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?
Edit: I will leave this post here, which is a post by one of the devs of Lemmy that enumerates some of the things Lemmy 1.0 has. Lemmy 1.0 seems to be already in alpha stage and is already testable. The feature selection does look fantastic. Here is the post I am referring to: https://lemmy.ml/post/40744781
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
My lemmy-client (connect) also shows crosspost comments since a couple weeks.
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
Long story short, they are supporting and apologetic to various dictatorships, be it past or present. And anybody that disagrees is a Nazi.
You can check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for some examples
Wrongthink
Not really. I think its more like everyone gets free milk but the lemmy milk has tankies in it.
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.
we need another Stalin to take care of…like you
I picked Mbin
There are dozens of us!
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.
I’m new as of today. I joined piefed.zip. I think I’ll do alright here. I’m already on Mastodon.
I’ve been testing both for some time and the differences are pretty minor. What I really like about PieFed comes down to two things: how it groups cross-posts and their comments (on the web version), and the moderation tools. The downside is that there are a lot fewer mobile apps that support it.
Cross-posting is an amazing feature that’s still massively underused.
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!
This is beautiful. The fediverse has achieved it purpose.
To be so seamless that you can’t tell a difference.
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 they 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
Most of these will also be available in Lemmy 1.0 soon!
Hello,
Hope you are doing well. Any time-frame (even rough) in mind for Lemmy 1.0 release?
We are currently finishing to implement the last feature community post tags. Once that is done there is still some cleanup and bug fixing to do. Soon after that we will publish the first beta version of 1.0 (likely in February), and ask app devs to start implementing the new API v4. How long the beta phase lasts is hard to say, it depends how many problems pop up.
Thank you for the summary
Interesting…Can you use boost or a similar app with it? Also, how popular is it compared to here in terms of user?
Apps do work with Piefed, but they do not necessarily have all the features Piefed has.
Hardcoded censorship is a no no
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.
Do you mind opening a GitHub issue? You can just make a single issue with that checklist. It’s just easier for me to track what needs to be done in GitHub instead of random Lemmy/PieFed comments. PieFed hide read should be an easy fix.
I thought Voyager supports piefed now?
it does. i am using voyager on piefed right now.
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.
Piefed has some critical features like, non-nsfw blur, flairs, ability to disable notifications from relies on posts and more information is exposed to admins.
PieFed all the way. It’s developing at lightning speed, while Lemmy lags behind as the transphobic genocide denying devs beg for donations with in built donation begging banners on all Lemmy instances front pages. Instances are apparently scared to defed from .ml for fear the devs wont support them with help.
Rimu has made some interesting choices, such as blocking 196 from default federating posts until a user subs first or a dislike for meme subs. But when spoken to has been receptive and removed such things or made them optional for admins.
Ethically and feature wise PieFed is in the lead, its not perfect but its open to change and receptive to ideas.
Why should we withdraw from the tankies, insufferable though they may be. Just don’t follow their posts. We don’t need or want to withdraw into echo chambers to protect our own people from wrongthink. Use your reason to dissuade from wrongthink.
More than just the tankies, we want to expand the people federated to include the right wing. You don’t have to follow their bullshit if you don’t want to, but segregating from them is a mistake, one that has led us to where we are today, in different realities.
we want to expand the people federated to include the right wing.
Non-nazi conservatives already can use the existing general instances. Every ‘free speech right wing’ instance that has been created immediately became nazi bars that welcomed fascists. Tolerating the intolerant will simply push away the non-fascists from participating, which is what ultimately caused previous reddit alternatives like Voat (and Bitchute, Nostr, Odysee, etc) to fail.
The majority of conservatives are not nazis even if they unknowingly support them. It does makes sense that nazis are looking for a home and colonized offshoots like lemmy though as the explicit ones would be forced from mainstream outlets.
Obviously there is a line there, where do you draw it? From banning out and out nazis, to what? Who says who is a nazi, or a fascist?
We should have a clear set of rules, and violations, or censoring, should go through a process ending in a jury trial of users before any final decision is made. Not only would it be fun to run such jury trials on violations, and give a sense of community, but it would prevent moderators and developers deciding for us what we can see and prevent abuses of their power, and prevent government and business interests getting their hooks into the moderation.
In the case of banning instances idk about that even, my instance doesn’t block any instances and I’ve seen no nazis. Even if I did, so what, I could avoid them, same as I do with tankies. It’s better to be able to see what they are doing anyway, insight is valuable at times. The instance could have a banner explaining they are condemned by the other instances, where you have to affirmatively click on it like a nsfw post.
What about people critical of Israel? Israel’s superfans insist it’s bigotry to not support their final solution against their others, to question them forcing millions of people into ghettos. Are we to censor anyone disputing such narratives because bigotry is alleged? Because they equate criticism of their policies as naziism, quite literally, while themselves being nazis of a new sort. The bad (worse) guys always accuse their victims/opponents of doing what they are doing. Why should developers and site administrators decide truth on their own?
I do not see what good it does banning instances in the first place. You think your own users are going to become nazis after seeing their posts? To protect their weak minds from wrongthink? It doesn’t really work like that, and people not being exposed to it can make it more likely they get seduced to it not less. And it’s not in the best traditions of western culture to censor viewpoints as such.
I agree. And you know what, Facebook’s sponsored algorithm makes more Nazis than Nazis alone. What we need is to be able to subscribe to community notes and misinformation alerts from trusted sources. There is room for everyone, even the fucking Nazis. We just need block lists etc. And before someone cries echo chamber, you know it’s kind of up to you to monitor your “trusted” sources over time. Things change and being informed is being informed. Apolitical people or people too thick for ethical decisions just don’t need an algorithm pushing political propaganda to their feed every moment of every day.
I’m on Lemmy (db0) because, at the time, I thought PieFed was just another instance, and I chose the instance I liked best without much thought behind what software it ran.
db0 has talked about spinning up a PieFed instance, but I would have to join it and I’d have two accounts. I’m not sure I want to manage two accounts. AFAIK they are not talking about converting to PieFed (if such a thing is possible).
On the tech side, the two mostly federate with one another. I (maybe mistakenly) called out a PieFed user for not posting a link. They thought they did. And they did — it was visible on PieFed, but it was not visible to Lemmy. So they apologised and posted the link in the body of their text, and I apologised for not understanding how things worked. So that is an issue Lemmy (the people who make the software) would have to address, and then db0 would have to update the code on their server (I believe).
So I think as long as they continue to federate to one another, it’s fine to just use what you want. If one starts to pull ahead and the other is not catching up, it might be wise to switch, especially if there is a way to pull all your subscriptions, blocks, and managed communities from one to the other.
I have no idea about the ethics of using either.
The db0 folks did spin up the anarchist.nexus piefed instance if you want to give it a try!
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.
A fair point, but on the other hand PieFed images render without needing that expansion (ah, I see I’ve chosen that in my settings, so it probably is not that way by default), and the other image modes (Tile and Wide Tile) offer an even more streamlined experience for viewing a bunch of images in a community or in a multi-community Topic/Feed, if that is what you want.
So fwiw I don’t find myself ever missing that image expansion feature of Lemmy. I don’t see a similar option in my Lemmy account’s settings menu either. It’s more like Lemmy needs that feature, whereas PieFed provides a different workflow to meet that same underlying need.
I do remember enjoying that Lemmy feature though:-). The major downside is when something looked like an image but was actually a link, and then I start cursing at the fact that they can look so similar to one another.😂
The image viewer on piefed will crop an image without showing any indication that it was cropped, which confuses me a lot of the time (and makes scrolling Tumblr comms impossible). I think just spitting out the image directly is way better. Its form over function.
Lemmy can auto expand images as well. (Accidentally opening a link when you meant to expand an image is very annoying though)
Yeah I hate that cropping effect, though both Lemmy and PieFed do a similar thing in not quite “cropping” but only showing the first image, and then when you click through to the full post you can see a second or more images. So I just get used to clicking on the image and having it render in full in its own little pop-up-like state (where it takes over the screen, but that’s more intrusive than the pop-out that Lemmy does).
I suppose it depends which communities you browse regularly - like for the main meme and shitposting comms that pretty much only ever have just the one image I see what you mean, but for comics or certain communities like tenforward there’s often a second bonus image that makes it worthwhile to have gone into the post, which I usually do anyway in order to read the comments. Lemmy’s pop-out is primarily useful when you don’t care about reading the comments at all.
Also, it looks like the blorp alternative UI (see in action at https://blorp.piefed.world/home) doesn’t crop, maybe?
Blorp dev here. As of right now, images should not be cropped. Theres always a chance we encounter some weirdness with reading the aspect ratio of an image, but if everything goes correctly, it shouldn’t crop. A few people have asked for a max height for post thumbnails so they don’t take up too much vertical space, but as of right now, that hasn’t been implemented.
Just logged in again with piefed and it told me the login failed, it seems to be working fine though.
Was it a one time fluke or does it give the same error if you login again?
Sorry I was unclear, the login was successful, it just gave me the error anyway
