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 😊
I somewhat disagree: I used to use Facebook, then left that and joined Reddit ! whether I joined Reddit or not though, either way I was leaving Facebook) then left Reddit and joined Kbin, then left that when it imploded and joined Lemmy, then left that, and fortunately PieFed was coming up at the time. I view most social media as “bad” - at least for myself - and the interactions I was seeing on Lemmy were not worthwhile for me to remain. But if you enjoy it, that’s fine, I am just sharing my experiences.
And you asked “someone can just fork it and add the missing features”, which seems like a competition to me since you aren’t going to contribute to both Lemmy development (in Rust) and also PieFed (in Python): someone must make a choice where their time & efforts are going to be directed at.
Which if you choose Lemmy again is fine, but I am pointing out that it is in fact a choice being made. Hence I hoped to help inform that choice by pointing out some of the reasons to choose PieFed rather than Lemmy, which either way that ends up getting chosen will lead to increased efficiency and fewer regrets moving forward, with the cost having been counted in advance rather than discovered only much later on in the process.
Further, I would argue that the set of considerations is quite different for a mere user vs. someone thinking about actually contributing to development of a codebase. Even for an instance admin, I would hope that such a person actually would look at what is technically better than something else, before going to all that effort to set something up that will require much maintenance in the future. Of course, to each their own, I was just sharing my own thoughts on the subject.
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. 😁
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!!!
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.:-)
Then you must be avoiding politics and the major news communities here - which is good advice for anyone to follow - in which case the rest of the Threadiverse is outright kind. Reddit used to have such people but they stopped talking years ago - I know I did.
One thing to note about Reddit mods: the Rexodus broke the power of anyone who resisted, so the tiny dick energy thing is by design as in anyone there nowadays is a collaborator to its authoritarian regime, who of course is a very different type of personality (a conciliatory style: think “cop”, where power flows downhill) than what used to be the case years ago. I am speaking though of small niche subs - the largest ones had already enshittified by then, for different reasons. Power corrupts.
But the Threadiverse is new, and so the early adoptor mindset reigns supreme. There are definitely authoritarians though - some of the more major ones you cannot see since Lemmy.world has defederated from them, thereby protecting you from that. Lemmy.ml still exists though, and if you ever say anything slightly negative about Russia, China, or North Korea (or in some cases simply not supportive enough of them?), then you can be banned from every community across the entire instance including ones you’ve never commented in before. So such things do exist here… but yeah there are also kind people here too, and that’s awesome! (Whereas on Reddit I simply gave up all hope whatsoever for anything positive, buried amidst all the mountains of trash)
It’s fine for you not to like it, it’s just software and there’s room to use different ones on the shared Threadiverse:-).
I do maintain that bringing up PieFed seemed very relevant to this discussion though. The OP had:
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
And then from there we went into MAUs, although the link offered only showed Lemmy stats so I shared a different link with PieFed stats, especially relevant due to the incident with lemm.ee and how many of its users moved over to PieFed.
But if you’ve tried it and don’t care for it, that’s fine, we just wanted to offer the knowledge that it exists and that a lot of people really do seem to enjoy it.
Welcome! You are going to absolutely love PieFed:-D.
Oh right, I did forget, thanks!:-)
WHAT!? I am genuinely curious why you think this?
For one thing PieFed was only centralized for a bit there at its start, whereas now there are already numerous piefed instances. It is true that piefed.social is still the #1 instance (much as lemmy.world had 80% of the Lemmy userbase at some point - but you still remain there even now so that does not seem to bother you?), but now piefed.blahaj.zone (not even 3 months old yet!!!), and piefed.world each have >100 active users, and piefed.ca, feddit.online, piefed.zip, quokk.au, piefed.au, etc. each have multiple tens of users.
More to the point, PieFed is FOSS. You could download the code and have your own personal instance spun up by the end of the day tomorrow.
I am guessing that you mean that the opinions of a single dev (Rimu) have an exagerated effect on the development of the code - which was definitely true in the past, but he also listens to feedback, apologies when he is wrong, and is amenable to going in other directions when the community wants that. The private voting debacle is one such example: I argued against it from the start, but he did it anyway, then abolished it and apologized to people when it received heavy criticism. You can read a really frank discussion about the topic where dbzer0 was considering whether to make a PieFed instance. Look especially at the comment starting with “I don’t trust Piefed at all - they’re far too eager to curate my experience, and they’ve reintroduced all of the reputation anti-features (plus more) that were part of what drove me away from Reddit and the absence of which is part of what I like about Lemmy and Mbin.”
TLDR: it was a new project back then, and things were different. Also you might be unaware of the history of the development of Lemmy too, and of lemmy.world. These things are common, and nowhere close to be unique to PieFed. BlueSky on the other hand is corporate and so WILL be enshittified, eventually. PieFed on the other hand is just a better Lemmy :-).
What harms people is not the lack of knowledge but unwillingness to learn.
That said, there is only so much attention span to go around:-).
I believe that is more valid for Mastodon instances than for Lemmy ones.
Except that you are still correct in the operational sense that most will not bother. See e.g. the migration to BlueSky rather than Mastodon.
PieFed really might make for a qualitative shift though, in offering so many options such as categories of communities (akin to multi-Reddits), and polling, and flairs (both user and post) that Reddit users were used to and it makes them feel really like they are “slumming it” coming over to Lemmy that lacks all of that. The categories of communities and user-customizable and shareable feeds in particular really help with “content discovery”, as too does PieFed’s wizard that walks a first-time user through the process of setting up and joining what the user indicates that they are interested in.
In contrast, Lemmy users are supposed to go… (somewhere? but where? where are these "somewhere"s ever mentioned? on a side-bar somewhere? extremely rarely I would believe they might be, but the vast majority of the time usually not) to find the content that they want to see. Often they end up browsing All rather than Subscribed, and get so frustrated with that that they simply leave Lemmy altogether, and then report their complaints over in r/RedditAlternatives. PieFed solved that particular problem though, as well as several others, so at this point I think any discussion about “the learning curve” needs to be split into one for Lemmy, where it really does remain too complicated for the average Reddit non-technical normie, vs. PieFed where it does not anymore.
And I need to be careful or else this will turn into a HUGE tangent, but also the political extremism and bOtH sIdEs SaMe-ism on “Lemmy” is an enormous turn-off for people as well. Yes they can block each troll on an individual basis, or the same with communities, no they can’t TRULY block an entire instance (that horribly mis-named function would have been better termed a “community muting” rather than “instance blocking”, which still allows comments from users on that instance to appear everywhere else, plus able to reply and even trigger notifications, etc. - IT IS NOT A BLOCK). Anyway, how this relates is that mainstream non-technical normies just get overwhelmed, and don’t enjoy the political extremism having to be an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, with most of the ways presented by the software to opt-out not TRULY opting “out” rather than merely claiming to do so. In contrast, one of the first things that PieFed does is to set up a block-list of keywords, offering the options All, None, and even a third one Some to allow the content at a lower frequency. I have never put any words into it… but I appreciate that the feature exists, for the sake of those who want / need it to be able to enjoy their social media of choice.
I predict that for all these reasons plus a few others, Lemmy will continue to die off. The die-hard userbase seems not to care actually, even being oddly proud of this? While PieFed - which just increased its userbase +400% - will continue to grow, and maybe PieFed will actually be the thing that captures more of the Reddit users. Lemmy certainly will not be, nor Mbin, and I cannot say for certain that PieFed will, just that it seems to me to be the only thing that possibly could (Sublinks seems dead in the water atm, due to the primary - only? - dev having a baby).
Many of us stopped actually “engaging” on Reddit long before we finally left it - the amount of trolls just waiting to pounce on anything at all that was said just got too damn high!
There are (so MANY!) trolls here too, but you can block them all and then breathe an enormous sigh of relief and finally enjoy the rest - I am saying that here that is at least possible, whereas on Reddit it just simply was not.
Unless they went to PieFed - which many did - and then it would look like a net decrease on those charts for Lemmy.
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.
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all “good”, but yeah, me too :-P
I just mentioned this in another comment but I’ll add it here so you can see it more easily:
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
“Oops”
Furiously google’s “how to unread book”…