this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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founded 2 years ago
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To see it in action:

Crust.piefed.social (the Piefed development instance)

Not all instances implement it yet, I guess it depends how often they pull from the dev branch

Example of search for 'movies'

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[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Is this different to Lemmy's communities tab sorted by 'Top Week', which sorts by weekly active users?

IMO, the main advantage of Lemmyverse is the better text search and presentation.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

No it's not. It's just a way to sort by active weekly users, but you can mix and match by filtering with feeds which you can't do on Lemmy.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Lemmy's view does not allow to search and keep the data about active users, you immediately get into this view that doesn't show active users

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago

Indeed. You can also search a term and then sort by active users, or filter it by a feed. But I think there needs to be some UI cleanup on the feed drop down box as that is going to be really, really long as people on different instances make new feeds

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What would a Feed/multicomms' actively weekly users even be? An aggregate of all the comms weekly users, or just the highest one? Or does Piefed go through all the comms and collect the unique actors (God, that would be an expensive operation)?

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's the opposite, you only see the communities from a certain feed

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 4 points 1 month ago

Oh, within a multicomm. That makes sense now I think about it.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The text search on Piefed is similar to Lemmyverse. Example for 'movies'

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You still don't see the number of weekly active users.

On Piefed, it's the 'Active people' column, where you can see the numbers without having to go to each community. Lemmy (and Photon in this case) only show subscribers, which isn't an accurate metric as most of them are ghost accounts.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The active user counts are returned, suppose we just need a client that actually displays it.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago

That could indeed be the case, but that's probably a low priority item for most of the client devs.

I had been asking Rimu to add this feature for a while as Lemmyverse doesn't show Piefed communities on the community search, and as a lot of people use Lemmyverse to search for communities, Piefed communities are basically invisible.

This solves it, if other clients want to implement it too, that would be nice of course

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Out of interest, what is search like on Piefed? Lemmy’s is all but useless. Even filtering by "last week" will show me two year-old posts and comments, regularly that don’t actually include the word I’m looking for.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Lemmy's search is a lot better if you don't use the 'All' type, like just search comments or posts. With 'All', it is basically useless. Like sorting by controversial on a user's profile.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Here's a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month ("Top Month"), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah, right comments don't actually top with time ranges in 0.19: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html#sorting-comments, my bad. The fact lemmy-ui still shows all of them is very confusing, I'll admit.

This is different in 1.0, the logic was changed for both posts and comments so these will work in future.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html#sorting-comments

That's a page that really shouldn't be relevant, and it concerns me if it is, because the search page should not be working on the same ordering logic that comment pages or the front page use.

Anyway, I mainly only use the "top month" option as a proxy for what I really want, which is "filter by posts/comments in the last month", usually because I'm searching for something I saw recently, and I have a rough idea of when it was posted.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Eh, I don't think it's that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn't make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend. One thing you could do, but no client to my knowledge does, is add a search bar to a post that searches through the comments only within that thread.

Everything in the backend uses the same sorting as the posts do on that page except comments, which is frustrating. Comments do need a different sort enum as there are some options that don't apply to comments (scaled, new comments, etc.), but yeah the fact the top options don't work for comment search when they should is opaque and not user friendly.

I can't wait for 1.0 to actually come out because I feel like a broken record, but this is fixed there.

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[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Curious, I've found Lemmy search to be okay. I don't search a lot on Piefed, so I can't compare.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago

Piefeds search isn't great. I always search by Lemmy.

It's too clunky. Lemmy wins on this one imo

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 1 month ago

Here's a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month ("Top Month"), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Searching by "posts" on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by "all" or "comments" on Lemmy is absolutely borken (haha misspelled unintentionally but Imma just leave it there as it fits so well!?:-P). Reputedly Lemmy's search is about to add the ability to filter on post "titles" separately from the rest of the text, which sounds very nice.

So it's hit or miss what works or not on Lemmy. PieFed's search is the singular feature that is currently very behind compared to Lemmy, but like everything else I expect PieFed to rapidly overtake Lemmy one day soon-ish. Therefore I use a PieFed account as my daily main, but when I want to search for something I still switch back to Lemmy (you don't even need an account for that though).

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I figured that you would be! :-)

Although to be clear, searching for content is not something that I do daily or even weekly, so personally I consider it much lower in prioritization than other feature requests, e.g. a comment reply has a Preview option but a top-level comment to a post does not (that button does not appear), notifications is still a bit wonky, particularly not interacting well with the newer feature that loads comments (when there is a larger number of them?) only after loading the post, and then by doing so fails to traverse to where the notification link was aiming to take me to, etc.

Though I suppose others may consider it higher priority, especially newer people evaluating PieFed, and probably working on the search back-end may be a lot more fun!? :-P

It is always nice to see new things coming to PieFed. This is the only software giving me any hope for social media right now:-).

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A lot of those are fixed in v1.2 (unreleased) :)

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

Uh oh, I now have a problem: I cannot keep up with remembering all the new features added!? Oh well, I am very pleased to have this issue:-). (\s bc there are Release Notes)

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Searching by “posts” on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by “all” or “comments” on Lemmy is absolutely borken

Ah, that makes sense. I'll try to pay attention to which I'm doing, because my most recent search used only comments, but was absolutely useless.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah anything that involves comments doesn't work so well - either them specifically or the combination of them and posts. And tbf it does retrieve the results of the query, it is only the sort options that fail miserably.

I've used Lemmy now for >2 years and the excuse that "it's still in development" has very much worn thin when no changes at all have been made to this or so many other issues with it.

At least the search function is still better than Reddit's! (Obligatory and reflexive fuck spex:-P)

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s

I actually don't agree. This is one area where Reddit's centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn't great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

Yes I meant the on-site one developed by Reddit, but agreed that the centralized nature lends itself towards searching by Google.

Although the other way opens up a huge can of worms since every large, general-purpose instance will - due to the nature of how the ActivityPub protocol works - have basically all of the content of the entire Threadiverse. Or as near to that as it works for a first approximation anyway, e.g. someone deciding to index all content appearing on "Lemmy.World" would get all the memes, movie discussions, etc., missing chiefly things like piracy and anarchy and other things that LW has decided to ban. It won't be "correct" in the sense of attribution to the OP, but once someone found their way to the content housed on LW they are but a click away from getting to its original source anyway. So from that standpoint, Google indexing I would naively have thought would not be all that difficult? Except for the increasingly niche content that isn't federated with the largest instances, which is perhaps desirable anyway to not expose mainstream normies to content calling for e.g. actual murder in response to world events (such as occurs routinely on e.g. Hexbear).

A safer, sanitized version of the Threadiverse that is searchable by anyone works to all of our advantage, I would believe?

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

It's now live on https://quokk.au/ as well!

This is a great feature to have, as I was reliant on newcommunities and communitypromo to find new comms.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

Well done !

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

dean winchesters favourite fediverse software

[–] socsa@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's crazy how fast development moves when you don't spend all day celebrating censoring your instance.

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[–] mnmalst@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago (11 children)

Is there a theme or css for piefed that makes it look more like old reddit? I love the old reddit frontend for lemmy but sadly it seems to abandoned.

[–] Quokka@quokk.au 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Where I'm at so far with a theme. Gotta finish up the top bar with community subscriptions and tidy up the user part on the left before moving onto the feed.

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[–] Quokka@quokk.au 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As in old.reddit or the old “new” reddit they apparently changed a week ago.

I’ve been messing around with customising themes all week on https://quokka.au/, and I would be happy to give it a shot.

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[–] Snoopy@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 1 points 1 month ago

Not really but there one retro theme that i love : irix1998

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