Hello World,

we have just defederated from lemmy.org due to lack of moderation on their side.

This instance has open registrations, seemingly zero abuse prevention on signup, including not requiring emails. This leads to a small number of people constantly creating new disposable accounts for various types of abuse with zero consequences.

Their admin is the CEO of an ad company, which surely doesn't affect incentives. They do virtually zero moderation, allowing all these abusive accounts to rampantly harass other instances. The very rare cases when moderation actually happens is when it affects local communities on that instance, anything else seems to be getting ignored. The admin is also frequently posting to their local communities, but doesn't at all comment or interact with remote communities in any way.

We, as well as other people, including at least one admin of another instance, have attempted to reach out to them about their lack of moderation, but we haven't received any response at all.

At this point there isn't really anything left besides defederating them, which several other instances have already done as well.

Due to a (now former) admin of the instance anarchist.nexus calling for a member of our team, as well as anyone else they call a zionist, to be murdered, the instance has been defederated.

We're currently discussing how we will proceed with this situation and whether it will affect lemmy.dbzer0.com, which is mostly run by the same admin team, notably excluding the person who used to be on the anarchist.nexus admin team.

We will share further updates once we have them.

---

Update 2026-04-22 23:25 UTC: anarchist.nexus federation has been reactivated.

We are still discussing this matter, but there is currently no point in keeping anarchist.nexus defederated while lemmy.dbzer0.com is federated.

Hello World,

we will be performing an update to PieFed 1.6.18 today.

We are planning maintenance within the time frame from 19:30-19:45 UTC on 10th of April. The service is expected to go down for a few minutes during this update.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2026-04-10T19%3A30%3A00.000Z

Highlights:

• this should finally improve the post listing API performance significantly for most queries
• community theme configuration

You can find the full list of changes here:

• 1.6.15 release notes
• 1.6.16 release notes
• 1.6.17 release notes
• 1.6.18 release notes

The newly added NNTP/Usenet interface is not currently available for PieFed.World and we don't have any plans to enable it for the time being.

---

Update 19:33 UTC: update complete

Hello World,

we will be performing an update to PieFed 1.6.14 today.

We are planning maintenance within the time frame from 17:30-18:00 UTC on 30th of March. The service will likely go down a few times during this update, as we will also be migrating from PostgreSQL 17 to PostgreSQL 18 and adjusting some performance parameters on the database.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2026-03-30T17%3A30%3A00.000Z

Highlights:

• Finnish & Ukrainian localization
• various fixes for modlog
• additional functionality exposed via API, including modlog and feeds
• a fix to properly federate instance bans

You can find the full list of changes here:

• 1.6.7 release notes
• 1.6.8 release notes
• 1.6.9 release notes
• 1.6.10 release notes
• 1.6.11 release notes
• 1.6.12 release notes
• 1.6.13 release notes
• 1.6.14 release notes

We have also addressed an issue with our performance monitoring since our last post, which had slowed down our performance tuning, as we halted changes to the database while investigating that issue. We'll re-evaluate the slow API queries for post listings after the update and if needed optimize the queries or add additional DB indexes to improve performance there.

---

Update 17:58 UTC:

The updates for PieFed and PostgreSQL have been completed.

Hello everyone,

we have upgraded our DB host to a larger SKU now to better deal with the performance bottlenecks we've been seeing.
We already optimized a number of additional queries, but the overall state of DB optimization for PieFed still has lots of room for improvement. For now, we hope that this will result in a decent overall improvement for query performance, and we'll continue to tackle individual slower queries.

The DB server specs have been increased from 3 core, 4GB memory to 4 core, 8GB memory, which should allow the database to keep a lot more data in memory, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be read from disk.

One of the main performance bottlenecks we're currently looking into is the API method for listing posts, which can take multiple seconds in some cases. If you're experiencing slowness in other areas, please let us know in a comment. We're checking the logs from time to time to identify other struggling queries, but it can sometimes take extra time to track down where the queries were coming from, if the logs are older than 15 minutes.

We'll also be looking into upgrading the database from PostgreSQL version 17 to version 18 soon, which also might improve performance a bit.

Hello everyone,

this latest update fixes a few recently reported issues, including missing preview images on link posts and video uploads.

We've also optimized several DB queries and adjusted indexes on our DB directly to improve performance of various calls. This should already have noticeably improved loading times on various pages. We're aware that there are still several slow queries. We'll continue working on tracking down and mitigating the performance issues in the coming days. If we can't get the loading times down to a tolerable number we are also considering to upgrade the specs of our DB host.

Hello World,

we will be performing an update to PieFed 1.4 or higher today.

We are planning maintenance within the time frame from 16:15-17:00 UTC on 8th of February. The service will likely go down a few times during this update, as we will be performing some additional maintenance on the servers. We may also be able to get updates beyond 1.4 deployed with this, if not we'll follow up with those in the coming weeks.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2026-02-08T16%3A15%3A00.000Z

You can find an overview of the changes here:

• 1.3 release announcement
• 1.4 release announcement
• 1.5 release announcement
• 1.5.2 release announcement
• 1.6 release announcement

---

Update 17:55 UTC:

Unfortunately the database migrations took a lot longer than we anticipated, resulting in a significantly longer downtime than originally announced. We have however been able to use this extra time to ensure that we get the update all the way to the latest 1.6 version done. We might still have a few minutes of instability, but we're expecting everything to go smooth from here on.

Update 18:20 UTC: Looks like everything is stable, which concludes this maintenance. We'll still be observing performance metrics, as a few things seem to be running a bit slow still. If you experience any issues please let us know.

Hello World,

we may be performing an update to PieFed 1.4 on Friday.

We don't know for sure yet if we will have time to prepare and then do the update, but we'll try to squeeze it in to have it deployed this year still, as we would otherwise have to postpone it to next year.

We are planning maintenance within the time frame from 09:00-13:30 UTC on 26th of December. Actual downtime within this window is expected to be significantly shorter, maybe 15 minutes, but we don't know yet when it will be, or if we'll be able to fit it in here at all.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-12-26T09%3A00%3A00.000Z

You can find an overview of the changes here:

• 1.3 release announcement
• 1.4 release announcement

---

Update 14:09 UTC: Unfortunately we were not able to fit this into the planned maintenance window. We will aim to do this early January instead.

Hello World,

we will be performing an update to PieFed 1.2.6 in about 17 hours.

We are planning for around 15 minutes of downtime today at 18:15-18:30 UTC.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-12-01T18%3A15%3A00.000Z

You can find an overview over the bigger changes here: https://piefed.world/post/480217

We're currently also preparing the update to PieFed 1.3, which should follow in the next days.

Hello everyone,

we have just updated to the latest development version of PieFed, which includes fixes for a couple database lockups and some performance improvements. This will hopefully reduce the issues we've seen over the last days where pages ended up taking multiple seconds to load or not load at all, as well as the federation delays mentioned in https://piefed.world/post/297394.

Hello World!

as announced in our last announcement we open up community registrations up for everyone!

Please report any issues and questions about PieFed.World in [email protected].
For topics about the software PieFed, please visit [email protected].
Bugs can be reported on Codeberg.

Hello World!

We've recently added PieFed.World to the Fedihosting Foundation portfolio.

PieFed.World is still in its early stages, and we still need to port some of our automations we already have in place on Lemmy.World. This includes functionality to inform people about moderation actions taken against them, as well as some other moderation tooling. Administration is currently done by the same team responsible for Lemmy.World, and the same rules that apply to Lemmy.World also apply to PieFed.World.

What is PieFed?

PieFed is a Fediverse/Threadiverse platform similar to Lemmy or Mbin/kbin. You can find a description and feature comparison with Lemmy on their website.

While PieFed has a range of features currently not present in Lemmy, it also is a a lot younger and isn't quite as robust as Lemmy currently is. There are still many bugs and missing features that you will likely run across compared to Lemmy, which will take time to be addressed. PieFed has fairly active development and is seeing a lot of issues addressed fairly quickly, which is especially important recently, as the number of active PieFed instances and PieFed users increased significantly with a range of Lemmy instances opening up PieFed instances as well. PieFed currently does not have proper "stable" releases and no test suite, so it's not unlikely for things to break from time to time. Although 1.0.0 has already been released a while back, there are still too many issues addressed in more recent commits to stay on that version.

As PieFed is part of the same federated network as Lemmy and Mbin, all PieFed communities can be accessed from Lemmy and Mbin, as well as other Fediverse platforms. Likewise, PieFed can access communities from Lemmy, Mbin and other Fediverse platforms. Whether you use a PieFed instance, a Lemmy instance, or an Mbin instance, it does not matter what type of instance the community is on. The software affects your own user experience, but the content is available regardless.

Creation of communities

Creation of communities will be limited to admins for the first week of the public launch. We will reserve this time to allow community moderators of established communities to claim the name on PieFed.World before we open community creation to the public. We will limit this to communities with the same name and at least 2k monthly active users. In case of multiple qualifying communities with the same name on different instances expressing interest, Lemmy.World communities will be given preference, afterwards the number of monthly active users. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss an exception. Requests can be posted in [email protected]. After the first week, community creation will be available to anyone.

Migration of communities

PieFed has a feature to migrate communities to a local instance. We will not be offering PieFed's community migration feature initially.
We still need to research the details of how this works and the impacts this has on federation before we will make a decision on whether will support this in the future. If requested, we may reserve some names for potential future community migrations until we have made a decision to allow community migrations.

This does not prevent you from moving communities in the classic way, by opening up a new community and posting in the old community that people should move over.

Private voting

We had previously disabled private voting for PieFed.World before opening the instance to the public, as the original implementation has a range of drawbacks when it comes to federation, and our team overwhelmingly believed that the individual benefits of private voting did not outweigh the impact this has on the Fediverse beyond the user's instance. Additionally, due to the implementation of that feature, it was also trivial to identify the original voter, which significantly limited the promises of this bringing actual voting privacy.

Since then, the implementation of private voting has been changed to provide the option of federating or not federating votes. While this is more likely to result in vote differences across instances, it does not feed bad information to other instances, which could make it a lot harder for other instances to identify manipulation.

Non-federated voting is available for all PieFed.World users.

Topics

Topics are a kind of "starter packs" or collections grouping multiple communities that people can follow, curated by the admin team. We don't have a clear vision for the structure of these yet.

You can see an example structure on piefed.social.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts on this.

Feeds

PieFed supports feeds, which are user-created groups of communities, similar to topics. These are currently in a global namespace and all users can create public feeds in the same shared namespace.

Reputation and vote weight

PieFed has options for admins to treat certain types of content differently for "reputation" calculation, as well as options for weighing votes of specific instances differently compared to others. We currently have all options for treating certain content, communities or instances differently disabled.

How does PieFed compare to Lemmy?

PieFed has various features not present in Lemmy, check out their website!

There is also various functionality that Lemmy has, which you may be missing currently with PieFed for now:

Limited API support

In Lemmy, the default web interface relies entirely on the Lemmy API. This has the major benefit of all functionality available in the default web interface also being available to all third party clients. PieFed currently uses separate code paths and implementations for the default web interface and its API. To make it possible to access functionality in third party apps, dedicated API endpoints have to be created, even if this functionality is already available in the default web interface. This also includes alternative web-based UIs.

Multiple developers of alternative UIs and mobile clients are already working on PieFed support, some already released experimental versions.

Limited availability of Markdown previews

Markdown previews are currently only available in posts. There are many other places that accept markdown, but you can't preview the rendered comment before submitting it. This is tracked in #532.

Image uploads only on post creation

Images can't be uploaded to comments currently. You'll have to host them externally for now. This is tracked in #768.

Autocompletion of users/communities

Usernames and communities can't be autocompleted when typing their names currently. This is tracked in #799.

Limited availability of modlog

Modlog is currently very limited. While there is an instance modlog, there are currently no filters available, so it's not possible for users to see actions taken against a specific user or within a specific community. Community modlog exists, but it is currently only available to community moderators and admins. Filtering modlog is tracked in #846.

Moderator hierarchy

Lemmy has a moderator hierarchy based on the time a moderator was appointed, relative to other moderators in the community. This allows moderators to add other moderators, but they can only remove moderators that were added later than they were. There are a few other actions that check moderator hierarchy as well, including deletion only being possible by the top mod. In PieFed, communities have one or more owners, who can add and remove moderators, while all other moderators are currently on equal level. Community owners currently cannot be changed without editing this directly in the database, if you'd like to change owners in your community please reach out in [email protected].

Donations

Similar to Lemmy, PieFed development is supported by donations. You can donate to PieFed development through Patreon.

Additionally, we would appreciate donations towards the Fedihosting Foundation, the non-profit organization operating PieFed.World, Lemmy.World, and a range of other Fediverse platforms.

Problems and questions

Please report any issues and questions about PieFed.World in [email protected].

For topics about the software PieFed, please visit [email protected].

Bugs can be reported on Codeberg.

TLDR: New platform with similar functionality available, Lemmy.World will continue to exist.

edit: reordered sections and minor wording changes
edit 2: updated community owner information