Recently joined and started a community for people who want to move away from Lemmy and want to see Lemmy loosen its stranglehold on the threadiverse, if that seems like something interesting to you consider checking out [email protected]
Fwiw, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
I for one am extremely happy to see PieFed flourish, and one of my chief reasons to move to it 8 months ago was specifically to block lemmy.ml.
That said, I have no desire to “cancel” anyone at all - and the Lemmy devs are worthy of respect for their accomplishments, even as they also deserve some criticisms for the way that they run their instance.
I love how the future allows PieFed and Lemmy - and Mbin, nodebb, flarum, friendica, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. - to exist altogether in the Fediverse, without needing any of the others to die out. I even maintain accounts on both PieFed and Lemmy instances, as each currently offers features that the other lacks.
(also, if some of the lemmy instances were to be cancelled, then all of their users would come over to here… think about that for a moment, is that a desirable outcome to you? :-P)
I’ve always thought it was really weird and really dumb sentiment to want to cancel Lemmy, as an Open source software. It’s like people think they need to endorse the developers’ views to use Lemmy, or pay them money to use the software. But like that’s really dumb. Lemmy is free and opensource software, the developers have no say in who uses it, it’s also opensource meaning anyone can fork it. So this position just seems weird and reactionary.
One thing that really makes me reluctant about the future of piefed is the fact that it runs on Python. Great for tinkering but it likely won’t scale well, and Python is famous for breaking backwards compatibility. So expect this project to be hosed when Python 4 or 5 comes out and breaks compatibility or syntax with the previous version. I saw this happen with Kodi and other platforms with Python Based plugins, and it’ll most definitely happen again, not to say it can’t happen with something like Rust or Go, but these compiled languages are designed for big projects, python is just one-off scripts, so the ones maintaining languages like Rust, Go, C++ work a bit harder to keep them as functionally compatible as possible so big projects aren’t crippled and trashed by an update.
Anyway that’s my opinion on this whole thing, I don’t believe Piefed is the future, and I do not think Instance Admins should jump at the chance to abandon Lemmy. Maybe for sublinks if it ever comes out, but not for piefed.
Features
Nice things about PieFed:
- Written in a common programming language that many developers understand and which has a bright future ahead of it. Python, of course! This will enable more contributions from a wider range of people than if it was made with Erlang, Ruby, Rust or PHP, for example.
- Constructed in a simple and straightforward manner that new contributors can come to grips with quickly. No fancy algorithms, special design patterns, fragile build process, or front-end framework. Just Flask with sprinklings of vanilla JS and htmx.
- Keep third party dependencies to an absolute minimum, to make server administration easier. Python + database (PostgreSQL) and you’re good to go! Redis optional.
- Consume few resources, to make it cheap to run. Many examples of federated software are bloated Rube Goldberg machines that require hefty servers and serious server administration skills, making money a constant problem. PieFed instances will be small and nimble.
- Emphasise trust, safety and happiness, drawing inspiration from the Mastodon Covenant.
- Built to last using tried and true technology that will still work decades from now.
Differences between Lemmy and PieFed
- Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
- Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
- Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]
- People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
- Hide all posts based on keyword filters.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
- Better UI design (somewhat subjective!)
- Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)
- Voting is private.
- See also features for healthy communities.
- Each community has it’s own wiki.
Mastodon Covenant & “safe spaces” are overmoderated trash. Features for healthy communities consist of Reddity moderation tactics.
Heavy handed moderation is the main reason Reddit disgusts me, so no thanks, & fuck that shit.
People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
Software enforced echo chambers, as if it wasn’t bad enough.
Everything else looks so good about piefed, sad to see a deal breaker like that.
Did…did you start a lemmy community for people to talk about not talking on lemmy…on lemmy?
Lemmy isn’t the only platform on the fediverse, nor the only one with communities.
I’m writing from Mbin btw, another platform that’s not Lemmy.
My thought is that Piefed is too eager to curate my experience and too heavily promoted of late to be believably organic
It reeks of an organized, astroturfed attempt to effectively centralize the fediverse.
I don’t really agree that it’s an attempt to centralize the fediverse but I do think that the push and praise for it feels extremely unnatural, especially how people are bragging about liking and wanting the reputational features of it, and being able to hide the modlog. Like dude those are the biggest reasons people left Reddit, and now suddenly “people” are just going gaga for those same anti-features. That seems more than fishy to me…
And pixelfed is your alternative? That’s not even close to the same usecase.
PieFed not PixelFed.
PieFed is like kbin/lemmy.
Sorry, I must not have been awake enough, I misread it. kbin is dead when I look at the repo, but piefed still looks very young as a project.
kbin is dead when I look at the repo
kbin is dead yeah, but it does have an active fork in Mbin. That’s what I’m using.
