A big thank you to those who contributed to making this release, translating, writing documentation, providing emotional support and promoting PieFed! None of this would happen without you all.

New hotness

• Pronouns - when you put pronouns into Extra Fields on your profile that is used as a flair in all communities where you haven’t set a flair yet
• Private communities - no federation, only certain roles (depends on the community) can invite new people. Posts inside are only visible to members.
• Mastodon can now quote-boost PieFed posts
• Plain http web UI (no SSL required) with SSL used during federation - see http://retro.piefed.social
• Downvotes can be turned off completely in a community, not just instance-wide
• Admins can sticky a post on the home page, not just mods in their communities
• Auto-delete of replies on remote instances when reply author has been blocked by parent content author (only works in PieFed communities due to a ActivityPub limitation)
• On home page when showing number of replies a post has, calculate the sum of the replies on all cross-posts and display that
• New users can only do 3 posts in their first 24h, to reduce floods of posts by that guy who keeps deleting his accounts and making new ones

More good stuff

• Improve emoji federation compatibility
• Change order of emoji in picker to present most-used ones first
• Daily time limit on usage to help people use PieFed less (released in 1.5.2)
• A way to report posts that need to be tagged as AI generated
• Better accessibility
• Improved handling of bold and italics in markdown parsing
• Don’t accept votes from people the author has blocked
• Admins can resend email address verification email
• Admins can add notes to instances to keep track of defederation reasons, etc
• Search form has been simplified
• Option for admins to disable the em-dash detector
• Multiple minor bugfixes and security enhancements

To upgrade from 1.5.x

git pull
git checkout v1.6.x

At this point you might see an error message about a merge conflict with compose.yaml. To preserve your custom compose.yaml you will need to copy it somewhere else, then git checkout compose.yaml then git pull again. This time the pull will succeed so after that copy your custom compose.yaml it back, overwriting the one from git.

Then,

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

If you had to do the compose.yaml fix up earlier then you might want to compare what you have with https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/compose.yaml and manually copy and paste some improvements in particular the command: part of the db container which tunes postgresql for performance. Adjust the numbers for your system.

This time the database migrations will not take long.

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.