This is our biggest release yet, including more finished tasks than any of our previous ones. Below is a summary of the highlights:
What’s new
Posts & communities can be labelled as AI-generated and people can choose to hide all posts tagged that way. Very similar to how NSFW works.
Comments can be marked as an Answer, like on StackOverflow.
React to posts and comments with an emoji.
Hide an individual post from yourself, without blocking the author.
PieFed is now in the Yunohost app store, making initial setup easier.
When banned from a remote instance you cannot make local-only posts in their communities.
Honeypot to automatically IP ban badly-behaved crawlers.
https://lemmy-federate.com/ integration, making PieFed communities get more exposure.
“Share on Mastodon” menu item on posts.
Vastly improve docs for new developers, see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs.
Language selection is more visible during post creation.
Tag clouds can also be viewed as a list of tags.
View post/comment markdown.
Bot accounts are not included in community statistics.
Footnote support in markdown.
Polish translation.
Better HTTP caching, which reduces dependence on Cloudflare.
Bugs
Passkey fixes.
Polls can now have up to 15 options.
User profile performance improved.
Don’t allow bypassing minimum username length and post title with whitespace.
Polls and Events can no longer be posted into Lemmy communities.
API
Additional user settings can be set through the api, including Extra Fields.
Fetch url metadata.
Sort comments by controversial.
Comment search now works.
Hashtags.
Events.
Polls.
Emoji reactions on posts and comments.
See https://piefed.social/c/piefed_api for more details.
To upgrade
To upgrade from 1.3.x:
git pull
git checkout v1.4.x
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh
There is a big database migration that will take a few minutes to run. How long will vary depending on how old your instance is - older instances will have more content to process. It took ~25 minutes on piefed.social so expect it to be less than that.
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.
It’s not about “preferring big tech”. It’s all the societal harm that big tech causes on everyone because their source of profit is not aligned with the interests of their direct customers.
I don’t care about “changing habits”. I just don’t want people that I care about being exploited and manipulated like that.
I will say something that I know will be grossly misunderstood, but I will try to make the case: I want to have influencers on the Fediverse, I want to see corporations setting up their instances and pushing their stupid corporate PR bullshit. I want to see phone companies selling data plans with ActivityPub accounts. I want to have the equivalent of LinkedIn lunatics, and personal coaches and all that crap that one can find on Instagram/TikTok/Facebook.
You know why? Because that would mean that the Fediverse is relevant. It would mean that we have enough people here that it can not be ignored anymore.
If ya want people to stop using big tech, you have to change their habits. You can’t change it, they have built their network, found old friends…maybe one day but most of them aren’t attracted by the fediverse.
How do you handle this part with the above one (exploited, manipulated) ? I don’t want them. I will leave or ask for defederation.
I enjoy this place as it is. It doesn’t need to be bigger. Once you remove it, i think plenty people will leave and create their own forum elsewhere as we did for Reddit.
It’s one thing to have systemic corruption and exploitation (what Big Tech does), it’s another to have endemic issues (bad actors, small-scale scammers, etc). The former can not be neutralized by individual/localized action, the latter can.