I’ll be interested in following this thread. Some customers of mine are tired of Pixelfed thousand little papercuts and are considering dropping entirely. Even one photographer preferred to run their own Mastodon instance to avoid dealing with Pixelfed’s eternal beta status. I might spend some time this weekend figuring out how difficult it would to deploy Vernissage.

Best person to answer this is @[email protected]

True, you’ll need an activity object whose actor is the same as the original post creator to indicate the answer is accepted. The point still stands, though: the ActivityStreams vocabulary already has what’s needed to enable this funcionality.

Stop thinking in terms of “votes”. Think of the activities as a “fixed content messages”: John liked this. Alice liked that. Bethany did not like that other thing. Each “vote” is a meaningful interaction. A server that says “2734 people did not like your message” means absolutely nothing.

This is not a political council nor a popularity contest. No one will make critical decisions based on the amount of worthless Internet points.

I do not understand arguments about privacy when we are talking about a public, social network. Social interactions online do not need to be that different from real-world interactions. if you are not willing to say “I did not like / I disagree with you” to someone personally, then you shouldn’t say it at all.

Sean proposed something more ambitious: identity-first onboarding, where you import your social graph and content before choosing a server. The idea: set up a “pre-identity” that pulls in your posts and connections from other networks, then pick a server that fits

https://fediverser.network/ has exactly this. The missing piece was (still is) that no lemmy admin that I talked to bothered to integrate with it.

Off the top of my head, piefed is:

• Sending pseudonymous actor ids to hide votes
• “Migrating” communities by re-creating activities and objects on their own server, just rewriting the URLs and pretending the piefed server actually was the original source.
• Integrating functionality that is hardcoded to specific instances/groups (auto-posting new communities on [email protected])
• Integrating lemmy-federate directly into the instance - which is a horrendous idea if you consider that will lead to every piefed instance holding every copy of the messages, even if no one in the instance actually follows or interacts with it.
• Proposing a completely out-of-band and a custom activity protocol to notify moderation reports
• generating a JSON-LD document filled with unspecified terms.

I am not here to gate-keep anything. If the devs are having fun working on it and if the users are happy with the product they are getting, more power to them.

It might be that piefed gets enough users and outside interest to force the team to be more discipline and mature about their practices, but to an outsider this looks more and more like a bunch of amateurs building stuff for fun, and not something that can become a viable alternative for a open social web.

Believing that the we need professional hosting providers to have a sustainable Fediverse != “Monetizing the platform”.

Besides, I’ve already voiced similar concerns through different venues. The devs made it clear they are not interested in developing software with a focus on standards compliance. They care about throwing as many features as possible to their system.

It’s fine, it’s their project, they can do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to have an opinion about it.

How is creating a new Activity type preventing compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse?

If they chose to use any of the 3 solutions I described, there would be no changes on the other servers to receive and parse the message. But because it uses a different type, now those serves that want to store the information about an answer being accepted have to write code specifically to handle messages from PieFed.

It also works in the other direction: if I want to send an “accept” activity for a comment, I could do it from my server and PieFed could easily understand it as well. But because they want to create their own ad-hoc solution, then they won’t be able to.

When you’re the first one doing something with ActivityPub, you have to create it yourself.

No, you don’t. The whole point of Linked Data and RDF is that nodes can send data to each other without having to agree on any new protocol

Piefed features inspired by existing implementations such as the emoji reactions

You are only making my point. Emojis have already a defined extension, this is why it’s easier to adopt it.

picking the one feature

It’s not just that. They also proposed some ad-hoc activities for moderation in the past and their “import community” works by taking posts and rewriting them as if they originated in the piefed instance. These are all signs that the devs either don’t understand or don’t care about JSON-LD as an standard.

This is not a matter of “opening a PR”. The fact that they are adding features in this completely ad-hoc manner shows that they are prioritizing features for piefed over interoperability with the wider Fediverse. If my job was to go around convincing every AP developer that their approach is flawed and to fix their mistakes, I’d be doing nothing else with my life.

What I can do though is to create a framework that makes it easy to work with JSON-LD and occasionally file bug reports.

An aside: this “feel free to open a PR” - without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand - is the standard passive-aggressive response from every developer who is not interested in making the change. It’s sad to see that it’s also becoming the go-to retort for the project cheerleaders…

It’s this kind of thinig that makes me think of PieFed as just a pile of hacks with no serious consideration for the Fediverse

Designating which comment is an answer involves federating a new Activity:

{  
         "id": "https://piefed.social/activities/answer/hgb4iO4b8UAFRTn", 
         "type": "ChooseAnswer",  
         "actor": "https://piefed.socialz/u/rimu", 
         "object": "https://piefed.ngrok.app/comment/224",  
         "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "https://w3id.org/security/v1"],  
         "audience": "https://crust.piefed.social/c/linux_questions",  
         "to": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],  
         "cc": ["https://crust.piefed.social/c/linux_questions"]  
}  

There are at least three different ways to implement this in a way compatible with ActivityPub:

1. Send an “as:accept” activity with the comment as the object.
2. Add an attribute for the comment indicating that it has been selected.
3. Create a collection for chosen answers, add to the post object.

And even if this type of new activity was a necessity, they could add their own extensions via a proper JSON-LD context definition. But they completely disregard JSON-LD, which means that they expect other servers to either (1) adopt their ad-hoc vocabulary or (2) ignore it completely and keep this idea that “Only PieFed has these features”.