I finally got around to testing the “follow accounts” feature that was in the latest piefed and it’s awesome The pixelfed integration is very fun — following photographers feels very natural, and gets a lot of image content into my feed instead of just endless links. It does look like loops works too, but I could only see a privacy guides account so I didn’t follow it. I did manage to follow a couple of Bluesky accounts via bsky.brid.gy, but I can’t see any of the Twitter mirrors (like sportsbots.xyz), though I suspect that’s because a lot of those early Twitter shovels ended up on blocklists because they’re technically bots. My favorite follows are definitely publications — there’s a Graphic Policy account on sfba.social and a BBC news account from flipboard.com that fit in great in my feed. Definitely the biggest shortcoming is that there is no way to fetch an account that isn’t already known to your instance (I was hoping to get the Shiba every hour or the capybara every hour accounts, but alas), or a good way to search for accounts on larger instances, like mastodon.social, so I’m curious: what accounts have you found that are a good follow from piefed?
Edit: I couldn’t find a working rss shovel or an available ghost instance either, though both seem like they would be good follows.


I’m not following anyone yet. It’ll get a whole lot more interesting once we can accept boosted posts, which I’m working on now. Currently we’re only seeing posts the authors wrote, not posts boosted by people we follow.
It’s a bit complicated because in Mastodon people often boost a post halfway through a conversation so when it arrives here we’ve got a fragment of a conversation and need to go out and get the rest before it can be stored. In contrast with Lemmy the top-level post always arrives first, followed by comments on it so it’s simpler to accept them.
I hope boosts can be disabled, as I’d only follow someone to see their posts, I’m not interested in seeing boosted posts.
Yes some people really really overdo their boosting so it needs to be avoidable somehow!
I’m having trouble using this functionality, what’s the correct way to look up a specific account?
On Mastodon I follow an account with news from mas.to. I can look up this instance through Instances and browse users but I can’t find a way to look up a specific person. I tried adjusting URL using random account as a template but the one I’m after isn’t found even though it’s a valid handle.
There isn’t a correct way yet. I’m getting other things tidied up before opening the flood gates.
Now I see that this account resolves. Next time try
piefed.social/user/lookup/<their handle>/<their instance>Thank, i’m trying it because there is some account i want to follow and retrieve their content for my communities mostly one free software, agriculture, space… :)