@wjs018@piefed.social avatar

wjs018

@[email protected]

Piefed contributor and part of the piefed.social admin team.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

wjs018 ,
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I had a scroll through the recent exceptions thrown by piefed.social and I might have a guess as to what is happening, but I can't really prove it, and it is rare. I just pushed a fix and backported it to the 1.6.x branch. If @Demigodrick@piefed.zip avatar Demigodrick updates and this is still happening, then it is some other issue (a stack trace would be helpuful if you are able to grab one). This issue would be separate from the auth issues described by @Jerry@feddit.online avatar Jerry . More technical details below.

From my sleuthing, there are certain posts that, if they are present in the returned list of posts, will cause the API to throw an exception. This is due to the python library we use to validate our API schema (marshmallow), having too strict of a set of requirements on how urls should be formatted in Url fields of the returned json. I have changed the API schema to just be a string instead so that it isn't validating against its url requirements.

wjs018 ,
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I realized that I replied from the wrong browser tab. I can confirm that this is not some impersonator wjs018 🕵️

wjs018 ,
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It's a good question...for rimu. I have ssh access to do things like restart the server or roll out a critical bugfix or something like that, but my sysadmin skills are not the best.

wjs018 ,
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I find it funny when this happens. Also, I have definitely learned about bugs via these memes. It's kind of like painting dicks around potholes to get them filled faster.

wjs018 ,
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The Amethyst theme in your user settings is mostly a recolored version of the default theme that is pretty popular. You could give that a shot. The HPT themes are a bit more of a departure, but they have lots of fans out there as well.

The colors are all overwrite-able via custom css in your settings if one of those options doesn't work. Which elements are you looking to recolor? We use Bootstrap css for the web ui, so you would just need to overwrite the default colors that Bootstrap uses.

Manually add thumbnail image links to link posts

I'm really loving PieFed but there's one nagging thing that's making it tough to fully switch over from Lemmy. I post a lot of news articles. The autofill works great but there are many news sites that fail every time -- CBC, Tyee, The Atlantic, NYT, WaPo are a few examples (probably cloudflare issues). You can copy-paste the ...

wjs018 ,
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There is an open issue for this: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/887

I actually tried to implement this at one point, but ran into some issues that held things up, and I pivoted to specifying alt text instead. I would have to take another look to refresh my memory on what the particular issue was.

wjs018 ,
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I most often use PieFed as a PWA on my phone. As for lemmy, I tend to use Boost the most often (Boost also supports PieFed).

wjs018 ,
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If you are using the web UI, then you can disable the user popups by popping this bit of css in the Additional CSS field of your user settings:

.user_preview {
    display: none;
}

As for infinite scroll, that isn't a feature of the native web UI. There are some alternative UIs that support PieFed, and I don't know all the features they have, so you might find that in those. Two that I know of:

wjs018 ,
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The pinned posts still obey some of the visibility rules of any other post. So, in this case, piefed.ca has Popular as the default sort on the instance. That means that the community that is home to those posts must have the Posts can be popular box checked in the admin settings for that community:

admin screen

I can't confirm that this is the issue, but I was able to confirm with a dev instance that local-pinned posts do show up for anonymous users using the popular sort when that box is checked and don't when it is unchecked.

wjs018 , (edited )
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In /admin/communities, the far right column has an Edit link. That is where you have some additional settings, including checkboxes that can include/exclude communities from your instance's Popular and All views. You want to make sure that both of these are checked (they are down below the language settings):

checkboxes

wjs018 ,
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Welcome!

wjs018 ,
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For really, really poor internet connections, http can be a lot more performant because it has a lot less handshaking that needs to happen. This kind of use case is something rimu cares a lot about since he has previously had to deal with super awful internet connections in the past. It is a very specific use case and outside of that kind of case, it wouldn't be recommended. You can see that both http and https versions of the site can coexist, so it is an option for those that need it.

wjs018 , (edited )
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Even logged in and with filters so that the post is visible, I don't see the post in the piefed community as pinned. Could it have been unpinned when you did your db reload?

https://media.piefed.social/posts/3E/BV/3EBVN2vMXmt0jWC.png

If it is pinned on your side, then it must be a bug of some kind.

wjs018 ,
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Ok, it seems to be working now then. Let us know if you continue to see weirdness with the pinned posts.

image

wjs018 ,
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I feel the same. I'm going to be a bit self-centered and quote myself from the piefed matrix chat:

I like lemmy. I still use, run communities on, and donate to lemmy instances.

Different threadiverse implementations just means different features available to people looking for them, and a bigger, more diverse threadiverse is a better one.

wjs018 ,
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This isn't that far away from mine for two people: ~$600-$700 per month in a HCOL area and doing most of the cooking myself as well. I have found that sizing up a recipe for more people is only a marginal increase in cost. So, cooking for two is not just double that of cooking for one, but less.

wjs018 , (edited )
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Probably. rimu just pushed piefed.social to the 1.6 branch last night to shake it down before release, so probably related to that. I won't be able to take a look for a bit, but this definitely seems like a bug.

wjs018 ,
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The thumbtack trick was a game changer for me back when someone shared it with me. I have a dedicated thumbtack in a kitchen drawer now.

wjs018 Mod ,
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This series has been super impressive with how consistently funny it has been. Too often I will read a series that is funny for a bit, but the jokes wear out or get too predictable. I still find myself surprised each chapter of this series at how funny it is.

This chapter, the two jokes that really got me were that Rona's head is full of cats (just like the old internet!) and that death gods are a popular moe trope.

cats

wjs018 Mod ,
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It took me a minute to figure out how this was a Harry Potter reference. For those also confused, these three magics correspond to the Unforgivable Curses.

wjs018 ,
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If you go to your blocks on your settings page in the web UI (not in Voyager), are the blocked people listed in the table down near the bottom? I took a quick look through the /post/list endpoint in the PieFed api and it looks like we are filtering blocked users correctly, so I wonder if the issue is that user blocks are not getting created correctly.

wjs018 ,
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Ah, I see now. I had missed that this was for comments and not posts. I think I can see the bug in the PieFed API. The /comment/list endpoint is fairly complicated due to the way replies can be nested with different hierarchies, and I think it looks like it might not be filtering blocked users at a specific point. I opened an issue in the PieFed repo to keep track of this.

wjs018 ,
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🤦

rimu actually fixed the error leading to this and then never actually updated piefed.social with the fix. It should be fixed soon when he comes back online and can apply the fix. I am unfortunately not able to ssh in right now.

wjs018 ,
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Just wanted to quickly acknowledge that we were able to fix this one so quickly thanks to the help from @tenchiken@anarchist.nexus avatar tenchiken .

Thanks!

wjs018 ,
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Another pleased Bosch owner here. The thing has been solid for about 3 years now since we had to replace an Asko that died.

wjs018 ,
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I'm realizing that we should probably make an easy way to reset the timer on a device if it gets run up due to leaving a tab open and walking away. In the past that timer was nothing more than a curiosity. However, now that there is a way to put self-imposed soft limits on usage, we should flesh out that functionality a bit.

wjs018 ,
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Lol! That's some timey-wimey stuff! To be frank, I have no idea the exact details of how this little snippet of javascript keeps track of things for this counter. But, unless you are in some kind of hyperbolic time chamber when you browse, I don't think the timer should be going that high.

Browsing PieFed in real time:

aging

wjs018 ,
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There are keyword filters that you can create from the filters page of your settings. This is tough because there are so many ways to mention this topic in tons of different contexts. The keyword filters do allow you to make filtered posts still visible, but just semi-transparent so that they aren't as visible.

Add a keyword filter: https://instance.tld/user/settings/filters/add

Bug: Tap and Hold On an Image With Alt Text Doesn’t Bring Up the Share Menu

Tapping and holding an image in a comment sometimes brings up a share menu where you can copy the image link, etc. and sometimes it just collapses the comment. From doing some testing, I have found that whenever the image has alt text in the markdown is when it just collapses. So... ...

wjs018 ,
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Doing dev work, sometimes it's too easy to just see an endless ocean of feature requests and bug reports and feel like what you are working on must be the shittiest piece of spaghetti code out there. It might still be that, but it is at least nice to hear it is working for somebody. Thanks!

wjs018 ,
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Yeah...I can see why this is annoying if you have things set up to send an email every time the scripts run. Failing to activate the venv in docker is actually expected since there isn't a venv, it just runs baremetal from the container's POV. That line is necessary only for baremetal installs. The rest of the script still executes just fine even with that error.

We can take a look at trying to prevent this erroneous error from being thrown in a docker environment. In the meantime, the files you would need to comment out that line would be:

  • daily.sh
  • remove_orphan_files.sh
  • email_notifs.sh
  • send_queue.sh
wjs018 ,
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I sympathize with this bug as I wrote a big chunk of the code that does markdown to html conversion for piefed. I feel like every week or so some new edge-case pops up and I need to adjust my regex again. These community links are not standard markdown, so every app basically has to write their own bespoke solution.

wjs018 ,
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Post flair is not (yet) in lemmy. It is a feature that is supposed to be in lemmy 1.0 and we have tried to make PieFed's post flair compatible with what lemmy's flair will eventually look like (it was just a pull request at the time though, so it might need some tweaking as 1.0 gets closer).

There are some lemmy frontends that will convert some text in the title into something that visually looks like post flair. Photon is one that I know does this. So, if your post title is [Premiere] Awesome show debuts, then photon will instead render it as a post with the title Awesome show debuts and then tack on a Premiere post flair.

wjs018 ,
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🤖 exists, probably simplest to react that way. There is a touch of irony though in that emoji reactions are just interpreted as upvotes in lemmy.

wjs018 ,
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Lemmy doesn't have a feature, so it is pointless for other things to have that feature?

Yeah, OK

wjs018 ,
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Yeah...I don't consider this a spoiler. This is just a joke, it's not really significant to the plot at all. Do people consider any frame or panel a spoiler? Really?

wjs018 ,
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as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users

Some people seem to find this hard. I might be one of the PieFed devs, but there are certainly reasons that people might want to use lemmy instead and I think they do some things better. No one platform is going to be the best.

wjs018 ,
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The language really doesn't have much to do with things like performance; at least not at the scale that most fedi instances operate at. For PieFed we are using the Flask framework and the overhead of an interpreted language and rendering jinja templates is absolutely negligible compared to the speed of the postgres database. Most of the performance optimizations we have had to make have been related to crafting better db queries or moving things like federation tasks to background workers.

Might Flask have trouble scaling to the size of reddit? Sure, but I don't think that we necessarily need to optimize for a use case that may never happen and can also be alleviated by scaling out (more instances) rather than up. I know that rimu is already feeling like piefed.social is too big compared to other PieFed instances and has thought about closing registrations because of it. It is one of the reasons he made the built-in instance chooser, to try to move new users to other instances.

I wrote more about my thoughts on the pros/cons of python/flask in another comment.

wjs018 ,
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For piefed.social specifically, there are some words/phrases in the filter currently. Most of them are malicious links that have been spammed in the past or phrases that have been present among private message spam waves. Only one racial slur that I see in the list.

wjs018 ,
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it has difficulties with content on PieFed

That's likely because rimu defederated from the instance that lemvotes runs to collect voting data. So, communities on piefed.social are not forwarding voting data on to it.

wjs018 , (edited )
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If you really don't want downvotes, and their existence is harming your experience, then my suggestion would be to either run your own instance and disable downvotes at the instance level or to join an instance that disables downvotes (like blahaj).

I think pretty much everybody in the threadiverse seems to agree that voting certainly has some issues, but nobody agrees on a solution. Votes are a simple binary up/down and there can be a lot of nuance as to why somebody might choose to upvote one thing or downvote another thing. In other words, there are many different reasons somebody might hit the downvote button, some more helpful/harmful than others; being off-topic, spam, personal grudge, etc.

This was one of the things we were trying to address with something like emoji reactions. It is a much more expressive form of feedback without requiring somebody to overcome the barrier of actually authoring a reply. Also, as a side note, every emoji reaction is counted as an upvote to other fediverse platforms that don't have emoji reactions (lemmy), even "negative" emoji like 👎. Also, emoji reactions do show the usernames of those who reacted that way when you hover over the reaction.

In general, most general users (of social media, not just the threadiverse) don't really like their votes being public to every other user. This tends to come up every couple months when a post about lemvotes gets popular and sparks a discussion about it again. I have been in many discussions with Skavau about vote visibility in the past. I actually think that community moderators shouldn't be able to view votes, reserving it just for instance admins. However, with the way lemmy allows mods to view votes, my stance is kind of moot and PieFed now also allows mods to view votes.

wjs018 ,
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Asks for feature in software

Dismissive reply to, and ignores content of reply from one of the developers of said software

Good luck with that...

To bluntly answer your request, I am not going to put any of my time into implementing this feature (can't speak for the other devs) as I don't think it is a good one generally. Used responsibly, it might be better for how you specifically want to use social media, but I think this is too ripe for abuse if used maliciously. I have, in the past, advocated for less vote transparency instead of more. That is why I suggested to you an option of just disabling downvotes altogether as that is probably the closest you are going to get for the foreseeable future.

wjs018 ,
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I can't speak for rimu (he is the one that pulled the defed trigger), but I don't disagree with the decision. I personally don't view the radical transparency of votes provided by lemvotes as helpful or useful. Admins and mods already have access to voting data that is relevant for their moderation purposes. So, often lemvotes data is simply used as a way to call out people that downvoted but didn't reply or as a way to sleuth past votes from another user to find some rationalization that their vote shouldn't count. It also more easily enables things like a user voting in one community prompting a moderator in another community to preemptively issue that user a ban.

I understand that all of these things are certainly possible without lemvotes if you run your own instance and just harvest/analyze all of the activitypub data. Defederating from the lemvotes instance may be futile, but I guess I just see more negatives than positives of providing all that voting data to lemvotes.

wjs018 Mod ,
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Yeah...I think I am going to have to check out Journal with Witch. Too many people in this community have said too many good things about it.

wjs018 ,
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Looking up at the posts above her:

Frieren looking up