Rimu

Web developer. Lead developer of [PieFed](https://join.piefed.social )

Pronouns: he/him
Location: Earth
Mastodon: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@rimu

Public Key

npub1dje7m375wqzmdjzy5et5w7qj925yn9yyvmynctflq2mjr94emf9q0ux0zv

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxevldcl28qpdkepz2v4680qfz42zfjjzxdjfu95ls9depj6ua5jspzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejs2jrse2

Publishing to

nostr.wine

Author Public Key

npub1dje7m375wqzmdjzy5et5w7qj925yn9yyvmynctflq2mjr94emf9q0ux0zv

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Last Notes

2026-05-05 02:35:14 CEST

from the [mod log](https://piefed.world/modlog?mod_action=ban_user&suspect_user_name=&communities=&user_name=flatworm7591%40lemmy.dbzer0.com&submit=Search):
![Mojng5xTnVM7YHd.png](https://media.piefed.social/posts/Mo/jn/Mojng5xTnVM7YHd.png)
https://s.faf-pb.xyz/lXxek
The output from the LLM was provided as proof that someone needed to be banned.
I didn't want to do this but my hand was forced by [their dissembling, minimization and bullshit](https://piefed.social/post/2032935#comment_11212728).

2026-05-04 06:59:29 CEST

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Check this out - https://www.structural-integrity.eu/the-politics-of-decentralization-and-the-libertarian-allure-of-mastodon/

2026-05-04 06:53:04 CEST

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Yeah you can do that but now you're on my do-not-trust list. And probably a few other people's lists.
I appreciate you being open about your opinions because now I can make an more informed choice about interacting with you and the instance you run.
Don't you think everyone deserves the information they need to choose which instances they want to interact with, according to whatever criteria is important to them? Even if your criteria are different?

2026-05-04 06:46:22 CEST

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> you are free to leave and choose a different one.
I only have that freedom if the admin tells me that they use LLMs in this manner or if they federate with instances that do. At the moment everyone is in the dark.

2026-05-04 06:43:50 CEST

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You're hyperfocusing on one point, as if that's the only part that matters and ignoring all the rest. I don't consider that helpful, hence the downvote.
What is especially unhelpful is abusing your admin access to call out people's votes. Leave that shit alone.

2026-05-04 05:19:36 CEST

I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the user’s comment history to OpenAI with the question “analyze this content for evidence of *specific political ideology* sentiment. Also identify any *related political ideology* tropes“. (The italic bits are where I've redacted the ideology they're seeking).
OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
[![image](https://media.piefed.social/posts/JF/um/JFumUeL3iWYfLVr.png)](https://join.piefed.social/2026/05/04/ai-assisted-moderation-in-the-fediverse-is-happening-now-what/)
and so on, hundreds of comments.
I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Let’s focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances and people are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by groups we agree with but what if people we strongly disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?
The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of other questions too.
What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.
What safeguards do we need?
Would asking a LLM “please evaluate this person’s political opinions” give different results than “find evidence we can use to ban them” (as used in the cases I’ve seen)?
What are our transparency expectations?
Is this acceptable and normal?
Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not – should it have been?)
If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?
Can we opt out?
Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?
Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?
How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?
Once the user’s comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?
What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?
Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?
I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesn’t have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.
And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of worker’s rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I can’t see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But it’s happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.
What do you make of this?

2026-05-02 00:54:08 CEST

I did some analysis of [the modlog](https://piefed.social/modlog) and found this:
![V8lPrxY1qxcISLe.png](https://media.piefed.social/posts/V8/lP/V8lPrxY1qxcISLe.png)
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn't a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
![vyfUNYTrX9pHQeR.png](https://media.piefed.social/posts/vy/fU/vyfUNYTrX9pHQeR.png)
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have... But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let's look at the number of bans per community hosted:
![Yrc7TofOr88SeGt.png](https://media.piefed.social/posts/Yr/c7/Yrc7TofOr88SeGt.png)
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are [in this spreadsheet](https://join.piefed.social/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/banning_numbers.ods) if anyone wants to make their own charts.

2026-04-17 01:44:19 CEST

Banning kids from social media won’t work, as they “will find very quickly the ways to go around and to still use social media,” Estonian Education Minister Kristina Kallas said.

2026-04-09 00:33:36 CEST

**Please only vote if you have contributed to PieFed in some capacity (e.g. coding, translation, reporting bugs, discussing bugs) or might in the near future!**
> Currently, we have two different developer chats on Zulip and Matrix. This means, that new devs will be confused about which channel to join and experienced devs have to actively look around in both channels for questions to answer. This seems like a really inefficient system, so we should at least decide on one official communication channel.
More discussion at https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1964543/we-should-rethink-how-the-communitcation-channels-for-piefed-devs-work
Personally I find Matrix to be a pain in the ass and prefer Zulip. But it hasn't managed to attract as many users as Matrix has despite pushing it quite hard for months. Also PieFed development has started to bleed over into PieFed naturally, such as [email protected] and [email protected]. So we're in an awkward place at the moment.

2026-03-22 07:21:04 CET

A few months ago I threw this question out into the void - "what if you could access the fediverse through your Usenet reader??" and got almost no response. Still, the idea had lodged in my brain and wouldn't go away so this weekend I caved in and built the thing. Hat tip to the author of the excellent [nntpserver package](https://pypi.org/project/nntpserver/) that did all the hard stuff.
I look forward to seeing someone's screenshots of fediverse posts on a Commodore 64, some day.
This will be released as a part of PieFed 1.7, coming soon.

2026-02-24 00:15:02 CET

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Very interesting that only 71% of humans got it right.

2026-02-18 05:30:11 CET

2026-01-28 23:30:24 CET

Welcome! What brings you to PieFed and how did you find out about it?

2026-01-12 07:57:02 CET

### Big deals, omg
- Mods can move a post, with replies and votes, to another community. The change federates to other instances (except Lemmy, for now. I've been in discussion with devs from NodeBB and Lemmy about how this will work, they are on board).
- Upload video files while creating a video post - no external host needed. Admin setting to limit who can do this (to save space).
- Realtime chat - conversation immediately updates on screen when a new PM arrives.
### More good stuff
- Author-deleted posts are still visible to them and anyone with the url. No more loss of high-value comments with the OP deletes.
- Search filters - nsfw and minimum post score
- Improve speed of cross-posting form on mobile
- Emoji tokens like `:blush:` can be used in post or comment body. No GUI support yet.
- Admin setting to disable local copies of remote images - good for single-user instances
- Replying to a comment marks associated inbox item as read
- Updated HPT-Fruits theme
- 196 no longer excluded from default community import
- Remove unused community rating feature
- Remove unused instance vote weight feature
- Remove ineffective þ to 'th' replacement
- Improved accessibility - better contrast, fixed many incorrectly-used `aria-label`s
- Updated translations - Basque, Chinese, Japanese
### API:
- Admins can ban/unban users through the API. piefed.world was maintaining custom code for this, hopefully it'll make their version upgrades faster.
### Bugs fixed
- PMs
- Markdown parsing
- Speed up loading of profile pages for admin users
- Friendica post parsing
- Passkeys login UX tweak
### To upgrade
To upgrade from 1.4.x:
```
git pull
git checkout v1.5.x
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh
```

2025-12-07 08:37:24 CET

One of the long-standing issues we have in/on the fediverse is that when I have a link in my post that goes to another post on my instance, people on other instances will click that link and be taken to MY instance, where they can't comment, don't have an account, aren't logged in, etc and they will try to log in using their login credentials for their home instance then wonder why it doesn't work.
When someone links to https://lemmy.world/post/39832275 and I'm on piefed.social I want to see https://piefed.social/c/news/p/1544770/national-parks-ordered-to-check-gift-shops-for-dei-type-items not the copy on lemmy.world!
As of PieFed v1.4, links like that will automatically be converted to link to the local copy of the post, where 'local' is whatever is local for the reader. See the linked video where I demonstrate this in action.

2025-10-30 07:18:06 CET

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Yes, we know.
This is a blog post about Anubis I wrote a few months back, when I thought I had it working https://join.piefed.social/2025/07/09/an-anubis-config-for-piefed/
After writing that post I took another approach and moved the logic into nginx instead as the Anubis configuration language was impossible to debug. That seemed fine but then a different weird Anubis bug that had been languishing in their issue queue for months with no solution hit me and I gave up.
It's just not ready. It's bad software. Their documentation is very misleading. I hope no one else loses as many days as I did.

2025-10-30 04:14:23 CET

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Sir, this is a Wendys.

2025-10-30 00:40:52 CET

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I tried 2 times, for hours each time, to set this up in a way that does not break federation, the api, or the web ui. It's not as easy as the OP thinks and problems aren't always obvious immediately.

2025-10-09 05:39:21 CEST

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Yes PieFed has that.

2025-10-09 03:06:50 CEST

I've followed all the frequent posters on piefed.social using my mastodon.social account so we should be seeing a lot more PieFed content showing up there now. But unless you use hashtags, I'll be the only one seeing it!
When making your post, put a few words into the Tags field below the Body field, separated by a comma. No need to include the # character.

2025-09-13 00:39:25 CEST

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FYI piefed released v1.1.6 and v1.1.7 in the last week.
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/releases
I'll put more fulsome release notes on minor point releases like that if I know people are going to link to them.

2025-09-12 22:33:06 CEST

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Naah, when mods delete things it federates out.

2025-09-12 12:35:51 CEST

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I'll wait to see what people want but I probably intended the 'delete child comments' feature to be for moderators only. For cleaning up threads that have gone off on a bad tangent.

2025-09-07 02:01:52 CEST

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Possibly although the differences of federation between the threadiverse and the rest of the fediverse go way beyond deletes. FEP 1b12 is a whole thing, chipping away at it piece by piece would be slow going.

2025-09-07 00:53:09 CEST

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Yes, a Delete activity is sent to all instances with actors that follow the category/community. Those instances then delete their local copy. In Lemmy/PieFed there is no distinction between deletion and removal.
The deletes are soft so it is possible to un-delete by sending an Undo activity. PieFed keeps soft-deleted posts (topics, in NodeBB language) for a few days then after a week deletes the content from the database.
All of these activities are enclosed in an `Announce` and the http POST is signed using the community key. So in a way the content 'belongs' to the community, not to the original author. With that model of ownership the idea of removal redundant - a post without a community is not a post.
Tangentially - it would be good to come up with a way to move a topic to another category and federate that so the move can happen on other instances, too. We could go off-piste and create a `Move` activity, or use `Remove` (from old topic/comm) followed by `Add` (to new topic/comm) to do the same thing. I feel more inclined to go with `Move` as it's a single atomic operation that either succeeds or fails, despite it not being in the spec.
The AP spec is so badly stretched by various implementation-specific differences that I don't think it's worth being ideological about adherence to it it anymore.

2025-08-29 12:26:18 CEST

The upcoming v1.2 release will include a built-in instance chooser, so every instance will be able to recommend every other instance, without a centralized site like https://joinmastodon.org or https://lemmyverse.net/instances. (except those instances that have opted out or closed registrations)
The instance-choosers for other platforms tend to push people towards the bigger instances by prominently displaying the number of users or communities they have, or even worse sorting results by number of users. This seems like a good metric because if lots of people chose it in the past then it must be well-run, right? Right? Heh.
Instead, the PieFed instance chooser sorts by ping (network ping + page load speed) and prominently shows a "Stability" metric which is a combination of various things (daily backups, multiple people having SSH access, financial health, etc). Another key metric is Newbie-friendliness which is whether they have a decent number of topics created, which are used as starter-packs to get new accounts into many communities quickly. Thirdly, the Age is shown, which is the number of months it has been operating. Join brand new instances at your peril.
Another aspect I've chosen not to get into is regional or topic focus of instances because most people are into more than one topic, leading to difficult choices. Sorting by ping will tend to show you instances in your country anyway.
The primary language of an instance is really important - people need to be able to communicate with their admins - so I made that a filter.
With new PieFed instances opening up all the time we need to get new people using those instead of everyone clustering together on piefed.social. The sooner we do this the better, in terms of spreading the financial load around and fostering a healthy diversity of instances before one or two instances snowball and end up dominating.
I'm really looking forward to releasing this functionality, in the next couple of weeks.
https://media.piefed.social/posts/pv/RL/pvRLrJTDSKpMPAL.png

2025-08-04 10:43:00 CEST

It's been 6 weeks since 1.0 and we've merged in 80+ PRs and closed as many issues. A third of the issues originally intended for v1.2 are already completed and so they are included in 1.1 instead.
### Some signs of maturity
There are now 32 PieFed instances, serving 1750+ MAU. Voyager, Summit, Blorp and Interstellar are mobile apps that connect to PieFed.
From now on https://piefed.social will change from following the main development branch of the repo and instead stay on v1.1 until v1.2 is released. This will provide a more stable experience for people using the instance and allow for wilder experiments on the development branch. I recommend all other instances do the same.
It will also put less pressure on other instances to keep up with piefed.social. A new instance will be created soon that will use the dev branch and serve as a staging instance.
### To upgrade
To upgrade from 1.0.x (or switch to 1.1 from the main branch):
```
git pull
git checkout v1.1.x
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh
```
### Highlights of 1.1
Most instances have been on the dev branch anyway so they will already have these:
You can set a default comment sort, for when viewing a post.
LDAP support, so people can use their piefed.social login for chat.piefed.social and translate.piefed.social
More Ajax throughout, creating a more fluid UI.
Better notifications, with types and which are removed if the post they're notifying about is deleted.
Private votes are just non-federated votes.
Popup tooltips all over the place.
New login methods:
- Mastodon
- Discord
Hashtags in community side pane, e.g. [this community](https://piefed.social/c/fediverse)
Daily maintenance tasks execute in parallel, which is a lot faster.
[Batched ActivityPub federation](https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/fep-4248.md) that will significantly improve federation performance between PieFed instances
Filter out posts based on a keyword search of community name.
Reduce deadlocks and improve DB performance
- use redis for locking.
- extensive refactors to stop connection leakage.
Load comments using ajax when there are > 100 on a post, making the initial loading of a post quicker.
Automatic post archiving of old posts, to slow DB growth and reduce operating costs. Post body and comments are saved in S3 as JSON instead of in the DB.
Show/hide text inside password fields, making confusion during login less common.
Mods can lock comments and their children.
A lot of improvements to scheduled posts.
Several improvements in the markdown to html parsing.
Upgrade to Flask 3.
Swagger for API developers (in progress).
API: new json serialization lib that is 10x faster.
API: Get topics & feeds endpoints. Replacement for comments/list endpoint.
### Things planned for 1.2
An instance chooser during registration - no separate instance choosing website needed
Optional post approval process for mods
Communities populated by a RSS feed.
Remind me
AI content filter
Event post type which federates with Friendica and [Mobilizon](https://mobilizon.org/)

2025-06-05 23:56:19 CEST

What if the Fediverse met... in real life?

2025-04-16 02:45:22 CEST

2025-03-21 20:13:11 CET

>“This is a completely different approach to what people have done before. The writing’s on the wall that this is going to transform things, it’s going to be the new way of doing forecasting,” Turner said. He said the model would eventually be able to produce accurate eight-day forecasts, compared with five-day forecast at present, as well as hyper-localised predictions.
>Dr Scott Hosking, the director of science and innovation for environment and sustainability at the Alan Turing Institute, said the breakthrough could “democratise forecasting” by making powerful technologies available to developing nations around the world, as well as assisting policymakers, emergency planners and industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts.

2025-03-20 23:36:27 CET

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Every few months Dansup announces that Groups are imminent.

2025-02-21 07:38:05 CET

2025-02-10 04:59:51 CET

Communities on PieFed have a setting that controls whether downvotes are accepted and from where.
Perfect for communities that swim against the mainstream a bit!
https://piefed.social/static/media/posts/Jd/Xq/JdXqxnPr60X54ub.png

2025-02-10 01:36:38 CET

[email protected]
All pro-PieFed memes are welcome!

2025-01-25 00:23:51 CET

We’re working on a multireddit feature which will let people join or leave large groups of related Communities with a single click, and see all the posts from those communities in a single list. These groups will be crowd-sourced, so anyone can create or share collections of Communities around their interests. Basically the same as https://piefed.social/topics except crowd-sourced (and federated?).
We’re stuck on what to call this feature, though, and your creativity could really help us out! Here are some ideas we’ve been tossing around:
- Bundles
- Community Packs
- PieSlices
- Stacks
- QuickJoin Packs
- Collections (kbin called it this)
- Topics (we call them this now but they're all maintained by the instance admin)
Which of these do you like best? Do you have any suggestions of your own? We're aiming for something that’s easy to understand, catchy, and fits the PieFed ethos. I'll copy those suggestions into individual comments on this post so people can upvote what resonates with them.
The problem I have with ideas like "Collections" or "Topics" is those concepts have no relation to "Communities" which increases the learning new users need to do while getting comfortable. Something more intuitive like "Towns" is more obviously a larger or group of "Communities", for example.
Please throw your ideas into the comments below and vote on what you see!

2025-01-11 06:21:20 CET

2024-11-09 02:56:14 CET

Recently there have been two more PieFed instances created, which offer accounts to anyone who wants one:
- https://feddit.online
- https://link.fossdle.org
Feddit.online is hosted in USA which should make it a _little_ faster for people there. It also has a different topic structure at https://feddit.online/topics than PieFed.social has.

2024-10-11 09:57:41 CEST

Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

2024-08-19 23:42:22 CEST

We had [a really interesting discussion](https://lemmy.world/post/18805474 ) yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, [whether they are already public](https://lemmy.world/post/18813833 ) and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that [votes should be private](https://lemmy.world/comment/11850820 ) yet it was repeatedly pointed out that [a quick visit to an Mbin instance](https://lemmy.world/comment/11854355 ) was enough to see all the upvotes and that [Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI](https://lemmy.world/comment/11851016 ) for upvotes and downvotes (with [predictable results](https://lemm.ee/comment/13768482 ) ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you [make a new account](https://piefed.social/auth/register ) now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.

2024-08-19 00:55:23 CEST

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

2024-08-17 02:33:00 CEST

A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:
<li>Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field</li>
<li>Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.</li>
<li>Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with</li>
<li>Added a <a href="https://piefed.social/topics/new" rel="nofollow ugc" target="_blank">suggest a topic</a> form</li>
"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.
Also I did a few things:
<li>Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar</li>
<li>Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.</li>
<li>Some mastodon integration bugs</li>
<li>Wrote a guide about <a href="https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/" rel="nofollow ugc" target="_blank">how to install the PieFed mobile app</a></li>
As you can see we don't have a lot of *really* big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.

2024-08-07 05:40:48 CEST

Just a quick note to recognize that the first lines of PieFed code were published on the 28th July 2023, just over a year ago. Since then there have been 1400+ changes made by 9 people, involving adding 88,000 lines of code and removing 28,000 lines. The issue queue has 98 open and 99 closed issues.
While [join.piefed.social](https://join.piefed.social ) went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that [piefed.social](https://piefed.social ) went live on 4th January 2024.
Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.
What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!