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.

  • Tundra_Lifeform@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    Fuck me, I’ve been on Piefed for literally 5 minutes and let me tell you, it’s so relieving knowing that I can write (this comment included) without being traced right down to the marrow in my bones. Coming next month I’ll start to donate, excellent work, guys

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
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    3 days ago

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

  • Zombie@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    I don’t understand what the purpose of the plain http is, can anybody explain to me please?

    • wjs018@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      For really, really poor internet connections, http can be a lot more performant because it has a lot less handshaking that needs to happen. This kind of use case is something rimu cares a lot about since he has previously had to deal with super awful internet connections in the past. It is a very specific use case and outside of that kind of case, it wouldn’t be recommended. You can see that both http and https versions of the site can coexist, so it is an option for those that need it.

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    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/

      • wjs018@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        The pinned posts still obey some of the visibility rules of any other post. So, in this case, piefed.ca has Popular as the default sort on the instance. That means that the community that is home to those posts must have the Posts can be popular box checked in the admin settings for that community:

        admin screen

        I can’t confirm that this is the issue, but I was able to confirm with a dev instance that local-pinned posts do show up for anonymous users using the popular sort when that box is checked and don’t when it is unchecked.

        • Otter@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          It could be, where would I find that setting? I didn’t see it in the community settings.

          I do see the “popular” column is ticked on admin/communities for those communities, but I don’t see a page that has something like your screenshot

          • wjs018@piefed.social
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            2 days ago

            In /admin/communities, the far right column has an Edit link. That is where you have some additional settings, including checkboxes that can include/exclude communities from your instance’s Popular and All views. You want to make sure that both of these are checked (they are down below the language settings):

            checkboxes

            • Otter@lemmy.ca
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              2 days ago

              Thanks! That fixed it for our piefed.ca/c/main community. The lemmy.ca/c/main community’s post still doesn’t show up, but we can plan our announcements to get around that in the meantime

              • wjs018@piefed.social
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                2 days ago

                Even logged in and with filters so that the post is visible, I don’t see the post in the piefed community as pinned. Could it have been unpinned when you did your db reload?

                If it is pinned on your side, then it must be a bug of some kind.

                • Otter@lemmy.ca
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                  2 days ago

                  Oh we actually unpinned the main@piefed.ca post after I confirmed it was working and made that comment. It’s the other one from main@lemmy.ca that is still pinned, but doesn’t show up for users that aren’t logged in

  • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net
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    3 days ago

    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

    Alts Georg is an outlier and should not be included in the average alts per users figure

    Auto-delete of replies on remote instances when reply author has been blocked by parent content author

    I don’t really understand this. So if I block [email protected] and then he replies to My posts on piefed.social, piefed.social will delete his comments? But instance.net won’t?

  • Blaze@piefed.zip
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    3 days ago

    Great updates, especially the pronouns!

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

    @[email protected] as you requested a while ago

  • Quokka@quokk.au
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    2 days ago

    I don’t know how you do, so much so often. Thank you for everything Rimu and other PieFed dev’s who names I haven’t memorised!

  • HubertManne@piefed.social
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    3 days ago

    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.socialOPM
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      3 days 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.

      • walden@wetshav.ing
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        2 days ago

        At least in our case we’re divided about 50/50 between Lemmy and PieFed. I could force people to PieFed by deleting Lemmy, but that wouldn’t be nice 😀

        Private federation would be incredible but I’ve already heard you say it would be a large amount of work, so I’m not holding my breath!

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPM
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      3 days ago

      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.socialOPM
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        3 days 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.