PieFed
Open Source Federated Forum
PieFed
Open Source Federated Forum
piefedadmin
Demo: https://piefed.social
Matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/#piefed-community:matrix.org
Watch out for this footgun in the Python requests library
requests is a very widely used Python package, used for making HTTP requests. As you can imagine, a project like PieFed does a lot of HTTP and so I reached for the most widely used tool for the job, thinking…
PieFed features for growing healthy communities
Most software similar to PieFed delegates the job of maintaining the health of communities to the moderators of those communities. This frees up the instance administrators to focus on technical issues and leave a lot of the politics and social…
Handling large bursts of POST requests to your ActivityPub inbox, using a buffer in Nginx
Fediverse traffic is pretty bursty and sometimes there will be a large backlog of Activities to send to your server, each of which involves a POST. This can hammer your instance and overwhelm the backend’s ability to keep up. Nginx…
PieFed privacy: control your search visibility
By default, all posts show up in search results on #PieFed, #Lemmy and #Kbin. But in a first for the threadverse, PieFed has just added some privacy features that Mastodon had for a long time – being searchable is now…
Moderation & the design of social platforms
Recently @siderea wrote a fantastic thread about social homogeneity, moderation, the design of social platforms and what they could be. They covered a lot of ground and I can’t respond to it all so I’ll just pick some highlights I…
How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance?
For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote…
Technical performance of each fediverse platform
Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights which gives a website some metrics to assess how well it is put together and how fast it loads. There are a lot of technical details but in general green scores are good,…
Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
Us sitting here with our fiber internet and recent model phones have it pretty good. But the “i” in iPhone stands for “inequality”. Most people in the world still have pretty bad internet and old/slow phones. For a platform to…
Changing PieFed’s appearance with themes
As of today, PieFed includes a ‘theme engine’ which makes it easier for people with low or no Python skills to change how PieFed looks and behaves. Let’s start with the app/templates/themes directory in the PieFed codebase. In this directory…
An introduction to the PieFed codebase
Very often when encountering an open source codebase you are left on your own to figure it out. Documentation is often limited to installation / compilation instructions. With the following video I am trying to ease the onboarding process for…
Optimizing image communities: introducing grid view (masonry) for improved image display
There are quite a few communities that are entirely image posts so presenting them as a vertical list of thumbnails doesn’t really make the best of what is there. To improve on that I’ve made use of the common web…