PieFed Meta

It's been 6 weeks since 1.0 and we've merged in 80+ PRs and closed as many issues. A third of the issues originally intended for v1.2 are already completed and so they are included in 1.1 instead.

Some signs of maturity

There are now 32 PieFed instances, serving 1750+ MAU. Voyager, Summit, Blorp and Interstellar are mobile apps that connect to PieFed.

From now on https://piefed.social/ will change from following the main development branch of the repo and instead stay on v1.1 until v1.2 is released. This will provide a more stable experience for people using the instance and allow for wilder experiments on the development branch. I recommend all other instances do the same.

It will also put less pressure on other instances to keep up with piefed.social. A new instance will be created soon that will use the dev branch and serve as a staging instance.

To upgrade

To upgrade from 1.0.x (or switch to 1.1 from the main branch):

git pull  
git checkout v1.1.x  
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh  

Bare-metal installations should add these two lines at the end of celery_worker.py:

from app.shared.tasks import maintenance  
from app.shared.tasks import follows, likes, notes, deletes, flags, pages, locks, adds, removes, groups, users, blocks  

Also the systemd configuration for celery has changed, see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/INSTALL.md#celery. NB both celery.service and celeryd are slightly different.

Highlights of 1.1

Most instances have been on the dev branch anyway so they will already have these:

You can set a default comment sort, for when viewing a post.

LDAP support, so people can use their piefed.social login for chat.piefed.social and translate.piefed.social

More Ajax throughout, creating a more fluid UI.

Better notifications, with types and which are removed if the post they're notifying about is deleted.

Private votes are just non-federated votes.

Popup tooltips all over the place.

New login methods:

• Mastodon
• Discord

Hashtags in community side pane, e.g. this community

Daily maintenance tasks execute in parallel, which is a lot faster.

Batched ActivityPub federation that will significantly improve federation performance between PieFed instances

Filter out posts based on a keyword search of community name.

Reduce deadlocks and improve DB performance

• use redis for locking.
• extensive refactors to stop connection leakage.

Load comments using ajax when there are > 100 on a post, making the initial loading of a post quicker.

Automatic post archiving of old posts, to slow DB growth and reduce operating costs. Post body and comments are saved in S3 as JSON instead of in the DB.

Show/hide text inside password fields, making confusion during login less common.

Mods can lock comments and their children.

A lot of improvements to scheduled posts.

Several improvements in the markdown to html parsing.

Upgrade to Flask 3.

Swagger for API developers (in progress).

API: new json serialization lib that is 10x faster.

API: Get topics & feeds endpoints. Replacement for comments/list endpoint.

Things planned for 1.2

An instance chooser during registration - no separate instance choosing website needed

Optional post approval process for mods

Communities populated by a RSS feed.

Remind me

AI content filter

Event post type which federates with Friendica and Mobilizon