PyLova (Python+Pavlova) is a soft fork of PieFed, aimed at improving the user experience through UI overhauls, empowering users and admins with agency, improved administration and moderation functions, and general bug fixing.
New in V0.3.2
New & Improved
- Muffle Users : Instead of outright blocking a user, you can now ‘Muffle’ them. This will place their content behind a spoiler. This functionality has also been extended to the filter system.
- Live Posts : Mods can designate a post as a Live Post. A Live Post will continuously update with new comments coming through while sorting by new. This is great for keeping track on currently happening events such as global news or sports.
- Reel View : This is a new way to browse the site, putting it into ‘Reel’ view shows one post per scroll. Cuts out the noise, allowing you to appreciate one post at a time.
- User Flags : Want to show off who you are? Add a flag next to your pronouns. These small flags can be set by instance admins, great show showing Pride Flags, Sports Teams, Nationalities, Political Ideologies, etc.
- Bookmark Organisation : Users can now sort their bookmarked posts and comments by folders.
- Admin Notes : Admins and Instance Moderators can share notes about users on their profile page, this can be handy in building a history of bad behaviour or sharing concerns.
- Account Oversight : Admins and Instance Moderators have greater ability to search through a users upvoted and downvoted content.
- New Theme : Nocturne Core @[email protected] has wonderfully created a Sci-Fi inspired theme you can apply.
Bug-Fixes & Misc
- Lemmy/Mbin support for Multi-Image Posts : Multi-Image Posts will now add the extra images into the post body for users on Lemmy and Mbin so they don’t have to miss out on your amazing content.
- Censorship Transparency : On the instance about page, there is now a one-stop location for viewing what sort of things are being censored by your instance.
- Options Menu : The menu has been updated with a more navigable UI in 3 Panel Mode.
- Reactions Only Mode : A small setting for instance admins to ‘turn off’ up and downvotes, letting posts only have emoji reactions. Note, emoji reacts do technically count as an upvote and this is more of a visual change in regards to user view.
- Trusted Instances Only Federation : Communities can already be set to local only, this feature allows communities to only be visible on those in your instances trusted list.
- Banned Users can now unsubscribe from a community, allowing them to remove it from their feed.
- Blocked/Unfederated Instances now show more information, such as allowing for reasons why it was removed.
- Poll Post Type teasers had a slight visual inconsistency, their icon should now align properly with every other post type.
- Flair, Tags, & Live Status all follow the same visual format. Also now visible on post teasers.
- General Performance Improvements.
- Code Refactoring to follow a more pythonic style guide and reduce McCabe complexity.
Thanks!
Oops,
Name them please, I’m desperate for ideas here.
Searching for one, though that’s a big project. I typically abandon PieFed for Lemmy every time I need to do a search.
Oh and speaking of, a feature that’s probably significantly easier would be to either search through comments, or else expand them all at once - to allow a browser search to work.
Otherwise it’s mainly UI things not being polished rather than back-end. I’ve been trying out 3rd-party apps for the last month so there’s a slight possibility that it’s fixed by now (I had made a codeberg request a long time ago related to it, but I can’t log into PieFed’s codeberg right now, and it seems to not allow anonymous read-only access. One thing that has been hella annoying for more than a year in various forms has been that a goodly number of links from the notifications menu don’t take you to what it is trying to point at. When the conversations get longer, when things happen to cause a comment to be collapsed (bc of being too deep in the chain), and especially when there is a large number of comments, the post page typically begins to load, then doesn’t always indicate that you should wait (causing you to get hella lost if you start scrolling, which you would normally do, except in this case it’s the worst possible decision), then finally loads the large number of comments, and finally takes you to the place that it is attempting to notify you about - when someone tagged or responded to you - except that it doesn’t. And then the hunt begins, like maybe you have to click to expand a comment first, or scroll way back up, or perhaps down.
It works a helluva lot better now than it did a year and a half ago - I used to have to abandon PieFed and go back to Lemmy just to be able to find the comment, by searching for my username and seeing if there were any replies I had missed. It got way better, but the method of loading comments after loading the page broke it again - which is just poor design philosophy, like if I click a link to a COMMENT (from a notification), then yes maybe I want the page to load the COMMENTS, perchance/mayhaps, hrm?
PieFed was initially being built up to work for the most usual and basic scenario. Being able to handle >100 comments where some are nested >10 deep I understand was less of a priority. But sometimes those are where the absolute BEST conversations are!!
Also, the post/comment preview function keeps randomly disappearing. I mean with regards to a particular PieFed version it will either always be available or not available at all, but between version updates it kept disappearing like it would work for posts but not comments, or more rarely might not be available for either. I guess I’m ranting here but this is the kind of stuff that I find hella annoying and I’m not sure what’s easy to fix vs. hard. Greater stability of this feature, maybe?
Lemmy may have significantly fewer features but in many ways it comes across as being significantly more polished. Until you try to write a long comment that is (in my Firefox on Android the screen keeps jumping around like it’s drunk! 🥴), and then you really appreciate how PieFed’s features work better, some of the times, while for general browsing and readability (like for lurkers) Lemmy can be better - e.g. its search tools. Another example: having the votes be above comments rather than below them is very helpful to me sometimes, bc they can become exceedingly long (like the one I am writing right now!) and sometimes at least (like when modding) it helps to know how well it was received by a community before reading through it all, so not having to scroll down to the bottom and then scroll back up to the top is helpful.
I think PieFed tried to reinvent the wheel and just be different from Lemmy for the sake of being different, even if the way was not actually any better?
I don’t know if I am helping at all here but wanted to get back to you quickly so hopefully these ramblings can at least spark something within you.
Obviously, you should spend your efforts working on something that gives you joy to do so!!
PieFed, and now PyLova, and also Lemmy (and Mbin etc.) are so fantastic! We may never fully replace Reddit but who cares if we can at least have something worthwhile here.
Tbh that’s not surprising, looking at PieFed’s development priorities 😅 (emphasis mine)
Excellent point - stability was purposely deprioritized initially, though at some point I think it should catch up? Which could arguably be now, as unlike a year or especially two ago, these days I think people are not longer treating PieFed as experimental and expect it more to work well, as a fully usable Threadiverse product.
Of course PieFed will continue to be whatever Rimu wants it to be - nobody is saying otherwise. And also highly relevant, each instance admin selects from that code what features they want to enable/disable.
And PyLova will have to make its own choice what priorities to aim for, especially in the short, medium, and longer term. So it’s relevant then that greater stability could be a real selling point for it, to distinguish from the OG PieFed?
One thing that still makes me hesitate with discourse when suggesting a forum is that discourse has this thing whera post can be turned into a wiki. Everyone can edit it, add/update informations. It’s much better than a wiki “hidden” in another part of the community, here it’s part of the flow of posts, you can comment, etc…
Not sure if these are already addressed in PyLova, but some of my PieFed pain points are the notification page UI (namely the collapsed content previews and unintuitive mark as read buttons), and the lack of proper support for emoji (no shortcode suggestions like Lemmy/GitHub/etc. has, and the manual picker is unsearchable and missing many newer ones).