Developer of PieFed, a sibling of Lemmy & Kbin.

  • 3 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • If you really need it to be a proper mobile app then it’s unlikely you’ll find one - this would be quite a lot of work as every platform has implemented it’s own API for talking with client apps, rather than using ActivityPub. The app would need to talk to several different APIs.

    You’re better off choosing a platform that can talk with as many different types of other platforms as possible. And when I say ‘talk with’ there will be gradients of talking with differing amounts of problems. For example PieFed is great with Lemmy, good with PeerTube and Ok with Mastodon. Then use the client app for your chosen platform.

    Choosing the platform will be a process of just trying them all. Check out friendica, they cast a wide net.




  • Elena put their finger on an especially weak spot for Lemmy and PieFed, where Mastodon integration is somewhat of an afterthought. There is some integration but it doesn’t really work the way they expected it to.

    The ideal of “everything talks to everything” still remains elusive.

    These days I’m less sure it’s even a good goal to have - content on different platforms doesn’t always ‘fit’ in others. Mastodon posts lack a title so look awkward on Lemmy, Wordpress blog posts are often long, causing some Mastodon mobile apps to make their users scroll for days, Peertube videos often have a bunch of “here’s how you can give me money” links in the body which look spammy out of context, etc.

    Some platforms are a more natural fit for each other than others.






  • Yeah, I see that and it does concern me now that it has been brought up.

    However. In the last 6 months of being active in the ‘Lemmy.world defense hq’ matrix room where we coordinate admin actions against bad people, vote manipulation has come up once or twice. The other 99% of the time it’s posts that are spam, racist or transphobic. The vote manipulation we found detected using some scripts and spreadsheets, not looking at the admin UI. After all, using code is the only way to scan through millions of records.

    Downvote abuse/harassment coming from PieFed will be countered by monitoring “attitude” and I have robust tools for that. I can tell you with complete confidence that not one PieFed user downvotes more than they upvote. I can provide 12 other accounts on Lemmy instances that do, tho. Lemmy’s lack of a similar admin tool is unfortunate but not something I can do anything about.

    What I’ve done with developing this feature is taken advantage of a weakness of ActivityPub - anyone can make accounts and have them do stuff. Even though I’ve done it in a very controlled and limited way and released all the code for it, having this exposed feels pretty uncomfortable. There were many many people droning on about “votes must be public because they need to come from an account” blah blah and that secure safe illusion has been ripped away now. That sucks, but we were going to have to grapple with it eventually one way or another.

    Anyway. I’m not wedded to this or motivated by a fixed ideology (e.g. privacy über alles) so removing this is an option. It didn’t even take that long to code, I spent more time explaining it than coding it.