I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers an the .ml instance. The issue of funding a project with people openly expressing opinions many find distasteful and it being the biggest reddit alternative on the fediverse came up, so here’s a topic to discuss it.
What should we do? What are the options?
Answer: No fork necessary, there are Piefed and Mbin.
Why? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers
For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.
Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!
As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.
They are insane. But their views don’t seem to ever make it into the code, so I don’t mind for now.
I don’t see the point in boycotting something that’s free and doesn’t make money off of selling my data. I suppose you aren’t obligated to donate to it, but that was already true.
I suppose OTOH, I’m not pro-tankie, but I at least prefer tankies to the fascists and authoritarian capitalists (or whatever you want to call them) that run mainstream media. Harm reduction is the name of the game IMO, not finding a platform with a perfect set of political values aligning with yours (at least for me, I haven’t run into many leftists who are also committed to nonviolence due to pragmatic reasons). The russia/ukraine stuff in that thread you link does look nasty, on the other other hand
How dare are you a communist😡😡😡 Accept freedom and democracy in your country 🦅🦅🦅
We already have Piefed and Mbin.
Me being reminded I have my mbin account abandoned: 👀
OK, thanks. I guess I’ll be migrating to those and setting up a donation - if they don’t use Github sponsors.
Here’s PieFed’s “Donate” page: https://piefed.europe.pub/donate
Also the piefed main dev is nice normal human being with humanist views of the world. He has a rational discourse toolkit box with links about how to handle extremism, disinformation and stuff like that.
Piefed would be much better aligned with your views.
Both main devs of Mbin support at least Librepay.
You have piefed if you really want to. I personally am fine with developers having views I disagree with, expecting everyone to have the same views as me is unrealistic; if they tried to influence how you host your instance based on their views that’s something I’d disagree, but they do not do so on Lemmy.
We all have limits. For some communicating with those who tolerate genocide is alright, for others using their software is fine, and for even others they will happily give money to them à la “it’s not me, so why should I care?”. But if the number of people who don’t care is not enough to sustain that software development, it will have an effect. We can wait to see if we get that far or do something about it.
I’ll check out Piefed and Mbin as that seems to be most common answer here.
I don’t think Lemmy dev even have the opinion you stated above…
The Lemmy platform is just a tool to manage and delivery content. And I think it’s important to differentiate the software from those who manages the software. I can see there’s is a tacit connection and influence there. But unless they start baking inherently bias features into the software and skewing it, I don’t think it’s a big problem.
Also, because it’s an inherently federated platform, if people don’t like the opinions of those who run a specific instance, they can (with the inclination and determination) spin up their own instance and manage that the way they see fit. And that has happened quite a few times over the last couple of years.
So no, I don’t think it requires a fork really. Not unless the people managing the main branch lose interest and the software starts to wither on the vine, or they start corrupting it somehow. But that’s just my opinion.
I disagree. You are right that through federation and open source you can create your instance if another instance is a nazi bar. But now you open your new bar. Should you buy chairs from the nazis for your bar? Is it not a problem if the nazis are the only ones producing chairs?
That is to me the analogy with lemmy. Yes I don’t have to be on .ml. But I don’t want to sit on the transphobic, genocide denier built chair either.
Technology and society don’t exist in separate spheres and we should always consider them together.
So go with piefed if you can. I haven’t had any complaints since I switched :)
In this nazi analogy it would be less of buying chairs and more the nazis giving away chairs for free that come with blueprints so if the nazis started installing spikes in their chairs people can just build their own from the blueprints, they just choose not to because it’s a lot of work. Which is fine if you don’t want those chairs, but a lot of people are fine with those chairs as long as the nazis don’t start any camps.
Once every couple months someone makes a post saying “I just found out the Lemmy devs are TANKIES! Won’t someone do something about it?” No one has expressed real interest in forking Lemmy, though plenty of people have expressed interest in someone else forking Lemmy for them.
Most of the dev interest seems to be on Piefed right now. For some reason Mbin hasn’t seemed to really take off, I don’t see people talking about it as much.
Mbin is just kinda weird. I guess there aren’t too many people who are after a Reddit-like that also care too much about microblogging. Or maybe they do but the microblogging part of Mbin is just an inferior experience to Bluesky or Mastodon anyway? Or maybe people just dislike having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
That is super clunky and I do hate it.
I think that Richard Stallman is a despicable person. Never stopped me from using and supporting the development of Emacs and GNU tools for the past 25+ years.
This has been rethreaded so many times I feel like it deserves an entry in knowyourmeme. Opinions are like asses, everyone has one, everyone things someone else’s stink, in the end, what matters is you can support Lemmy without actually supporting the developers (eg.: support your local instance).
Reactionary forks don’t have a great record of success (or even getting off the ground).
Piefed already exists (although I contest the use of “reactionary” here)
PieFed is not even a fork, btw, it’s a completely different software
Yes I know, but I was just speaking generally.
It’s also not a fork
I just wish .ml was more honest with their rules and policies, so people can actually make an informed decision, before they sign up there.
It’s the Communist tradition to force it on unsuspecting people because they don’t want anything to do with it otherwise.
Move to PieFed
I’ll check it out. Thanks.
What is the difference with Lemmy? What’s better and worse with Piefed?
PieFed is newer so maybe missing a couple features with some clients, but in general is much better managed and more actively developed. It has some features above Lemmy already too. It will win in the end IMO.
Here is ChatGPT’s take on the differences:
PieFed
- Community topics & categories — lets admins organize communities into shareable broader topics.
- Feeds — user-created bundles of communities (like multireddits).
- Image-heavy gallery views for communities.
Lemmy
- Traditional community per instance model without built-in topic categories (though users can simulate via tags/feeds).
🛠️
Moderation & Safety Tools
PieFed
- Richer moderation toolkit — including stronger instance-level blocks, IP bans, and admin tools.
- Keyword filters and block instance content hiding.
- Emphasis on trust/safety tooling and reputation signals.
Lemmy
- Standard moderation hierarchy (instance admins + community mods).
- Moderation tools are improving but generally less opinionated than PieFed’s “healthy community” features.
👤
User Experience & UI
PieFed
- Keyboard shortcuts, cleaner UI design (subjective).
- Private voting option: votes can be hidden from the federation.
- Comment collapsing at −10 score by default.
- Low reputation indicators for consistently downvoted users.
Lemmy
- Mature, widely supported UI with more third-party apps and tools.
- Some features (like comment UI or search) are subject to continued refinement.
🔌
API & Ecosystem
PieFed
- API support is still maturing; some features in the web UI don’t yet have API endpoints.
- Some third-party clients are beginning to support PieFed but it’s not as broad yet.
Lemmy
- Established API used by many clients, so almost all functionality is accessible to apps.
🚧
Maturity & Stability
PieFed
- Newer project, rapidly evolving, occasionally incomplete features or polish.
Lemmy
- More mature with a larger community and more stable tooling thanks to years of development.
📌
Interoperability
Both PieFed and Lemmy speak the same ActivityPub-based “threadiverse” protocol, meaning:
- You can interact with communities from either platform regardless of which software you use.
- Posts, comments, up/downvotes, and interactions federate across instances and platforms.
There is Piefed, it’s compatible with Lemmy instances and has a whole load of useful feature for both users and moderators.
Much quicker and responsive development (I’ve been able to get two small feature/improvement requests implemented within weeks of my initial issue post).
One of the Lemmy developers is also an admin on the notorious Lemmygrad instance.
Looks like I’ll be checking that out.
It’s great, a lot better than Lemmy.
The main weakness IMO is that Voyager doesn’t support most of the cool features of Piefed (core interaction works great though). I have yet to try Interstellar. The mobile WebUI is pretty good, albeit in need of some polish and optimisations.
I’d like to clarify here that Voyager can do with PieFed everything it can do with Lemmy. But PieFed has a lot more features than Lemmy does, and of those extra features, Voyager supports none. But that only means that the PieFed experience on Voyager is precisely the same as the Lemmy experience on Voyager!
I think most of us using 3rd party apps are missing out on a lot of great piefed features that are available on the default UI. I personally use Thunder. I tried Interstellar but unfortunately don’t really like the UI (at least at its current state). Blorp is also supposed to be built with piefed in mind but it lacks even more UI customization (doesn’t even have compact view mode). I think we can just be patient that our apps will catch up eventually. Piefed is being developed so fast that I can understand 3rd party app devs have a hard time keeping up
Compact view mode like this?Source: I’m Blorp dev
Ah I haven’t checked in a while. Thanks for correcting me! I need to try using Blorp more often.
I added it on the more recent side. Thanks for trying Blorp!
