PieFed development update June 2024 - Bookmarks and Announcements

For the last few weeks our focus has been on fixing bugs and improving stability. There have been 3 people who have launched new PieFed instances, bringing the total to 4, which brought up a slew of new issues and feature requests. Close collaboration with those new instance admins yielded many positive improvements and a slew of PRs to merge.

Despite this “under the hood” focus there were a few quite visible features added & changes made:

Bookmark (save) posts and comments

Click the three dots on any post or comment and you’ll see a Bookmark menu item. Access your bookmarks using the menu item on the Account menu. Saved posts are sorted based on when they were saved, not when the post was made.

Announcement banner on home page

I’ll link to this post from the home page so you can see it in action.

Japanese language

Translation is complete enough to be usable, thanks to karasugawasu

Hashtags have a RSS feed

Topics and Communities have had a feed for a while but now hashtags do too. Thanks to Dave Lane for the idea.

Automatic archive.ph link on some link posts

Some websites are especially important and really need an archive link. When the poster does not provide one, PieFed will add it.

Ctrl + Enter to submit a post or comment

While typing a new comment you can hit this key combination to submit the comment. Thanks for reminder about this forgotten issue, Jeena.

“Features for growing healthy communities”

I wrote a blog post describing some of the admin features that are available for rooting out bad apples.

Some people felt I had gone too far, perhaps rightly so.

General thoughts

It is encouraging to see more instances sprouting up and to have code contributions from even more people. Activity in the repository has never been higher and the Matrix channel is becoming quite chatty!

I am traveling overseas while working my day job so it is difficult to put as much effort into PieFed as I have in the past. When I return home in August there will probably be a large chunk of paid work to do alongside my regular job so I expect to be quite busy then too. Fortunately there is a trend towards me doing less coding myself and more merging in other people’s code so PieFed development will continue on regardless.

PieFed is entirely free and open source and has not received any grants or funding. If you find it useful and would like to support the project, please consider donating using Patreon.