this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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PieFed help

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How to "get posts into Piefed"? (piefed.social)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Not sure of the right words for what I mean. I'm still new to the Fediverse and even newer to PieFed.

I'm now 99% of the time in PieFed (my instance: piefed.social ) as opposed to Lemmy. Often I'll visit a community and see zero or almost zero posts. But if I open the same community in Lemmy (my instance: lemmy.ca) there are loads of posts.

An example I just noticed: [email protected]

  • Piefed.social: 2 posts.
  • Lemmy.ca: 141 posts.

  1. Is there a way to get those missing posts into Piefed?

  2. All of them at once (not just one at a time)?

  3. Can an ordinary user like me do it?

Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Content from a community isn't pulled to a new instance until at least one user from that instance subscribes to that community. At that point, the most recent posts are pulled to the local copy of that community and new posts going forward will be, too. Older posts will not, which may be why lemmy.ca can see some piefed.social cannot.

But also, piefed supports instance-wide blocking. If you've blocked the instance from which the content comes, you won't see it from piefed. Lemmy lacks this functionality (so far).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Thanks for the reply.

So there's just no way to see those older posts on Piefed.social?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

As mentioned, if you subscribe to the community, everything going forward will federate over just fine. If there are specific posts you want to force piefed to fetch for you, then you can do so.

On the sidebar for the community, under where the mods are listed, select "Retrieve a post from the original server." That let's you pop in a link to the post from the lemmy server and it will make piefed bring it over. It won't bring the comments though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Thanks for the info.

Sad to hear so much content becomes inaccessible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Just one of the limitations of the fediverse as it exists today. FWIW, lemmy works the exact same way. In its case, you pop in the url of a post you want to fetch in its search bar and it will find it and bring it over. When I have seen people confused about lemmy/mbin/piefed in the past, federation weirdness like this is one of the primary pain points.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

It won't bring the comments though.

FYI, you can use the same feature to bring the comments one by one. Painful, but possible

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You can get comments using that feature too, I used in the past, it worked

https://piefed.social/search

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I just tried the "Retrieve a post" function with one from [email protected]

Trying a different post via https://piefed.social/search

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I just retrieved a comment there: https://piefed.social/post/974588#comment_6777142

Using the original link of the comment (https://sopuli.xyz/comment/14337052) in the "retrieve remote post"

You can theoretically retrieve all the comments that way, but it would take a while. There might be some automated way to do it, but I'm not aware of it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Ideally, you could use ActivityPub (there'd be a /comments endpoint for every post, with a list to retrieve) but that's not something Lemmy currently provides.

For automation, the API endpoint to use it 'resolve_object', and since it operates recursively, you can save yourself some time by only getting the deepest comment, so it will also fetch any parents (and the post too, if required).

For example, https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] was missing the "I'm loving SG-1 (first time watcher), but just doing:

curl --header "authorization: Bearer MY_LOGIN_TOKEN" https://piefed.social/api/alpha/resolve_object?q=https%3A%2F%2Flemm.ee%2Fcomment%2F19279509

was enough to get the post and 7 comments in one call.

Instances disappearing really limits the viability of this kind of thing though - there's already loads of missing comments from kbin.social and feddit.de, and it will be way worse when lemm.ee goes too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info. I don't suppose anyone has written some script to automate this and preserve all that content, have they?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not that I know of.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Crikey, it would take a while to do it all manually. I guess 99.999% of that pre-federation content will end up invisible to me on PieFed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

See the other comment about potential automation: https://piefed.social/post/974305#comment_6778240

Potentially a feature to work on in the future, but I guess there are higher priorities at the moment