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?
Edit: I will still post stuff. I’ll just post a lot less!
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. 🫤
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.
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!! 😜
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).
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 😀)
EDIT: The licence is this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License
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
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.
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)
The instance and communities federate correctly
You can ask @Deceptichum@quokk.au for details
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.
Ok I’ll bite. What are some good piefed instances to consider?
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
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.
I like Piefed much better. :)
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all “good”, but yeah, me too :-P
😳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…
The difference is, that C and similar can be compiled, python and similar needs an interpreter to be run.
This is the reason that languages that need to be compiled are why more efficient, meaning way less power is needed to execute, meaning less CO2 and cheaper server as less powerful hardware is needed.
But it takes more time to develop it. This is why I like Go, which has a quite nice DX and is fast.
Yeah, I think vibe coders being more common in Python is more a product of Python being pushed to more people, particularly new developers
And depending on vibe coding, python just isn’t complaining about wrong syntax, but just do its job, which generally results in nasty code.
If you need a script language (run using interpreter instead of precompiling) use ruby, this one enforces good syntax.
Wdym “doesnt complain about wroh syntax”?
“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
Can confirm, used to have an account on lemm.ee, switched to PieFed just before lemm.ee went down.
PieFed is currently at ~1.7k MAU, last month it was 1.6k. I suppose the 400% increase is over and that was just some people from lemm.ee, any significant future increase will most likely come from people switching instead of new users. Lemmy dropped from 54k MAU in April down to 41k.
Yes the lemm.ee switch-over crowd is over so it will be interesting to see the more natural growth after that.
e.g. from January to March PieFed (edit: 's Monthly Active Users) more than doubled in size long before lemm.ee’s troubles were widely announced.
Typically as people hear about the new features and are astonished by how PieFed offers exactly what people have been outright begging to see brought to Lemmy (heck, in some cases even Reddit) but they simply won’t do it. In fairness, perhaps they cannot, given their current pace of development, but also their prioritization may differ from those of the end-users (I have noticed that particularly things that involve federation between instances - e.g. modlog actions - typically receive much lower prioritization than things that will work inside a singular instance, perhaps reflecting the bias that the main Lemmy devs are also the admins of their own personal instance? for good or for ill, it is what is is: this is their platform, and if someone does not like it then they are free to go ahead and make their own from scratch, which both Kbin, before it was forked to Mbin, and now PieFed have done just that:-D).
I finally switched to PieFed now that Voyager has more or less stable support for it. Fuck the Lemmy tankie devs
Everything I personally dislike is tankie! You dorks sound like those conservative idiots who call everything leftist Marxist communist
They are transphobic, tankie assholes though. Here’s a good list of the .ml shit: https://lemmy.world/comment/18997412
i blocked the tankie instances early on, and any stray .ml accounts that catches my attention.
New account, 2 comments, both in this thread defending the tankies over at ml…
they love to larp and not use their ml accounts in the hope that ml avoids being defederated
long overdue
Blocking ml from my feed was one of the better decisions I’ve made on here.
blocking the triad of tankies has been the best