Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Currently trending down. And it's all your fault for taking a break. π
PieFed MAUs increased by 400% though - when lemm.ee went down a LOT of people abandoned Lemmy in favor of PieFed.
wow piefed is kinda taking off :) Thats awesome.
Its not like we cant all get what we want. Some will want lemmy, some will want piefed, some will want mastodon/kbin/mbin/etc...etc... Posts/comments show up in all. Its nice to have options.
Yeah, but look at the scale involved. That being said, I do expect it to stick around and become a major part of the ecosystem.
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. π«€
Is there any reason beside that to choose one or the other?
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.
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.
when a lemmy instance, community bans you, it doesnt notify you of it
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)
How is Lemmy's code actually licensed? If it's GPL or somesuch, someone can just fork it and add the missing features. There's some amount of work needed for keeping up to changes in Lemmy's main branch, but it's still reasonably easy work. (Assuming you can code, of course π)
EDIT: The licence is this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License
That seems far too simplistic imho. Instance admins have done this for years and can tell you how quickly things fall behind: if you want to federate with any other instances (the entire point behind the federated model?), then you need to maintain compatibility. Fortunately Lemmy is fairly mature and far less likely to release groundbreaking changes than it did in the past.
But also, you have to learn to code in Rust, which even people who already know C++ seem to find very difficult, for a number of reasons including major lack of support by a standard library (such as C++ itself has in its STL), which in Rust is still fairly primitive iirc, forcing the user to build every tiny little thing from scratch, or use less well-written and tested code, possibly so poor as to negate the advantages of having chosen Rust over some other, more commonly useful language like C++.
And then you'd be doing all of that entirely on your own, and maintaining it in perpetuity. Don't get me wrong, several people have done exactly that (Admiral Patrick, developer of the Tesseract front-end, comes to mind).
But all of that seems like it would be even slower, compared to PieFed releasing new features practically weekly? And also it is Python, which is a much easier language. And also you could work along with others, fixing bugs in your code that you did not spot, and vice versa. I'm not seeing the advantages there to what you are proposing: I mean yes obviously there are "advantages", but relatively speaking I mean, they seem much smaller than if someone put the same amount of effort towards improving PieFed, which would then be shared and maintained world-wide even if you got sick or busy irl or something?
And even if you were right, that doing this with Lemmy would work out well, for how much longer would that remain true - six months? - before PieFed absolutely blows the set of features that Lemmy uses out of the water? Imagine social media that is actually fun to use, and where the computer automates the most common tasks so as to not require menial labor every hour of the day, as Lemmy does (I am speaking of the requirement for manual moderation efforts)? That much has already come to pass, to various degrees, in many ways on PieFed. e.g. in Lemmy you could search for every cross-posting across all instances wherever you can find them, then click on each one, and read through the comments, making sure to get the version of the community that is accessible from the instance you are on rather than follow a link taking you to a different one... but why do all that work, when PieFed provides it ready-made, instantly upon loading the post?
Starting with PieFed is starting ahead of Lemmy, in most ways (not all though: Lemmy's search functionality is still way better, and reportedly about to get even better still by allowing limiting of search terms specifically to post titles separately from message contents).
Unless you just want to learn Rust for other reasons. π
I'll try to remember to address the rest of your comment later tonight, but one things I want to mention now: it's not really a competition. If one is better than the other, it's only a good thing for both.
And then, people don't really look very much at what is technically better than something else.
I'm on Lemmy and I've got stuff here. It's definitely good enough, so I'm not going to migrate anywhere. People land at whatever some they land at, and unless that one is actually bad, they are unlikely to change for something else.
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.
It's not though. You not only do not receive a notification, unlike Reddit btw, but you also can't message the person who did it, also unlike Reddit btw, and on top of that, the modlog simply says that it was done by a "mod", so you can't DM them either unless you DM every single mod in the entire community (tbf Reddit does NOT show which mod did something, but in that case you still have the shared modmail so there was no actual need to have it).
Even weirder, I remember when this feature was added: it used to always show the account of the mod, but over time it has become even more authoritian than it used to be. I am saying that Lemmy is somehow even more authoritian than Reddit itself. Instance admins and to a lesser degree mods have tremendous freedoms, whereas the end users not so much. The devs left Reddit, but how Reddit operated still seems very much prominent in their minds, except when they choose to do differently and yes, enormous kudos that there is a modlog, but without notifications of an event or a modmail it still on balance ends up being MORE authoritian than Reddit.
Whereas PieFed offers numerous features aimed at the democratization of moderation, allowing mods to be more hands-off and leave the end-user to decide what they want to see, possibly enlisting the aid of the entire community. e.g. one of the first things PieFed does with a new account is a sign-up wizard asking what their interests are and subscribing to communities based on the answers, and as part of that asking if the user would like to block All, Some, or None of any keywords the user would like, such as "Trump" or "Musk". This allows mods to have additional options beyond simply remove that content vs. allow it: now, they can more readily allow it knowing that the users that are super tired of seeing it all the time have a means to see less of it, provided by the automated software (which also reduces the burden of manual moderation tasks too).
Sorry this is getting long and you had other questions but I wanted to point out that the pro-democracy stance of PieFed's democratization of moderation and the pro-authoritarian stance (not from the perspective of an instance admin but to the end-users themselves) is very much baked into the code and a large part of the overall experiences, as it shapes what content is allowed to show up on the respective platforms.
It brings all comments together across all communities, both PieFed and Lemmy - it is one of PieFed's most popular features! Here is an example showing 9 cross-posts where the comments are all brought together: https://piefed.social/post/1189671 (except I have Lemmy.ml blocked so those comments properly don't show up for my account:-) - note clicking the horizontal lines shows the community sidebar with explanation and rules for each one.
As you said, it really helps posts to smaller communities maintain traction rather than get ignored by the masses of Lemmings, with that automated software feature allowing Pie-heads to be more connected across the Fediverse.:-)
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. :(
It's great to see you still posting on the Threadiverse! Okay so you've been doing it for awhile I guess but I've been sick myself so not staying up with things, anyway it's still great to see!! π
You may want to think about it from the ground up: a lot of the need for Tesseract was due to things like the strict authoritian stance of the tankie devs - e.g. not providing a means to truly block all users from an instance, or not showing alternative image text, or not embedding video playbacks - forcing you to find creative solutions to that problem (note PieFed does all of those things mentioned, usually not as comprehensively implemented as well as Tesseract does it but at least to some degree, e.g. Peer tube and YouTube videos can embedd but not Loops ones). Maybe now Tesseract would not have to be an entire alternative UI front-end - especially when the development pace of PieFed is so rapid in comparison to Lemmy that would increase your difficulty of keeping up - but instead rather a "theme", combined with changes to the underlying codebase that would affect all of the users of PieFed instead of only some of them? These devs I believe would be much more friendly and receptive to your ideas:-).
Although I am not a developer like you so too far away from the problem to see it anywhere close to clearly like you will, as you get into it, but wanted to throw out that oddball idea from left field in case it helps jar your thinking along creative lines. Remember to do six impossible things before breakfast each day!
But most important of all, if I can add, would be for you to enjoy it!!!
Good points.
I don't have a full plan yet (just the general idea of a plan), but when I start the journey to Piefed, it'll probably be from the ground up or very close to that. I already need to update the codebase from Svelte 4 to Svelte 5 which is a pretty big job due to the fundamental and breaking changes between those two versions.
The components that make up Tesseract (posts, comments, sidebars, everything) are also all heavily tied to Lemmy's type definitions. To support Piefed, I'd have to de-couple the components in the code from Lemmy's type def and add in an abstraction layer (both for future-proofing and to make it possible to support both if I wanted to).
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.
Also @lena@gregtech.eu
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.
If you're using the browser, the Piefed main page is a lot more data efficient, if you care about that sort of thing.
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
I just switched and there is definitely a noticeable difference in that department. It runs so smooth compared to my lemmy experience.
Can confirm, used to have an account on lemm.ee, switched to PieFed just before lemm.ee went down.
Probably will bump back up in September
yeah
Honestly, I'm not complaining about it going from 2 mil at its peak (2023!) to 1.25 mil now. That's way more people than I thought!
Replying to this to make the line go up
Interesting that user counts are lower, but posts and comments are still going up. Hopefully, that doesn't mean more bot activity π§