
Visualizing Global Carbon Dioxide
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has released a video showing how wind and air currents pushed CO2 emissions around Earth’s atmosphere from January to March 2020. The video’s high-resolution zooms in and sees individual sources of CO2, including power plants and forest fires.
This global map of carbon dioxide was created using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather reanalysis model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to represent what was happening in the atmosphere — including storm systems, cloud formations, and other natural events. This model pulls in billions of data points from ground observations and satellite instruments – and has a resolution is more than 100 times greater than your typical weather model.
More at https://www.universetoday.com/167872/our-carbon-dioxide-emissions-have-a-mesmerizing-side/