How do we feel about the idea of reply controls on Lemmy threads? Limit replies to members of the community, same instance, etc…

Check this out for general background discussion https://piefed.social/post/205362. The idea to differentiate by trusted instances was mine and not discussed there. Pretty sure there was some discussion about it in the Matrix channel which is lost to time.

During the recent roadmap planning one of the potential units of work was to sort all this out https://piefed.social/post/411591 but it didn’t garner significant interest and didn’t make it through to the final version of the roadmap.

I hear ya. There was quite a bit of back-and-forth about it and we ended up with a compromise. It would be good to have more configurability of this to suit different preferences.

There’s a niche out there for a max-privacy instance. No server logs, no email verification, automatic deletion of old content. And if it was running PieFed, no trusted instances set.

Not a niche I want to pursue but someone could.

Bummer.

It depends what your threat model is. Admins being dickheads about who downvoted what was the main issue at the time so I made it about choosing which admins to trust.

If future Lemmy versions show votes to mods (not just admins) then Pandora’s box would be well and truly open so we’d need to rethink this.

I guess NodeBB or Discourse would not qualify as they were forums that now have AP tacked on as an afterthought. Same for WordPress.

But yeah all the big names are original, fediverse-first software.

The Devs of every fediverse software run the biggest instances of that type and those instances don’t have this problem.

Thing is, search bars are for typing in keywords, not urls.

Certain other federated reddit clones just have a ‘add remote community’ button on the communities list.

Ok if you want to focus on that single phrase and ignore the whole rest of the page which documents decades of stuff to do with search engines and not a single mention of api endpoints, that’s fine. You can have the win on this, here’s a gold star.

It’s been a consensus for decades

Let’s see about that.

Wikipedia lists http://www.robotstxt.org/ as the official homepage of robots.txt and the “Robots Exclusion Protocol”. In the FAQ at http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html the first entry is “What is a WWW robot?” http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html. It says:

A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web’s hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.

That’s not FediDB. That’s not even nodeinfo.

Maybe the definition of the term “crawler” has changed but crawling used to mean downloading a web page, parsing the links and then downloading all those links, parsing those pages, etc etc until the whole site has been downloaded. If there were links going to other sites found in that corpus then the same process repeats for those. Obviously this could cause heavy load, hence robots.txt.

Fedidb isn’t doing anything like that so I’m a bit bemused by this whole thing.

lol FediDB isn’t a crawler, though. It makes API calls.

Nice channel, I’ve just added it to https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome to help people find it.

Theoretically in the future PieFed might not be limited to only using ActivityPub, or only using Lemmy-compatible ActivityPub.

I hope you feel better soon.

Yes this is a good minimum. We need our instance-chooser guides/websites to surface this information so people can make choices about which instances they join.

Currently if you go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://join-lemmy.org/instances there is no way to filter for VPN compatibility, allowing disposable email, logging policy or legal jurisdiction (in the case of join-lemmy). Or political alignment, defederation policy…

too destructive for compatibility with other ActivityPub software

Yes, but that’s Ok, not every community needs to federate outside PieFed. There can be a mix of insecure (widely-compatible) and secure (PieFed only) communities. PieFed does not be need to be held back by the limitations of ActivityPub as we know it today.

It needs to be short enough to fit into a tweet. That’s the attention span people have.

Not as a hosting service, no. But at wordpress.org you can download the software and install it on any web server. A lot of web hosting companies offer a 1-click process of setting up wordpress on their servers, too.

Another thing on the 2025 roadmap - currently the topics are under control of the instance admin but soon any account will be able to create a topic and add communities to it. People will be able to join and leave topics, just like they currently do for communities.

snap!