PieFed has a bevy of great and unexpected features to help moderators run their communities!

Snoqualmie Pass on I-90 sees a ‘wild’ milestone 12 years after it initially opened to animals.

PieFed has a bevy of great and unexpected features to help moderators run their communities!

The parallels are strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbunker

Maybe it'll end the same way too.

OpenAI, Gemini and others have gotten together and agreed on a standard way to embed metadata in images so platforms can tell if an image was made with AI or not. It's called c2pa.

PieFed now uses c2pa to label image posts as AI, where possible. This will not be 100% reliable because often as images are passed around the embedded metadata gets wiped out but it will help reduce the moderation burden involved with labeling AI images.

If you don't want to see any AI generated content, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters and set the "AI-generated posts" setting accordingly.

If you are posting content that you know is AI generated, in the post creation form click 'More options' and then find the "AI generated" checkbox. If you're creating an image post and the image file contains c2pa metadata (i.e. you downloaded it straight out of the LLM without further modifying it in GIMP, etc) you don't need to bother - PieFed will take care of it when you submit the form.

When an image post from Lemmy arrives PieFed will attempt to read the c2pa metadata but there's a good chance Lemmy will have stripped it out while resizing the image. Image posts coming from other PieFed instances will already have been checked and arrive pre-labelled.

Also another change in this release is emoji reactions are more prominent and can be made from the teaser view, without going into the post itself. I hope this leads to more reactions being made and we all get a more interesting and vibrant feed as a result.

The specialized Chinese version of Windows was already scheduled for retirement in February 2027, but now its end-of-life date has been moved up.

This is a quick run-through of the PieFed admin area to give you a feel for some of the great features Piefed offers to make running a fediverse instance easier.

If you want to know more see the 40 minute version where I go into much more depth and compare it with what Lemmy offers. Even in the 40 minute version I felt rushed, missed out things and like I wanted to linger for longer in some places. There's just so much.

The dumbphone revival and the broader push to reclaim our attention have zeroed in on one habit in particular: reaching for a phone the moment we wake, and again as the last thing before sleep. A growing crop of devices now promises to break that loop, from feature phones built purely for calls and texts to social-media-blocking flip phones like Commodore's retro Callback 8020. Copenhagen-based Habity Design is tackling the same problem from a different direction, replacing the phone on your nightstand rather than the one in your pocket.

Some of the appeal of his work, for me, is a nostalgia for an imaginary past, before everything got ruined.

Of course in reality life was rough and difficult then in ways that I will never know, thankfully.

Technology didn’t create selfishness, but it has made selfish acts extraordinarily easy and almost inconsequential. It’s easier than ever to treat a friend as an audience, use a stranger for content, present a private moment as evidence, feed a human voice into a training set, and turn somebody else’s misfortune into afternoon entertainment.

RIP

Somehow I didn't realise that Prime Minister won two emmys, that one slipped by me.

I haven't seen it yet but now I want to. The only place I can find to get it is YouTube rental, which is less than ideal. Any other options? I don't mind paying but preferably not big tech.

Mostly to do with how posts are composed which was always cramped and weird in the past.

And no more mixing up normal posts with DMs.

Oh god, please, be more than $1 trillion.

The paper suggests regulation that would ban surveillance-based business models, limit big tech companies' claims over data, and require major platforms to be licensed, with conditions attached to their continued operation.

Another possibility was giving people affected by these companies a greater say in how they are governed.

Now that's what I'm talkin about

I've been taking notes since 2023. Here they are, grouped by depravity level (subjective, yes, I know) and sorted by date within each group. Please share this widely as the election draws near. The last 3 weeks of the campaign are crucial and when this information will make the most difference.

Where possible the minister responsible is noted although really they are all collectively responsible.

It's a lot. As you get into it your eyes will glaze over a bit and you'll start skimming. Try to sit with each item and really feel it.

High Depravity

• Resume oil exploration - An environmental item from 4 November 2023 attributed to Everyone; Labour & Greens banned offshore oil exploration in 2018, and this repeals that ban.
• Treaty referendum - From 8 November 2023, driven by David Seymour.
• Increase smoking addiction and death - health action from 1 December 2023; Chris Bishop used to be a lobbyist for the tobacco industry which explains a lot.
• Landlord tax cuts - action from 12 March 2024 delivering a $2.9b tax cut for landlords.
• Bad insulation - from 18 July 2024.
• Reduced pay for women - employment action from 8 May 2025, driven by Brooke van Velden.
• 100,000 homeless - A housing action, in progress since 1 June 2025, attributed to Everyone.
• More fossil fuels - action from 1 June 2025, attributed to Simon Watts.
• End emissions reporting - environmental action from 15 August 2025 by Simon Watts; three major emitters no longer have to report emissions, making the whole exercise useless.
• Gut Zero Carbon Act - action from 6 November 2025, attributed to Simon Watts.
• Abolish regional councilors - An environmental action from 25 November 2025 by Chris Bishop, sharply reducing environmental protections.
• 2026 and still building fossil fuel infra - An environmental item from 9 February 2026 by Simon Watts, concerning an LNG import terminal.
• Abolish the ministry for the environment - An environmental action, in progress since 16 February 2026, attributed to Penny Simmonds.
• Change law to prevent climate lawsuits - An environmental action begun 12 May 2026, attributed to Paul Goldsmith.
• Fast track corruption - action from 26 May 2026, attributed to Everyone.
• Highest homelessness in history - housing action from 28 May 2026, attributed to Everyone.
• MMP referendum - A society action, in progress since 6 August 2026, driven by Chris Luxon.

Medium Depravity

• Houses unaffordable - A to-do housing item; more sprawl means higher rates and more driving (no start date recorded).
• Pollute rivers and groundwater - An environment/health action currently in progress starting from 2023.
• Encourage sales of gas guzzlers - An environmental item from 31 December 2023 attributed to Everyone; repealing the Clean Car Discount that taxed large utes and subsidised EVs and hybrids.
• More roads, more cars - An environmental item from 31 December 2023; the more roads you build, the more people drive, the more emissions there are.
• Remove first home buyer subsidy - action begun 5 June 2024; during the election they had promised to keep this subsidy.
• Block Otago water rules - environmental action from 18 October 2024; Otago wanted to limit water takes from rivers but the government stopped them.
• Seabed mining instead of windmills - action from 18 October 2024.
• Fucked up ferries - action from 12 December 2024.
• Regulatory standards bill - An action in progress since 1 February 2025, driven by David Seymour.
• Boot Camp - action from 7 November 2025.
• Reject Climate Change Commission recommendations - action begun 4 December 2025, attributed to Simon Watts.
• Constitutional vandalism - human rights action from 12 April 2026, attributed to Everyone.

Low Depravity

• Cancelled Lake Onslow battery - environment/energy action from 4 December 2023 by Simeon Brown, made before the feasibility study could be completed.
• Remove the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax - environment/transport item from 31 December 2023.
• Increase road deaths - A to-do transport item from 31 December 2023; raising speed limits means more people will die on the roads.
• Richard Prebble appointed to Waitangi Tribunal - action from 18 October 2024.
• Importing Russian oil - An action in progress that started 11 November 2025.
• Criminalise Rough Sleeping - housing action from 23 February 2026, driven by Paul Goldsmith.
• Rejection of WHO pandemic rules - action from 7 April 2026, attributed to Simeon Brown.

So there you have it. The last 3 years have been a trainwreck that was especially hard to watch - taking notes during it was my way of coping. I hope it makes a difference.

Once again, please share this with anyone capable of changing their minds. And/or bookmark this, you'll need it later.

There will be SO much that I missed out. Education and health is a true mess at the moment but that's not where my attention goes a lot of the time. Please add what you have in the comments, with a news link if possible.

It's depleting a bit slower than I feared it would, a few months ago.

Feels like they could do another one or two reserve releases if they wanted, enough to keep things stable ("stable" in the sense of merely a low-grade unending emergency that hurts everyone for a long time rather than a calamitous immediate collapse) for the rest of 2026.

While the war still has no end in sight I would be surprised if it was still going on in 2027. So chances are it'll sort of work out ok-ish in the long run.

Bigme has launched the B1051 Ultra, a 10.3-inch color E Ink device aimed at reading, note-taking, and office work. It combines a Kaleido 3 display with a MediaTek Dimensity 1080 processor, Android 14, stylus support, and a 6,900 mAh battery.

I'm pretty jaded when it comes to tech but this gives me The Lust.

The X1 aircraft is comparable in size to a small regional airliner and can achieve a maximum takeoff weight exceeding 25,000 pounds with the help of four wing-mounted electric motors. The battery-electric propulsion system delivered more than one megawatt of power during the maiden flight.

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 ![email protected] and ![email protected]. 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, which does not waste vote quota the way upvoting-to-hide did.

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.