I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally purchased

It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    192·
    1 month ago

    While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.

    e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.

    Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don’t have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.

    Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not “filters”, just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone’s reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.

    Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that… but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.

    PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.

    Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.

    • Cricket@lemmy.zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed.

      This is the first time I’m hearing most of this, except the part about Piefed having more moderation tools. Do you have any links to additional information?

        • Cricket@lemmy.zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          Thanks, that was interesting about the network utilization. For a while now I’ve been trying to evaluate the resource efficiency of Lemmy vs. PieFed for my own curiosity. Rust has been shown to be much more resource efficient on the server, using a lot less RAM and CPU from what I recall reading in the past, but I hadn’t thought about the differences in network utilization that could counteract that efficiency, and I was also not aware that Lemmy was so reliant on Javascript. Javascript is still supposed to be quite more resource efficient than Python, but much less so than Rust since it’s still an interpreted language (an extremely optimized one, but still has inherent limits compared to compiled languages). I would still like to know about PieFed requiring less maintenance and the Lemmy database issues requiring constant restarts, if you have any links to information about that. Thanks.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            23 hours ago

            One very popular account that you probably have already heard is here: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed.

            Another informative discussion relates to the upcoming (in 2026) switch of slrpnk.net from Lemmy to PieFed, see e.g. https://slrpnk.net/comment/18799445. Some highlighted nuggets from that:

            the main bottleneck on performance is the database itself, and at that point the language the frontend is written in doesn’t seem to make much of a practical difference

            the core issue with Lemmy is really that it is very annoying to run and maintain, has huge memory issues (ironically given that it is written in Rust) that the devs ignore since years, and the image integration is a stuff of nightmares. In addition, the upstream devs are often actively hostile to sensible suggestions how to improve things and the proposed solutions by them often make things actively worse (latest case in point: the next version will hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities). After nearly 5 years of running Lemmy, I am ready to cut my losses and rather give Piefed a try, and so far the devs and community around it has been very welcoming and actually have lots of sensible ideas.

            (Note that the proposed hard-coding issue has been somewhat walked back, as in it will still be hardcoded to some instance but it only remains lemmy.ml by default yet can be changed. Using a single instance as the ultimate source of truth though, it will still be subject to issues of defederation.)

            The Lemmy backend causes the Postgres database to use more and more RAM, to the point that it crashes with out of memory issues randomly and causes other processes to go down with it. I have reported the issue multiple times and I am not the only one with the problem since many years,

            There are also some further links there to older discussions and additional blog posts, such as https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/.

            See also notes for developers at https://join.piefed.social/docs/developers/, e.g. it mentions PieFed relying upon the Flask framework, and the code repository at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi, which reportedly the Docker containerization makes it fairly straightforward to install? (I have no personal experience with that though, or Docker containers at all myself.)

            In my mind, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy and has been for like a year now. Nobody knows how scalable any of these approaches would be to handle like a million of people, but on the other hand the entire Threadiverse has only ~35k active users currently (last I checked) and that is already down from our peak at 55k just after the Rexodus. i.e., scalability is the least of our concerns right now, and can be postponed for another day, in lieu of aspects such as features proferred to users and ease of use to instance admins.

            Then again, FOSS is FOSS, so I wish both Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) the absolute best of success - when one is improved, we all benefit due to the federated nature of content shared via ActivityPub Protocol. I just think that Lemmy has little hope for the future, while PieFed continually impresses me. Nothing is perfect, but on the whole I hear the best things about it, and I have little doubt you’ll enjoy having delved deeper into learning about it, based on so many stories shared in e.g. !piefed_meta@piefed.social that have said exactly that.