Over the last 3 weeks there have been significant contributions from h3ndrik and myself.

H3ndrik

• Many many under the hood improvements. Simplifying code & improving performance.
• Better lightbox
• Improve post teaser layout

Rimu

• Mod log which shows all moderator actions

• The “Rational discourse toolkit” block in the bottom right is now optional - instance admins can turn it off in the settings.

• Staff role - some admin tasks can be delegated to a supporting role which can do limited things. Which operations the supporting role can do can be controlled with checkboxes. This is nearly complete and just needs a bit more elbow grease.
  

• A.gup.pe integration - These are a kind of basic community / group function built on Mastodon. About 20% of new posts on piefed.social are coming from Mastodon, mostly via a.gup.pe. These groups include

  • https://piefed.social/c/photography@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/actuallyautistic@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/auscovid19@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/fedibikes_de@a.gup.pe (German)
  • https://piefed.social/c/classicalmusic@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/histodons@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/actuallyadhd@a.gup.pe
  • https://piefed.social/c/bookstodon@a.gup.pe

• Community wikis - moderators can create pages that serve as a resource for the community. Each page has revisions that can be reverted to. See a demo at https://join.piefed.social/vlog/piefed_wikis.mp4.

The largest crypto super PAC is called Fairshake and is practically the same size as Make America Great Again (MAGA), the main super PAC supporting Donald Trump, who is making his fourth run at the White House: MAGA has raised $178.6 million through the end of May, Fairshake $177.9 million.

A new contributor, h3ndrik, has made significant improvements to the filtering options for NSFW/NSFL content and I've also added some options to the same form which control when comments are collapsed or hidden.

Previously, NSFW was a yes or no option but now you can choose to have it unblurred, blurred, semi-transparent or entirely hidden.

The defaults values for collapse and hide are:

• when a comment has a score of -10 it is shown but in a collapsed state. You can click on it to expand it and read it. This has always been the case but now you can change that threshold.
• a score of -20 means the comment will not be shown. There is no way to make it visible and no indication that it was ever posted and no temptation to click on it.

You might want to review those settings to make sure they're suitable for you: https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters. If you don't want comments hidden then remove the -20 from that field or set it to -1000.

Creatures of Place is an insight into the wonderful world of Artist as Family: Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, and their youngest son, Woody. Living on a 1/4-acre section in a small Australian town, Meg and Patrick have designed their property using permaculture principals.

They grow most of their own food, don't own cars and ride their bikes instead, use very little electricity, and forage food and materials from their local forest.

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.

£9bn due to not having built more cheap onshore wind, £5bn due to poorly insulated homes, £5bn due to low solar deployment, £3bn because new homes were built less efficient.

A Swiss court has handed jail sentences to four members of Britain’s richest family for exploiting Indian staff at their Geneva mansion.

The Hindujas, who were not present in court, were acquitted of human trafficking but convicted of other charges on Friday in a stunning verdict for the family, whose fortune is estimated at £37bn.

Prakash Hinduja and his wife, Kamal, were each sentenced to four years and six months in prison, and their son Ajay and his wife, Namrata, received four-year terms.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMnNosUBBWM by a guy who actually did the tutorial properly and has a more productive time of things

Videos show the China Coast Guard (CCG) brandishing knives, ramming ships, and using tear gas against Filipino soldiers. China says the CCG was 'professional and restrained.'

A great resource that makes it quick and easy to find alternatives to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and many more.