Hey all,
I’m evaluating PieFed as a replacement for Lemmy, with a view to importing my two Lemmy communities to move them out of the failing Lemmy instance they’re currently hosted on (a PieFed exclusive I understand). I’ve created an account and imported my Lemmy settings yesterday, and so far it’s been more or less smooth sailing.
But there’s one showstopper for me: when I create a post, there’s no field to specify the thumbnail image URL. When PieFed guesses the image URL correctly, no problem. But here, I just posted this YouTube video, and just like on Lemmy half of the time, the thumbnail image didn’t get picked up. On Lemmy, I always manually insert the thumbnail URL when I post YouTube links for that reason.
Similarly, some sites make it extra-hard for software to correctly guess the og:image - Reuters for instance - and so in those cases when it doesn’t work, I manually set the correct thumbnail URL too.
Here on PieFed, there doesn’t seem to be a provision to set the thumbnail URL.
Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something obvious? I really doubt this basic functionality is missing from PieFed.
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As the author of the codeberg issue for this, it hasn’t been added yet. I really liked the custom thumbnail feature when it was added to lemmy, so I haven’t forgotten about adding it to piefed. A big focus of my devwork recently has been on the api-side to help make apps/frontends more complete, so we will get there. I just added the issue to the 1.3 release kanban to make sure it is prioritized.
Thank you!
Nice! Thanks!
FYI PieFed doesn’t use thumbnails for youtube videos, it just embeds the video directly:
FYI PieFed doesn’t use thumbnails for youtube videos, it just embeds the video directly:
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear in my original post.
Indeed the video shows up fine in Piefed. What I meant was the view from Lemmy is devoid of thumbnail. For instance, my Youtube post seen from Sopuli:
https://sopuli.xyz/post/32680798
When I said it was a dealbreaker for me, it’s because I (usually) always try to make posts with a thumbnail to make them more attractive on Lemmy. Even if it’s just a question, I’ll upload a picture to illustrate what I want to say, and then write whatever I want to write in the body.
I find it nicer to offer a visual clue in all my posts. But when you look at my Piefed Youtube video from Lemmy, the thumbnail it’s just a bleak arrow on a bleak background. Not super appealing.
So I guess what I meant was that I want to manually supply a thumbnail URL for the benefit of Lemmy viewers.
Yep, I understood but if Lemmy can’t do thumbnails for youtube videos that’s a Lemmy problem.
That said, we’ve had an open issue for this feature for a couple of months and the person who created it is a frequent contributor to PieFed so there’s a very good chance it’ll get coded quite soon.
Yeah clearly a Lemmy problem, even when posting directly from Lemmy.The whole manual thumbnail URL thing is clearly a workaround for when the automatic thumbnailer is deficient.
But as a mere user, my aim is to make posts that are correct and somewhat appealing. So I work with what I have 🙂
Hello,
Nice to see you experimenting with Piefed.
Regarding the thumbnail URL, you might be right, it might not be there at this moment. On the other hand, that feature on Lemmy itself wasn’t available for quite a while IIRC.
There is an issue existing on https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/887 , feel free to comment/vote on it so that it gets picked up for the next release (probably 1.3 by this point, 1.2 is almost done)
You can see the planned features for the 1.2 release: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/projects/19472
Here are the ones for 1.3: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/projects/20953
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m not complaining 🙂 Just trying to make PieFed work for me.
There is an issue existing on https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/887 , feel free to comment/vote on it so that it gets picked up for the next release (probably 1.3 by this point, 1.2 is almost done)
I guess that’s a good excuse to create a Codeberg account. I need to move my repos out of GitHub and I was planning to evaluate Codeberg at some point.
Thanks!
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m not complaining 🙂 Just trying to make PieFed work for me.
It was clear, no worries! You will see, there are still a few features that are missing, but most of them are being worked on (see the 1.2 dashboard above), so things improve a bit every day.
