PyLova (Python+Pavlova) is a soft fork of PieFed, aimed at improving the user experience through UI overhauls, empowering users and admins with agency, improved administration and moderation functions, and general bug fixing.

New in V0.4.1

New & Improved

• Customisable Sidebar Widgets: You can now choose what widgets appear (if any) and in what order. Selection is small for now, this feature will be expanded upon further in future updates. Please suggest any ideas for widgets you would like to use.

Bug-Fixes & Misc

• Can Sort Communities by Sub Count
• Comms can now be assigned into multiple communities.
• Fixed security vulnerability with markdown injection.
• New Communities without post body were breaking daily cron jobs.
• Updated requirements. For older instances this should enable AVIF in post thumbnails.
• Images upload into WebP to reduce storage needs.

The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.

Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.

https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.

The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.

I decided to block lemmy.ml instance at all that does not have any interaction.

I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here

• https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
• https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
• https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
• https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
• https://lemmy.world/post/43978041

Log screenshots

I really loved using it. It had a (imo) very nice UI and style.

Unfortinately, it seems like the dev (sheodox) hasn't been maintaining it. Their activity has been literally 0 since last year. Does anyone know what happened to the dev?

In my opinion.

It's fine, but it's too common in online communities (including Lemmy) and it discourages people from posting their original thoughts or events that they find important and relevant, since something needs to come from a 'real news source' or an 'online article'.

I can make a website right now and call it "The Daily Pragmatist" or some shit and people won't bat an eye.

Reality also is that many reach conclusions based on titles alone anyhow. I can't see how it would be worse, since the body of the post is always going to be a tad more accessible than opening a new website. And we see how little people want to work to gather their knowledge, on the whole.

I get removing crappy content, but what about when thoughts are backed up with sources and opinions are relevant to overall discussion?

And separately, what's up with aversion to 'non-standard' forms of expression? I would argue that something like the show 'The Rehearsal' by Nathan Fielder, is an equally valid way to deliver real and important news to people. I wouldn't be alone in this sentiment.

Imo this shit is busted and dumb.

Edit: for those that agree in part or in whole, if you have the bandwidth for it, consider making your own community! Lemmy is still relatively small and your local instance might be even more so. It's not impossible to get a community going, and if it fails - oh well!

(and mastodon too) (other mastoapi services like pixelfed aren't really tested yet)

it's totally not ready for most people, but i think i'm only missing one feature i'm used to on web, and it's a non-standard/fork feature

flick thru art, videos and memes from the grid

or scroll thru a home feed that just looks and feels a little nicer

we might have more to offer soon

I'm not with the SWF, but today they announce a $20,000 grant for a team of a developer and a content creator. I'm no developer, but if anyone wants to apply with me, I'm up for it. :D You can be a part of more than one team. They obviously can't and won't take all entries, but why not try?

Here's the page:

Today, with the help of our partner the Interledger Foundation, we are announcing a new program of grants for multimedia software and creators. In this program, we are asking software developers and publishers to partner to make new and better content on the Fediverse.

Multimedia, such as audio, video, and images, provides an engaging experience for Fediverse users. It can give a more visceral social and media experience than text alone. Multimedia software, however, can be difficult to develop, host, and use, and integrating it with other ActivityPub services takes time.

It’s also challenging to produce engaging media on the Fediverse. It can be hard to develop an audience, work with unfamiliar tools, and understand the different dynamics of a federated architecture.

Our intent with the Fediverse Multimedia Grants program is to bring more, and newer, rich content to the Fediverse for people to enjoy. We want to give creators a chance to get their feet under them, develop an audience, and make a permanent home on the Fediverse. We also want this program to help developers concentrate on creators’ needs — authoring, editing, organizing and publishing rich, engaging content.

For this program, we are offering grants of up to US$20,000 to developer/creator teams to start new publications on the Fediverse. We expect the teams to work in close cooperation, providing mutual support and feedback. Our expected outcome is ActivityPub-enabled software that’s better fitted to the needs of creators, and new publications with a foothold in the Fediverse.

Applications are open today at the Fediverse Multimedia Grants round of our grants portal. Applications are only for developer/creator teams. For publishers who aren’t familiar with Fediverse software, or developers who don’t have a good idea for a publisher to work with, please feel free to contact us and we’ll try to point you in the right direction to make a match.

Important dates for the program:

Applications open: 7 Oct 2026 (today)
Applications due: 4 Nov 2026
Decisions announced: 18 Nov 2026
Projects start: 1 Dec 2026
Please ask questions in the comments and replies for this post, or contact us privately. I (Evan) will also be organizing a session on the grant program at Fediforum today, 7 Oct 2026.

Thanks so much to the Interledger Foundation who generously funded this and other programs at the Social Web Foundation and who have been excellent creative partners in crafting this program.

Cross-posted from !fediverse@piefed.social

I'm the maintainer of Catodon, which offers both microblogging and forums (Lemmy-compatible communities), and we noticed that discoverability is not the threadiverse's strongest point: Our server only showed forums/communities that it "knew" because someone from the server already followed them. In Reddit it's easy to see if there is a community for a subject you care about; on the Fediverse it's not that easy.

So I looked at what indexes there are, and most were focused in Lemmy - lemmyverse.net has added MBin and PieFed explorers, but I was looking for something that covers more platforms, and is a unified directory, rather than per-platform only. Maybe there is something that I missed, but I didn't find what I was looking for: a directory for the threadiverse. So I decided to build it.

The Threadiverse Catalog lists forums/communities from Catodon, Discourse, Friendica, Lemmy, Mbin, Mobilizon, NodeBB and PieFed. It hasn't been online for many days, so it hasn't indexed everything, but we already list over 20.000 forums/communities. If there are any bugs or other issues, please let me know.

We built this primarily for Catodon, and on our latest release (26.10.0 "Bongo Cat") users have access to its results through the in-app Search and Explore features, but it's open for everyone to use. It's open source and written in Go. Other projects are also welcome to use it.

Cheers =)

#threadiverse #fediverse #catodon #discourse #friendica #lemmy #mbin #mobilizon #nodebb #piefed

We Distribute is teaming up with Bonfire to develop a new kind of social instance - one that elevates curation and discovery to promote all things Fediverse. It's a social instance, but also a discovery portal.

• Gallery posts, which is an image post with multiple images in it, compatible with Mastodon and Pixelfed. Check out this example from Mastodon.

• "Reposters" as a separate thing from "Bots" with the same Show and Hide options for filtering that bots have. Reposters are more targeted, with higher quality content than true bots and often have a human operator writing comments. However many people find this inauthentic so now they can be filtered out. More details

• /c/microblogs can show posts from people you're following OR all posts.

• Recent hashtags shown on the home page sidebar.

• Support for receiving posts with jpegxl images.

• Communities can have a default hashtag for new posts - posters can edit or remove it if they want.

For admins:

• Option to manually approve posts by new accounts, to cut down on spam while having open registrations (no approval on the new account). This will let people dip their toes in without waiting.

• Easily contact other instance admins, see /admin/instances

• Vote manipulation detection tools for simple sockpuppets and complex coordinated voting networks. See /admin/voting

• Serial downvoter report showing who made lots of downvotes against a single person in a short time.

• Other bot detection tools - e.g. easily spot unnatural runs of very quick post creation.

• Display list of alts on user profiles to more easily investigate activity by alts.

• Filter emoji with keywords rather than importing absolutely everything - this will speed up the emoji reaction dialog.

• Identify instances likely to be used by spammers in future. See /admin/instances?filter=liability

• Microblog posts with no replies can be automatically deleted - set the MICROBLOG_CONTENT_RETENTION environment variable to how many months you want to keep them for.

To upgrade from 1.7.x

git pull  
git checkout v1.8.x  

Then,

./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.

Still a bit alpha, but looks promising. Several features seem to be waiting for atproto implementation.

This is not going to be a blogpost about "Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?". I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven't even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.

Just wondering as im curious and im still learning.

Kinda neat :)

PyLova (Python+Pavlova) is a soft fork of PieFed, aimed at improving the user experience through UI overhauls, empowering users and admins with agency, improved administration and moderation functions, and general bug fixing.

New in V0.4.0

New & Improved

• Instance & Community Stats: Mods and admins get a stats page for their community, tracking total subscribers, new subscribers, votes, posts and comments over time.

Example

• Ban Appeals: Banned users can appeal a community ban with a written reason. Appeals federate to other PyLova instances as a queued notification, for other software (Lemmy, MBin) the head mod will receive a PM with the requet.
• Community Post Requirements: Mods can set rules for posting in their community, things such as requiring flair, specific keywords (Rule) in post titles, ban specific words in titles, and disallow post types.
• Notification Settings: Users can set what notification types they wish to receive.
• Markdown Editor Overhaul: New options for tables, strike-through, horizontal rules, headings and footnotes, alongside support for ruby annotations, inline hashtags and Mbin-style details/spoiler blocks.
• Markdown in Chats: Direct messages now use the full markdown editor and render formatting. Images are offered as a link, due to potential for misuse in unmoderated messages (i.e. tracking/doxxing).
• Modlog Suppression: Admins and staff can hide a modlog entry's reason from everyone else, which displays as " Reason suppressed by AdminName ". It is intended for use cases such as doxxing or harassment through modlog entries. This replaces the PieFed behaviour of outright hiding all modlog entries if not from a trusted instance.

Bug-Fixes & Misc

• Ranking Algorithm Rework : Scaled sorting now weighs communities by monthly active users instead of raw subscriber count.
• Unsaved Draft Warning : Closing a tab or hitting Ctrl-W with a part-written post or comment now asks for confirmation first.
• Chat Deduplication : Starting a chat with someone you have already messaged opens the existing conversation instead of creating a second thread.
• Lemmy/Mbin support for Multi-Image Posts : Extra images now render correctly on Lemmy instances that run an image proxy.
• Markdown Editor Fixes : The link and image buttons no longer prefill https:// or add a leading space, the cursor now lands inside the () ready for a paste, and the redundant quick/email link options are gone.
• Vote History: Users can now view their own upvote and downvote history, linked from a new activity card on the profile page alongside bookmarks and scheduled posts.
• Indented Code Blocks : A ``` inside a four-space indented block no longer breaks the rest of the comment.
• Animated Images: WebP, APNG, Gifs no longer resized in ways that strip the animation.
• Notifications : Expanded by default rather than collapsed.
• User Preview Card : Rebuilt to show flair, flags, pronouns and admin/staff badges, using thumbnails rather than full-size avatars.

Hi, thank you everyone who participated in the Threadiverse Vibrancy Challenge. The rules of the challenge were here, but essentially ten categories had to be claimed each with a unique post or comment.

Open this only if you scored 10 on the challenge!

Gold Star! Congratulations!

How was the challenge for you? Did you notice anything different on the Threadiverse?

Mastodon toot:

Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org

Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.

Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM

This is a common support question that we get. It's great that our platforms let users customize their feed to the extent that they can, but all this customizability can lead to confusion. Content can be hidden based on

• domain blocks
• instance, community, or user blocks
• language settings
• "seen" post settings
• bot post settings
• hidden post settings

Instead of reducing the customizability, I think we can fix this by fixing visibility. A little optional UI counter, enabled by default, could let users see if some content is being filtered out and narrow down which filter is causing it.

What are the technical challenges to something like this? I imagine it would need updates to the APIs to expose that information

I was curious as to where some Threadiverse instances were hosted, as not all explicitly indicate this. Thought that I'd also mention this here in case someone else has an interest in same.

I'll use lemmy.world as an example, as it's the most-popular Threadiverse instance and doesn't presently declare a location (at least via whatever mechanism is propagated to lemmy.fediverse.observer; I assume that fediverse.observer uses the Lemmy API to query it, though I've not dug into the matter).

Historically, one could resolve a hostname to an IP address and then could get the approximate location of an IP address in a number of ways; using whois will give the location of the netblock owner of the IP of a instance, which is generally good enough if one just cares about the approximate region, to find an instance near one.

However, the increasing use of CloudFlare for various reasons, including caching and DDoS prevention, has meant that often, that just provides the closest CloudFlare server to the requestor:

$ host lemmy.world|head -n1
lemmy.world has address 104.26.9.209
$ whois 104.26.9.209|egrep "^(NetName|Country)"
NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET
Country:        US
$

I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area; that'll just return a San Francisco CloudFlare netblock IP.

It is possible to measure latency to a server, which is often good enough to get a general idea of where that server is, unless the server is severely overloaded. One can't use, say, ICMP to reach a server behind CloudFlare, but one can use HTTPS.

$ httping -c3 -lg https://lemmy.world/
PING lemmy.world:443 (/):
connected to 172.67.71.35:443 (1075 bytes), seq=0 time=452.89 ms 
connected to 104.26.9.209:443 (1081 bytes), seq=1 time=403.00 ms 
connected to 104.26.9.209:443 (1080 bytes), seq=2 time=464.63 ms 

https://lemmy.world/ ping statistics

3 connects, 3 ok, 0.00% failed, time 4321ms
round-trip min/avg/max = 403.0/440.2/464.6 ms

The minimum time there is what we're looking for, since the server cannot respond before it gets our request. But...this also is setting up a TLS session for each request, which is a lot of overhead that's going to increase the latency. Better to use HTTP keepalives to cut session setup time out of the equation:

$ httping -c3 -Qlg https://lemmy.world/
PING lemmy.world:443 (/):
pinged host 104.26.9.209:443 (1097 bytes), seq=0 time=437.16 ms 
pinged host 104.26.9.209:443 (1084 bytes), seq=1 time=329.65 ms 
pinged host 104.26.9.209:443 (1087 bytes), seq=2 time=332.28 ms 

https://lemmy.world/ ping statistics

3 connects, 3 ok, 0.00% failed, time 4135ms
round-trip min/avg/max = 329.7/366.4/437.2 ms
$

Okay, but...it also takes time to generate the Web page, which adds overhead. We'd like to use a webpage that is fast to generate to minimize that. Plus, it's impolite to add load to instances by hammering an instance requesting expensive-to-generate pages repeatedly. So we'd like to find a webpage that's pretty cheap to generate and doesn't get cached by CloudFlare.

For example, lemmy.world's server thumbnail is static and CloudFlare can cache it and serve it from a local CloudFlare server, so any latency we measure is just going to be latency to CloudFlare:

$ wget --server-response https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0fd47927-ca3a-4d2c-b2e4-a25353786671.png -O/dev/null 2>&1|grep cf-cache-status
   cf-cache-status: HIT
$

I remember seeing some discussion about the /setup URL being exposed on Lemmy instances. It's non-functional once the server has been set up (or it'd be a security risk), but it's not cached by CloudFlare and while I haven't gone and tried to benchmark it, I expect that it's cheap for an instance to generate, as there's virtually no content there:

$ wget --server-response http://lemmy.world/setup -O/dev/null 2>&1|grep cf-cache-status
  cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC
$

So using that, it's possible to get an approximate estimate of how far the instance is away by network distance:

$ httping -c20 -Qlg https://lemmy.world/setup|grep ^round
round-trip min/avg/max = 226.3/260.0/348.7 ms
$

226.3 milliseconds. How about lemmy.today, my home instance (which doesn't use CloudFlare, but is useful as a control)?

$ httping -c20 -Qrlg https://lemmy.today/setup|grep ^round
round-trip min/avg/max = 52.9/61.2/148.9 ms
$

52.9 milliseconds.

In lemmy.today's case, CloudFlare isn't in the picture, so we can check ICMP latency to get a feel for page generation time:

$ ping -c20 lemmy.today|grep ^rtt
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 40.375/40.884/41.708/0.347 ms
$

40.375 milliseconds. Since we measured the response time for the webpage to be 52.9 milliseconds, figure that one might expect something on the order of 12 milliseconds for the page to be generated (maybe less than this; I don't know whether lemmy.today has other proxy infrastructure in place. One could maybe put tighter bounds on page generation latency by setting up a dedicated instance and measuring time for this to be returned).

So we can figure maybe something like 214 milliseconds to lemmy.world, about the time from US West Coast to Europe. Some other instance network distances from me:

$ httping -c20 -Qlg https://lemmy.zip/setup|grep ^round
round-trip min/avg/max = 211.0/220.2/283.9 ms
$

211 milliseconds. Also probably Europe (IIRC from reading their ToS at one point, they declare that they're subject to Finnish laws, so probably there).

sh.itjust.works says that it's Canada East Coast in their instance sidebar:

$ httping -c20 -Qlg https://sh.itjust.works/setup|grep ^round
round-trip min/avg/max = 117.9/133.0/192.2 ms
$

117.9 milliseconds.

Lemmy.ca (lemmy.ca does declare that it's in Canada already on lemmy.fediverse.observer):

$ httping -c20 -Qlg https://lemmy.ca/setup|grep ^round
round-trip min/avg/max = 42.7/49.3/158.2 ms
$

42.7 milliseconds, significantly closer than the sh.itjust.works Canada East Coast instance. So it'll probably be Canada West Coast.

For my purposes, that's good enough, since I really only care about whether an instance is near me or not. However, if one wanted to know where a distant instance is more than "not very near you" or "near you", one could extend this via "triangulating" an instance's network distance by measuring the latency from several locations; either via having several users in different locations participate and report latencies or setting up a VPS in several known locations around the world.

AI-generated contributions are not accepted.

Pull requests, patches, documentation, translations, issues, or other contributions that are substantially generated by generative AI or large language models will not be accepted.

Contributors are expected to understand, author, and take responsibility for the work they submit. Tools such as linters, formatters, autocomplete, spellcheckers, and other non-generative development tools are unaffected by this policy.

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed#ai-generated-contributions

https://github.com/joinloops/loops-server#ai-generated-contributions

We heard you! We are not accepting any AI or agentic code contributions, and will keep building Pixelfed by hand.

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/117350705262301318

Mastodon is focused on posting on your personal account's page and doesn't really support groups AFAIK. Lemmy does have groups (communities) but doesn't support personal posts. While I get that the two mimic their proprietary counterparts and this defines their functionality, as a self-hoster I'd like to host just one service that would combine the functionality of both Mastodon and Lemmy and potentially other Fediverse platforms.

So what is the platform that implements the most of ActivityPub features?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/43122896

If you’ve not played The Button before, it’s a very silly game where you press a button. Yes, really.

Ok, so there’s a little more to it than that, including factions, politics, an economy, and season-specific twists and turns.

You can also visit !thebutton@lemmy.zip for more details on it

I think I get an extra button press from this referral

Hey folks, I have several accounts across the fediverse (Lemmy, pixelfed, mastodon, bookwyrm), and I think it would be neat to have a single identity across all these platforms.

I'm an amateur self hoster, and was looking into Rebased, a fork of Pleroma. If I were to create a single user instance on rebased, what would I be missing over these accounts on all these services? Could I still use the different apps? (Blorp, Pachli, Rocinante). Would I be missing features?