Rimu / is on Nostr

Developer of [PieFed](https://piefed.social ), a sibling of Lemmy & Kbin.

Last Notes

2024-06-29 02:47:32

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:
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
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.

2024-06-27 09:25:59

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](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/86 ), Jeena.
###
“Features for growing healthy communities”
I wrote a blog post describing [some of the admin features that are available](https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/ ) 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](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/activity/monthly ) has never been higher and [the Matrix channel](https://matrix.to/#/#piefed-general:matrix.org ) 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](https://www.patreon.com/PieFed ).

2024-06-02 22:43:59

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.

2024-05-12 06:12:34

- reply

Please see https://join.piefed.social/features/ for some background and comparison ☺️
Your reply came through to me at PieFed. Fingers crossed that this reply reaches you!

2024-05-12 03:32:39

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](https://piefed.social/post/108399 ) 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
<li>recently posted</li>
<li>heavily downvoted</li>
<li>posted by new accounts</li>
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.