In recent weeks, I have posted an absolutely staggering amount of content on Lemmy.
My goal is simply to support the platform. I hate huge corporations.
Now I’m taking a break. I won’t post anything or I’ll post very little (I still feel a little guilty!! Who will post new content 😢?)
But I need to focus on improving my own life and relax.
However… I’m just curious.
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
I don’t even know what is fundamentally different between Lemmy and Piefed aside from Piefed’s web interface. AFAIK, they’re basically the same thing but Lemmy is primarily developed by a harmful douche. 🫤
Is there any reason beside that to choose one or the other?
I put together this short list of benefits Piefed offers to regular users in response to one of our members at slrpnk asking about our future migration to it.
PieFed, like Mbin, was written from the ground up, and in a totally different language than Lemmy.
But it interoperates with Lemmy, so yeah it’s very similar. Except the LARGE list of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks, and a handful of features that Lemmy still does better on.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
But also, PieFed is written in Python that is a heck of a lot easier to code in than Rust, so the fact that PieFed not only caught up to Lemmy but has already surpassed it in SO MANY ways is a strong indicator of its future success.
But aside from the tankies building in tankie philosophy right into the core of the Lemmy software, it depends on whether someone wants those additional features or not. Like polls, flairs (both user and post), categories of communities, which btw are user customizable and shareable, combining all comments across all cross-posts (helping to reverse the fragmentation effect inherent in federated platforms), and so much more.
I bet that if you tried out PieFed for a day, you’d fall in love with it. You can also do entirely different workflows with it, like trigger notifications to be sent to you that really helps you to stay on top of posts from communities that are very low-volume (and so have trouble making it into your Subscribed feed, like poetry rather than politics or worshipping Arch Linux), but those are likely to take more than a day to figure out - there’s definitely a learning curve. Also note that ymmv with regard to the different apps not (yet!) fully utilizing all the features offered by the PieFed back-end.
Hey, to be fair it’s all public in the modlog. They have weird geopolitical ideas, but I don’t see a lot of ways it’s influenced the design of the platform.
Okay, that does sound dope. How is it implemented? Does it only work if the commenter is on PieFed?
Ditto for more priority going to niche communities. Way too often those posts just slip past in the waterfall of AskLemmy and Tech-related comment.
Yeah…I’ve had to do a LOT of work client-side in Tesseract to give Lemmy half the features Piefed has. Eventually I’m gonna start targeting Piefed, but there’s some under the hood stuff I’m waiting to be resolved before I embark on that voyage. Mainly, I’ve heard that the main Piefed experience and the API are not 1:1 and not everything is exposed in the API. :(
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Don’t even need to acknowledge the flairs and polls; sign me the fuck up.
Honestly I do not know - Notifications on PieFed, along with searching, are both features that are still a bit wonky and behind everything else. Side-note: you will legit want to keep your old Lemmy account, and use it especially for searching for content, and also if you choose piefed.social whenever that goes down for upgrades, which it does far more often than a normal instance (it literally says that btw, it deploys new features sooner than other instances so it is the “test bed” to try them out:-D but if that bothers you then use one of the other ones like piefed.zip, piefed.world, etc.).
So that one may be a bad example for me to use… but on the other hand, Lemmy has been out for YEARS and that feature requested for YEARS, whereas PieFed is still being built and new features are added WEEKLY. So I would expect to see that feature “soon” on PieFed, whereas on Lemmy I would expect to see it “never” (b/c of the authoritarian mindset precluding them even wanting to do it). Just like so many other of the continually growing set of features offered by PieFed.
Not to get too deep into the tankie bashing, but nevertheless it does seem worth pointing out that the philosophies of the Lemmy devs have gotten them into some financial trouble, as people do not want to interact with them, e.g. to first learn the super-difficult (even compared to C++!!) Rust coding language and then try to contribute code. In contrast, pretty much every programmer already knows Python and so a lot of people can - and do - contribute to PieFed.
TLDR: PieFed is so much newer than Lemmy and honestly it is a bit behind in some ways, but even so PieFed is already running circles around Lemmy in not only the pace of development but also the raw set of features already developed.
And if I can add: even Reddit stopped adding features YEARS ago, unless you count things like those Doge coins that generate profit for the company but do not add anything new to the user-base. To see a thread-based forum platform actively adding brand-new features… damn it is so refreshing! (and yes Lemmy does that too, but on the scale of YEARS rather than, again, mere WEEKS)
Piefed was also designed to be better at serving more people, especially outside of North America and Europe. It does more with less data, so people on slower internet in large parts of the world can participate just as easily.
I just mentioned this in another comment but I’ll add it here so you can see it more easily:
I would convert my instance to piefed if there was a migration script, iirc they’re working on it, so I’m looking towards that.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, I’m on the Zulip (https://chat.piefed.social/ ) and Matrix chats and the migration script isn’t really worked on by anyone.
Instances like quokk.au just went nuclear and recreated their instances with Piefed when keeping the domain name.
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/ went the subdomain route.
There’s an open issue for migration script blockers on the codeberg. It looks like there might be more movement on that front now that 1.1 has been released release.
Also @lena@gregtech.eu
Does that even work? Wouldn’t that kinda break federation?
It worked 99.99%, the only issue was PieFed doesn’t allow capitals in community names which meant one community broke as the name didn’t match after being made lowercase.
The instance and communities federate correctly
You can ask @Deceptichum@quokk.au for details
I don’t rightly know but… to a first degree of approximation, if both are fully compliant with the ActivityPub protocol then why would it? (they are not I would guess, but that is a more nuanced take than I have knowledge of:-D)
I read this on Sh.itJust.Works and am now commenting from piefed.social.
I haven’t dug in much but really like it.
Welcome! You are going to absolutely love PieFed:-D.
I like Piefed much better. :)
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all “good”, but yeah, me too :-P
Ok I’ll bite. What are some good piefed instances to consider?
I like it because it’s a lowkey anarchist server. Administration isn’t as overbearing as some places, and you have a lot of freedom to do what you want. It’s been active for 2 years and I know it’s funded for another 2 at least. Plus smaller servers help spread the load (and hopefully load faster for you).
There’s also anarchist.nexus, but they’re not open for registration.
What level of anarchy are we talking here? (You and I tend to differ on some (not all) of our politics 😉)
A lowkey level :P The admin is a lot less extreme than myself, and pretty accepting for most things outside of hate content.
What do you like about these?
It is the same set of considerations that govern Lemmy instances: the admins are irl people who have whatever ideas they like to see happen in the world, and it’s their personal machines and effort that they are putting into administering the instance, so they get to do whatever they please. If you like those philosophies (which they tend to say in their sidebars), then you can make an account on them - FOR FREE - and if not, then you are free to go elsewhere.
Fwiw, piefed.zip avoids defederation as much as possible iirc and has an affinity for gaming topics, piefed.social is one of the oldest but note that it tests deployment of all the newest features, so it can break more readily than a more stable instance, piefed.ca is located in Canada and geared towards people who live there but like the Lemmy version, all are welcomed, and piefed.world is run by the same admins who handle lemmy.world, with all that that entails - some people love that fact, others will hate it, and again it’s all fine and good bc there is room for us all to coexist peacefully across the Threadiverse:-).
That’s https://crust.piefed.social/ now
Oh right, I did forget, thanks!:-)
/s
😳python?!
Yep and its pretty easy to read when looking at the source code.
C is easy as well… For me, even more easy than python, as I read like 100x more C++ rather than python…
I don’t even bother to write python anymore 🤣 I let it generate by AI nowadays
Honestly as long as its a “supported” language and well built, I would argue the language doesn’t matter as much as its execution.
I make my $$ on python, but C/C++ is soooo much better than when I started back a couple of decades ago. both are “fast enough”. Im glad there are people like you that like to work with the Cs of the world :).
Reddit is written in Python. It was originally written is Common Lisp, but they rewrote it in Python since it is easier to find developers.
That was a long time ago, I highly doubt it still is
Damn! How inefficient 🤪 but that explains a lot
Python dev tend to vibe code while C (and other similar programming language) devs tend to plan more prior coding.
As a decision maker, I would let my devs only use python for proof of concepts or for build scripts…
Although I’m not a big fan of python, or dynamically typed languages in general, I think its DX is a lot better than stuff like C. Unless you really enjoy leaking 40GB of ram per second.
What? Maybe the percentage of vibe coders among python users is higher, but that’s irrelevant. Just hire the real developers…
“Everything I don’t like is tankie” freaks just love shoehorning “tankies” into everything it’s so funny
It’s more tedious than funny, honestly
If you’re using the browser, the Piefed main page is a lot more data efficient, if you care about that sort of thing.
I just switched and there is definitely a noticeable difference in that department. It runs so smooth compared to my lemmy experience.
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
Feature-wise there are some differences, but they both are part of the same fediverse so you’ll have access to the same content.
Personally I am used to the Lemmy UI, and I feel like it’s not as easy to see if a mod report was being taken care of on PieFed vs Lemmy