You brought this up in the matrix room, so I will try to put down here a summary of what I responded in there so that it lives in a more permanent fashion.

Lots of profile changes are not federated out in realtime, extra fields being one of them. Instead, your profile, as seen on remote instances, is only refreshed periodically. In the case of PieFed, when an instance receives an activity from a user (post/vote/comment), and their profile information hasn’t been refreshed within the past 24 hours, then the instance will query your home instance to make sure it is up to date.

What this means is that if you update your extra fields right now, it can be up to 24 hours before that has propagated out to remote instances depending on when your profile was last refreshed on their instance. It could be even longer if you don’t federate any activities out in that time.

A very similar process also happens for lemmy as well as for other “actors” in the ActivityPub parlance. This includes communities and feeds.

My thinking on a per-device basis was that themes might work better/worse in a mobile vs. desktop browser, so people might prefer different experiences, but I could see the other side of things as well. That was also the rationale for making compact mode be in the cookie rather than saved in the db.

I honestly don’t know what the expiration of the session cookie is. It might depend on the browser. I think it is pretty long-lasting unless people clear their cache because I have definitely loaded up piefed instances after a long time and have still been logged in.

As for technical details, to save space, it might make sense to make a key (maybe like ignore_comm_theme) be a comma-separated list of community id’s that people have unchecked the box. That means you can easily convert this to a list with split and then see if the currently requested community id is in that list. Being the id means that it is unique for the instance and avoids name collisions like the actual community name might have (how many linux communities do we have now). It also keeps things relatively small since the cookie has a pretty small size limit iirc.

To do this on a per-community basis, it might make sense to store it in the session cookie rather than in the db. Look for instances of response.set_cookie and request.cookies.get to see other examples of where we do that.

Some user settings are stored in the cookie to look at as an example; stuff like the compactness level, low bandwidth mode, etc. Basically anything that is set on a per-device basis rather than stored in the db.

As mentioned already, our API links are in the codeberg: stable and dev branches.

There isn’t yet a pythorhead-like library that I know of, so API requests would need to be done using an http library. As much as I love requests, I believe it is largely unmaintained at this point, so something like httpx might be better (though that is having issues now too, we’ll see). The general workflow for interacting with the API is to make a network request, getting a json back. Then, parse the json in python exactly like you would a dictionary (or nested dictionaries).

Also, you might want to check out the work done over at !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com to see how they do things.

Yes, actually! There are two ways you could force a user to get fetched that I can think of:

1. @-mention them in a post or comment and then click that link after the post/comment is made…if piefed doesn’t already know that user, it will go fetch that user.
2. Just input the lookup url directly. This is what is happening behind the scenes in #1, but the url structure looks like this (looking up myself using piefed.zip as an example): https://piefed.zip/user/lookup/wjs018/piefed.wjs018.xyz

All the comments are there, but they are split across two communities (1 in !sciencefiction@lemmy.world and 8 in !solarpunk@slrpnk.net):

• https://multiverse.soulism.net/c/sciencefiction/p/86593/so-solar-cars-are-a-reality-indeed
• https://multiverse.soulism.net/post/86632

The number of comments under a post in the web UI is the combined number of comments including crossposts.

I am not going to name names or point to specific PRs so as not to shame anybody since that isn’t my intention, but we have had a couple AI-assisted PRs in the past and rimu has generally not been very receptive to them. I even really liked the functionality that one of them provided. However, they have generally been huge in that it is a ton of very verbose code that is difficult to review. I don’t believe that he has an official policy on AI-assisted contributions other than that it is easy enough to review and confirm that it is working as intended as well as not completely changing up coding style and conventions we have used elsewhere.

As a bit of disclosure, I have occasionally used very basic AI queries to help me understand something in a python library I haven’t used before or couldn’t find docs about. A specific case I remember was that I didn’t understand how to do something in the orjson library and I couldn’t find a good example in their docs or on stack overflow. Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a minimum viable example that I was able to adapt to what I needed. I have done similar a couple times when trying to craft regular expressions as well as dealing with some edge cases in the marshmallow python library that I couldn’t find answers for in their docs. I do make sure to test any code I write to make sure that I wasn’t just fed a hallucination or something that applied for an older version of the library but is out of date now.

Yeah, this is a known issue: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1225

I remember looking at this one night, but couldn’t track it down. In general, this seems to just be a UI thing and subscribers are being tracked correctly for the purposes of federation.

existing posts still have a problem

This is because the markdown to html conversion is only performed when the markdown source is created or edited. The html generated from old posts isn’t going to update on its own.

How is the first person supposed to find a specific community without discovery

I think discoverability is one of the biggest issues facing the fediverse in general and the threadiverse specifically. There are third-party sites that try to catalog the wider ecosystem of communities (like lemmyverse - click the dropdown to switch between lemmy/piefed/mbin), but relying on third-party services like that is far from an ideal solution, and it is a barrier of entry to casual, non-techie users.

Others in the thread have already explained this bit of how federation works, so allow me to provide directions for how to bring an unfederated community to your instance.

On Lemmy:

• Click the magnifying glass at the top of the page to open up the search page.
• Search for the full url of the un-federated community that you want to subscribe to: https://remote-instance.tld/c/cool-community
• Lemmy will say that there are no results found…but don’t believe it, just wait on this page a little longer
• After lemmy does some searching in the background, it should list the community below, now you can click through and subscribe to it.

On PieFed:

• Along the top navbar, click the Communities dropdown and select Add remote community.
• In that form you can either enter the full url (like in the lemmy directions) or you can use the ! notation: !cool-community@remote-instance.tld
• PieFed will reach out, find that community, and bring it over, letting you subscribe to it

Brave Bang Bravern! - A great show and one of the finalists for anime of the year from 2024 in this community. It never fails to escalate the weirdness while not losing touch with the heart and what it means to be a hero.

Yes! I have been enjoying the hell out of this series. Thank goodness Hanamitsuji is proactive, or this would have been a really boring story of a lonely dude living out a lonely high school life.

Yeah…that seems like a pretty clear bug. Should be an easy fix. Thanks!

This was removed. Instead, users have the option to simply not federate out their votes if they want.

Heavenly Delusion. It was a great show that sadly has had no season 2 announcement. I started the manga after it aired though, and that has been great as well.

PieFed 1.6.x doesn’t support video embeds using the ![]() format, just images. However, I recently added this functionality so that it will be in 1.7 when it comes out. There are going to be lots of improvements to the markdown parsing coming in 1.7.

Edit: My instance is running the latest 1.7.x code (not stable yet), but below I have added an embedded webm video. You will probably need to click to see my comment on my instance in the three dots menu.

@snoopy@piefed.social tries to keep this wiki page updated. I sometimes see app devs reach out to snoopy when they support new features as well, so it is reasonably current.

I suspect this is due to a bug in auto-content removal. The ibbit.at communities only have posts created by bots that are mirroring an rss feed into a community. piefed.social is configured to automatically prune bot-created posts that don’t have engagement (comments iirc) after a set amount of time. So, I am willing to bet that somewhere in that removal process, the removal is being counted as more than -1 post, driving the total for the community below zero.

Just wanted to follow up on this. I just pushed a fix for this issue, but it won’t ship until PieFed 1.7. Thanks for your help identifying it!