What's new
Media library that lets you upload images to comments/post body and paste from the clipboard
Animated gif support for user profile pictures
Specify alt-text for link posts that link to an image
Emoji picker and spoiler button added to markdown toolbar
More links to the modlog (footer, community sidebar, user profile) and improved searching/filtering
Leave a conversation to remove it from the list of their direct message conversations
Post urls are now "friendly" since they include the community name and a snippet of the title instead of just a number
Add link to show parent comment when directly viewing a comment reply
Image markdown style formatting to allow more advanced control of how images are rendered. e.g. 
Code syntax highlighting in code blocks and allow for style selection in user settings
Tag cloud added to sidebar for feeds and topics
Better searching and filtering of the Instances list
Add a block (of a user, community, instance or domain) from the blocks and filters management area, without doing it via a post
Popup suggestions when mentioning a community or user as you type
Onboarding plugin which auto-subscribes, auto-blocks and sends a welcome message for new accounts
Improved federation efficiency
Old posts can be automatically archived (saved to S3) to free up database space
Old posts by bots with no comments are automatically deleted
LLDAP support, which does LDAP a bit differently
To upgrade
To upgrade from 1.2.x:
git pull
git checkout v1.3.x
./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh
In the past we had a separate project for realtime notifications, which is now unsupported as it's code has been merged with the main PieFed project. To set it up, refer to the Push Notifications section of install.md. As well as enhancing the user experience doing this will decrease load on your server if it hosts local communities with many subscribers as some of the federation work has been offloaded to the push notifications service.
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.