A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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Do we have to recommand it? Do to the nature of the threadiverse, Lemmy content is available on PieFed and PieFed content is available on Lemmy. It is mostly a matter of chosing an instance. We could surely add an PieFed recommendation to our go to threadiverse instance but is there instance culture there yet?
Shouldn't we recommand it first to active user, the ones that create and animate communities, the ones that would create new feeds making those instances more alive?
Yes we do have to recommend PieFed. While PieFed is already incredible for what it is able to do, there are some missing key features. So we also need to be honnest about PieFed.
It is a new software so we need to invite more people to give a try. Once they try, sysadmin may give a go after listening to their user feedback.
Most active user won't create a community outside their main instance. Do you picture myself using Piefed.social for c/pisourd ? I would lose the benefit of my french speaking local timeline. :)
And yes, all content are federated but the way community are managed is different. I can show you the inside of tarte.nuage-libre.fr or [email protected]
Don't you want to give a try ? In exchange i will do a promotion on jlai.lu on any software you want to boost. That one will be the next "tour d'horizon" π
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 wouldnβt use Lemmy so much if Voyager didnβt fill the hole Apollo left in my heart.
If it can get apps, ill probably be more on it.
I love you lemmy.world but I would rather like to run my own piefed.
Voyager is so polished, it elevates the whole experience.
Phanpy is phenomenal and fixes a lot of the problems Mastodon and all microblogging platforms have.
I think it's good that PieFed is so small, that means they can move faster and innovate more without fearing that things will break for thousands of people. I think it's good that a project like PieFed can try things and see what works and sticks and this is then a good indicator for projects like Lemmy to copy what is good and leave out what is not good.
Probably app support. If Lemmy didnβt have wefwef/voyager during the API debacle of 2023, I probably would not have stuck around. The default UI is terrible for mobile.
The default UI is terrible for mobile.
I'm definitely in the minority, but I prefer the Web UI on mobile to apps
I also like the default UI, even if it's not the prettiest. But for mindless scrolling I prefer Voyager.
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.
We won't 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.
Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/
There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It's what you do with it that counts.
https://piefed.social/ is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won't increase as more users come on board.
PieFed is also really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that. I haven't bothered to add S3 storage code because we just don't need it (yet).
Anyway, all this focus on costs and downsides is only half the coin. There are massive benefits that come from using Python:
For a FOSS project where volunteer contributions from people play a big part these things are really important. There are many ways a project can fail (not just technical reasons but social & governance too) and running out of CPU is way way down on the list.
These performance results are only from the browser side, but dont cover server performance. The database for lemmy.ml is 60 GB, and that is with 6 years of history. Not sure where your 10x claim comes from. The lemmy.ml server costs 70 Euros per month and doesnt have much loa, with almost 10 times as many active users.
The lemmy.ml server costs 70 Euros per month and doesnt have much loa, with almost 10 times as many active users.
I know the 0.03β¬ per user per month has been known for a while, but it still impresses me.
using Python
Full disclosure: I like Python a lot and have written a lot of it.
That said, if not for my recent work experiences, I would be absolutely horrified at the idea of using Python for such a project. Between the type system and being interpreted, the performance and runtime issues are pretty painful. That and the historical greater dependence on external application servers really makes Python-based services something that really sucks to administer.
However, as I noted, I have also recently seen Python performing far faster than it has any right to with highly-optimized use of multi-processing and offloading the server stuff to Go.
I think I'm going to have to take a look at Piefed source this weekend.
Thats super impressive. I need to take a look at hosting a personal instance just for the fun of it if its really what it costs.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, you are right. Mbin is far more advanced than Lemmy. And PieFed more avanced than Lemmy, less then Mbin.
There are lot neat features in Mbin and PieFed so i wish we consider all options before pushing Lemmy everywhere. I also wish more app support from both of them.
I wish we try to remain neutral because, i strongly believe that the 3 softwares can inspire each other.
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.
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.
For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there's a decent amount.
The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one's uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.
Keyword filtering is about to be merged into Lemmy. Other features will also be added over time.
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.
I never knew what it was because I'm a bit desensitised to new apps / app names.
Edit: using https://phtn.app/ has made Lemmy extremely pleasant to use too. I haven't had a better experience on any platform.
Is there even a second instance running piefed? I've only seen piefed.social