piefed

You can join /c/technology and then block all the posts in there about Windows, for example. Or join /c/politics and block all the USA news.

In the video I demo this with [email protected]

After 5 months of chipping away at it, PieFed is now an installable ‘app’ in the Yunohost store! It’s been there for a couple of weeks actually but until this weekend it had a scary red exclamation mark because some automated tests hadn’t ran yet. But that’s gone now so I feel confident about recommending it to others.

Yunohost is a linux distro for servers that has a web gui for installing and managing services, that takes all the hassle out of self-hosting. How to get started with Yunohost.

@[email protected] and @[email protected] have had good success setting up their instances already: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1561141/thanks-to-rimu-ericgaspar-and-tituspijean-yunohost-has-a-working-piefed-setup

The upcoming v1.2 release will include a built-in instance chooser, so every instance will be able to recommend every other instance, without a centralized site like https://joinmastodon.org or https://lemmyverse.net/instances. (except those instances that have opted out or closed registrations)

The instance-choosers for other platforms tend to push people towards the bigger instances by prominently displaying the number of users or communities they have, or even worse sorting results by number of users. This seems like a good metric because if lots of people chose it in the past then it must be well-run, right? Right? Heh.

Instead, the PieFed instance chooser sorts by ping (network ping + page load speed) and prominently shows a "Stability" metric which is a combination of various things (daily backups, multiple people having SSH access, financial health, etc). Another key metric is Newbie-friendliness which is whether they have a decent number of topics created, which are used as starter-packs to get new accounts into many communities quickly. Thirdly, the Age is shown, which is the number of months it has been operating. Join brand new instances at your peril.

Another aspect I've chosen not to get into is regional or topic focus of instances because most people are into more than one topic, leading to difficult choices. Sorting by ping will tend to show you instances in your country anyway.

The primary language of an instance is really important - people need to be able to communicate with their admins - so I made that a filter.

With new PieFed instances opening up all the time we need to get new people using those instead of everyone clustering together on piefed.social. The sooner we do this the better, in terms of spreading the financial load around and fostering a healthy diversity of instances before one or two instances snowball and end up dominating.

I'm really looking forward to releasing this functionality, in the next couple of weeks.

ALT

This is our biggest release yet, including more finished tasks than any of our previous ones. Below is a summary of the highlights:

What’s new

Posts & communities can be labelled as AI-generated and people can choose to hide all posts tagged that way. Very similar to how NSFW works.

Comments can be marked as an Answer, like on StackOverflow.

React to posts and comments with an emoji.

Hide an individual post from yourself, without blocking the author.

PieFed is now in the Yunohost app store, making initial setup easier.

When banned from a remote instance you cannot make local-only posts in their communities.

Honeypot to automatically IP ban badly-behaved crawlers.

https://lemmy-federate.com integration, making PieFed communities get more exposure.

“Share on Mastodon” menu item on posts.

Vastly improve docs for new developers, see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs.

Language selection is more visible during post creation.

Tag clouds can also be viewed as a list of tags.

View post/comment markdown.

Bot accounts are not included in community statistics.

Footnote support in markdown.

Polish translation.

Better HTTP caching, which reduces dependence on Cloudflare.

Bugs

Passkey fixes.

Polls can now have up to 15 options.

User profile performance improved.

Don’t allow bypassing minimum username length and post title with whitespace.

Polls and Events can no longer be posted into Lemmy communities.

API

Additional user settings can be set through the api, including Extra Fields.

Fetch url metadata.

Sort comments by controversial.

Comment search now works.

Hashtags.

Events.

Polls.

Emoji reactions on posts and comments.

See https://piefed.social/c/piefed_api for more details.

To upgrade

To upgrade from 1.3.x:

git pull git checkout v1.4.x ./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

There is a big database migration that will take a few minutes to run. How long will vary depending on how old your instance is - older instances will have more content to process. It took ~25 minutes on piefed.social so expect it to be less than that.

Donations

PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.

Donations can be made via Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi.

Big deals, omg

Mods can move a post, with replies and votes, to another community. The change federates to other instances (except Lemmy, for now. I’ve been in discussion with devs from NodeBB and Lemmy about how this will work, they are on board).
Upload video files while creating a video post - no external host needed. Admin setting to limit who can do this (to save space).
Realtime chat - conversation immediately updates on screen when a new PM arrives.

More good stuff

Author-deleted posts are still visible to them and anyone with the url. No more loss of high-value comments with the OP deletes.
Search filters - nsfw and minimum post score
Improve speed of cross-posting form on mobile
Emoji tokens like :blush: can be used in post or comment body. No GUI support yet.
Admin setting to disable local copies of remote images - good for single-user instances
Replying to a comment marks associated inbox item as read
Updated HPT-Fruits theme
196 no longer excluded from default community import
Remove unused community rating feature
Remove unused instance vote weight feature
Remove ineffective þ to ‘th’ replacement
Improved accessibility - better contrast, fixed many incorrectly-used aria-labels
Updated translations - Basque, Chinese, Japanese

API:

Admins can ban/unban users through the API. piefed.world was maintaining custom code for this, hopefully it’ll make their version upgrades faster.

Bugs fixed

PMs
Markdown parsing
Speed up loading of profile pages for admin users
Friendica post parsing
Passkeys login UX tweak

To upgrade

To upgrade from 1.4.x:

git pull git checkout v1.5.x ./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

A lot of people made new years resolutions about using social media less. So now we have an optional daily time limit! It’s in https://piefed.social/user/settings.

One nice thing about the fediverse is we don’t need to optimize for addiction and try to keep you here longer than you want to.

The warning pops up with every page load so just clicking through it once won’t work. It’s for your own good!

Towards an open, federated review platform based on OSM As I am changing my life away from big tech services and towards independent tech and in particular services powered by OpenStreetMaps, I often fin… Page · piefed.social

I just made a discussion post to [email protected], which is visible here: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2091360/towards-an-open-federated-review-platform-based-on-osm

However, when federated to Mastodon, the post link is broken. It directs here, as if it was made to a local community: https://piefed.social/c/osm/p/2091360/towards-an-open-federated-review-platform-based-on-osm

This was pointed out by a user of sfba.social: https://sfba.social/@FinchHaven/116641561263747414

A few months ago I threw this question out into the void - “what if you could access the fediverse through your Usenet reader??” and got almost no response. Still, the idea had lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away so this weekend I caved in and built the thing. Hat tip to the author of the excellent nntpserver package that did all the hard stuff.

I look forward to seeing someone’s screenshots of fediverse posts on a Commodore 64, some day.

This will be released as a part of PieFed 1.7, coming soon.

A few months ago I threw this question out into the void - “what if you could access the fediverse through your Usenet reader??” and got almost no response. Still, the idea had lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away so this weekend I caved in and built the thing. Hat tip to the author of the excellent nntpserver package that did all the hard stuff.

I look forward to seeing someone’s screenshots of fediverse posts on a Commodore 64, some day.

This will be released as a part of PieFed 1.7, coming soon.

pyfedi Project background: https://join.piefed.social. Flagship instance: https://piefed.social Page · codeberg.org

This release saw contributions from some new people, which is great to see.

In this release you can now follow other people, not just join communities. When you follow someone their posts will show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of whether you have joined the community it was posted in or not.

You can also follow Mastodon+ accounts. Getting Mastodon integration working really well is going to be a long journey but this release gets us headed in that direction. Eventually I hope that this integration will provide a steady source of timely content to cross-post into threadiverse communities as well as being a peer citizen in the Mastodon-flavored parts of the fediverse.

New:

You can follow other users and their posts will always show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of the community they were posted into. Following Mastodon users works also but should be considered as very experimental. This will improve soon.

In the future you will be able to upload a list of people that you exported from your mastodon profile and follow them in one go. And add people that your instance doesn’t already know about - but not yet. These features will be rolled out in future versions once the dust settles on this version.

Mastodon posts have a new design that is distinct from threadiverse posts - there is no post title and larger author profile pic.

Communities can be marked as being a favorite, which makes them more prominent in the ‘Communities’ menu.

Clicking anywhere in a post teaser takes you to the teaser - you don’t need to aim for the title

Dramatically improved page load times on Chrome-based browsers (Speculation Rules API).

Little spinner thing while a vote is being cast

Updated translations

Preview markdown when editing a wiki page

RSS feeds on the home page, including a feed of posts from your subscribed communities

Topic selection during onboarding looks way nicer now.

Accessibility improvements to headers.

For Developers:

Massive CSS reorganisation by travis-jeans. Lots more usage of CSS variables. Improves maintenance and accessibility.

API: Users can now log out

API: Follow and unfollow users

API: video file upload works now

For Instance Admins:

Communities where every moderator is a bot or inactive are flagged as un-moderated. Reports about posts in un-moderated local communities go to admins.

Warnings on domains can be 3 types instead of only a warning - the other two are ‘helpful context’ and ‘recommendation’

Send a DM to a user asking them if they are a bot, with 1 click. If they do not respond their account is automatically flagged as a bot

Email bounce inbox can now be accessed through POP3, not just IMAP

Tokens used by mobile apps can be set to expire, using the JWT_EXPIRY_DAYS environment variable

More accurate tracking of when a user was last active. This will significantly increase your MAU stats.

Strict allowlist mode to reduce attack surface exposed by federation

/admin/federation form split up into 3 separate pages rather than one long confusing page.

Option to disable DM sending for individual users if they lack the self-control to use it responsibly.

compose.yaml has changed a bit: For most containers the build target is now “runtime’ instead of ‘builder’.

For example

celery: build: context: . target: runtime

Topics can be associated with countries, for more targeted onboarding suggestions based on the viewer’s location.

To reduce server load and network traffic, a maximum number of votes that can be cast each day has been set at a level that will only affect the top 2% of voters, leaving the bottom 98% unaffected. This quota can be altered with an environment variable. View a profile to see how much of their daily quota has been used.

To upgrade from 1.6.x

git pull git checkout v1.7.x

At this point you might see an error message about a merge conflict with compose.yaml. To preserve your custom compose.yaml you will need to copy it somewhere else, then git checkout compose.yaml then git pull again (or use git’s stash feature). This time the pull will succeed so after that copy your custom compose.yaml it back, overwriting the one from git.

Then,

./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

If you had to do the compose.yaml fix up earlier then you might want to compare what you have with https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/compose.yaml and manually copy and paste some improvements in particular the target: part of the db container.

Donations

PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.

Donations can be made via Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi.

Login Page · piefed.social

Go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and choose ’OpenDyslexia’ in the Font setting, halfway down the form.

This font looks odd to me but I’m told that it really helps some people. If you’re one of those people, please let me know if you have any preferences around letter spacing or line height, etc.

PieFed v1.7 is released: Following People, Faster Browsing & Smarter Moderation This release saw [contributions from some new people](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/activity/monthly), which is great to see. In this relea… Page · piefed.social

5808 active users, 2 more than in March.

Some of this will be due to new features in the latest version but I think most of it is because previously PieFed was not accurately keeping track of user activity. Now that it is, the numbers are bigger.

ALT