Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I’m blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.
Whats the catch? Why aren’t we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?
App support is one thing I can think of.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question. Currently it seems it’s got a bit under 1000 users across under 10 servers.
There are now sizeable communities run on Lemmy instances that are reinforced by network effects. There needs to be a significant reason for them to migrate. To that point, the collective project is building communities away from corporate power, not software. The software is a tool to facilitate that. Lemmy has worked well so far in this regard. If someone can show that Piefed can work better and not cost significantly more, it’ll probably get adopted for new communities. If the difference is drastic, we may even see migrations from Lemmy.
I second this. Lemmy is written in Rust where as piefed is written in Python. When it comes to running a high-performance webserver, Lemmy has the advantage.
While theoretically true, the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL for that, I somewhat doubt that Piefed being written in Python will have much noticeable effect in reality.
Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spent in IO, not compute, and if you’re running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you’re running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.
If you want it to be “free to most users”, the cost of data storage and IO will completely dominate over the cost of CPU.
There are plenty of good arguments to prefer Rust over python for a distributed application, but “language efficiency” is not one of them.
Anyway, if you are biased in favor of Rust and want a decent argument to justify it, I will let you use ‘It’s easier to compile Rust to WASM and have the application run on the browser, while compiling python in a cross-platform way is a nightmare’, free of charge.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question.
I don’t think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They’ve got room to grow.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
People can start posting about PieFed on Reddit and see how the Reddit users react.
But how is that not a concern if you’re interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 new users in a few days. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That’s not gonna be great for you or the new users.
I think it’s unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don’t even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.
There’s already been some comments about PieFed and they didn’t result in huge surges.
Sure but does the rate of growth matter? The post asks about recommending Piefed instead of Lemmy. I presume the point is that the number of Piefed users would grow if we did that. So whether a thread produces 10, 1000, or 10000 users in a day, the number of users would grow over time. Then I think the question remains, if my Piefed instance costs $10/mo to run today, would it cost $100 with 10000 users or $1000, or more, or less?
The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.
Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.
If people start recommending PieFed now, it’s on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.
Yeah, that makes sense for the defect class of performance problems. I’m more concerned with the inherent performance (compute) disadvantages of Python. Perhaps they wouldn’t matter, hard to know without load testing.
I didn’t downvote.
Apps make or break those platforms. Lemmy apps are way better than what Mastodon has for example (but I have to tip my hat to Phanpy). We got really lucky that Lemmy exploded in popularity due to Reddit API changes which meant many app developers gave Lemmy a shot. I probably wouldn’t use Lemmy so much if Voyager didn’t fill the hole Apollo left in my heart.
Voyager is so polished, it elevates the whole experience.
All your saying is, it looks better. I am not using any Lemmy webfrontend, I’ve always been using the apps that are available, many of which are absolutely polished.
There’s more than that.
Stuff like feeds, topics and better onboarding.I run a Pixelfed instance. The code is faaaaaaaarrrrr from polished. Its buggy and the admin interface either doesn’t work or is poorly implemented. I’d rather run and moderate Lemmy than Pixelfed. I have considered just shutting it down several times. I run the instance https://social.photo/.
Piefed is another federated social aggregator https://piefed.social/ akin to Lemmy.
My biggest issue with Piefed is how much space the UI uses. Last I checked it didn’t have a “compact mode” like current Lemmy or Alexandrite. Browsing communities is also a bit awkward since it shows you so many topics without a way to sort or remove them.
Why aren’t we suggesting Mbin over Lemmy, actually? Because it seems like it has the same options. And Mbin even has an app (not just the PWA function)!
There’s quite a few nice apps for Lemmy. I’m using Connect for Lemmy on android and it’s wonderful.
Oh, I’m aware that both Lemmy and Mastodon have good apps. I’m just pointing out that if the ‘argument’ is that alternatives don’t have an app, MBin does have one.
MBin does have one.
…for Android. Nothing for iOS.
I don’t really have a positive thing to say about people who want to stick to Apple as their primary device ecosystem.
If you want to debate Apple, start another thread. This post is about Mbin and Piefied, and for me, I use Voyager on iOS to surf Lemmy. I don’t want to switch to or recommend Mbin or Piefied if there’s not an app for it and the best I can do is a PWA.
Don’t try to hijack the thread to push your anti Apple agenda. You can dislike Apple all you want, just not in this thread.
True, MBin is small so I’m not surprised they cater to the bigger platform.
You may not be from the US, but in the US smartphone market, as of late 2024, iOS (Apple) holds a larger market share than Android, with iOS at around 58% and Android at 42%.
I’m the developer of Interstellar, and I am actually from the US. iOS support is something I’d like to add, but is not the priority. @[email protected] made many good points about it not catering towards FOSS projects, but I’d also like to add, it costs $100 every single year in order to have an Apple developer account, which is required if you want to publish anything to the Apple App Store. Additionally, Apple’s very expensive hardware is required in order to build and release any Apple software, which I do not own.
All that to say, I’d like to support iOS and macOS platforms, but Apple makes it extremely difficult (and costly) for that to happen. Why should I have to pay $100 every year in order to publish a free app that I’m not even making any money off of?
Valid point
Mbin has Interstellar, it’s pretty good.
It really is, from my limited use. I use the PWA on my (very old) phone and Firefox on desktop. But I like Interstellar.
Interstellar works with PieFed now although the API it uses is only enabled on one instance https://preferred.social as we’re still testing it out.
Looks like preferred is invite only at this time.
“Invite code (see post on flagship instance)”
Invite code is here: https://piefed.social/post/484755
Generally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web.
Particularly in relation to piefed: it seems to be focused on the exact opposite (giving more power to the server admins) and it takes a good page of social engineering / “nudge theory” principles to guide its design. Much like Mastodon, it seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture.
It may be a bit opiniated, but it’s nice to see a different approach from Lemmy devs who don’t see the need for any additional moderation tool.
I brought up mod mail during the AMA, it has been considered too complex to implement. A moderation panel with an overview of the mod queue would be nice too, but not a priority.
I’m not saying Piefed is perfect, but at least they prioritize that aspect.
“moderation duties” and “regular participants” in a forum system have such different use cases, it makes no sense to try to make it work with the software itself.
It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators, instead of trying to shoehorn it in the existing API. But I don’t really think that this is something that really bothers people enough, given that last time I asked if I could get 20 people interested to sponsor the development of the moderation tool, and to this day only one person showed up.
It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators,
Piefed built it in their software without a separate tool
We are working on new moderation features all the time, for example 1.0 will correctly federate instance bans which is quite complicated to get right. There will also be a plugin system which allows for much more flexible mod tools. Its just that our time is very limited for all the work that needs to be done on a project with over 50k active users.
This comment was not supposed to be a huge critique of Lemmy, more like a comparison.
Everybody is aware that you do what you can with the resources you have.
Fair enough, its just a bit strange that this particular critique comes up regularly.
I just gave it a try, this is what the moderation panel looks like on Piefed:
Maybe this makes it more clear
Thanks, good to know.
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user? Remember the majority of users don’t post, comment or otherwise interact with the platform beyond voting.
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user?
I don’t think it’s always easy to pinpoint UX issues and user friction. Sometimes these things just don’t stick with mainstream users. I say it’s worth a try to see which platform the average Reddit user will prefer.
But if you’re gonna use from a phone, Lemmy’s selection of mobile apps is unbeatable.
Fair point. It probably hard to see these things when you’ve been in the thick of Lemmy for as long as most of us here have. It’s easy to dismiss not liking lemmy-ui because alternative frontends exist (written from Photon), but does that matter when the overwhelming majority of instances use it as their landing page.
As I said, it has a lot more polish. Its easier to discover communities, and it has feeds.
Two questions for you, I’m genuinely curious, I hope they don’t come up as agressive
- why are you still using your Lemm.ee account instead of Piefed
- why create this post here instead of [email protected] ?
Is there even a second instance running piefed? I’ve only seen piefed.social
There’s feddit.online and some personal ones I’ve seen knocking about.
Thanks
Is there a way to see version number? Everything else seems way slower than the flagship instance and even that seems slower than every Lemmy instance
Seems they’re all running the same version, or Piefed doesn’t tag releases:
piefed.social nodeinfo
curl -s https://piefed.social/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq { "openRegistrations": true, "protocols": [ "activitypub" ], "software": { "name": "PieFed", "version": "0.1" }, "usage": { "localComments": 12382, "localPosts": 1169, "users": { "activeHalfyear": 561, "activeMonth": 309, "total": 800 } }, "version": "2.0" }feddit.online nodeinfo
curl -s https://feddit.online/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq { "openRegistrations": true, "protocols": [ "activitypub" ], "software": { "name": "PieFed", "version": "0.1" }, "usage": { "localComments": 503, "localPosts": 214, "users": { "activeHalfyear": 85, "activeMonth": 34, "total": 85 } }, "version": "2.0" }
For me…
Because the PWA font is too small and can’t be enlarged.
Because there’s no ‘back to top’ button so have to kill the app to refresh.
Because there’s no app.
But sometimes I use it anyway because the combining of articles is so much better than seeing the same article three or four times in a row in Voyager.
- apps
- alternative front ends
- Comments view / chat view
