When I used to use Reddit, one of my favorite things about it was the design of the navigation. Specifically I am referring to when you open a post, and the only thing needed to go back is to click in the margin.

Alexandrite also implements this same type of functionality.

If it hasn't been suggested already, I'd like to know if this is something that could be implemented here as well.

Here's some development highlights from the last 3 weeks and who contributed:

Freamon

Markdown parsing improvements and let us use a different variant of Markdown than Lemmy does.
Poll federation - Mastodon accounts can vote on PieFed polls, and receive votes from PieFed users for Polls they've posted into a local community.
PeerTube integration - New channels arrive with 10 recent videos, their player is embedded in the PieFed post, new posts are correctly restricted to channel owners, and arrive into PieFed automatically.
Manual post-retrieval from remote communities function
Improvements to federation that led to an 80% drop in the amount of spam cleanup work admins need to do (some post deletions on remote Lemmy instances weren’t being imported into PieFed properly).

Rimu

A minor dark mode improvement.
Made the Poll UI and database.
Made a start on federation with Pixelfed and Discourse.
An admin tool to list communities that need to be assigned to a topic.
Update translations from crowdin - French is finished thanks to wazaby. Steady progress continues on Japanese translation.
Much better topic list layout.
Imported many PeerTube channels into piefed.social and assigned them to topics.
Top-level topics added to the main menu under ‘Topics’.
Soft deletes - post deletion can be reversed for up to 7 days.

Tallship

Suggested PieFed use 'soft-break' Markdown
Testing User Follows from various platforms
Reporting that the use of Mastodon's trademark was problematic

General comments

We are reaching the end of the initial roadmap I sketched out 6 months ago at the start of development. There are just a handful of small tasks to do before the “beta test” phase ends.

With Lemmy to PieFed federation pretty solid, we are entering a phase of diversifying to other platforms. The first other platform, PeerTube, involved a lot of work that hopefully paved the way for future platforms to be integrated more easily. Pixelfed is going live with Groups support very soon. Exploratory work has been done on integration with Discourse although disappointingly they have implemented federation as an optional plugin so fewer Discourse forums actually federate than I initially hoped. NodeBB looks interesting.

In general the Fediverse has reached a steady state in terms of user numbers which gives us space to slow down and reassess. There is not as much of a sense of urgency or bursting-at-the-seams that there was a few months ago. This might be a good time to start to pay down some of the technical debt we have built up. It’s not that the code is bad, it's just that it’s structured in a way that made things easy in the early days but is no longer serving us as well as it did.

Very soon it will be good to have a discussion to create a roadmap for what comes after the beta ("1.0"). I’m thinking - more platforms (Mastodon, Friendica, etc), community wikis, API for mobile apps, better accessibility and can’t wait to hear other ideas from the community.

Thanks to amazing work by @andrew_s@piefed.social, PieFed can now federate with PeerTube - channels from a PeerTube instance show up as communities in PieFed and each video is a post which can be voted on and commented on.

To get things started I've done a bit of crowdsourcing and added all the interesting, active and cool PeerTube channels I could find! Check these out:

Linux

https://piefed.social/c/thelinuxcast_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/linuxuserspace_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube
https://piefed.social/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com
https://piefed.social/c/linuxappsummit@tube.kockatoo.org
https://piefed.social/c/hacker_culture@kolektiva.media

Other

https://piefed.social/c/blitzcitydiy_channel@makertube.net - electronics and music

https://piefed.social/c/simon.caine_channel@tilvids.com - general technology

https://piefed.social/c/thunderbird_channel@tilvids.com - thunderbird email client

https://piefed.social/c/ewen@makertube.net - photography

https://piefed.social/c/icesheets_climate@tilvids.com - climate

https://piefed.social/c/shifter_cycling@video.canadiancivil.com - cycling

https://piefed.social/c/transit@video.canadiancivil.com - transit

https://piefed.social/c/urbanism@video.canadiancivil.com - urbanism

https://piefed.social/c/coreyartusimagery@makertube.net - art

https://piefed.social/c/dot_social@flipboard.video - fediverse podcast

https://piefed.social/c/thegiddystitcher@makertube.net - crafting

https://piefed.social/c/linuxappsummit@tube.kockatoo.org

https://piefed.social/c/submedia_channel@kolektiva.media - anarchy

https://piefed.social/c/solarpunk@kolektiva.media - documentaries

https://piefed.social/c/boilingsteam@peertube.linuxrocks.online - gaming

https://piefed.social/c/justsomeguy@comics.peertube.biz - comics and movies

https://piefed.social/c/comicuno@comics.peertube.biz - comics

https://piefed.social/c/blender_channel@video.blender.org - blender

https://piefed.social/c/4742f338-1ded-4798-bd85-93e8de367476@peertube.touhoppai.moe - krita tutorials

Here's some highlights from the last 3 weeks and who contributed:

Mastodon integration - freamon

Mastodon accounts can follow PieFed accounts (but not the other way around). Look for the 'follow on Mastodon' button on local accounts e.g on mine: https://piefed.social/u/rimu. Once followed, new posts they make will show up in your Mastodon feed.

This is a major piece of work and I expect improvements to this will continue for some time.

Post and comment languages - rimu

Whenever you make a post, you can specify the language it is in. Communities can have one or more languages. Filters for language have been added to the community list and search.

Interface language switcher - rimu

PieFed tries to detect your preferred language based on your browser settings but you can override this in your profile settings.

French UI language process - wazaby

Pretty soon you'll be able to use PieFed in French! We went with the 'inclusive writing' version of French but if someone provides a traditional French translation then people could switch to that using the previously mentioned language switcher.

Hashtags - rimu

Posts can have a list of keywords (hashtags) associated with them. This will help make posts more visible on Mastodon. Kbin/Mbin supports hashtags also so there is already some content that uses hashtags. This post has 4 tags on it, for example. See all tags at https://piefed.social/tags.

Spam finder - rimu

When spam is reported and the community and instance that it is in has been abandoned, the report is unseen by anyone. Luckily the downvote signal federates to everyone so we can use that to spot likely spam. Admins now have a page which lists content which is

• recently posted
• heavily downvoted
• posted by new accounts

Simple yet very effective.

Subscribe to anything - rimu

Look for the bell icon next to headings. Topics, People, Communties, Posts and individual Comments can all be subscribed to. You'll receive a notification whenever there is a new post in that topic, a reply to that comment, etc etc.

Masonry fix - rimu

Posts in galleries are now ordered horizontally (in a 'Z' pattern) rather than in columns which is a more intuitive and natural way to order images.

Print stylesheet - rimu

PieFed and Pixelfed are the only fediverse platforms that look decent when a page is printed. I tested them all.

Recently saw some posts about interest in following posts/comments for replies with PieFed, which made me wonder about essentially the opposite.

In Lemmy there's presently no option for this, and I gather similar functionality (auto-follow submitted posts & notify for replies) is on PieFed, but can't tell if there's any option to disable notifications/unsubscribe from one's own posts (yet).

**edit:**Thanks for the reply @andrew_s@piefed.social! From their reply on PieFed:

It does, yes. When you make a post or comment, there's a tick-box with 'Notify about replies'. It's ticked by default, but unticking it before you submit means you won't get notification about replies.

After that, you can change the status using the same bell icon that you use for other people's content. To subscribe to your post, I'd change the bell from struck-through to clear, and to unsubscribe to my own post, I'd change the bell from clear to struck-through.

Unfortunately this reply didn't federate so I only got around to checking PieFed's version of this thread today and read it. Seems some more stuff to work out in this regard

There's been a lot going on lately. Here's some highlights from the last 4 weeks and who contributed:

spoilers - freamon

Lemmy-style spoilers now render properly. These are often used in community descriptions, like this one.

local community federation - freamon

Until now it has been a bad idea to run local communities on piefed.social as PieFed would not reliably share all the activity in the community with every subscribed instance. This has been resolved now.

This was the biggest and most difficult piece of work needed to finish the beta test phase so massive credit to freamon for making this very significant contribution.

bot comments don't add to count of replies - rimu

Now you won't click on a post with a reply and then be disappointed to find it's just the 'Auto TL;DR' bot, or whatever.

videos - rimu

youtube videos have always worked fine in PieFed but now links to .mp4 URLs, streamable.com and redgifs.com videos are embedded in the post nicely too. There is a new type of post just for videos, too. At the moment this is very similar to creating a normal 'Link' post but when/if PieFed gets the option to host video content the Video post form will get file upload, transcoding and thumbnail-choosing features.

topics can have sub-topics - rimu

Communities are organised in a fully hieractical tree, of any depth. See https://piefed.social/topics

improve documentation - rscmbbng & somoso

Lots of little changes and improvements here. Not especially glamorous but very useful and worthy of recognition.

about page - rscmbbng

There is an 'about' page at https://piefed.social/about which has some automatically generated stats and admin-controlled content.

cross posts - freamon

When a link post is made which links to the same URL as other recent posts do, a relationship is established between the posts making it easy for people to check out other posts/discussions about the same URL.

UI translation - german by AchtungDrempels, Catalan by nihar.

Based on the preferred language setting in the web browser, PieFed automatically presents the menu, button text, etc in the right language. The only catch is someone needs to manually translate every bit of text into every language! German is complete and we've made a good start on Catalan. Contact me if you'd like to help with translating PieFed into any language.

In related news I've recently added code to save the language of communities and posts so that when we eventually add UI controls to filter by language we'll have a decent amount of content in various languages already.

moderation tools - rscmbbng, freamon & rimu

Communities now have satisfactory moderation tools. More on this. This was another major piece of work that needed to be finished to complete the beta phase.

sticky posts - freamon

Posts can be stuck to the top of a community, making them more visible. This federates across instances.

It is amazing to see so many contributors already and the difference it has made to the quality and speed of PieFed's development. We are almost at the end of the beta test so it will soon be time to start making a roadmap for the next phase.

This has turned into quite a wall of text. I'll try to make more frequent updates in future, perhaps every two weeks.

I noticed responding to posts in communities hosted at lemmy.ml gives the following warning:

This post is hosted on lemmy.ml which will ban you for saying anything negative about China, Russia or Putin. Tread carefully.

While I see where this is coming from and I agree with the general sentiment, I'm not sure it's a great idea to include such a message. I basically read it as an invitation to be off-topic and to derail conversations in order to annoy the admins. While it comes from a point of good intentions, it can be disheartening for the people running communities on Lemmy.ml to receive comments about Russia from users basically trying to get banned, in communities that has nothing to do with this issue.

It's unfortunate, but a lot of valuable older communities are still hosted on lemmy.ml, and I think PieFed users should be encouraged to be constructive and on-topic users there as they should be everywhere else.

An alternative suggestion: Maybe it could be useful to remind people which community they are posting in? Like, "This community is dedicated to renewable energy. Please keep this in mind when contributing to the discussion". Then again, that would be a mess to implement in a good way.

Until now, development has proceeded pretty loosely - we work on whatever seems cool at the time. This is fine but if we collaborate on a decision about priorities then perhaps we'll all be pulling in the same direction a bit more often. If the decision is made in public with all stakeholders, perhaps we'll get some buy-in.

Let's try this: each of us pick up to 5 issues from the issue queue that are important and up to 5 issues that are urgent. If an issue is both important and urgent, include it in both lists - these are the issues we really want to highlight.

After a few days we'll collate the results and try to find issues that most people think are both important and urgent.

This process is open to anyone who regularly uses PieFed.

Moderators can:

• delete & edit anything in community
• ban people from community, and unban them.
• review reports about content in that community
• mark a report as resolved / ignored.

When a report is resolved or ignored, all reports regarding that content are also resolved. So if something receives 150 reports then mods won't need to click 150 times to resolve all reports. Ignored reports stop all future reports from being accepted.

The person who created the community can appoint other moderators.

Reports federate to and from Lemmy so if a PieFed user reports some content that came from a Lemmy instance the moderators on the Lemmy instance will be notified about the content being reported.

There's still more to be done with federation of bans, a moderation log, etc. But it's shaping up nicely!

There's more than one way to do this, of course. For group-based forums like piefed, I think the most promising way is to automatically create a local community for each person that someone wants to follow. Incoming activity is then put into the appropriate community, and so you have a consistent UI of UserA has posted to technology@wherever, and UserB has posted to [UserB's community]@piefed.social. This avoids the '2 websites in 1' look that can happen when a site wants to display both lemmy-like communities and mastodon-like microblogs.

I haven't done too much work on it, in case this idea gets shot down in flames. So far, what I've got is:

1. A user searches for another remote user, e.g. @freamon@pixelfed.dk

2. When they're found, the user is offered the opportunity to create a 'Follower Community' (for want of a better name. I've been using 'fan club', but that's maybe a bit naff)

3. The community is created, formatted from the profile id, so [https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon](https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon) becomes [https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon](https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon)

4. A follow request is sent to the remote user (from the user doing the search, or a dedicated bot account, maybe)

5. Incoming activity will just be to activitystreams and followers, so there won't be any matches in 'to', 'cc' or 'audience'. In that case, 'attributedTo' is looked at, using the same conversion as above: so something from [https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon](https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon) will be sent to [https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon](https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon) if it already exists.

6. The posts will show in the community like any other. Other users can then subscribe to the community in the normal way, and get updates whenever the remote actor publishes something for their followers.

7. Posts from Mastodon would need another post-type to look their best (something that simulates how they look over there). Posts from Pixelfed already display well using Masonry:
   On pixelfed:
   
   On piefed:
   

8. Post replies and upvotes (maybe) should make their way back to remote user, the same way they do if they'd actually made a post in a local community.

Random thoughts:
There would need to be an Undo Follow sent if the community was deleted.
A local community called c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon looks a bit ungainly, but there's likely a way communities like this could be rendered as something like [SELF] in the homepage feed.
I realise pixelfed are planning to implement Groups, but that hasn't really worked out for mastodon, so we'll see how it goes. I think the ability to follow individuals will still be useful.
The remote user could be made a moderator for the local community, and it set to 'mod posts only' so it would only contain stuff from them.
This approach doesn't require any database changes.

I've just bashed this together for now - looking to get your thoughts before I continue ...

I put together a nostalgic theme, in the style of 1980s monitors. It uses the same font that the Hercules graphics adapter had. Try it out by choosing "Hercules 1982" at https://piefed.social/user/settings.

You can toggle between amber and green by using the dark or light mode icons in the header.

I'm happy with the font and how the amber version looks but I found it very difficult to get the right shade of green. Modern monitors do colour so differently.

If anyone would like to make their own themes or improve the existing ones, here is a quick intro - https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/07/changing-piefeds-appearance-with-themes/

Lemmy's spoiler format is

As described here

The regex I've come up with is :{3} spoiler\s+?(\S.+?\n)(.+?)\n:{3}

It won't do spoilers inside spoilers, but that's a pretty niche case.

The changed code is viewable on GitHub

Any thoughts or suggestions for the regex before I create the PR?

I'm assuming that if I create a PR, and if they accept it, they'll (eventually) release a version with it in, and the line in pyfedi's requirements.txt can get version bumped. This seems like the 'proper' way to do it, but it's a bit long-winded, so maybe there's a better way to do it.

In honor of Trans Visibility Day, I've made a theme for PieFed inspired by the trans pride flag and set it as the default theme.

I've been thinking about what to do about cross-posts (e.g. where the same link is uploaded to both fediverse@lemmy.world and fediverse@lemmy.ml).

In terms of them being annoying, I don't yet know what to do about that.

My progress so far, and what it requires:
The Community table has an extra field (xp_indicator), for the field which determines if something is a cross-post or not. It defaults to URL, but it could be the title for communities like AskLemmy.
The Post table has an extra field (cross_posts), which is an array of other post ids (Note: this would lock PieFed into using Postgresql)
New posts, for local and ActivityPub, are checked to see if they are a cross-post, and the relevant posts are updated. This also happens for local edits and AP Update. In the DB, the posts in the screenshot looks like:

-[ RECORD 1 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 27
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {28,29,30}
-[ RECORD 2 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 28
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {27,29,30}
-[ RECORD 3 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 29
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {27,28,30}
-[ RECORD 4 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 30
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {27,28,29}

In the UI, posts with cross-posts get an extra icon, which when clicked bring you to another screen (similar to 'other discussions' in Reddit)

In terms of hiding duplicate posts from the feed, I don't yet know. If it was up to the back-end, it would require some extra DB activity that might be unacceptable speed-wise. This update would mean though, that a future API could provide a response similar to Lemmy for posts, so apps/frontends could merge duplicates the same way some of them do for Lemmy. Likewise, if there was a 'Hide posts marked as read' feature, it could regard any post ids in the cross_posts field as also being Read.

I have to wait a few days until the quota on my ngrok account resets (something in the Fediverse went crazy, I'd guess), so I thought I'd share here in the meantime. Also, it means the PR doesn't come out of the blue, and it can be discussed beforehand.

(also: it turns out I can't spell 'minestrone')

For me personally, it makes sense to have one 'announcement'-style community per software as part of the main Fediverse topic, instead of delegating it to a subtopic

As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content. This change appeals to a larger audience interested in such content, creating a vicious cycle where valuable discussions are overshadowed and marginalized by the platform's primary demographic.

It's the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.

• Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
• Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
• New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
• Community becomes "popular" enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
• New users flood in
• Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
• Community now sucks.

It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.

https://lemm.ee/comment/552579

As the platform grows, it becomes increasingly important to have a system that differentiates between different types of content, such as insightful discussions and humorous posts. Without such a system, there is a risk that the platform could become dominated by low-quality content and memes, burying meaningful discussions and discouraging participation from users seeking more substantive interactions.

To address this concern, I propose implementing a nuanced voting system inspired by Slashdot's approach

this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.

That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.

Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you’d have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.

Then finally, they had ‘meta moderation’ where you’d be shown a comment, and asked “would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment” to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.

I don’t think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it’s one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.

edit: a couple other points i liked about it:

Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn’t change the comment’s score.

User karma wasn’t shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.

https://beehaw.org/comment/208569

Normal, Offtopic, Flamebait, Troll, Redundant, Insightful, Interesting, Informative, Funny, Overrated, Underrated

Slashdot had this covered years ago, literally decades.

1. Upvotes limited to +5.
2. Votes categorized: funny, informative, insightful, etc.
3. Number of votes limited per time frame and user karma.
4. Meta-moderation: your votes (up/down both) were subject to voting (correct/incorrect). good score == more upvotes to spend.

It's a pity that Reddit and other sites didn't follow this model.

https://discuss.online/comment/65643

I'm thinking this seems pretty similar to post tagging. Perhaps both could be implemented with the same feature? Post tagging usually needs to be objective but that's indicated in the guidelines, perhaps there could be some subjective tags users could vote to sort the posts based on those tags.

Wikipedia — Slashdot Peer Moderation

I'm excited to see the new meme browsing interface feature in PieFed. I expected PieFed to be yet another Reddit clone using a different software stack and without any innovation. I believe there's an opportunity to take things a step further by blending the best elements of platforms like Reddit and image boards like Safebooru.

I wish there was a platform that was a mix between Reddit and image boards like Safebooru. The problem I have with Reddit is the time-consuming process of posting content; I should be able to post something in a few seconds, but often finding the right community takes longer than actually posting, and you have to decide whether to post in every relevant community or just the one that fits best. In the case of Lemmy, the existence of multiple similar communities across different instances makes this issue even worse.

I like how image boards like Safebooru offer a streamlined posting experience, allowing users to share content within seconds. The real strength of these platforms lies in their curation and filtering capabilities. Users can post and curate content, and others can contribute to the curation process by adding or modifying tags. Leaderboards showcasing top taggers, posters, and commenters promote active participation and foster a sense of community. Thanks to the comprehensive tagging system, finding previously viewed content becomes a breeze, unlike the challenges often faced on Reddit and Lemmy. Users can easily filter out unwanted content by hiding specific tags, something that would require blocking entire communities on platforms like Lemmy.

However, image boards also have their limitations. What I don't like about image boards is that they are primarily suited for image-based content and often lack robust text discussion capabilities or threaded comments, which are essential for fostering meaningful conversations.

Ideally, I envision a platform that combines the best of both worlds: the streamlined posting experience of image boards with the robust text discussion capabilities of platforms like Reddit and Lemmy.

I would be thrilled to contribute to a platform that considered some of the following features:

• Slashdot-Style Nuanced Voting System
• Rethinking Moderation: A Call for Trust Level Systems in the Fediverse
• My Dream Social Media Platform
• [Lemmy backend issues](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues?q=is%3Aissue author%3A8ullyMaguire sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc)
• [Lemmy frontend issues](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue author%3A8ullyMaguire sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc)

I would also like to see more community-driven development, asking users for feedback periodically in a post, and publicly stating what features devs will be working on. Code repositories issue trackers have some limitations. A threaded tree-like comment system is better for discussions, and having upvotes/downvotes helps surface the best ideas. I propose using a lemmy community as the issue tracker instead.

• Embrace Complaint-Driven Development: Let Users Guide You to Better Solutions
• What are your complaints about Lemmy? Developers may want your feedback

Discord is a very popular chat application which has a business model that is partly based around the concept of Server Boosts. In this model, people "boost" (sponsor) the "servers" (chat rooms) they are part of. They do so by paying Discord the parent company, but it unlocks benefits for both the chat rooms they are a member of and want to support (enabling more features for all users of the chat room) and for themselves (they get more features as well as labels that show they support a particular room). Discord is targeted at gamers and therefore Server Boosts are heavily gamified and commercialized, however the core is clever and based around solidarity for the common space that people create, and something other projects could draw inspiration from. Having a way in which people can materially support the communities they are part of can possibly be a path to financial sustainability either for pyfedi the project or for individual instances.

Imagine that an instance can set up an Open Collective / Patreon / Liberapay to receive donations ( a practice which is already relatively common for Mastodon instances). Individual users of a pyfedi instance can support the instance or community with financial contributions and then connect their profile (using oauth) to Open Collective / Patreon / Liberapay to establish a link. Instance admins or community admins can then configure their instance or community to translate those contributions in to particular perks. For instance a label that shows the supporter level on the profile or something that enables more features (character limit? creating communities? posting to exclusive communities? unique emoji? ability to bookmark posts? immedately get rid of "new user" status? allow profile verification like mastodon?).

The model is nested: if a community receives multiple contributions the community management interface could show that and say "hey, pay some of it forward to your hosting instance". Similarly, the hosting instance would have an interface that says "hey this instance is sponsored by x amount, pay some of it forward to the project".

Pyfedi already has a relatively flexible model for "roles" which could be tied to community membership. Similarly, it already works with a gradual permissions system which would make this a good fit. At the same time, this is not only a model towards financial sustainability, but some long-running platforms use paid membership as a way to keep low-quality contributions at bay. See for instance MetaFilter's one time fee.

The crucial thing here is that communities or the software do become proprietary / exclusive necessarily, but that it provides a flexible model to support the work at various levels. It can also be designed in such a way that it is not a "freemium" model, where "advanced" but necessary functionality is pay-walled. Instead, it could be done in such a way that all the necessary features are available, but that additional features that allow the creation of a community identity are unlocked through material support for the project.

Not sure if you noticed but half the threadverse is memes. They're not my thing but I enjoyed putting together the best meme consumption experience I could.

Check it out in this video or go to https://piefed.social/topic/chilling/memes?layout=masonry_wide&sort=hot to use it yourself. Click/tap on any image for a full screen lightbox-style image gallery that you can move through by swiping or using the arrow keys.

Can you think of any improvements?

By default, all posts show up in search results on #PieFed, #Lemmy and #Kbin. But in a first for the threadverse, PieFed has just added some privacy features that Mastodon had for a long time – being searchable is now optional!

Un-tick the “My posts appear in search results” checkbox in your settings and not only will your posts be hidden from the PieFed search on your instance, but on all other PieFed instances too (yes, it federates, but only to PieFed instances).

But wait, there’s more. Google will not add your profile or any of your posts to it’s index (because of the <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> tag used when rendering your posts) AND comments you made on other people’s posts won’t be indexed by Google either (because of the

So if you’re tired of living in a fishbowl, want a bit of privacy or would rather people can’t follow you around, PieFed is here for you.

Or both?

PieFed seems to be the only fedi software that allows you to automatically receive notifications on a post when you comment on it (which i love!) so I'm wondering if this was something custom you built since no one else has been able to ship this.

Good luck with the project!

This is probably just me, but I found INSTALL.md to be a bit confusing.

So, for a fresh install of Ubuntu in a Windows Hyper-V VM, this is the list of steps I took to get something that at least looks like it might be the right thing:

remove unattended-upgrades, and clean up after OS install

sudo systemctl stop unattended-upgrades
sudo apt-get purge unattended-upgrades
sudo apt autoremove

install postgresql 16

sudo apt install ca-certificates pkg-config
wget --quiet -O - [https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc](https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc) | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/](http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/) $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libpq-dev postgresql

install python libs

sudo apt install python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev python3-psycopg2

install redis server

sudo apt install redis-server

install git

sudo apt install git

set up database

sudo -iu postgres psql -c "CREATE USER pyfedi WITH PASSWORD 'pyfedi';"
sudo -iu postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE pyfedi WITH OWNER pyfedi;"

clone PieFed

git clone [https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi.git](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi.git)

cd into pyfedi, set up and enter virtual environment

cd pyfedi
python3 -m venv ./venv
source venv/bin/activate

use pip to install requirements

pip install wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt

edit .env file

cp env.sample .env
nano .env
(change SECRET_KEY to some random sequence of numbers and letters)

initialise database, and set up admin account

flask init-db

run the app

flask run
(open web browser at http://127.0.0.1:5000))
(log in with username and password from admin account)

Maybe this will help someone else (or maybe someone has spotted something that I missed - like I say: it looks right when loaded in a browser, but I'm not 100% sure)

Look for the wee magnifying glass on the main menu. For logged-in users only.