this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

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Feeds are a combination of communities into one, like multireddit or mastodon tags.

Try it out!

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[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 43 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Neat, it federates. Seems to work similar to a normal community, so it should be easy to follow these feeds from Lemmy.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

While the actor is a Group and you can follow it, no posts are Announced. All the federation of posts is still driven by the individual communities within the feed. You'll need to modify Lemmy to add the logic of subscribing to the constituent communities when you receive an Accept.

Also there are Add and Remove activities sent out whenever the feed owner manages the list of communities within which would need to be handled.

Documentation still to come...

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah its more complicated than I thought. We also have a similar or same feature on the roadmap, when I get to that it can federate with Piefed.

[–] jollyroberts@jolly-piefed.jomandoa.net 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For the federating its a new kind of AP actor. I'll be putting in a FEP for it in the near future, but its basically a "Group" that only cares about the "Following" collection.

You can see example json for the AP interactions here: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/activitypub_examples/feeds

The AP interactions for a Feed are:

  • Send a Follow request for a Feed
  • Accept a Follow request (this is automatic for public feeds)
  • Reject a Follow request (this is automatic for private feeds)
  • Announce an Add of a Community to a Feed
  • Announce a Remove of a Community from a Feed
  • Send a Delete of a Feed to subscribers
[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hmm so the Feed actor mainly consists of a following collection and uses Add/Remove activities. This really sounds like it should be a Collection and not an actor.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Possibly. At the end of the day it's all just JSON.

Here is more detail - https://codeberg.org/JollyDevelopment/fep/src/branch/jollydev/fep-1d80/fep/1d80/fep-1d80.md

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago

That's cool, i hope lemmy federates with it in the future :D

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 42 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Reminder that Piefed's patreon is only at $13 a month. If you have the means, consider donating to the project to say thanks for all of the work and effort being put into it :)

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 week ago

100%. Rimu, jollyroberts and andrew are all amazing people, providing both piefed and .social itself for free. They work very hard, and hell, the feeds PR was only created 4 days ago, and pushed today!

Piefed and its devs deserve way more :D

[–] Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 week ago

To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So do I understand correctly that these are identical to Topics, except customizable without requiring backend changes?

Sweet!

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago
[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 16 points 1 week ago (14 children)

This is great but I still don’t think it fixed the issue that both softwares have, what do you do about wanting to share the same content between multiple same named communities without spamming?

I still really like the idea that communities can choose to federate with each other. You post to privacy at ML and LW and it shows as one post in both communities.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 20 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yes, that is high on the agenda.

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 9 points 1 week ago

Exciting! I’ll try to get my piefed running again then

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[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.

[–] Blaze@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Trying it right now, it's pretty sweet

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago

new blaze account? 😭

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago

Fedipie.dbon1.com? We have the technology for it.

[–] xnx@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does posting to a feed post to all the communities in it?

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago

Feed isn't a place you can post to. It just collects posts from different communities into one feed/stream.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (4 children)

This will reduce the discourse quality significantly as it will bring in more drive-by comments from people not subscribed to the specific communities in question.

I hope there will be some way for communities to opt-out from this or maybe better require them to opt-in.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Possibly. (Subscribing to a feed does actually subscribe you to all the communities in the feed. So technically they are not drive-by comments by non-members. But I see what you mean.)

Discoverability is a huge huge problem with all federated platforms and this will significantly alleviate that.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

If I don't misunderstand then you can only add communities to these feeds that are already known to your instance, thus I don't really see how this solves the federated discoverability issues which are ultimately due to instances not being aware of each other at all.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The feed creator needs to know about the communities so they can type/paste the community address in, yeah. This feature takes the expert fediverse landscape knowledge contained in the heads of the terminally online and makes it available to more casual/new users.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Once a community is known to an instance it is available via the search feature. Thus this really doesn't improve discoverability at all assuming the person adding it to the feed is already using the instance.

What it however does is moving the conscious choice of looking for and joining a community to an opaque follow feed button that makes someone subscribe to a lot of communities they know nothing about other than that someone else thought they somehow fit to a single word tag (and it is worse than hashtags on Mastodon as it is not the person making the post that adds them, but a totally unrelated 3rd party).

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[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago

Subscribing to the feed subscribes to communities in them = federation solved.

On top of that the content is over there organised for you which is not something you otherwise have. You have discoverability solved in 2 ways. If someone has a good feed and you see a cool community missing you can message the owner for them to add it building the collection as a community.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

c/all is worse imo and with feeds you will at least have control over picking topics you're interested in unlike c/all. We should be focusing on opting out from c/all more as it causes far more damage and it's been that way for a long time unlike feeds on such a small platform that just got the feature implemented.

Also the opt-in would be a great way to KILL the entire feature that's been the most hyped up and requested feature across the entire threadiverse. BRUH

Imagine having all communities opted out from c/all by default. That would be stupid and make everything hard to access.

Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.

E: c/all is just one monolithic feed forced on all users for better perspective about the issue. With custom feeds much like with communities you pick out your interests and follow them specifically and it's all optional. I don't see how it could cause more damage than this.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.

Lemmy already has a setting community.hidden so that communities dont show up on the All feed. But this is not easy to access at the moment. I can fix that.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes having that option more easily accessible would be much apprechated.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?

Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).

To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it's right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).

At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a "moderator", so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the "mod" to ask that it be removed?

Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a "private" setting. Lemmy already has a "local-only" setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!

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