PieFed on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

PieFed on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

PieFed is an open source federated link aggregator and discussion platform. People post links and text to topic-based communities, others vote and reply in threads, and moderators keep each community on track. It speaks ActivityPub, so an instance can federate with the wider fediverse. You own the instance, the data and the moderation policy.

This image is a complete, working PieFed instance rather than a set of parts: PostgreSQL 16, Redis 7, a Celery background worker, gunicorn and nginx are installed, tuned to the VM size and wired together, so it boots and works standalone with no external services to sign up for.

cloudimg hardening:

• Every secret is generated on YOUR VM at first boot, never baked into the image: the Flask signing key that protects session cookies, the PostgreSQL password and the Redis password. They are written to a root-only file.
• The administrator account is created at first boot with a per-VM password, before the instance accepts a single connection. There is no window in which the site is reachable without an owner, and no shared default login.
• Registration ships closed and the instance ships private, so nobody can sign themselves up before you decide who may.
• PostgreSQL, Redis and the application server all listen on loopback only. nginx on port 80 is the single entry point.
• Community data, uploaded media and database storage live on a dedicated data disk, separate from the OS disk.
• The OS is fully patched at build time and unattended security updates stay enabled.

Federation, stated plainly: ActivityPub federation requires a real public DNS name and HTTPS. A VM reached by IP address alone cannot federate, and no hostname is baked into this image. Out of the box you get a fully working private instance - accounts, communities, posts, comments, votes and search. The deployment guide covers pointing a DNS name at the VM and terminating TLS, which is what turns federation on.

A step-by-step deployment guide is published at https://www.cloudimg.co.uk/guides/piefed-on-ubuntu-24-04-azure/ and 24/7 support is included.

PieFed is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. The complete corresponding source is retained on the image at /opt/piefed/app; licence and third-party notices are at /usr/share/piefed/.

cloudimg is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the PieFed project. PieFed is the mark of its respective owner and is used here only to identify the software included in this image.