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• Anti-fascist PieFed features

• Trans-friendly PieFed features

  Trans people have a lot to deal with and there’s many of them on the fediverse so I’ve taken special care to ensure their voices influence the development of PieFed and have built some features with them in mind.

• PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking

  AI scrapers have been hammering fediverse servers for years with things getting especially intense lately. Fediverse developers have been slow to respond with solutions so desperate instance admins have been bolting on Anubis which is fragile and really hard to configure in a way that doesn’t break federation, mobile clients or web UI access. Anubis forces browsers to run some CPU-heavy javascript for a few seconds, increasing the cost to scrapers hopefully to the point where they go elsewhere i...

• AI-found bugs aren't proving any easier to exploit despite the hype

  VulnCheck says fewer than 2% of AI-assisted vulnerability discoveries have been weaponized, casting doubt on claims frontier models are handing attackers a major advantage

• PieFed is 3 years old today

  The first commit to the git repository was this day in 2023. What a ride, how time flies, etc. So many people have helped and contributed, in big and small ways. Code, translations, ideas, testing, feedback, writing docs, running instances - PieFed wouldn’t be what it is without you all! Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this journey so far! Onwards to the next chapter!

• ePaper + eInk community

  For fans of ePaper and eInk devices and tech! This is quite an old community but it’s never been advertised here and has been a ghost town for months. But I made 3 posts in it recently and they did well so it seems like there’s an appetite for this subject out there. !epaper@piefed.social

• How learning te reo Māori in her 70's transformed one Pākehā grandmother's view of Aotearoa

  “If I can do it in my 70s, anyone can,” she told RNZ. “Open your heart. Just listen and learn. There is so much generosity in the Māori community that if you take a step forward, you will be met.”

• Post #4083612

  Huge wildfires in Canada, Scotland, France, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia https://www.dw.com/en/from-france-to-greece-wildfires-rage-across-europes-south/g-77852792 https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/11/europe/spain-france-wildfires-heat-intl Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco Seems like a lot.

• Debian is debating the use of LLMs

  The Debian project is engaging in a debate and vote on whether large language model (LLM) tools may be used in the development of Debian, its distribution-specific code, and the project’s website. The general resolution is currently being discussed leading into a vote on the subject.

• India arrests opposition leader

• Trump imposes 50% tariff on Canadian imports

  These tariffs have been introduced under Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, which covers trade discrimination rather than national emergencies (the mechanism used for the previous tariffs which the Supreme Court struck down recently).

• S&P downgrades Oracle stock to BBB-

  Only one notch above junk level.

• The history of encrypted email

  I’ve always been a bit confused about this messy part of how email works and the author explains it all.

• Bank of England to stop accepting bonds linked to coal for key loans

  The Bank’s new policy suggests that bonds linked to thermal coal are now too risky to sit on its balance sheet, as an international shift away from dirty fossil fuels towards greener energy could end up wiping out their value.

• You can now block posts based on their flair

  You can join /c/technology and then block all the posts in there about Windows, for example. Or join /c/politics and block all the USA news. In the video I demo this with !movies@piefed.social

• Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release

  This is why you should not install any of the vibe coded apps that get advertised in here regularly. You’re just creating a liability for yourself.

• The Lancet got a bunch of scientists to figure out what needs to change in our food production

  The Lancet got a bunch of scientists to figure out what needs to change in our food production It’s a lot. The text of the report is very dense but there are some helpful charts. e.g.

• PieFed now has a font for people with dyslexia

  Go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and choose ’OpenDyslexia’ in the Font setting, halfway down the form. This font looks odd to me but I’m told that it really helps some people. If you’re one of those people, please let me know if you have any preferences around letter spacing or line height, etc.

• PieFed v1.7 is released: Following People, Faster Browsing & Smarter Moderation

  This release saw contributions from some new people, which is great to see. In this release you can now follow other people, not just join communities. When you follow someone their posts will show up in your ‘Subscribed’ feed, regardless of whether you have joined the community it was posted in or not. You can also follow Mastodon+ accounts. Getting Mastodon integration working really well is going to be a long journey but this release gets us headed in that direction. Eventually I hope...

• Normal shipping will not resume in strait of Hormuz until 80 mines cleared

  “We are in uncharted territory. I don’t think [shipping in the strait] is getting back to normal this year.”

• Great to see the Dutch government so active on Mastodon!

  The Dutch Government began offering Mastodon accounts to all government organizations at all levels of government as a shared service. You can read more about how their using Mastodon at https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/overzicht-van-alle-onderwerpen/mastodon-overheid/

• Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

• Americans lost nearly $900 million to AI-powered scams, FBI says

  Deepfakes, voice cloning, and other AI-powered scams cost Americans nearly $900 million in 2025, says the 2025 FBI Internet Crime Report.

• Coastal village in Italy

  This is one of the “Cinque Terre” chain of villages along the north west coast of Italy. We had dinner in the dark brown building in the bottom left and the waitress was so drunk that she was fired shortly after serving our food. She blamed us before storming off.

• small details in my mastodon client [Outpost-fe] that i wanted more people to notice

  A lot of the really good stuff is later in the post so hang in there if ‘readable css classes’ does not get you interested.

• MUST READ

  PieFed.social is going offline for urgent maintenance very soon! Export your community subscriptions now, if you want to continue using PieFed on another instance. I don’t know how long it’ll be offline, could be up to a day.

• What worked at 100 users broke at 5,000

• AI-assisted moderation in the fediverse is happening. Now what?

  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...

• Proof of AI-assisted political profiling by Unruffled @ lemmy.dbzer0.com

  from the mod log: 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. Note how the output includes a nice big logo with a slogan and ascii graphics - this was not a one-off experiment, this is an app they were proud to call their own.

• Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

  I did some analysis of the modlog and found this: 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? 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...