A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:

• Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field
• Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.
• Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with
• Added a suggest a topic form

"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.

Also I did a few things:

• Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar
• Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.
• Some mastodon integration bugs
• Wrote a guide about how to install the PieFed mobile app

As you can see we don't have a lot of really big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.

Hello everyone,

As I discovered that Piefed allows to actually have a "New comments" filter (it's "Active": https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/275#issuecomment-2152580)), I have been giving it another try.

It's quite nice so far, but I haven't found how to block a community from the website. The three dots menu for a community allows to block the author, the domain, the instance, but not the community itself. Am I missing something?

Just a quick note to recognize that the first lines of PieFed code were published on the 28th July 2023, just over a year ago. Since then there have been 1400+ changes made by 9 people, involving adding 88,000 lines of code and removing 28,000 lines. The issue queue has 98 open and 99 closed issues.

While join.piefed.social went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that piefed.social went live on 4th January 2024.

Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.

What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!

attempting to make sense of the #Piefed logo

@piefed_meta

People new to federation are wandering elsewhere. If the logged-in screen is anything like what I see as a guest, I'm not surprised. I found this through my own instance's search feature.

Over the last 3 weeks there have been significant contributions from h3ndrik and myself.

H3ndrik

• Many many under the hood improvements. Simplifying code & improving performance.
• Better lightbox
• Improve post teaser layout

Rimu

• Mod log which shows all moderator actions

• The “Rational discourse toolkit” block in the bottom right is now optional - instance admins can turn it off in the settings.

• Staff role - some admin tasks can be delegated to a supporting role which can do limited things. Which operations the supporting role can do can be controlled with checkboxes. This is nearly complete and just needs a bit more elbow grease.
  

• A.gup.pe integration - These are a kind of basic community / group function built on Mastodon. About 20% of new posts on piefed.social are coming from Mastodon, mostly via a.gup.pe. These groups include

  • https://piefed.social/c/photography@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/actuallyautistic@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/auscovid19@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/fedibikes_de@a.gup.pe (German)
  • https://piefed.social/c/classicalmusic@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/histodons@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/actuallyadhd@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/bookstodon@a.gup.pe

• Community wikis - moderators can create pages that serve as a resource for the community. Each page has revisions that can be reverted to. See a demo at https://join.piefed.social/vlog/piefed_wikis.mp4.

A new contributor, h3ndrik, has made significant improvements to the filtering options for NSFW/NSFL content and I've also added some options to the same form which control when comments are collapsed or hidden.

Previously, NSFW was a yes or no option but now you can choose to have it unblurred, blurred, semi-transparent or entirely hidden.

The defaults values for collapse and hide are:

• when a comment has a score of -10 it is shown but in a collapsed state. You can click on it to expand it and read it. This has always been the case but now you can change that threshold.
• a score of -20 means the comment will not be shown. There is no way to make it visible and no indication that it was ever posted and no temptation to click on it.

You might want to review those settings to make sure they're suitable for you: https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters. If you don't want comments hidden then remove the -20 from that field or set it to -1000.

For the last few weeks our focus has been on fixing bugs and improving stability. There have been 3 people who have launched new PieFed instances, bringing the total to 4, which brought up a slew of new issues and feature requests. Close collaboration with those new instance admins yielded many positive improvements and a slew of PRs to merge.

Despite this “under the hood” focus there were a few quite visible features added & changes made:

Bookmark (save) posts and comments

Click the three dots on any post or comment and you’ll see a Bookmark menu item. Access your bookmarks using the menu item on the Account menu. Saved posts are sorted based on when they were saved, not when the post was made.

Announcement banner on home page

I’ll link to this post from the home page so you can see it in action.

Japanese language

Translation is complete enough to be usable, thanks to karasugawasu

Hashtags have a RSS feed

Topics and Communities have had a feed for a while but now hashtags do too. Thanks to Dave Lane for the idea.

Automatic archive.ph link on some link posts

Some websites are especially important and really need an archive link. When the poster does not provide one, PieFed will add it.

Ctrl + Enter to submit a post or comment

While typing a new comment you can hit this key combination to submit the comment. Thanks for reminder about this forgotten issue, Jeena.

“Features for growing healthy communities”

I wrote a blog post describing some of the admin features that are available for rooting out bad apples.

Some people felt I had gone too far, perhaps rightly so.

General thoughts

It is encouraging to see more instances sprouting up and to have code contributions from even more people. Activity in the repository has never been higher and the Matrix channel is becoming quite chatty!

I am traveling overseas while working my day job so it is difficult to put as much effort into PieFed as I have in the past. When I return home in August there will probably be a large chunk of paid work to do alongside my regular job so I expect to be quite busy then too. Fortunately there is a trend towards me doing less coding myself and more merging in other people’s code so PieFed development will continue on regardless.

PieFed is entirely free and open source and has not received any grants or funding. If you find it useful and would like to support the project, please consider donating using Patreon.

TLDR: The main reason was Lemmy hogging sever resources.

Last year, during the Reddit 2023 API controversy I finally deleted my account and moved on to Lemmy. Here’s a look at my experiences and why I eventually decided to switch to PieFed.

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

https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies/star-trek
https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies/star-wars

https://piefed.social/topic/random
https://piefed.social/topic/chilling/comics
https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft/photography
https://piefed.social/topic/regional/brazil
https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome/cats

language-based content

https://piefed.social/topic/regional/europe/french
https://piefed.social/topic/regional/europe/german
https://piefed.social/topic/regional/europe/portuguese

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