this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Fedigrow

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Presentation of the feature: https://piefed.social/post/667045

Example of successful migration: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876492

Our next step would be to give this feature a try. What would basically happen is that

Should the migration not work, we would still be able to use the current community, and then manually migrate elsewhere.

The one caveat is that from Lemmy instances, the community doesn’t have show old posts (see https://lemm.ee/c/barcelona@piefed.social), but if you were restarting a community from scratch you wouldn’t have access to your old posts anyway.

Other federated instances like feddit.online would also see the posts and comments on the new community: https://feddit.online/c/barcelona@piefed.social

The objective of this post is to address any questions or issues before we move forward. We are probably going to leave it open for 48 hours, and then reassess based on the community feedback.

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[–] taco@piefed.social 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

👍, the consolidation of the duplicates/crossposts on my feed alone was enough to gradually make piefed my daily driver. I've liked the change so far, and conceptually favor decentralizing not only away from a single instance, but also a single platform.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

Yes, that feature is great. However, as some people here are not convinced, we are probably going to stay on a Lemmy instance.

Lemmy.zip is the only one suggested so far, let's see if there are other suggestions.

This sounds good yeah.

There are valuable posts on this community it would be cool if they got transferred over with the piefed migration feature.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 3 days ago

I'd say go for it.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I asked elsewhere, but this is probably a better place for it.

Wait, Piefed migration doesn’t just work from Piefed to Piefed, but even from Lemmy into Piefed?

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago

Correct, you can see the example here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876492

Piefed to Piefed is better to migrate subscribers, and content for federated Piefed instances, but the core feature (migrating posts to the new community) work for Piefed and Lemmy

[–] katze@lemmy.cafe 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Can I ask why people are ready to rely on piefed? I didn't audit the code, but from the user's perspective it looks and feels like a final project in a CS class. I don't mean to disrespect, but you seem to put a lot of trust into something that is rather raw and unproven (imo). I'm ready to be proven wrong, I'm genuinely asking.

[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Disclaimer: if you prefer Lemmy, you would still be able to interact with the new Piefed community as if it was a Lemmy community (e.g. : https://lemmy.world/post/30619912). The main pro here would be able to recover all of the past content in an active community, compared to only having it archived in a lemm.ee community.

So the Piefed/Lemmy choice wouldn't really change a lot for a user, you can still use your platform of choice to interact with the community.

Now, about Piefed itself:

Feature-wise, it is already ahead of Lemmy

App support is starting, with Interstellar supporting it (https://piefed.social/post/817564) and Thunder going to work on it (https://lemmy.world/comment/17459098)

Also, I'm not sure about the "final project of a CS class" aspect, it's not like Lemmy doesn't have its own quirks and issues (!languagesettings@lemmy.zip , all of the features above missing).

Of course, the UI could be improved (I still prefer the Lemmy UI, probably a matter of habit), but as the Piefed API has now been enabled, we can expect Photon, Alexandrite and others to support it too in the future.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Is there a recommended way for other instances to load the old posts that were added in the new community? Right now we only see the new content that is on !barcelona@piefed.social (2 posts)

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Happy cake day!

Hm, you should still see at least 5, maybe nobody from lemmy.ca is subscribed to the new community yet?

But yes, as I said it's not possible to backfill the new community on Lemmy instances (on other Piefed instances, it works though)

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Makes sense, and thank you!

[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I would suggest lemmy.zip as a Lemmy instance to migrate this community too.

Admins are very transparent (https://lemmy.zip/post/39959863), the instance has a good track record and monitoring dashboard (https://status.lemmy.zip/)

As !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com is already on dbzer0, that would allow to spread the "meta" communities a bit on different instances.

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It blocks UK though right.

Be a shame if UK people can’t see this useful comm.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Lemmy.zip being blocked in the UK wouldn't prevent them from accessing the community via another instance: https://feddit.uk/c/soulslike@lemmy.zip / https://feddit.uk/c/fedigrow@lemm.ee

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think u accidentally replied twice.

But cool, interesting! I was under the false impression they had been defederated.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

No no, even the Lemmy.zip admins recognized it was stupid: https://lemmy.zip/post/31644782/16522418

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[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I as a Lemmy.World user would be able to subscribe just the same, right? It's all just fediverse connectivity? Or does it need to be a Lemmy community specifically for me to do that?

[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes, you would be able to interact the same way. You can see !casualeurope@piefed.social and !lego@piefed.social as an example.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Ah, that's what I thought. In that case, I'm good with the move.

I mean, my preference is that lemm.ee stayed alive, but, what are ya gonna do?

[–] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Could you please elaborate why?

[–] rglullis@communick.news 6 points 3 days ago (3 children)

PieFed has the tendency to add features that are are not compatible with ActivityPub in general (flairs, multi-communities) and I am not convinced it is ready to have a large influx of activity. It's one thing to have a server with lots of users receiving notifications, it's another to have the same server also responsible in sending a large number of notifications whenever it needs to announce a new comment or post.

[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

flairs

Small question about the flairs: is there another example of flairs implementation on other Fediverse software? My guess was that as Lemmy/Mbin and Piefed are the only Reddit clones in the Fediverse, then there would be no existing implementation of flairs anywhere else in other Fediverse apps, but I'm probably missing something.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The annoying thing about it is that their implementation is completely "top-down". They just defined what is their idea of "Flair" (text/color settings) and have this stored in their database. It is completely disconnected from any of ActivityStreams or LinkedData concepts. If they had gone with a "protocol-first" approach, they could've proposed to use as:Tag or even Schema.org PropertyValue entries, attach them to the object (actor/questio/post/note) and it would be absolutely easy to federate.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 days ago

@rimu@piefed.social, could that be a potential rework in the future?

[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago

Fair. I'll edit the title so that people can also suggest the instances they would like to move this community to.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I am not convinced it is ready to have a large influx of activity

this community is not what I would call a large amount of activity

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah, but there are several other communities talking about moving to piefed.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago

Valid point

[–] Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I would be fine with a Piefed community.

I am assuming this refers to Fedigrow, right? Not casualconversation?

[–] Blaze@lemm.ee 5 points 3 days ago

Well spotted, I was lazy and just copy pasted from the other community, editing now

[–] iso@lemy.lol 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't seem like a great feature if it only moves the post history to the imported instance and not to any other instances.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago

It also imported the posts to https://feddit.online/c/barcelona@piefed.social , so not only to one instance.

It stays a Piefed feature, but it's not limited to a single instance.

Beyond that, it's better than nothing? The choice is basically between

  • starting a new community from scratch without any post
  • starting a community with existing post and comments for the new instance and federated Piefed instances

It's not like there is an alternative that would work better.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Does Piefed even have version numbers yet?

Also, can I opt out of having my posts and comments migrated?

Also why the flagship and not another instance?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

PieFed will release version 1.0 today.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 2 days ago

Congratulations!

[–] Blaze@piefed.social 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Does Piefed even have version numbers yet?

Not that I know of, is that a deal breaker for you?

Also, can I opt out of having my posts and comments migrated?

I guess we can try working something out if we would indeed migrate.

Also why the flagship and not another instance?

Would you prefer to use https://feddit.online/ ?

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Not that I know of, is that a deal breaker for you?

It's just a terrible practice. How do users ensure that an instance is running the latest security patch?

I guess we can try working something out if we would indeed migrate.

While I'm happy to move, I'm not happy to have software falsify my actions and I in no way consent to it doing so.

Would you prefer to use https://feddit.online/ ?

You know me, I like to spread the load.

[–] Blaze@piefed.social 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I had a quick look, seems like current versioning is handled by docker images, without proper versioning indeed: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/INSTALL-docker.md

Hopefully that will be solved down the line.

While I'm happy to move, I'm not happy to have software falsify my actions and I in no way consent to it doing so.

Noted. I might migrate !casualconversation@lemm.ee using that feature, do you have any comments or posts there we should remove?

You know me, I like to spread the load.

I guess at some point I'll probably use another instance too. Feddit.fr is tempting, but they aren't using the latest version (I know because the title completion feature is missing). Hence my question on the Piefed Matrix chat on how updates are handled.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Noted. I might migrate !casualconversation@lemm.ee using that feature, do you have any comments or posts there we should remove?

I don't. You're all good there.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago

Thank you for confirming!

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I’m not happy to have software falsify my actions and I in no way consent to it doing so.

There is no falsification if implemented correctly. Every comment and post that you submit is an activity. All that the "community migration" should be doing is to take these activities and re-Announce them, so it should look like a repost on Lemmy.

If the migration feature however takes the content from the imported community and creates new activities out of the comments, then yes, it will be shady.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's falsification and not a slippery slope I want to go down. I only post to communities I want to and I do that explicitly. I do not authorise the pretense that I posted anywhere other than I actually did.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Just to clarify: what would you say if someone followed your Lemmy account from mastodon and Boosted (Retweeted) all of your posts and comments?

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 3 days ago

Excuse my pedantry, but from the point of view of ActivityPub, it is.

Any remote instance sees your posts to any community as a as:Announce activity. All that the community is doing is boosting your comments/posts, and that can be done by anyone else.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Ok, I watch the video with presenting the feature. @rimu@piefed.social, what is the AP representation of posts?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

All the posts are reassigned to the local piefed community. From the perspective of remote instances, PieFed just got a new community with a whole lot of content in it.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I just checked one post from lemm.ee that was migrated to piefed. You are keeping two different objects with the same id, but altering the content to change the audience. I'd have to agree with @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al, that would definitely qualify as falsification.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 2 days ago

Thank you for your magnimity

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