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!
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Currently trending down. And it’s all your fault for taking a break. 😔
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?
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
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.
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).
Yeah and as you have pointed out, the PieFed API is very new and not as mature yet as Lemmy’s, so there is value in waiting for it to advance while you work on other things like Svelte upgrades.
So long as you enjoy yourself in the doing, it’s all good 😊
Removed by mod
It’s more tedious than funny, honestly
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?
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.
combining all comments across all cross-posts
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.
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.
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.
Okay, that does sound dope. How is it implemented? Does it only work if the commenter is on PieFed?
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.:-)
😳python?!
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.
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…
Damn! How inefficient 🤪 but that explains a lot
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.
Python dev tend to vibe code
What? Maybe the percentage of vibe coders among python users is higher, but that’s irrelevant. Just hire the real developers…
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 :).
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 @[email protected]
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?
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
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
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
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. 😁
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.
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
Removed by mod
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
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!
piefed is its own category there, but kbin/mbin might be included in “lemmy” - I didn’t dive deeper.
piefed is growing recently but it’s not in the millions ;)
Mbin has <1k monthly active users. Kbin has <100 total, and if you dig deeper, only one server (in Poland) self-reports as using Kbin.
No PieFed is not included in “Lemmy” in this software b/c it looks at the software that the instance reports as using.
Even Lemmy is not in the millions, its peak was ~55k MAUs somewhere in Spring of 2024. Well, the “posts” counts could be in the millions (according to the Lemmy stats page it was 12.2 million a couple months ago), but those stats can be fairly misleading, so I typically only ever go by monthly active users that seems verifiably closer to what people actually see happening. e.g. so very MANY people have alt accounts all across the Fediverse so the total number of accounts is highly misleading, but the number of “active” ones seems more reliable? (even then it could be an over-counting, especially if bots are active and being counted as well)
40k MAUs is barely even a highly active sub over on Reddit.
Even Mastodon only reports ~700k MAUs, and falling, though at its peak it was closer to 2 million. They really dropped the ball on making the software easier to use - unlike Lemmy (and Mbin and PieFed), each Mastodon instance does NOT show posts from other Mastodon instances, by default - or at least that was true for an exceedingly long time though I thought it was going to change this summer iirc? Maybe that change only affected “searching” for posts though? I don’t use Mastodon so don’t really care - but I understand why people prefer BlueSky, b/c for them centralization is the point, if that is what it takes to make the software actually work.
A LOT of the criticisms that people on Reddit have about Lemmy actually pertain to Mastodon rather than Lemmy in particular.
The entire federated concept really was not ready for mainstream deployment, at the time of the Rexodus. We here are those with the “early adopter” mindset, which is very much different than the mainstream normie one.
According to Voyager, I have upvoted your content 34 times.
Hope this helps.
I have OP at +227 :x
Well now I just feel like I haven’t been very supportive at all 😤
Its the perfect size right now. Big enough to have a good variety of content and discussions while still small enough and niche to not be plagued by bots or targeted by corpos
the perfect size would be bigger than reddit.
Its been at a pretty consistent 50k which means we retained 25% of the users from our peak. Its 37.5k at the moment with 1.8k on piefed. There is another 18k users once NodeBB federations integrates.
Its a decent little community, enough to be self sufficient and enough for new users to feel like they arent joining a ghost town.
I do feel it’s increasing, and not to mention, I love scrolling through Lemmy more than Reddit these past few days, I noticed.
One thing I’ve noticed is that on reddit, if I post a comment it’ll get either zero votes or a thousand, with next to no correlation between the number and how useful or well thought-out the comment was. On Lemmy it seems a lot more consistent, as though people here are actually paying attention? That and/or The Dreaded Algorithm hits a lot harder on Reddit.
Yep, I agree… that was what I noticed too… plus, some did mention that it was the bots who upvoted/downvoted on Reddit posts and comments, so was there any real interaction, or? I was confused, really.
Been here since November. Seeing a lot more upvotes and comments on posts than when I got here.
Nah. The same ten people that post content have just upped their game. Never stop you beautiful people!
not really, since the great purges in the spring thats where we had a huge boost, the shadowbans and sitewide ban seemed to have died down for now, although the SB are increasing in the background, we might see another increase if reddit does another major purge. although instances dying ive seen less content overall(especially with ee gone)
One of the main things that drove me away from Reddit was the sense that they’re really pushing the buttons to hone it into a pure content creation service for AI bros and advertisers.
That is to say, most subs do not want you just hanging out and chatting to people like they’re your friends. You have to generate content, and you have to do it in the approved sub format, and if you don’t like it you can fuck off. So, I fucked off.
its also harder now, if your a new user, or inactive user who suddenly became active. so subreddits have cqs scores, karma,content history requirements. you can easily get shadowbanned if you somehow trigger the filters, also the fact that they do it so indiscriminately it catches innocent account. i was visiting the shadowban sub recently, and someone posted they were unbanned because reddits AI mistankengly shadowbanned them, for “assuming and misconstruing his posts, as offensive”
yeah I don’t know exactly how these things work, but I did notice that all my comments in one popular sub all had exactly 1 view and vanished if I logged out. And my post history there isn’t much different from here, it’s not like I’ve been going there to troll and spam. I guess the wrong mod (or bot) decided that they didn’t like people objecting to genocide? My posts in other subs still appear as normal.
some subs might have filters on to automatically remove or hide comments its definitely more pervasive now.
What’s disturbing about it is the effect it has on the actual dialog. The mods have basically zero public oversight, so you have no idea when you read a sub what kind of manipulation has happened to the conversation you’re reading, both directly and indirectly (chilling effect).
It turns out that the Capitalism version of internet censorship is even more insidious and manipulated by shadowy forces, than even the Chinese government’s version.
For added scarytimes, consider that all the LLMs are being trained on this shit.
and reddit filters is seperate from the mod ones, so they can ovveride the sub filters and ban or remove your comment randomly too. im sure certain subs are protected as some mods are either power mods, or have connections with the admins.
I would agree. And I’m spreading the word. We need to break our dependency on huge corporations. It’s just laziness.
No, the MAU (which is what I assume you meant) seems to be going down very slowly. Though it probably will start going up once again someday. Possibly when the new digg is released to the public or when Reddit pulls another shit that not even the current Redditors will be able to tolerate.
I personally don’t have a problem with the current state. I like it here. I recognize lots of people every day comment and post. It feels cozy.
Have you been keeping a record?
I don’t, but I do get the feeling that it is.
Also you can check FediDB.
Another factor is this year’s canvas and last year’s.
Appearently the algorithm of Reddit has become shit this last days
That + I have begun to loathe the average “user” there + the Admin AI bot decided my comment making commentary on Reddit’s generally poor culture through very thick ironic language constituted “harassment” and perma-banned me. My 14 year old account - 2 “offenses” (one was valid) and it’s gone. I’ve appealed but it has been 8 days with no action.
It’s also just “people” parroting the same cold take like it’s hot over and over to farm karma. Yes Trump sucks, yes Epstein files need to be released, yes progressive policy, but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys? IRL is miserable enough lmao.
Ban-happy power tripping mods, recycled low-effort content, a generally discouraging attitude toward nuanced takes and critical thinning, and an absurd amount of bots and propaganda has really made me want to migrate. Anyways I’m here now, and I hope to contribute to this platform in a constructive and positive way! I welcome any pointers or advice!
Well, I myself still use Reddit for my hobby since on lemmy there’s like 4 of us FPV pilots.
But generally: spread the word, if there’s a community you’d like that doesn’t exist - make it yourself
I was worried at first that Lemmy would be basically dead compared to Reddit. But holy hell, its active enough and its qualitatively better than Reddit could ever be. I never realized how shit it was until I actually decided to leave permanently.
I salute you. And please take care of yourself first.
This ain’t a sprint. This is a marathon
I don’t know if Lemmy is the future but ActivityPub social media is.
It is only matter of time.
I no longer feed my shit post on corpo socials. This is an aspect of the class war. Don’t feed your enemy.
It appears that Twitter users are migrating to Bluesky, while simultaneously engaging with Reddit and Discord. Meanwhile, Reddit users are making their way to Lemmy or maybe not I exacly don’t how but LEMMY IS GOING UPP.
