Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I’m blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.
Whats the catch? Why aren’t we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?
App support is one thing I can think of.
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 wouldn’t use Lemmy so much if Voyager didn’t fill the hole Apollo left in my heart.
Voyager is so polished, it elevates the whole experience.
Probably app support. If Lemmy didn’t have wefwef/voyager during the API debacle of 2023, I probably would not have stuck around. The default UI is terrible for mobile.
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.
Fair point, but mobile apps and inertia seem to outweigh those additional features
If you use a mobile app then whether your account is on Lemmy or PieFed makes no difference - most of your experience will be determined by which app you choose.
Keyword filtering is about to be merged into Lemmy. Other features will also be added over time.
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.I run a Pixelfed instance. The code is faaaaaaaarrrrr from polished. Its buggy and the admin interface either doesn’t work or is poorly implemented. I’d rather run and moderate Lemmy than Pixelfed. I have considered just shutting it down several times. I run the instance https://social.photo/.
People are talking about Piefed not Pixelfed
I know, I read it wrong :(
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?
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:
- Easy and fun
- Fast development velocity
- Huge amounts of developers know Python
- Extensive and mature libraries with good documentation
- Good readability
- Cross-platform without re-compiling
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.
