An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated.

Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for almost half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.

He was recently granted a retrial amid suspicions that investigators may have planted evidence that led to his conviction for quadruple murder.

We tried to hold back from coding new stuff in order for things to stabilize but it didn't work out. Maybe next month. Instead, we made a whole bunch of cool things:

rimu

• Detect offline instances and stop federating to them until they come back. feamon helped a lot with this.
• Private voting - see https://piefed.social/post/205362 for background.
• Remove moment.js to ease load on clients. We were using a quite heavy javascript library to format dates on the client side but removing the JS and doing it in Python on the backend instead more than halved the amount of JS we need to send (we're now down to 70 KB, gzipped).
• Post teaser redesign - the most significant visual change since the beginning. Image posts now have a much larger preview image and video posts can be played without going to the post itself. YouTube videos are lazy-loaded just before scrolling into view but only if running on AC power. Devices running off a battery (or like Firefox which do not support the battery API) will only load the video once you visit the post page, not while scrolling the feed.
• Use a connection pool for federation - rather than making a new network connection to send an Activity, PieFed will reuse an existing connection where possible. This has less overhead and results in faster federation.

hendrik

• Better notifications about comments buried deep in a thread

freamon

• Better federation of bans from remote admins.
• use HTML portion of Activity instead of Markdown. Lemmy sends Activitys as both Markdown and HTML. For a long time PieFed would use the Markdown and convert it to HTML for display but now it just uses the HTML that Lemmy provides.
• Image alt text federation
• Backfilling improvements especially with image posts.
• Many misc bugfixes

JollyDevelopment

• New theme - "card shadow" - this quickly became a favorite among the dev team and both freamon and myself use it. It's basically the same as the default except there are shadows behind things, giving a more 3D look to the interface and giving a bit more visual hierarchy. It's nice, try it - https://piefed.social/user/settings
• Admin page - instance administration - there is a table showing all the instances you're federating with and stats for each instance.
• Profile export - PieFed has had the functionality to import settings from a Lemmy profile for a long time but now it's possible to go the other way and export settings from PieFed to Lemmy.
• Add remote form - The form for adding a remote community used to require you to type the community as !whatever@instance.com but now you can give the URL as well, e.g. https://instance.com/c/whatever

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As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!

Takes 2.5 minutes to build up but well worth the wait!

Starts pretty heavy on the vocals but gets proper trancy about 1 minute in.

The original mix of this came out around 2000.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-rally-arrest-taser-media-68fe78b79ae65556c4efc850e142998c

Much more at https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).

As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.

ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.

That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.

To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.

This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

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.

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!