PieFed looks so amazing! And it is fantastic how it continues to be developed more all the time.
Though it still lacks numerous features found on Lemmy - e.g. being able to search for users (I tried searching for one of my favorite people to talk to, lvxferre, and many variations such as @lvxferre@mander.xyz, but piefed.social came up with nothing - it seems to search only within the text fields, and I saw nothing in any of the dropdowns to look for a "user", or a "community", etc.). Likewise I tried to find existing posts in that search bar - e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/21055894 "Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this." but again could not. Another one is that the frontend UI needs some polish, e.g. on this post I literally cannot see the name of the community (no matter how far I zoom out), only that it begins with "[META] Piefe…" (oh wait no, now I see, at https://ponder.cat/post/326806 - that's the name of the post? but then why is it repeated like that, in tiny font, right next to / above the huge font, and also cut off - wouldn't it make more sense to just stop the list at "Communities@ponder.cat"? or if it is important enough to add, then not to cut it off?)
Minor issues of polish aside, the USA election season is coming up so... this makes me wonder: can you block users from a given list of instances using PieFed? e.g. if I wanted to block users, and I mean all of communities, posts, comments, even voting if possible - basically I want a defederation action, but will take a user-level block if that is all I can get. People might be able to engender this behavior with keywords, but the key would be to allow things like a discussion of the firefox@lemmy.ml community name, while blocking the users from that instance name - and yet given the above issue of not being able to search for users at all, my guess is that keyword-based blocking would do the exact opposite of that? (cutting out posts that just happen to contain the instance name, while allowing the users free reign so long as their posts do not contain the instance name)
Either way, I do so look forward to the development of this fantastic Lemmy alternative, which nonetheless federates with it plus so much else besides!:-)
Only admins can do this.
This would be nice. I recall that kbin had this ability (and thus mbin probably still does).
I haven't tested this, but I think /community/[HTML_REMOVED]/block_instance would be the way to block the instance, where community_id is the id of the community.
So for example, https://piefed.social/c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
If you look for the "Retrieve a post from the original server" link on the community page, that link will have the community id in it. So piefed.social has the community id for the above as 709 (since the link points to https://piefed.social/community/retrieve_remote_post/709 )
So if you were on piefed.social and wanted to block all of lemmy.blahaj.zone then you could call https://piefed.social/community/709/block_instance to block it.
Or for lemmy.ml specifically, you could look at https://piefed.social/c/firefox@lemmy.ml and find https://piefed.social/community/retrieve_remote_post/295
And then use https://piefed.social/community/295/block_instance to block all of lemmy.ml for your piefed.social user.
FYI the code for this is defined in https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/community/routes.py#L1255 if I'm understanding this correctly.
Edit: There might be an easier, more user friendly way of reaching that final link that I don't know about. Hopefully Rimu or another pyfedi dev will point us in the right direction if exists.
I am not so sure that Mbin does allow that - e.g. https://sopuli.xyz/post/13676782 and https://lemmy.cafe/comment/6178568.
Which brings up an interesting additional issue: both Mbin and PieFed do not make it easy to see which instance someone is from. This seems predicated on the notion that all users that someone is interacting with are engaging in good faith. To the extent that this is true, this is a wonderful approach, HOWEVER... trolls do (occasionally!) exist on the internet, and often they get incubated from the same echo chamber, thus it helps to know where people are coming from in order to block them. e.g. Truth Social, Fox News, Infowars, The Joe Rogan Experience, and many others. Evaluating the quality of a source saves an enormous amount of time as compared to having to evaluate the quality of the information itself - e.g. Google's AI that appears in search results spouts bullshit, hence I tend to distrust everything that it says, rather than have to do my own research every single time. :-).
So I hope that this is something that will be added eventually.
Yeah I've been wanting to add the instance name for a while now. Knowing that someone else wants it too increases it's priority, thanks :)
Oh that's fantastic! PieFed is looking better by the minute for some reason... :-P