Trans people have a lot to deal with and there’s many of them on the fediverse so I’ve taken special care to ensure their voices influence the development of PieFed and have built some features with them in mind.
Pronouns
PieFed displays each person’s pronouns after their name, if they have provided them. Below is a post I made recently, showing mine.
On other platforms people achieve the same thing by putting their pronouns into their display name which achieves a lot of the same thing but is clunky and often looks out of place. PieFed reads pronouns from the profile’s Custom Fields, which federate with Mastodon.
Reporting transphobia
When reporting rule-infringing content one of the preset reasons for reporting is “transphobia”. Every PieFed instance supports and encourages people to report transphobia when they see it – this is not something an admin can opt out of unless they edit the code themselves.
Theme
PieFed comes with a theme that uses the Trans Pride flag colors. I’m not a designer so it’s a bit garish – help wanted!
Logo
piefed.social, the PieFed flagship instance, is currently sporting a Trans Pride flag style logo to support of the trans community on Lemmy which came under attack recently.
At other times the PieFed.social logo has been switched to flags of various oppressed groups or anti-imperialist movements such as Palestine, Ukraine, Tibet and others.
Safety
As a frequently discriminated against minority, trans people really benefit from safety, privacy and effective moderation tools, another strong area for PieFed.
- Abuse often comes through the direct messaging system, so it is possible to turn it off or only allow DMs from people on the same instance, or only from trusted instances.
- Moderation and admin tools on PieFed are far more advanced than similar platforms, enabling the provision of much higher degrees of safety with much less effort and admin burnout.
- Transphobia and fascism are often intertwined so PieFed’s anti-fascist features support and enhance the safety of the trans community on the fediverse. I’ll do another blog post on that facet of things soon.
It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface
What’s been done so far are all quite obvious things. Any ideas for what comes next?