PieFed development update September 2024 - not prepping for 1.0 release

We tried to hold back from coding new stuff in order for things to stabilize but it didn't work out. Maybe next month. Instead, we made a whole bunch of cool things:

rimu

• Detect offline instances and stop federating to them until they come back. feamon helped a lot with this.
• Private voting - see https://piefed.social/post/205362 for background.
• Remove moment.js to ease load on clients. We were using a quite heavy javascript library to format dates on the client side but removing the JS and doing it in Python on the backend instead more than halved the amount of JS we need to send (we're now down to 70 KB, gzipped).
• Post teaser redesign - the most significant visual change since the beginning. Image posts now have a much larger preview image and video posts can be played without going to the post itself. YouTube videos are lazy-loaded just before scrolling into view but only if running on AC power. Devices running off a battery (or like Firefox which do not support the battery API) will only load the video once you visit the post page, not while scrolling the feed.
• Use a connection pool for federation - rather than making a new network connection to send an Activity, PieFed will reuse an existing connection where possible. This has less overhead and results in faster federation.

hendrik

• Better notifications about comments buried deep in a thread

freamon

• Better federation of bans from remote admins.
• use HTML portion of Activity instead of Markdown. Lemmy sends Activitys as both Markdown and HTML. For a long time PieFed would use the Markdown and convert it to HTML for display but now it just uses the HTML that Lemmy provides.
• Image alt text federation
• Backfilling improvements especially with image posts.
• Many misc bugfixes

JollyDevelopment

• New theme - "card shadow" - this quickly became a favorite among the dev team and both freamon and myself use it. It's basically the same as the default except there are shadows behind things, giving a more 3D look to the interface and giving a bit more visual hierarchy. It's nice, try it - https://piefed.social/user/settings
• Admin page - instance administration - there is a table showing all the instances you're federating with and stats for each instance.
• Profile export - PieFed has had the functionality to import settings from a Lemmy profile for a long time but now it's possible to go the other way and export settings from PieFed to Lemmy.
• Add remote form - The form for adding a remote community used to require you to type the community as !whatever@instance.com but now you can give the URL as well, e.g. https://instance.com/c/whatever

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As a free and open source project, PieFed receives no funding and developers are not paid. Any donations you can spare will help cover server and infrastructure costs - https://piefed.social/donate. Thanks!