this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
70 points (93.8% liked)

PieFed Meta

2446 readers
102 users here now

Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.

Wiki

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A big thank you to those who contributed to making this release, translating, writing documentation, providing emotional support and promoting PieFed! None of this would happen without you all.

New hotness

  • Pronouns - when you put pronouns into Extra Fields on your profile that is used as a flair in all communities where you haven't set a flair yet
  • Private communities - no federation, only certain roles (depends on the community) can invite new people. Posts inside are only visible to members.
  • Mastodon can now quote-boost PieFed posts
  • Plain http web UI (no SSL required) with SSL used during federation - see http://retro.piefed.com/
  • Downvotes can be turned off completely in a community, not just instance-wide
  • Admins can sticky a post on the home page, not just mods in their communities
  • Auto-delete of replies on remote instances when reply author has been blocked by parent content author (only works in PieFed communities due to a ActivityPub limitation)
  • On home page when showing number of replies a post has, calculate the sum of the replies on all cross-posts and display that
  • New users can only do 3 posts in their first 24h, to reduce floods of posts by that guy who keeps deleting his accounts and making new ones

More good stuff

  • Improve emoji federation compatibility
  • Change order of emoji in picker to present most-used ones first
  • Daily time limit on usage to help people use PieFed less (released in 1.5.2)
  • A way to report posts that need to be tagged as AI generated
  • Better accessibility
  • Improved handling of bold and italics in markdown parsing
  • Don't accept votes from people the author has blocked
  • Admins can resend email address verification email
  • Admins can add notes to instances to keep track of defederation reasons, etc
  • Search form has been simplified
  • Option for admins to disable the em-dash detector
  • Multiple minor bugfixes and security enhancements

To upgrade from 1.5.x

git pull  
git checkout v1.6.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. 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 command: part of the db container which tunes postgresql for performance. Adjust the numbers for your system.

This time the database migrations will not take long.

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.

all 40 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] otter@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Admins can sticky a post on the home page, not just mods in their communities

Nice!

We've been using the announcement field, but that doesn't show up for people on apps. This should be better :)

Swapped it out now: https://piefed.ca/

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 hours ago

Odd, I can only see the pinned posts when signed in @rimu@piefed.social

Right now we have two pinned posts, one from lemmy.ca and one from a local only piefed.ca community. Both show up nicely when signed in, neither show up when signed out

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 hours ago

Looks like a great update. Very cool that communities have the granular ability to disable down votes.

[–] mintiefresh@piefed.social 20 points 7 hours ago

Always in awe at the speed of development of this project.

Thank you for all your hard work.

[–] Jerry@feddit.online 11 points 6 hours ago

Always getting better, by leaps and bounds. Thank you, devs, for all the hard work and great ideas!

[–] walden@wetshav.ing 15 points 7 hours ago

Nice. Thanks for the hard work. PieFed is great.

[–] YoiksAndAway@piefed.zip 8 points 6 hours ago

I'm glad I made piefed my daily driver. Thanks for all your hard work.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

mmmm. private communities are nice but without federation it means they have to cajole anyone they want to join to make an account on a particular server.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 6 points 5 hours ago

Yes. The intended use-case is something like a community group that runs their own instance, or an admin team coordinating among themselves. Those people are going to be on the same instance.

[–] squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyi 5 points 6 hours ago

Thank you for all your work. 1.5 is just three weeks old. Impressive how much development happened since then.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Great updates, especially the pronouns!

Downvotes can be turned off completely in a community, not just instance-wide

@snoopy@tarte.nuage-libre.fr as you requested a while ago

[–] Snoopy@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 1 points 1 hour ago

Merci, parfait ! i will desactivate downvote in most of my communities. I hate downvote with a deep passion. :)

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I woul really prefer people I block to not see my stuff as if they blocked me so that they could not vote. I don't block people needlessly but if I do I sorta want them out of my federated life.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

That has serious down-the-line consequences though.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

yeah its my pie in the sky want. I know its not easy but since two people can block each other I know its not impossible either.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I meant people will block to echochamber themselves

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

This system exists on Reddit, and this is an example of how it can be gamed.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Oh thats not the same. Its stops replies. I want it to be completely bilateral. I don't see their posts or replies and they don't see mine. It only stops replies because they would not see something to reply to. It would effectively make it so if someone blocks someone it effectively shadow blocks them from that person like they blocked them. Mutually assure blockstruction.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, Reddit also blocks visibility too. You would see [unavailable] if someone has blocked you on Reddit. This can cause problems highlighted in that post.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

ok because it sounded like it blocked replies which sounded like they still saw the content. I don't even see how they would make a reply to something they can't see. maybe im not getting the article. EDITED - you know I should say probably moderaters should not have content of their communities blocked to them but yeah now it sounds real complicated as you would need the shadow block flag but also some sort of mod override flag for posts to their community. actually now that I say it, it does not feel as bad as I thought at first. Still. more complication.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

They wouldn't see posts by users that have blocked them, but the problem is that a malicious account could block people who would call them out and then post misinformation, safe in the knowledge that anyone who might challenge them are blocked.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 5 hours ago

Yeah sorry I edited quickly but you are responding quickly. The issue I see is the mods. Those are formal positions. I don't really see a problem with the blocking of people who are good at calling out. I guess when I envisioned it I just assumed mods could always see an admin level of a community that would be everything. Even stuff other mods removed.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

FYI https://retro.piefed.social/ has HSTS enabled, so browsers refuse to load it

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Sorry the correct link is http://retro.piefed.com/. I'll update the post. Beware your browser will try to switch to https instead because they prefer it so you probably won't get the full rawdogging PieFed experience unless you change your browser setting to stop that.

My fingers are used to .social! I also own the .com to stop someone else nabbing it but couldn't use retro.piefed.social because of SSL on piefed.social...

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 6 hours ago

I still need to finish the Dillo theme, which will make PieFed compatible with roughly Firefox 3+. That'll compliment the http mode nicely. This is super niche so just something I potter away on occasionally.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

@die4ever@retrolemmy.com I assume this is your instance?

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

No it's a subdomain off piefed.social and is linked to above, it's rimu's i assume

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 6 hours ago

That makes sense, thanks

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

no, it'd be part of piefed.social, likely just a different frontend

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Oh right, read too fast. Sorry for the ping!

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

no problem, I'm always on here anyways lol

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 3 points 6 hours ago

And it's always nice to see you around! 😄

[–] julian@activitypub.space 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Testing custom emoji :face_with_rolling_eyes: :sweat_smile:

Cool news about private communities! I'd love to unlock inter-compatibility between instances so that can finally be federated... lots to do in between then and now.

Hopefully we can work together on that soon?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I couldn't think of a way to federate privately, when we don't know which software is at the other end. In the current political environment there are going to be groups of people who simply can't take the risk.

For example with mastodon's followers-only notes - that only gives some privacy because there is massive social pressure on any fedi implementation that doesn't follow the gentleman's agreement we have to hide those notes. That fails when implementations have bugs, are under the control of ICE, or whatever.

It's tricky! Happy to bounce ideas around on it sometime. Maybe encryption...

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

probably a whitelist of instances (by hostname) is the only way? each community has its own whitelist set by its mods?

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 0 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

heck if I had an instance I would limit new accounts to not posting for a week or a month if I could. I don't get people feeling the need to start posting like crazy.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

User intake would drop through the floor at that point. It's fine to make a welcome post or a post in a community you're interested in, but 3+ posts in a single first day is sus as hell - and Lemmy's ongoing problem here prompted this.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 5 hours ago

yeah I think its totally a personality thing so for me its foreign to want to engage before getting the lay of the land. Im not sure how long before I started posting on kbin. Now im a hypocrite to because the thing is that once you have been on the federation then it would get quite annoying if I moved to a new account for new hotness or maybe for censorship reasons and then could not post because I would not think of it as a new place but my account would be a newbie account. So yeah my thing was more like about feeling. I could do 24 hours standing on my head though :)