this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025

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PieFed 1.2 is released (codeberg.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by rimu@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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UI

Bottom sticky menu on mobile
Instance-chooser during registration, displaying info about all other instances
3D rotating tag cloud for communities with lots of hashtags
Explore menu, with feeds and topics, separate from the Community menu
Translation function for posts written in languages you can't understand, uses any LibreTranslate server.
Advanced search filters on /communities table
Show poll results without voting
Nicer formatting on quotes
Consistent image thumbnail size in post teasers in compact mode
Communities list shows number of active users not subscriber count
PWA uses instance logo instead of default PieFed one
Slideshow doesn't bug out after a few dozen photos like it used to
Improve search results by weighting post titles more than bodies
Mods can set nsfw and nsfl the same way they set flair - with a popup menu in the post list
Import saved posts & comments and user notes when importing settings
NSFW-specific functionality, like R18 agreement upon first visit, video auto-play.

Posting

New type of post - events, with federation
Remind me about a post or comment in the future
Markdown parsing improvements - em-dashes, link syntax, subscript
Preview markdown while writing a top-level comment
Support CMYK images without mangling their colorspace when resizing

Admin & backend

Log in with LDAP creds stored in LDAP server (in addition to earlier LDAP functionality which stores creds in LDAP server). Helpful for Yunohost-based deployments (coming soon).
Modlog filtering
Account passwords stored in Lemmy format (bcrypt) can be used to log in (this is in preparation for the day when Lemmy instances are converted to PieFed instances)
Instance shutdown process - tell all other instances to stop federating immediately.
Restrict NSFW access in specified countries (e.g. UK)
See which users share an IP address
Really Simple Licensing
When a new community is made a post is automatically created in !newcommunities@lemmy.world
Automatically add remote communities mentioned in !newcommunities@lemmy.world

API

Automatically-updating Swagger docs to ease frontend development
Include crosspost count in Post json
Return thumbnail width/height information with post
post/replies endpoint which returns nested JSON, better than comments/list

Federation

Federate flair changes properly
When blocking an instance, block it in more places e.g. community lists in sidebar
Context property on comments and posts to make it easier for NodeBB to backfill
FEP 3b86 - activity intents

PieFed.social news

When a.gup.pe shut down, the photography group became https://piefed.social/c/photography which is doing well. Snoopy, Skavau and wjs018 are now admins in addition to rimu.
https://crust.piefed.social/ is our new testing and development instance.

To upgrade

git pull  
git checkout v1.2.x  
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

all 49 comments

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[–] squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

Helpful for Yunohost-based deployments (coming soon)

Very nice. Looking forward to this. I was trying to selfhost PieFed but failed multiple times. Yunohost could be great for easier selfhosting.

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

wjs018 [is] now admin

Hey! That's me! I just wanted to provide some thoughts on this release...

Most of my dev time for this release went into backend api stuff. Specifically, this point:

Automatically-updating Swagger docs to ease frontend development

So, most of the regular users probably won't really notice (unless it breaks your favorite mobile app). However, I just wanted to send some thanks to both rimu and freamon for the work that they did in finishing this up. Also, to thank the cadre of mobile app/frontend developers that provided input, tested changes, and pointed out problems along the way. It was a lot of work that is completely transparent to most people, at least it hopefully is transparent.

Going forward, the newly schematized api should be much easier for developers interacting with it, and we shouldn't be introducing breaking changes at this point. I wouldn't yet call the api complete or mature, but it is at least a stable base from which we can expand, and the most common types of interactions should be implemented at this point.

The other feature I wanted to highlight is this one:

Federate flair changes properly

This was actually a lot of work for such a short bullet point. Basically, we rewrote the post flair system so that it federated out as part of the community in the activitypub messages passed between instances. What this means for users is that communities located on piefed 1.2+ instances should have their full flair list visible on remote instances, regardless of whether the flair has been used or not. For example, if a community mod changes the name of a flair, it will automatically be updated on every instance and every post that it was attached to as that flair edit is federated out.

This work also laid the groundwork for post flair being interoperable with what lemmy is planning to do with their 1.0 release. Their work is still ongoing, so it might yet change, but when we were restructuring how flair was implemented on our end, we tried to make it look like what they are currently planning so that it can hopefully be a seamless integration when lemmy 1.0 is released.

Admins: I also added a function for remote communities that lets you "fix up from remote" located near the bottom of the sidebar. Basically, if you have a remote community on your instance that has some extraneous pre-1.2 flair hanging around that could use some cleaning up, then you can hit that button and it should phone back home to the community's home instance and kind of reset things for you to bring everything in sync.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yup, in my post I highlighted the things I thought the general public would find most compelling but probably the chunkiest parts of this release were rebuilding the API and rebuilding the flair federation. This is all a bit esoteric and behind the scenes but were vital to get done.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 18 points 1 week ago

The 'remind me about this post/comment' feature is in the 3 dot menu:

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

New type of post - events

Whoa...

[–] rimu@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Here is an example event!

https://piefed.social/post/1279049

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wow!

Will there be federation with Mobilizón?

Will PieFed get a Jitsi?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago

Yes, eventually. I ensured the JSON structure of the event is the same as Mobilizón to make it easier in future but the details of how to send the data hasn't been sorted out yet.

If the office hours become a regular thing then a Jitsi would be set up, yeah.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

3D tag cloud - https://piefed.social/tags/community/127

Click on a tag to see posts.

The positioning of the tags is not random, their distance from each other depends on how often the tags are used together. For example fediverse and piefed are often used together.

Most tag clouds you'll see around piefed.social are not based on very many posts so this clumping does not happen very obviously, yet.

[–] klu9@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Would it be possible to have a community setting to allow a choice?

alphabetical tag list (like before)
rotating tag cloud

[–] rimu@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes I'd be fine with that but have other priorities at the moment.

[–] sga@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago

i remember in late 2000s and early 2010s, this was the peak design one could get (i think wiki homepage used to/maybe still today has it)

[–] rimu@piefed.social 11 points 1 week ago

Translation feature example: Go to https://piefed.social/post/1261266 and then click on the globe icon at the bottom of the post.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago

Wow.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago

Bottom menu on mobile:

You can get rid of it if you like - https://piefed.social/post/1278887

[–] feddit-admin@feddit.online 8 points 1 week ago

Excellent and impressive! A big THANK YOU to all the devs!

[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Liking the new thumbnail positioning.

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago

Thanks! Fixing that in compact mode was on my to do list for quite some time.

[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 8 points 1 week ago

The bottom bar on mobile looks great; way easier than reaching for the top of the screen to get to the communities link.

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Suggestion: in case of breaking API changes maintain old endpoints for a bit? This caught me off guard as a Voyager user this morning because versioning suggests that Piefed is stable (1.x) and that this was a minor release (x.0 -> x.2), yet it broke down completely.

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

Piefed version != api version. The api is still listed as alpha and uses alpha endpoints, so changes are to be expected on that front. For the past couple of weeks, we have been making posts to !piefed_api@piefed.social about changes coming in 1.2 as we have been working through them.

The devs have been really responsive as well. If I am honest, I expected a lot more problems than what has appeared in the wake of the changes. This release included a huge overhaul to the api to help make it more stable for the future, and as part of that included quite a number of changes where things were really inconsistent before. There shouldn't be breaking changes like are in this release going forward as we are working from a much more solid foundation now.

[–] BruisedMoose@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"breaking API changes"

Oh, so that's probably why I can't comment from Interstellar today?

[–] misk@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I can browse normally now (phew!) but in Voyager pretty much everything stopped working for a time.

Sent from my Voyager

[–] BruisedMoose@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

comment from Interstellar

Edit: And now it's working again. I swear I just got an error 10 minutes ago.

[–] Sunshine@piefed.ca 7 points 1 week ago

@Shadow@lemmy.ca @shadow@piefed.ca

Please consider updating the Piefed instance.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I think this would be much easier to read with just a little more markdown (on here and on GitHub)

Bottom sticky menu on mobile
Instance-chooser during registration, displaying info about all other instances
3D rotating tag cloud for communities with lots of hashtags
Explore menu, with feeds and topics, separate from the Community menu
Translation function for posts written in languages you can't understand, uses any LibreTranslate server.
Advanced search filters on /communities table
Show poll results without voting

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

next time!

[–] julian@activitypub.space 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

benpate@mastodon.social activity! intents! what!!

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago

haha

really not a big deal, just a bit of extra info in the webfinger response:

webfinger_data['links'].append({
              "rel": "https://w3id.org/fep/3b86/Create",
              "template": f"https://{current_app.config['SERVER_NAME']}/share?url=" + '{object}'
            })

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Firstly, thank you all for the hard work this is a lot and great to see!!

Any idea when the ability to cross post any post would be added? https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/996

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Quite soon, probably. It should be in the next version.

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Amazing thanks

[–] Snoopy@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

(If you are impatient you can bypass it using some app as the latest version of thunder)

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago

You really are that guy.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When a new community is made a post is automatically created in !newcommunities@lemmy.world

Why? I'm sometimes creating just test communities to play with and then I delete them, Is this opt in or opt out?

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago

It is a checkbox in the community creation form. Similarly, the auto-discovery of new communities is also a checkbox on the admin/federation page.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bottom sticky menu on mobile

Urgh, this one is really not aligned with how I want to use PieFed on my phone, I don't understand who would be the user for it:

Home - is already available by clicking on the logo or name
Explore - is already available in the hamburger menu with one click
Communities - is already available in the hamburger menu with one click
Settings - is already available in the hamburger menu with one click

What problem are we trying to solve with this menu which covers valuable space on a the already small screen?

That's the first think I have to hide in my custom theme.

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

A lot of people didn't like the hamburger menu (see here and elsewhere in this thread). It should be easy to disable, just a line of css (see here). Also, the hamburger menu is still there, so disabling the bottom nav bar still lets you use the interface the same way you are used to.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I like the suggestion of the person who created the post in the first link much more to clean upp the hamburger menu instead of adding a second one which is always visible.

I'm glad I can disable it, I already figured it by myself too.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago

I'd very much like to clean up the hamburger too. Patches welcome ;-)

[–] Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Congrats!

[–] julian@activitypub.space 4 points 1 week ago

jesseplusplus@mastodon.social context collections :ok_hand:

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 4 points 1 week ago

Looking real snazzy. I might need to subscribe to a Piefed instance in the future.

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 4 points 1 week ago

this is in preparation for the day when Lemmy instances are converted to PieFed instances

I've been watching this bug report, when it's easy I think I'll look at migrating to piefed

[–] klu9@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Great work, thanks!

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

Congratulations on all the devs for this release!