This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Neat, it federates. Seems to work similar to a normal community, so it should be easy to follow these feeds from Lemmy.
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...
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.
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
That's cool, i hope lemmy federates with it in the future :D
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 :)
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
So do I understand correctly that these are identical to Topics, except customizable without requiring backend changes?
Sweet!
Exactly :)
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.
Yes, that is high on the agenda.
Exciting! I’ll try to get my piefed running again then
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Less goo!
Fedipie.dbon1.com? We have the technology for it.
Does posting to a feed post to all the communities in it?
Feed isn't a place you can post to. It just collects posts from different communities into one feed/stream.
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.
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!:-)
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.
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.
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.
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).
If I understand correctly that existing feeds can be altered later by the creator, then this is still quite an improvement over the old way that required potentially more limiting admin support. By allowing for such "mods" of not a community but rather of these feeds (again, rather than concentrating the authority solely in the hands of a full admin), it democratizes the process overall. Tbf not very well, but a little bit, and that's not nothing.
And if only a tiny change was made to more easily list out the full set of communities present in a feed (the copy button didn't seem to do that for me, but maybe it could become like a meta-sidebar feature), then it would democratize it still further to allow any user to see what communities are in those feeds - even those lacking a PieFed account, who simply wants to subscribe to those same ones while remaining on their existing Lemmy account?
Anyway, it's a step forward, however small or large, and that's worth acknowledging, woo-hoo! 🥳🎉
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.
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.
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.
Oooooooh, love u.
Yes having that option more easily accessible would be much apprechated.
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