A front page for the threadiverse, picked by people

Fedigest is a small website you host yourself. Your curators pick posts from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, say why each one is worth reading, and publish them as one newest-first page. The conversation stays where it started.

See it running Install Fedigest
A Fedigest front page with a pinned welcome post and a picked post about a restored arcade cabinet
The front page, in light or dark depending on your device.

How a post gets picked

  1. Paste a link to a post on any Lemmy, PieFed or Mbin instance. Fedigest fills in the title, text, image, author and community.
  2. Say why it matters. Write a short excerpt for the front page and as much as you like for the post itself, or keep the original post as the body.
  3. Publish now or at a time you set. Comments load live from the original thread, and readers can open the post on their own instance to vote and reply.
A post page with View original and Interact from your instance links, followed by comments from the original thread
A picked post with its comments, fetched from the community where it was posted.

What's in it

For readers

  • No account needed, and Fedigest adds no trackers or third-party scripts
  • Comments straight from the original thread
  • One click to the same post on your own instance
  • RSS for the whole site and for each category
  • Light, dark or automatic, plus a pure black option for OLED screens

For curators

  • Paste a link and the rest fills itself in
  • Drafts, scheduled posts and pinned posts
  • A warning when a post has already been picked
  • Several categories per post
  • Your own author page and avatar

For admins

  • Watch a community, a person or a whole instance, and review what comes in or publish it automatically
  • Admin and curator accounts, created by invitation only
  • Search, sitemap, link previews and a privacy page out of the box
  • View counts per post, without cookies

Themes

Fifteen built-in themes: Light, Dark, Dim, Sepia, Newspaper, Solarized, Nord, Terminal, High contrast and more. Most come in a light and dark pair, so the site follows each reader's device, and readers can pick their own from the footer.

The front page on a phone in the Nord theme The front page on a phone in the Sepia theme The front page on a phone in the green Terminal theme

Or make your own: copy a theme and change its colours, font, corners and buttons, with a live preview of your site.

The theme editor with light and dark pairing, colour pickers and a live phone-sized preview
The theme editor.

Install

Fedigest is one small container with its database built in. You need a server with Docker Compose, a domain name, and a web server such as Caddy in front of it for HTTPS.

# unpack the release and configure it
tar xzf fedigest.tar.gz && cd fedigest
cp .env.example .env
nano .env            # set SITE_NAME and SITE_DOMAIN

# build and start
docker compose up -d --build

# the first admin password
docker compose logs app | grep -A2 "First-run"

Everything else, from categories to themes, is set up in the browser. To update later, run ./deploy.sh: it backs up your data first and puts the previous version back if the new one doesn't start.