Nostr notes by piefedadmin

## PieFed v1.7 is released: Following Users, Faster Browsing ...

2026-07-03T13:03:00Z

##

PieFed v1.7 is released: Following Users, Faster Browsing & Smarter Moderation

This release saw [contributions from some new people](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/activity/monthly ), which is great to see.

In this release you can now follow other people, not just join communities. When you follow someone their posts will show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of whether you have joined the community it was posted in or not.

You can also follow Mastodon+ accounts. Getting Mastodon integration working really well is going to be a long journey but this release gets us headed in that direction. Eventually I hope that this integration will provide a steady source of timely content to cross-post into threadiverse communities as well as being a peer citizen in the Mastodon-flavored parts of the fediverse.###

New:<li>You can follow other users and their posts will always show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of the community they were posted into. Following Mastodon users works also but should be considered as very experimental. This will improve soon.</li>[]( )In the future you will be able to upload a list of people that you exported from your mastodon profile and follow them in one go. And add people that your instance doesn’t already know about – but not yet. These features will be rolled out in future versions once the dust settles on this version.<li>Mastodon posts have a new design that is distinct from threadiverse posts – there is no post title and larger author profile pic.</li><li>Communities can be marked as being a favorite, which makes them more prominent in the ‘Communities’ menu.</li>

[]( )<li>Clicking anywhere in a post teaser takes you to the teaser – you don’t need to aim for the title</li><li>Dramatically improved page load times on Chrome-based browsers (Speculation Rules API).</li><li>Little spinner thing while a vote is being cast</li><li>Updated translations</li><li>Preview markdown when editing a wiki page</li><li>RSS feeds on the home page, including a feed of posts from your subscribed communities</li><li>Topic selection during onboarding looks way nicer now.</li><li>Accessibility improvements to headers.</li>###

For Developers:<li>Massive CSS reorganisation by travis-jeans. Lots more usage of CSS variables. Improves maintenance and accessibility.</li><li>API: Users can now log out</li><li>API: Follow and unfollow users</li><li>API: video file upload works now</li>###

For Instance Admins:<li>Communities where every moderator is a bot or inactive are flagged as un-moderated. Reports about posts in un-moderated local communities go to admins.</li><li>Warnings on domains can be 3 types instead of only a warning – the other two are ‘helpful context’ and ‘recommendation’</li>[]( )<li>Send a DM to a user asking them if they are a bot, with 1 click. If they do not respond their account is automatically flagged as a bot</li><li>Email bounce inbox can now be accessed through POP3, not just IMAP</li><li>Tokens used by mobile apps can be set to expire, using the JWT_EXPIRY_DAYS environment variable</li><li>More accurate tracking of when a user was last active. This will significantly increase your MAU stats.</li><li>Strict allowlist mode to reduce attack surface exposed by federation</li><li>/admin/federation form split up into 3 separate pages rather than one long confusing page.</li><li>Option to disable DM sending for individual users if they lack the self-control to use it responsibly.</li><li>compose.yaml has changed a bit: For most containers the build target is now “runtime’ instead of ‘builder’.</li>For example<code> celery:
build:
context: .
target: runtime
</code><li>Topics can be associated with countries, for more targeted onboarding suggestions based on the viewer’s location.</li><li>To reduce server load and network traffic, a maximum number of votes that can be cast each day has been set at a level that will only affect the top 2% of voters, leaving the bottom 98% unaffected. This quota can be altered with an environment variable. View a profile to see how much of their daily quota has been used.</li>###

To upgrade from 1.6.x<code>git pull
git checkout v1.7.x
</code>At this point you might see an error message about a merge conflict with compose.yaml. To preserve your custom compose.yaml you will need to copy it somewhere else, then git checkout compose.yaml then git pull again (or use git’s stash feature). This time the pull will succeed so after that copy your custom compose.yaml it back, overwriting the one from git.

Then,./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

If you had to do the compose.yaml fix up earlier then you might want to compare what you have with https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/compose.yaml and manually copy and paste some improvements in particular the target: part of the db container.###

DonationsPieFed is [free and open-source](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/LICENSE#L587 ) software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.

Donations can be made via [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/PieFed ), [Liberapay](https://liberapay.com/PieFed/ ) or [Ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/piefed ).

#piefed

## AI-assisted moderation in the fediverse is happening. Now ...

2026-05-04T00:06:20Z

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AI-assisted moderation in the fediverse is happening. Now what?

I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the user’s comment history to OpenAI with the question “**analyze this content for evidence of *specific political ideology* sentiment. Also identify any *related political ideology* tropes**“.

OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:

> Below is a structured analysis of the uploaded content, focused on *specific ideology* rhetoric. This is an analytic classification, not a moral judgement.

> 1. Overall Pattern

> blah blah

> 2. Evidence of *specific ideology* sentiment

> blah blah

> 3. several pages more, concluding with (in this case)

> Yes, the content contains:

> Clear *specific ideology* alignment
> Repeated *specific ideology* framing, especially through blah blah
> Extensive use of canonical *ideology* tropes, in blah blah domains.

> The pattern is not accidental or isolated; it is consistent, internally coherent, and reproduces well‑documented *country with the ideology* public‑diplomacy narratives rather than neutral analysis.

> ===========================================

> FULL DUMP OF COMMENT HISTORY BELOW

> ===========================================

> Date: 2026-xx-xxT0xxxxx

> Comment ID: > [> https://>; instance.told/comment/2497xxxx](https://instance.told/comment/2497xxxx )

> Post ID: 603xxx

> Community ID: 1xx

> Content of the comment has been redacted

> ========================================

> Date: 2026-xx-xxT0xxxxx

> Comment ID: > [> https://>; instance.told/comment/2497xxxx](https://instance.told/comment/2497xxxx )

> Post ID: 603xxx

> Community ID: 1xx

> Content of the comment has been redacted

> ========================================

> Date: 2026-xx-xxT0xxxxx

> Comment ID: > [> https://>; instance.told/comment/2497xxxx](https://instance.told/comment/2497xxxx )

> Post ID: 603xxx

> Community ID: 1xx

> Content of the comment has been redacted

> ========================================

and so on, hundreds of comments.

I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Let’s focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by communities we agree with but what if people we *strongly* disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?

The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of questions.

What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.

What safeguards do we need?

Would asking a LLM “please evaluate this person’s political opinions” give different results than “find evidence we can use to ban them” (as used in the cases I’ve seen)?

What are our transparency expectations?

Is this acceptable and normal?

Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not – should it have been?)

If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?

Can we opt out?

Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?

Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?

How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?

Once the user’s comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?

What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?

Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?

I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesn’t have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.

And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of worker’s rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I can’t see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But it’s happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.

What do you make of this?

#fediverse

## PieFed v1.2 is releasedPieFed 1.2 has just been ...

2025-09-19T00:55:26Z

##

PieFed v1.2 is releasedPieFed 1.2 has just been released.<li>Event posts</li><li>3D rotating tag cloud</li><li>Built-in translation</li><li>Set a reminder on any post/comment</li><li>Log in with LDAP</li><li>and so much more.</li>

Details and links to examples at https://piefed.social/post/1278967

#piefed

## How PieFed federates “flair” on posts and comments[On the ...

2025-05-10T08:09:04Z

##

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 just a piece of text that appears next to their name whenever they make posts or comments in the community. This can be helpful for giving a hint about someone’s background, interests or expertise.

However PieFed is federated and there are copies of the communities on multiple servers (instances). The way to use ActivityPub to create and maintain those copies is described in [FEP 1b12](https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/1b12/fep-1b12.md ) which makes no mention of flair. I have made some minimal additions to that FEP, described below:

For flair on posts, [the Lemmy devs have already done quite a bit of work on this](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5636 ), which I added a little to, so that flair can have colors. Community actors have an additional type of tag:{ "type": "Group", "id": "https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta", ; "name": "piefed_meta", /* ... */ "lemmy:tagsForPosts": [ { "type": "lemmy:CommunityTag", "id": "https://piefed.socia1/c/piefed_meta/tag/whatever", ; "display_name": "Some Post Tag Name", "text_color": "#000000", "background_color": "#dedede" } ] }

lemmy:tagsForPosts is a list of lemmy:CommunityTag objects.

So now all the different copies of the community will know which flair can be used there. When creating a post in the community we just need to add one or more lemmy:CommunityTag objects to the Page activity:{ "id": "https://piefed.social/post/1", ; "actor": "https://piefed.social/u/rimu", ; "type": "Page", /* ... */ "tag": [ { "type": "lemmy:CommunityTag", "id": "https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/tag/whatever", ; "display_name": "Some Post Tag Name" }, { "href": "https://piefed.social/post/1", ; "name": "asdf", "type": "Hashtag" } ] }

In this example the post also has a #asdf hashtag on it.

User flair is simpler because it’s not managed by the community moderators and is not a fixed list. PieFed simply adds the author’s flair to every comment (federated as a Note activity) they make. When a Note is received the author’s flair is updated on the receiving instances.{ "id": "https://piefed.social/comment/1", ; "actor": "https://piefed.social/u/rimu", ; "type": "Note", /* ... */ "flair": "PieFed dev" }

This means that when someone changes their flair it will take effect immediately on their instance but until they write a comment it won’t propagate to other instances. As flair is primarily used on comments and the people using flair will tend to be posting a lot of comments this is kinda “good enough”.

It would be trivial to add a “flair” attribute onto posts too and have receiving instances read that. User flair shows up next to the author’s name on their posts so arguably it makes sense to send it then too.

Let’s see how it goes.

#asdf #fediverse #Lemmy #piefed #threadverse

## How PieFed federates feeds (aka multi-reddits or ...

2025-04-30T22:08:21Z

##

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](https://piefed.social/topics ), Feeds are federated, can be created by anyone and can be public or private. There are now hundreds of feeds at https://piefed.social/feeds.

A feed being federated means that people using other instances can subscribe to feeds that were created on your instance, in the same way that people can subscribe/join communities on remote instances.

I’ve written up the technical details of how this all works behind the scenes at:

**https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/activitypub_examples/feeds.md**

#threadverse