PieFed development update May 2025 - Passkeys, Flair, Image hashing & much more

This post summarizes the development work completed in May 2025, grouped by contributor.

Overview

1. Enhanced Feed System: Comprehensive feed management with remote links, child feeds, and improved navigation
2. Scheduled Posts: Create posts that get published when you know they'll be read
3. Post & User Flair: Federated flair system for both posts and users
4. Advanced Notifications: Notification system with filtering and types
5. Image Management: Hash-based image blocking and improved display systems
6. Mobile Experience: Significant improvements to mobile layouts and touch interactions
7. Authentication: Passkeys and Google OAuth integration
8. Community Tools: Enhanced moderation features and community management
9. Performance: Database optimizations and memory usage improvements
10. Themes: Multiple new and updated themes with improved accessibility

Contributors and Their Work

rimu (142 commits)

Feed System Enhancements

• Feed navigation improvements with remote feed links
• Adding a remote feed automatically includes all child feeds, enabling easy addition of complete feed hierarchies

User Interface & Experience

• Added image preview when uploading images during post creation - helps users verify correct image uploads before posting
• Larger image sizes when displaying posts
• Image post height optimization - prevent long vertical images from taking excessive screen space in lists of posts
• Mobile layout improvements, especially for tablets
• Community navigation improvements on mobile
• Font loading optimizations and descriptions
• Service worker caching for Bootstrap and fonts

User Management & Authentication

• Passkeys implementation
• Google OAuth integration
• Throwaway email detection and warnings
• Enhance ban system with reasons, content purging, and IP address bans
• Temporary ban expiration handling - fixes issue where expired temporary bans from Lemmy communities weren't being lifted
• User flair federation and display in posts/comments
• Staff role permissions throughout admin area so admins can delegate some functions to volunteers

Post & Comment Features

• Scheduled posts system with timezone handling
• Post flair system for intra-community categorization
• User flair, for fun
• Allow moderators to add flairs to posts from platforms without native flair support
• Fixed a sticky posts federation bug
• Cross-posting improvements - the last community posted to is set as the default for the next cross-post
• Cross-post into any community, not just ones you've joined
• Link post auto-fill the title field based on title of linked page
• Quick share functionality using bookmarklets
• Tweak OP flair display
• Join/leave button AJAX improvements - avoid full page reload
• Join button on post teasers to encourage community participation

Community Management

• Fix community icon responsiveness
• Optional low-quality community post hiding to reduce memes & shitposts in the 'All' feed
• Moderator editing permissions - fixed bug where non-top moderators couldn't edit community sidebars

Content Moderation & Safety

• Image hashing system for content blocking - deduplication and comparison against known abusive images using hash algorithms
• Blocked images management UI for admins
• Downvote abuse threshold adjustments
• Private instance mode for scraper protection

Notifications System

• Notification filtering by type
• Unread notification red dot indicator

Performance & Infrastructure

• Database deadlock prevention
• Large memory usage reduction in daily maintenance task
• Community list and user profile optimization
• Increase speed of casting a vote

Themes & Styling

• Irix theme inspired by the OS from the 90's
• You can choose from a few different fonts, independently of theme choice

Bug Fixes & Maintenance

• Default instance inbox for when detection of inbox url fails
• Instance inbox editing in admin area
• Translation updates from Weblate and source code
• Schema.org metadata addition for posts and profiles
• Custom welcome email configuration - enable instance administrators to customize welcome emails instead of hardcoded "piefed.social" text
• Event post type infrastructure - foundation for posting events with date/time/location fields and potential Mobilizon federation

JollyDevelopment (15 commits)

API development and notifications system

API Development

• Notifications API endpoints with pagination
• Notifications now have a type and a target, not just a url.
• Enhanced notification read/unread handling

Notification System Enhancements

• Mark all as read functionality
• Notification counting and pagination improvements

Bug Fixes

• Card shadow theme fixes
• Various API endpoint refinements

freamon (7 commits)

API enhancements and user interface improvements

API Extensions

• Top sort for additional time periods
• User notification state error handling
• Explicit GET methods for notification routes
• API validation improvements

User Interface

• Activity alerts - dropdown conversion from tabs
• Feeds tab addition for activity alerts

h3ndrik (5 commits)

User experience and interaction improvements

Lightbox Enhancements

• Touch gesture support (dragging, pinch zoom)
• Improved scrolling for full-size images
• Mobile-friendly gesture controls
• Attribute reset functionality

Comment Management

• Comment options display for deleted comments
• CLI command fixes for scheduled posts

wjs018 (3 commits)

UI polish and theme improvements

Visual Enhancements

• Increased image blurring in feeds
• Darker community breadcrumb backgrounds
• Dillo theme tweaks

karasugawasu (2 commits)

Localization

• Japanese website title encoding fixes
• HLT Fruits theme

fxomt (2 commits)

Theme development

• Vote button clarity improvements
• Theme updates and enhancements

Tournesol (1 commit)

Documentation

• Caddy server configuration example