PieFed development update, April 2024

There's been a lot going on lately. Here's some highlights from the last 4 weeks and who contributed:

spoilers - freamon

Lemmy-style spoilers now render properly. These are often used in community descriptions, like this one.

local community federation - freamon

Until now it has been a bad idea to run local communities on piefed.social as PieFed would not reliably share all the activity in the community with every subscribed instance. This has been resolved now.

This was the biggest and most difficult piece of work needed to finish the beta test phase so massive credit to freamon for making this very significant contribution.

bot comments don't add to count of replies - rimu

Now you won't click on a post with a reply and then be disappointed to find it's just the 'Auto TL;DR' bot, or whatever.

videos - rimu

youtube videos have always worked fine in PieFed but now links to .mp4 URLs, streamable.com and redgifs.com videos are embedded in the post nicely too. There is a new type of post just for videos, too. At the moment this is very similar to creating a normal 'Link' post but when/if PieFed gets the option to host video content the Video post form will get file upload, transcoding and thumbnail-choosing features.

topics can have sub-topics - rimu

Communities are organised in a fully hieractical tree, of any depth. See https://piefed.social/topics

improve documentation - rscmbbng & somoso

Lots of little changes and improvements here. Not especially glamorous but very useful and worthy of recognition.

about page - rscmbbng

There is an 'about' page at https://piefed.social/about which has some automatically generated stats and admin-controlled content.

cross posts - freamon

When a link post is made which links to the same URL as other recent posts do, a relationship is established between the posts making it easy for people to check out other posts/discussions about the same URL.

UI translation - german by AchtungDrempels, Catalan by nihar.

Based on the preferred language setting in the web browser, PieFed automatically presents the menu, button text, etc in the right language. The only catch is someone needs to manually translate every bit of text into every language! German is complete and we've made a good start on Catalan. Contact me if you'd like to help with translating PieFed into any language.

In related news I've recently added code to save the language of communities and posts so that when we eventually add UI controls to filter by language we'll have a decent amount of content in various languages already.

moderation tools - rscmbbng, freamon & rimu

Communities now have satisfactory moderation tools. More on this. This was another major piece of work that needed to be finished to complete the beta phase.

sticky posts - freamon

Posts can be stuck to the top of a community, making them more visible. This federates across instances.

It is amazing to see so many contributors already and the difference it has made to the quality and speed of PieFed's development. We are almost at the end of the beta test so it will soon be time to start making a roadmap for the next phase.

This has turned into quite a wall of text. I'll try to make more frequent updates in future, perhaps every two weeks.