Knights of New was a reddit meme/movement where people would take the hit of exposing themselves to the river of trash that is /r/all, sorted by ‘New’, and upvote good stuff while reporting or downvoting bad stuff, as a public service. Now you can do that on PieFed, too.
When sorting the home page by ‘New’ or ‘Top’, the list of posts automatically displays new content once per minute. Disabled when scrolling down. This makes voting on new content much easier and makes the threadiverse feel more dynamic and alive.
It seems like a small thing but I’ve been using it for a few hours and I’m surprised and how engaging it is and how it turns the threadiverse into a river of posts flowing by, like on Mastodon. Compared to the static and slow-moving feeling that the threadiverse often has, it is quite refreshing. Give it a try by going to https://piefed.social/home/new/all and NOT scrolling down. It’s ok to scroll down to look at things but return to the top to await fresh content. The title bar of your browser will show the time of the latest automatic update.
This works in Subscribed, Popular or All feeds - it’s not just for ‘All’. You can also switch to ‘top 1 hour’ instead of ‘new’ and leave it running on a secondary monitor, etc so you can dip into whatever’s popping off at the moment without being a true Knight.
This release also includes multiple small bugfixes:
- rss feeds import - strip tracking codes on urls so cross-post detection works properly
- exempt Googlebot from Anoobis
- default to dark mode on Linux
- tweak opacity of blocked posts to be a bit more visible
- profiles of people who have posted a lot loads much faster now and doesn’t time out
When sorting the home page by ’New’ or ‘Top’, the list of posts automatically displays new content once per minute.
I really wish there were a way to turn this off. I despise any kind of auto-refresh (one of the reasons I jumped away from early lemmy). I was just trying to read New again and the page moved on me. Also, is the timer based on the actual time or started when the page load finishes? I could swear it just did it like 5 seconds after I loaded it and was trying to read.
It is 1 minute after the page finishes loading.
If you scroll down, even a couple of pixels, the auto-refresh is disabled.
Anything happening 5 seconds after the page loads is some other issue.
Love it!
Am I supposed to be able to crosspost from !Microblogs? I ask because I cannot.
Edit: Fixed the comment language.
In the next version of PieFed :)
Be careful with your commenting language, I can’t see your comments most of the time, because they’re set to Deutsch.
Will I be able to add users from Microblogs to my feeds?
No.
Mastodon has recently added “Collections” which are feeds containing users so ideally whatever PieFed does with that will be compatible with Mastodon. This is going to need some R&D.
Also you can now go to someone’s profile and search just their posts, using the Search box in the sidebar.
Thanks for this! I’m usually not the type to search others’ posts. I feel creepy doing that. But my own? Yeah. I mostly post to !NiceMemes here, and being able to search up what I posted in the past to make sure I’m not just reposting something I already did and forgot about is helpful. Also helpful for if I randomly remembered a meme I posted and wanted to retrieve it for a friend.
Thanks as always for developing PieFed!
Yes it’s a bit weird which is why I didn’t do it earlier. But recently we’ve gotten to the point where some people have done so many comments and posts that their profiles (which show a list of those) were not loading within a reasonable time so to speed it up I put a limit of 1000 on it. This makes it impossible to go through someone’s entire history (once they’ve done more than 1000…) by clicking ‘next page’ often enough. The addition of the search tool kind of makes up for that new limitation.
Oof. I sort exclusively by new and I hate how often I lose my place on mastodon because of this. I don’t wanna knock it before I’ve tried it but I’m trepedacious.
Yes I thought of that - it only refreshes if you’re at the top of the screen, as soon as you start scrolling it won’t refresh on you.
Tbh I hope people use this feature only to view new content quickly, but not to vote on it. It’s one thing to vote quickly on many one-sentence comment replies in a row but quite another to do so on posts without reading them.
Though I suppose if someone can quickly engage and disengage that should help them pause the river long enough to read what they actually want to spend more time on, then jump back into the flow state.
Also, community-specific rules. What one user considers “trash” might be allowed or welcomed in the community; but these drive-by voters would vote it down. (Of course, not any different from doing the exact same if they sorted by New and scrolled now.) Or what one user considers good, but is disallowed in the community, but gets heavily upvoted anyways (which I assume is because of drive-by voting) before a mod cleans it up, if at all. I see the latter decently often.
Usually people posting politics, political snark, or ragebait (whether posts or as comments) in communities that have rules against it, getting upvotes because it agrees with the Fediverse hivemind (and to be fair, I fit into the hivemind very well, except for the part where I do not want to see these political and cultural viewpoints I agree with brought up everywhere all the time), despite being inappropriate in the community, probably because drive-by voters largely do not read the community’s rules.
Bringing up depressing real-world stuff in !nicememes in the comments ¬_¬
This is an excellent point. One feature that could help mitigate that is that PieFed offers to community mods the ability to restrict votes to only Subscribers. I am not sure if such communities would then even show up in All?
Though Lemmy or Mbin I believe do not have this ability, so PieFed users surfing the river in this manner could still brigade those, exactly like Lemmy and Mbin users already do so now except with PieFed instances perhaps now doing it at ever so slightly higher frequency than previously.
I would expect most communities would probably not enable this feature though, and thereby remain affected by such drive-by votes.
PieFed community mods can restrict down votes to only subscribers, or only local users (same instance) or only trusted instances.
Thank you for the correction!:-)
Heh sorry it if came across as a ‘correction’, I was just providing information and forgot to wrap it in polite language :)
It was polite, I thought? And I also thought it was pretty cool - I lacked some knowledge but learned a new thing by your sharing, so genuinely thanks! :-)
When adding microblogs, will I be subscribed to them automatically?
Or do I have to check later if the mod gated them through so that I can subscribe to them afterwards?Observation: You subscribe to them automatically.
Edit: Fixed the comment language
default to dark mode on Linux
Can you revert this please? The change negatively affects private-mode browsing. When on GNOME, I do toggle system-wide between light and dark modes for accessiblity reasons - during blackouts after bombing, I need dark theme, otherwise light becuse reading on dark is more difficult. The environment communicates this preference well, similar to Android. If another environment doesn’t, that’s their bug.
Today I tested 6 different desktop environments. Gnome, KDE and Mate all successfully propagated the system light/dark mode to Firefox. Xfce did not, same as LxQt and Openbox.
I use LxQt so the problem seemed more common to me than it really is. Probably 80% of Linux users will be using a desktop environment that is not broken.
It is likely that I will revert the change.
The community did express a strong preference for dark mode and I do want to find another way to respond to that. Probably incorporate it into the onboarding process or make the sun/moon icon easier to find.
