Open source runs on good faith
When we talk about free and open source software it’s usually in technical terms – the source is available, anyone can inspect it, fork it, change it or contribute. But all those things only work and make sense in the…
PieFed
Your Ad‑Free Forum for Real Community
PieFed
Your Ad‑Free Forum for Real Community
Category Devlog
Did PieFed ‘steal code’ from Pylova? Let’s look at what happened
This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.…
What PieFed’s “social credit system” actually does
Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere…
Anti-fascist PieFed features
Some time ago some fascists took a copy of Mastodon and made Truth Social with it. Arguably the damage caused by Truth Social to the world is greater than the good Mastodon brought to a few of us. This is…
Trans-friendly PieFed features
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…
What worked at 100 users broke at 5,000
Recent events have made me realise something. In the early days, when PieFed was tiny (it’s still tiny I guess) me being really engaged with the community was a huge strength. I knew immediately what was going on and could…
How PieFed federates emoji reactions
PieFed federate reactions as a normal Like except with an additional field: content which contains either a unicode emoji letter or a string with : on the start and end. e.g. :fire:. The reactions that are just a single letter…
Reducing PieFed’s dependence on Cloudflare
When Cloudflare had problems recently pretty much every PieFed instance went offline. This was a real “wtf are we doing” moment, for me. What’s the point of having multiple instances (there are now 64 PieFed instances!) if they all have…
PieFed v1.2 is released
PieFed 1.2 has just been released. Details and links to examples at
How to use Really Simple Licensing (RSL) to block all AI crawlers
RSL is a new initiative by a group of big internet publishers that seeks to define the conditions under which AI crawlers can harvest their content. Their guide describes the various ways the content can be made available, including for…
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…
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…