So, it seems like PieFed is becoming a real alternative to lemmy.
What are the differences between these two? From a tech perspective, and also morality/ethics, if you want. Any differences in vision for these services?
Say whatever is on your mind. I want to know.
On which one should we put our weight?
Lemmy, I started with Lemmy and have not seen a reason to move away.
I have no idea. I’m a vanilla, semi-norm who came from Reddit, mainly because they banned me after 15 years of active and mostly chill engagement.
I’m basically just a slightly opinionated guy who’s interested in what other people have to say on a variety of subjects.
I’m only dimly aware of PieFeed. I like lemmy as it feels like early Reddit and I access it through the boost app on Android, which was the peak Reddit experience before the locked down the APIs.
I’ve no interest in spreading myself over multiple platforms - I just want access to other humans via the path of least resistance.
With this in mind, is PieFace better? And if so, in what way?
Piefed has a bunch of tools Lemmy doesn’t have: Flairs, Hashtags, Custom Feeds (Private and Public), Scheduled Posts, Combined comment sections for crossposts, Emote Reactions, Events, Polls
As soon as I can microblog straight to my own profile I’m sold. On mbin I had to make an admin only magazine for my microblogs to all be in one place.
Could you describe your problem in more detail?
Microblogs are always associated to your profile. If you want to post something which is not meant for a specific magazine, the
randommagazine is what you need to use. It is a pseudo-magazine (and so not federated as a community) which aggregates all microblog posts which are not attached to a real magazine.
Why vs when we can just interop?
We are not like traditional websites. When one community does well, we can all do well.
Piefed users comment and post to lemmy and via versa.
Piefed Game Changer number 1: Custom feeds, ex:
that way I can look at non-tech non-politics stuff (either few memes or all memes) when I want.
Piefed Game Changer number 2: Scheduled posts. That way when I got free time I can make a bunch of posts and schedule them over the next couple days or weeks.
I still keep a Lemmy account bc a couple things are still easier there. Plus to see what the posts look like to other people.
Honestly, PieFed for me, since it has more Reddit-like features than Lemmy does. However, for some reason, the PieFed instance of choice for me, Thriv Social, is not working as of right now. I’ve been meaning to get in contact with its admin and ask what’s going on with this “internal server error” deal.
I see a lot of piefed posts on Lemmy - are we not federated across so that we’re getting the milk without needing to buy the cow?
I’m gonna fuckin buy it and milk it and treat it tenderly
It is still important to support the better project, be it with our attention, or with our money/donations. What “better” means here depends on the metric.
Again, in this time and age, specially with everything going on around the world, I would hope that there is more thought about using/buying something.
I mean, I don’t jump from trend to trend, so I’ll support Lemmy until either the project gets depreciated and no more updates happen. I can still see everything because piefed is federated, so why jump from platform to platform every few months? What features really are there that make a difference?
On top of what others have said, I’m going to recommend piefed to my friends when they want to jump in because of the built in on boarding.
From the start it’ll show you and let you pick what topics you might like to see (so sort of like multireddit that groups together similarly themed communities into one feed / group), and shows what you want to filter and partially hide and or outright block posts with certain terms. It just kickstarts someone new so quickly with what they would want to see rather than going to all view and swim through a lot of posts that might turn you off of Lemmy/mbin/piefed.
And like you said Lemmy and piefed still federates with each other so still can leverage the content already existed.
And later on you could create your own topics/grouped communities just like multireddits.
For me I jumped the ship because ever since I got introduced to Lemmy, the knowledge of who the main Lemmy devs are left a really sour aftertaste to everything.
Piefed doesn’t have this baggage and as you say - Lemmy and Piefed can federate so I can still keep connected in the communities. And you can export your Lemmy profile and import to Piefed so the switch is really easy (though saved posts don’t get imported, but oh well).
Sorry, what’s the story with the Lemmy devs?
Transphobic tankies
Wrongthink
Piefed lists comments from crossposts together, grouped by post, so there is less repetition due to crossposts.
Piefed lets me tag users so I can mark who is a dumbass and not worth replying to, which is nice because I block fewer users and don’t miss out on their posts that are fine because their comments elsewhere are terrible.
The two things I don’t like about piefed is that they don’t have a compact view for image posts and they don’t make the modlog easy to get to or search.
Thanks for the rundown. OK, I’ll give it a shot.
My lemmy-client (connect) also shows crosspost comments since a couple weeks.
I consider clients are their own thing since they vary significantly from the lemmy web sites.
Piefed has flairs, custom feeds, events, scheduled posting, hashtags, word filters, emote reactions.
TIL - FINE, I’ll give a try!
It is still important to support the better project
If everyone went to the “best” instance it would crash it…
Like, you do realize the whole “decentralized” thing is why most of us are here, right?
OP is talking about the software all of the instances run on, not the individual servers themselves.
I would say that having a variety of software options also helps keep one party from having too much power, which is the main focus of federation. It’s not as important as having a variety of instances, but we can have both, so why not take advantage of it?
I would say that having a variety of software options also helps keep one party from having too much power
I don’t disagree, but since Mbin, Piefed, and Lemmy are all open-source and interoperable, none of them can ever have any meaningful power no matter which one became dominant, as each project can be forked if they go off the rails or if development from the OG devs stopped (as happened with Kbin, which was forked into Mbin).
As an example, the app ‘Organic Maps’ recently had controversy because the main dev was using donated funds for personal expenses without informing anyone. This caused a lack of trust, and it was just forked into CoMaps instead. That’s the inherent advantage of free and open-source software.
This is not about an instance, it is about a project.
And also, different people have different metrics for what constitutes “best”. Picking what one would think is “best” would not crash an instance. What are you talking about…
It would not crash an instance. What are you talking about…
Ah, someone who wasn’t around for the reddit exodus to Lemmy.
Read the last line in the comment you replied to.
Not really. I think its more like everyone gets free milk but the lemmy milk has tankies in it.
OOooooooh… ok, well that’s a feature not a bug.
God, I hate tankies. I definitely worry about the future of lemmy with how nuts the developers are
I wouldn’t necessarily say I “hate” them but god any sort of interaction is just tedious.
I do have a lot of respect for the lemmy lead dev in that he’s been a pioneer in the fediverse, and lemmy has become a popular opensource project. However, his ideological views are incompatible with mine, and he seems unusually passionate about them.
Yeah I like Lemmy, i donate and have massive respect for the devs that worked hard for years building this software. But their views are disgusting and it will kill Lemmy eventually. We’re to small at the moment to start infighting so I dont worry to much about it. At the moment its more important for people to move away from corporate platforms to free and open platforms.
I don’t really understand the difference between the two. Don’t they essentially do the same thing, connect to the same communities, etc? (Apart from some minor details)
Piefed is its own software. If you just go to piefed.social you’ll see it is massively different and has different tools and functions.
But yes, they both federate with the same communities.
It seems to have a very different, potentially better feed than lemmy, interesting, might switch
I just clicked over there and it has the “new” Reddit style rather than the “old” Reddit style. That’s a pretty big ding off the bat if the style can’t be changed.
I’d say it’s halfway between old reddit and new reddit. And I hate new reddit with a passion but felt like old reddit is a bit tiresome.
Piefed has theming though to change a bit.
Piefed and Lemmy are act-pub/fediverse software systems, same with Mastodon and many others. Since Lemmy and Piefed are so similar in their structure though as link aggregators that people vote and comment on you could think of them as the same network with different clients.
I switched from Lemmy to Piefed somewhere around piefed’s 1.15 version as I recall. On a technical front Piefed is a solid margin ahead in admin and usability features, at least as of when I switched. I haven’t noticed a major performance difference, but mine is a single user instance so that might be better shown at a larger scale. Lemmy was a bit easier to deploy initially since there wasn’t a need to have anything compile locally but rather just pull an image and go.
Ethically, I’m less concerned using Piefed than Lemmy. The devs of Lemmy are notoriously vocal in their support of Russia/China/Korea, and basically anything that could be considered in opposition of western liberal/progressive policies. This is troublesome since there is the potential for updates being made that help create even more aggressively divisive bubbles than we already have in many parts of the fedi. Those could be applied to any software of course, but the Lemmy devs make their stances quite visible in that regard.
There are a lot of tankies on lemmy, but I’ve only seen it on a couple of instances. It’s not worth the time to make common cause with them I’ve learned, they just want to make the cheap point of west bad, not fix anything, their whole point is it can’t be fixed. As if the alternative of getting a one party state would lead to a better outcome. They can’t even have their own opinions or make up their own minds it appears, they need permission from their leaders to even agree on something not already endorsed.
I thought PieFed and Lemmy were one and the same.
I am not savvy on how this place is structured.
Lemmy and piefed are like different brands of phones. They do the same basic things for communicating with any other phone, but have different features for the user to interact with and different limitations.
Great analogy! Stealing it…
Thank you.
The beauty of open standards!
I switched to piefed to help it grow, although for me the lemmy experience is still superior, due to the difference in clients available for Android.
On Android, the Voyager Lemmy client is better than the Blorp Piefed client.
Since the blorp Dev reads these comments (thanks for making us free software!), here’s my list of features to bring blorp up to parity, from most to least important:
- Choose what type of link to share by default: community link, poster’s link, my instance link, or blorp link, or other… Currently when I want to share something, I have to open it on Voyager to get a link.
- Ability to select text in comments. Voyager has this in the context menu.
- Ability to hide read posts. Blorp has this setting but it doesn’t work. When I open piefed I see old posts, but on Voyager I see fresh stuff.
- Ability to download .webp images. Downloads fail, but I can “share” the file to a file manager and save it that way.
- Put the profile button on the bottom stripe so it is easier to reach.
Would you be willing to try Summit? That also supports piefed instances for some time now.
I didn’t know voyager now supports piefed. Have to give it a try some time.
Trying it out, first step change post type to
cardfull!Edit: how do you actually post something? EDIT: it is the … Menu
I thought Voyager supports piefed now?
it does. i am using voyager on piefed right now.
I guess I’m bad at logging in. Thanks.
Hm, perhaps your instance needs to update to a newer version? I notice that it’s on 1.4.6, while Piefed.social is currently running version 1.5.3
EDIT: Ah, nevermind, 1.4.6 is only a couple weeks old! I was thinking of the gap in those releases in relation to Lemmy’s, where that would be a massive difference.
Is voyager updated to the latest release?
I have Voyager 2.43.2 which is the latest on fdroid and also the latest stable release on GitHub. Maybe it is on the blahaj side?
I had to sign up for the experimental bug test version of Voyager to gain access to piefed compatibility, though that was several months ago now; not sure if it’s been added to the main version yet or not. I haven’t had any issues using the experimental version.
It does. The only thing I miss compared to the Lemmy experience is that “auto fill title” does not work yet when link posting. However, most of the PieFed features aren’t integrated into Voyager yet, so it will be similar to the Lemmy experience but you will miss out a lot of PieFed stuff.
Ah, good to know. I’m already pretty happy with the lemmy voyager experience for just passive scrolling, and mostly do anything important (mod actions, longer comments, etc) on desktop anyway, so for me at least, that switch would be pretty seamless. Though hopefully Voyager supports more piefed features in the future!
When I moved from Lemmy to Piefed, I just dumped apps all together. I’ve been using the web version since and it works absolutely fine for my use. Granted, I mostly comment, having only created a few posts ever. So perhaps using built in “share” feature of phone OSs is useful, but besides that, the web version works great.
I used Lemmy for a few years, but switched to PieFed recently. They offer very similar functionality. PieFed suits me slightly better. I would be happy with either. And I’m still using Voyager.
I like both. The main thing keeping me from using piefed is it’s atrocious image viewer though. I like how Lemmy just spits out the image when you click the thumbnail.
Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:
- a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
- the ability to combine comments from multiple communities under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
- the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.
On the sysadmin side of things, it’d bring some nice advantages regarding network resource usage and page loading speed, and benefits from using tried and tested industry standard frameworks (I.e, Flask), instead of bespoke solutions.
That linking of comments is pretty cool.
Page loading speed is interesting. Your link only tested on mobile. A few days ago I did a non-scientific test, on desktop, (just me browing on piefed) and I thought lemmy was faster. But I may be wrong, or it was just instance specific.
In most cases, when bandwidth/latency is not a bottleneck, the thing that limits page load times is the database (in both lemmy and piefed’s case). So, if an instance has a beefy server they are running their db on, then it is going to snappier most of the time.
The difference in speed could be due to differing hardware specs of the servers, locations of the servers in relation to you, and the amount of user activity on each server.
I’m not sure if piefed.ca is hosted in the same location as lemmy.ca, or if their server specs are similar, but it probably has a better chance of being able to compare relative speed.
On my end at least, they both seem about equally as fast, but perhaps it would be more noticeable on a slower internet speed.
Lemmy is established, having existed very long before. But also they work together. So unless you have some major issue there’s no real reason to up and switch.
Having two softwares actually contributes to the decentralizing of the fediverse IMO, as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users…
as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users
Some people seem to find this hard. I might be one of the PieFed devs, but there are certainly reasons that people might want to use lemmy instead and I think they do some things better. No one platform is going to be the best.
