PieFed
Your Ad‑Free Forum for Real Community
PieFed
Your Ad‑Free Forum for Real Community
How PieFed federates “flair” on posts and comments
On the surface flair on PieFed functions very similar to how it does on Reddit – on posts they’re community-specific tags that can be used to filter posts in a community. People can also add flair to themselves which is…
How PieFed federates feeds (aka multi-reddits or multi-comms)
Recently PieFed added a way to group communities into collections of related communities, which we called a “Feed”. Unlike Topics, Feeds are federated, can be created by anyone and can be public or private. There are now hundreds of feeds…
Tuning PostgreSQL for PieFed
Every instance will be different but generally speaking the default settings that PostgreSQL has will be Ok to start with but once the instance has been running for a few months the amount of data being stored will mean things…
PieFed 2025 Roadmap
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,…