The last week has been all about email.
With the addition of the private message ( kinda -private message...) feature the previous week it became more important that recipients are aware they have an unread notification waiting for their attention. Without an email telling them about it they might not see the message for days or whenever they next log in.
So now there's an automated email that goes out to people with unread notifications. The logic of it all took a while to get right - the system needs to track when someone last used PieFed, keep track of whether an email has already been sent for a notification, handle bounces, stop sending after a few bounces, etc. Also getting AWS SES set up right and SPF/DKIM/DMARC was quite a rabbit hole but one I'm very familiar with so it was pretty smooth sailing.
If you'd rather not receive those notification emails, click the unsubscribe link in the bottom of one of them or go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and untick the second checkbox. There's a checkbox for email newsletters too, which is a different thing.
Instance admins now have an email newsletter function which will email everyone. I'll probably use that once a month or so to give a summary of new features, news, etc.
Many people's email inboxes are overflowing or ignored so I'll be looking at adding push notifications pretty soon. As part of this PieFed will need to have a service worker, which will make it into a PWA.