A page with a million checkboxes. Checking a box checks it for everyone.

That's it. Have fun!

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.

Former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman has given her first in-depth interview after her arrest for shoplifting and subsequent resignation from Parliament, telling 1News it was an act of "self-sabotage."

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.'

Instead of asking humans who they would vote for, try to understand the nuances of their thoughts and concerns, let those messages bubble up to candidates so they can adjust their campaign to meet voters' demand, instead of that, why not just segment humans into a bunch of shallow stereotypes (the socialist Millennial, the conservative Boomer, the liberal city dweller, the rancorous rural voter who feels left behind...) and then have some AI agents replicate how those people would respond?

Surely nothing could go wrong.

archive.ph link

> > > Imagine being able to remember every single day of your life, all the way back to when you were a newborn. > >

> > > Australian woman Rebecca Sharrock is one of only 60 people in the world with a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia. > >

> > > On 28 April 2022, Just Stop Oil supporters blocked the entrances to Clacket Lane Services on the M25 by sitting in the road with Just Stop Oil banners. They also decommissioned the petrol pumps by breaking the display glass and covering it with spray paint. This action was taken in support of their demand for the UK government to end all new oil and gas projects in the country. > >

> > > In a unanimous verdict delivered today by a jury at Guildford Crown Court, Just Stop Oil supporters Nathan McGovern, Rosa Sharkey, and Louis Hawkins were found not guilty of causing criminal damage. > >

Any jury may consider that the law itself is unjust. It is an important principle and indicates public opposition to aspects of law, in this case, the 'lawful' behaviour of fossil fuel corporations.

Every mod action would automatically create a new post. Anyone could see what is going on and express their approval / disapproval with votes. Maybe even comment on the post.

It should probably be a local-only community (no federation) to avoid clogging up other instance's "All" feed with mod actions?

What do you think of this idea?

Zoom founder Eric Yuan has big ambitions in enterprise software, including letting your AI-powered ‘digital twins’ attend meetings for you.

Here's some development highlights from the last 3 weeks and who contributed:

Freamon

Markdown parsing improvements and let us use a different variant of Markdown than Lemmy does. Poll federation - Mastodon accounts can vote on PieFed polls, and receive votes from PieFed users for Polls they've posted into a local community. PeerTube integration - New channels arrive with 10 recent videos, their player is embedded in the PieFed post, new posts are correctly restricted to channel owners, and arrive into PieFed automatically. Manual post-retrieval from remote communities function Improvements to federation that led to an 80% drop in the amount of spam cleanup work admins need to do (some post deletions on remote Lemmy instances weren’t being imported into PieFed properly).

Rimu

A minor dark mode improvement. Made the Poll UI and database. Made a start on federation with Pixelfed and Discourse. An admin tool to list communities that need to be assigned to a topic. Update translations from crowdin - French is finished thanks to wazaby. Steady progress continues on Japanese translation. Much better topic list layout. Imported many PeerTube channels into piefed.social and assigned them to topics. Top-level topics added to the main menu under ‘Topics’. Soft deletes - post deletion can be reversed for up to 7 days.

Tallship

Suggested PieFed use 'soft-break' Markdown Testing User Follows from various platforms Reporting that the use of Mastodon's trademark was problematic

General comments

We are reaching the end of the initial roadmap I sketched out 6 months ago at the start of development. There are just a handful of small tasks to do before the “beta test” phase ends.

With Lemmy to PieFed federation pretty solid, we are entering a phase of diversifying to other platforms. The first other platform, PeerTube, involved a lot of work that hopefully paved the way for future platforms to be integrated more easily. Pixelfed is going live with Groups support very soon. Exploratory work has been done on integration with Discourse although disappointingly they have implemented federation as an optional plugin so fewer Discourse forums actually federate than I initially hoped. NodeBB looks interesting.

In general the Fediverse has reached a steady state in terms of user numbers which gives us space to slow down and reassess. There is not as much of a sense of urgency or bursting-at-the-seams that there was a few months ago. This might be a good time to start to pay down some of the technical debt we have built up. It’s not that the code is bad, it's just that it’s structured in a way that made things easy in the early days but is no longer serving us as well as it did.

Very soon it will be good to have a discussion to create a roadmap for what comes after the beta ("1.0"). I’m thinking - more platforms (Mastodon, Friendica, etc), community wikis, API for mobile apps, better accessibility and can’t wait to hear other ideas from the community.