Web developer. Lead developer of PieFed

  • 55 posts
  • 109 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 4th, 2024
  • I got an email from a client last week asking me to install an AI-generated list of containers onto a server. The key container, the database at the center of the whole system, has commits from Claude in it’s git repository. Great start guys.

    They outsouced the software architect job to a chatbot and then had a veteran of the industry who has been around since the internet equivalent of the big bang install a handful of docker containers. Reverse centaur to the max.

    It’s going to hurt in 12 months time if they realise the reason why everything sucks is because they built on sand. But they probably won’t even realise why the project failed because their chatbot won’t be able to tell them why.

  • I used fail2ban as an anti-scraper strategy for a few months. It helped with the really basic scrapers that only use one or a few IP addresses.

    But then they adapted and started using hundreds or thousands of different IP addresses, each one only making a couple of requests. fail2ban became counter-productive as it slowed my server down - the log files it was monitoring became massive under high load and it needs to scan the log files often to check if an IP has been seen before.

    I’m not saying don’t try it, I’m saying it’s only effective in some situations.

Features and changes

Big improvements to finding and adding people to follow, including from Mastodon:

  • bulk follow of people, using a CSV file exported from Mastodon
  • improve layout of people list info cards
  • add people navigation elements to Explore menu
  • search for people in the main search tool

Go to https://piefed.social/instance/people/interesting to check it out. Sorting is based on average number of upvotes received per post or comment.

Option to manually approve followers rather than just automatically accept all. You can turn this on in your user settings and then look for ‘Follow requests’ on the Account menu.

RSS feeds which automatically create posts in communities, with flair to distinguish multiple feeds in same community. Admins need to set the RSS_FEEDS environment variable to enable this. Currently testing this in these communities !bbc_rss@crust.piefed.social and !aljazeera_rss@crust.piefed.social. When there are multiple feeds in a community, each gets it’s own flair which people can subscribe to independently by clicking ‘Membership’ in the community sidebar (recent v1.7.x versions only).

Admins can see a list of unmoderated communities, so they know where the liabilities are. Go to Admin -> Communities -> Unmoderated.

Misc features

Fix removepaywall link.

Stop spammers from sharing links in their bio.

‘Mark as read’ icon on post teasers.

API: filter post/list endpoint for user languages - thanks to wjs018

API: add unread comment counts to postview result.

Remove annoying blogspot.com url filter.

Better instance chooser search that finds more things.

Updated translations. Filipino languages coming along well.

To upgrade from earlier 1.7.x

./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

Donations

PieFed is free and open-source 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, Liberapay or Ko-fi.