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 !cancel_lemmy@piefed.social
Get a job
there is nothing wrong with lemmy.
“Stranglehold” lmao. They invented the threadiverse and they are welcoming other implementations like mbin and piefed. That’s the opposite of a stranglehold.
Go cancel yourself
The capitalfascists are trying everyrhing they can to destabilize any attempt at anything free. I’m not saying piefed is that but the amount of recent tries to cancel the lemmy devs and now lemmy itself does reek like capfash.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml do you guys know that a couple of these attempts are being made? Please update us if more stuff like this pops up.
What the fuck are you talking about Jesse?
You can sell me on Piefed without trying to cancel Lemmy out of nowhere.
How does it compare to mbin as a Lemmy alternative?
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.
Piefed isn’t a centralised system itself. There isn’t just one Piefed instance.
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…
The reputational anti-features are part of what makes me suspicious. I agree entirely with your impression of it.
And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it’s gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.
The other thing though is Piefed’s automated subscription feature, which, if it gains enough clout, will allow it to effectively promote or undermine, as the devs prefer, communities or even entire instances, and to erect a barrier to entry for new communities and new instances, simply by granting or withholding inclusion on its subscription lists. That’s the primary thing that triggers my suspicion.
Well - that and the fact that aside from anti-features like reputation and automated subscriptions, I don’t see anything notable about the software, and to the degree that it differs from lemmy or mbin, it seems if anything to be inferior, which makes the sudden flood of praise just that much more suspicious.
And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it’s gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.
It was gaining momentum anyway, but the big reason was the collapse of lemm.ee - which held many medium-sized communities having to find a new home. A lot (not all) chose piefed.
, I don’t see anything notable about the software, and to the degree that it differs from lemmy or mbin,
- consolidated comment view for all crossposts
- actual instance blocking
- multicommunities
- keyword filters
Beehaw has been asking for better moderation tools for two years, it’s nothing new.
Also the lemm.ee admins burnout made people question how to deal with toxic users
Following the lemm.ee announcement, moderators were looking for a way to migrate communities
Piefed had such feature: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876492?scrollToComments=true
No need to think of an organized campaign when one platform has a feature that people are looking for
I thought anyone could create a Piefed instance, and it can be interacted with by both mbin and Lemmy?
i presume you’re questioning the assertion that it seems like an attempt to effectively centralize the fediverse?
Yes - anyone is free to start an instance.
However, a new instance is not going to get any communities on Piefed’s preset list of subscrptions, nor is any community which the Piefed devs, for whatever reason, disapprove of or oppose or simply dislike. And that means that if Piefed can gain enough users (by, for instance, astroturfing the appearance of greater popularity than it in fact currently enjoys), then it will be able to effectively gatekeep the fediverse - to undermine or advance existing instances and create an insurmountable barrier to entry for new instances, by granting or withholding positions on its list of communities to which users are automatically subscribed.
Additionally, it seeks to do essentially the same thing to individual users, by instituting a karma system (something that the rest of the fediverse has not coincidentally avoided, since it was and is so easily and often abused on Reddit) and by automatically collapsing responses with 10 or more downvotes (it would be child’s play to use bots to deal out ten downvotes to whoever one pleased). Again, if it can attract enough users, it will then have enough clout to effectively control the narrative not just in its own communities, but throughout the fediverse.
And those potentialities, in combination with the fact that Piefed has gone from being rarely if ever even mentioned at all to, in just the last few days, being mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times a day in threads on virtually any topic, makes me highly suspicious.
So I understand, if I created my own instance of Piefed, the original developers have backdoor access to manage my communities?
That’s incorrect, I don’t know why the person you’re replying too is thinking this
I may be misunderstanding
The Piefed developers don’t have backdoor access to remote communities.
What they have access to, is that communities they want to promote during the onboarding process, but that’s not much more different than Lemmy already allowing admins to have “default blocks” for new joiners: https://lemmy.zip/post/33065677
Piefed has gone from being rarely if ever even mentioned at all to, in just the last few days, being mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times a day in threads on virtually any topic, makes me highly suspicious.
You make interesting points, but for this specific thing, it almost certainly has to do with the .ee shutdown which was announced just a few days ago, apparently PieFed has fantastic comm transfer tooling so that’s why it’s probably been exploding in discussions since .ee has a number of large comms that are trying to figure out their next steps
That undoubtedly had some effect.
But then, look at this thread for a particularly egregious counterexample.
I like Piefed, it’s my daily driver, but cancelling Lemmy is probably too much.
The majority of people still haven’t moved from !privacy@lemmy.ml (!privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) or !linux@lemmy.ml (!linux@programming.dev ), so trying to get them to switch platform based on “cancelling” isn’t productive.
If you want to advocate for your platform, explain what features Piefed has compared to Lemmy (https://join.piefed.social/features/) instead.
Why cancel lemmy? it ain’t perfect, but it’s not a bad platform.
Some people for some reason want to cancel or boycott lemmy as a software because they think it’ll hurt the Devs, which is stupid because this is open source software. Not only do the Devs get nothing from people using it without donating but they can’t stop people from using it either, and since it’s opensource, they can’t stop people from modding/forking it either. This whole movement to cancel Lemmy is just reactionary garbage.
Reactionary to what?
It is reactionary to want to cancel an open source project or codebase based on grievances with a particular person or their opinions.
Unrelated, but happy cake day
Oh thanks, I think that’s the first time someone’s said it to me on Lemmy. Which is weird since I’ve had multiple others before. This account is two years old, and I have other accounts too.
Yeah, I don’t even think this one is your main, but hey, here we are
I mean it’s my first account, and also the only one I use on Lemmy.world communities.
Basically, the devs are tankies and extremely transphobic.
i just say feel free to block the triad of tankies instances, i imagine the complaints are come from there.
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.
Mate,you have a 20 year old perception of python. “good for tinkering”, Cheezus…
Are you denying the problem of Backwards compatibility with python versions? It was and still is a big problem today. I’m still seeing the affects of that though many communities. I don’t really think it’s only good for tinkering but I know its developers clearly do, otherwise they wouldn’t have subjected us to the transition from python 2.7 to python 3 and the fallout that followed, and people wouldn’t have been so eager to comply with them dropping python 2.7 support in all their python integrated envionments before you could say bitrot.
Yeah somehow that doesn’t give me much confidence for the future.
Python 2 transition took decades and EOL was almost a decade ago, get over it. If you still want to use it, use it!
I don’t understand this approach at all. Software evolves and sometimes you need breaking changes. Godot did it as well, but I guess that “great for tinkering” as well.
It fills me with confidence that the language is the most widely used in the world and is not afraid to do what must be done instead of growing stale and unwieldly so that lazy developers don’t learn anything new.
Yes I don’t think that demolishing whole ecosystems is a good thing. I think that it’s a shitty mentality of wanting shiny and new shit and fixing what isn’t broken. I am a believer in legacy support and I find it weird and concerning to see and hear people complain about it. You do realize that if Python had been the Web’s scripting engine instead of JS, a lot of Websites would’ve been, and still would be trashed and unusable due to said breaking changes with zero regard for legacy support. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but it does go to show that legacy support and backwards compatibility is important.
Again, python 2 still exists. nothing would be “trashed”. If you want backwards compatibility just keep using python2. We clearly don’t see things the same way, but given that python is the most popular languge in the world, I’m happy most see it my way.
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People can always find problems if they look hard enough, lol. There are probably some legitimate complaints about Lemmy, but nothing is perfect. I find their messaging weird though. Like, you can be pro Piefed without having to be anti Lemmy. Seems needlessly combative to me.
The problems with the Lemmy developers though is plain on the face of it. Problematic political and social positions. And then demanding that donations must go towards furthering those problematic political and social positions. Because they think they found this one weird trick that nobody can argue with. Their Flagship server is the political server. It’s not lemmy.org after all.
Not to mention that the admins of the server moderate more than most the moderators on the server. There is no free speech. It doesn’t matter how moderate or respectful you are. If you go against the narrative you will be banned.
Development wise they are also vanguard minded. Does the userbase want features the devs aren’t working on? That’s too bad. The devs are going to work on what they want to work on. Whether or not that’s a good thing. Which can sometimes it can be. It also has led to a number of people reluctant to contribute. The childish cliquesh behavior.
You’re not always going to agree with the politics and views of the people who write the software you use. And that is okay. But when they mix the two it’s not wrong to have issues with that.
I think you nailed it. For me personally, if I move to PieFed, it’s not because I want to “hurt” the devs, it’s because I really don’t want to be part of what they stand for.
That and it speaks to a lack of maturity and professionalism which doesn’t inspire confidence in the project.
There’s no need to hurt the devs for sure though. They do that well enough on their own.
I keep forgetting about the dev issues, lol. Deffo legitimate problems one might have with a software for sure. I don’t run into that a lot over here on Lemmy.ca though, which is nice.
I stand by my assessment though. It’s still weird to me to promote one thing by shooting down another. Feels too much like politics in North America to me. They could have made a “Support Piefed” community instead.
I agree, this whole idea of canceling Lemmy is weird and just feels reactionary. Also Piefed running on Python doesn’t seem like something that can scale well nor something that can be perpetually worked on for the long haul without running into issues with new python releases and compatibility with them.
To not support genocide denying, transphobic, authoritarian developers.
Devs are more active and adding features users/mods need.
We’re still all on the same Fediverse able to communicate, we’re just using more ‘ethical’ software.
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Since both platform communicating with each other genocide deniers would also be shown on piefed
The Lemmy devs are the genocide deniers.
Many users are also genocide deniers
That’s a strange comparison. I imagine someone who objects to the politics of the lemmy developers would also object to similar political expression said by anyone.
There are a huge number of lemmy users who are genocide deniers and hate many other things , including lemmy.ml and the developers
I agree, canceling a software over that is just purely reactionary, an opensource software no less.
The developers of Lemmy also run lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, the former being a hardcore communist anti-everything delusional conspiracy crapshoot of a platform, the latter a tiny bit more relaxed, but moderated/administered by a bunch of dicks that are essentially also tankies (= hardcore leftists) and Russia fans/apologists.
They (the devs) recently asked for funding to support their work, and in doing so, disclosed that part of the funding would be used to run those two instances, thus giving users no alternative to support without cross-financing extremism.
Piefed is developed independently and has none of those links to moronic ideologies.
Piefed as a platform uses the same underlying protocol as lemmy, mastodon, etc. (Activity Hub), so users can seamlessly interact with one another.
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theres only a few real reasons… lemmy does not have a lot of ‘microblog’ features (50% of the fediverse)… you cant, for example, follow mastodon accounts or have them follow you.
other platforms also add missing lemmy features over the same data. mbin has the equivilent of reddits karma in the form of ‘reputation’
Because Lemmy’s Devs have extremely problematic positions and Lemmy as a software is severely lacking in features which other platforms like Piefed have. Lemmy is just a poor experience, but also Lemmy fosters dependency due to it’s widespread use, meaning it’s harder for people and servers to branch out into other platforms.
I just moved my instance over to PieFed on the weekend.
If anyone is looking for a smaller PieFed instance away from the bigger players, we’d love to have you here at quokk.au.
Do you know where I can see a list of piefed instances?
Not that you would want to look any where else of course, but…
filter by software.
Interested, how do I move an instance from Lemmy to piefed?
At the moment, you basically have to restart it all with a fresh install of PieFed on your server.
They are working on features options to transfer over and copy the content etc, but that may be many months away still.
So I will stick on Lemmy for the time being. After all I don’t care for down votes, I think votes in general should not be private, because this is like a public plaza what you say is public, and attaching a reputation because of down votes is dangerously bullying and a slippery slope, so piefed doesn’t actually feel like my pie at the moment.
Still maybe I will try a fresh installation just to check it out.
I think votes in general should not be private, because this is like a public plaza what you say is public, and attaching a reputation because of down votes is dangerously bullying and a slippery slope, so piefed doesn’t actually feel like my pie at the moment.
I agree with this, both of these things are bad on their own but together they are extremely bad. Like it encourages the same groupthink as there is on Reddit while also allowing easy vote manipulation to help yourself and hurt others. Really bad combination.
I’m not a server admin., just a user. The Lemmy instance I’m on setup a Piefed instance in parallel and is giving users the option to use either, or both. I’m still trying to get my head around the history and the pros/cons of each but for now it seems like I’m switching to Piefed. I imagine that if most users move then the Lemmy instance might get shutdown in the future.
Did…did you start a lemmy community for people to talk about not talking on lemmy…on lemmy?
It appears to be a Piefed community. You can see it on Lemmy through the magic of federation though.
No… I started a Piefed community to discuss Lemmy alternatives and problems with Lemmy, on Piefed, the superior platform.
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.
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/pics@lemmy.world
- 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.
[Features][features]
- [Proceeds to list social credit features]
No thanks, if I wanted that I’d go to the CCP, Reddit, or Twitter.
Better UI design
Not from what I’ve seen.
I don’t have a problem with Lemmy as software. I do wish the devs weren’t tankies, but we don’t have to engage with them.
- Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/pics@lemmy.world
So what you’re saying is that they have a
Social CreditKarma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
Oh a really strict social credit system. Yeah fuck piefed for sure. It’s already bad enough that people maliciously downvote comments on lemmy with alts, giving power to their votes will just make that shit worse.
As much as people give the Lemmy Devs shit they work hard to prevent this from happening on Lemmy, they removed the score API so people couldn’t use Karma bots like Reddit does, they have a publicly exposed modlog so mod actions can be called out and critiqued (piefed has no modlog as far as I can tell). They may have their problems but Lemmy is a far better platform in terms of freedom and open-ness. Piefed is the real Reddit 2.0 complete with it’s own social credit system, designed to make people with less popular opinions (or people at the mercy of downvote brigading) be ostracized.
Those are all optional choices for instances.
So what you’re saying is that they have a Social Credit Karma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.
Not that I’m aware of, members can see what percentage others vote (i.e. do you vote 100% downvotes?) but that’s about it. Mods and admins can see a reputation metric, but that’s not forward facing to the public and simply a way for bad faith actors to be flagged.
Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
You can set it on a per instance or community scale as to if votes count, if you only accept votes from your instance, etc. It’s actually a really handy option to have, maybe you want a community for only local members to vote on policy etc, well now you can filter it so only they can vote in here.
(piefed has no modlog as far as I can tell)
Admins can turn it on/off, I’ve turned it on for my instance. https://quokk.au/modlog
Admins can turn it on/off, I’ve turned it on for my instance. https://quokk.au/modlog
That’s still not really much better. It should be on by default, the whole reason there’s a modlog is for liability. Hiding the modlog isn’t doing anyone any favors, don’t try to tell me that there’s merit to that. Obfuscation of mod actions is hiding them from accountability.
So what you’re saying is that they have a Social Credit Karma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.
Not that I’m aware of, members can see what percentage others vote (i.e. do you vote 100% downvotes?) but that’s about it. Mods and admins can see a reputation metric, but that’s not forward facing to the public and simply a way for bad faith actors to be flagged.
Piefed puts weight on votes, the software punishes for being downvoted a lot. Therefore this is in a sense a social credit system. And it’s made worse by the fact that you can exclude upvotes from counting but downvotes still count in there, so you can make it very difficult to earn
social creditreputation but easy to lose it. That’s not acceptable to me, that’s worse than the environment on Reddit. This isn’t a good thing.
Don’t forget that admins can literally turn the modlog off on their instance to hide mod actions from others and who did them. How can anyone think that accountability limiting features is a good thing, especially coming from Reddit.
As much as public modlogs are required, the lack of accountability of some mods repeatedly reported for power tripping makes me question sometimes if all of this is not in vain.
!privacy@lemmy.ml is still the most popular privacy community
!world@lemmy.world is still the most popular world news community
On the other hand, there are several features that Lemmy always ignored, and that exist on Piefed
- consolidated comment view for all crossposts
- actual instance blocking
- multicommunities
- keyword filters
As much as public modlogs are required, the lack of accountability of some mods repeatedly reported for power tripping makes me question sometimes if all of this is not in vain.
Maybe it seems that way since mods don’t always or often yield to pressure on YPTB, but if there wasn’t a modlog or if they could hide it and not announce actions publicly. We wouldn’t even know. People would still complain about their bans but there would be no public evidence. No one could make a critical assessment based on the public evidence it would be the banned person’s word against the mods. That’s what a life without the modlog is, that’s what it is on Reddit. I do not believe that real people want to go back to that. Server admins and mods maybe but not people.
On the other hand, there are several features that Lemmy always ignored, and that exist on Piefed
I believe the second, third, and possibly the fourth one are coming in later Lemmy versions.
Enabled and working
No one could make a critical assessment based on the public evidence it would be the banned person’s word against the mods.
I agree. I’ll ask Rimu to enable the modlog on Piefed.social.
It just got enabled on https://piefed.world/modlog (so similar to https://quokk.au/modlog), it should appear in a few hours
I believe the second, third, and possibly the fourth one are coming in later Lemmy versions.
Let’s talk again once they are here.
Edit:
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.
Yeah this is like the worst feature of Reddit taken to the extreme by the ability to filter out upvotes from communities, but still allowing downvotes from those communities to hurt your score. I can’t support a platform like that.
I will check, but IIRC downvotes on ignored communities aren’t accounted either
That’s not what it says in the building healthy communities section. It said that upvotes in “low quality communities” aren’t counted but downvotes are.
@rimu@piefed.social, we might want to revisit this, maybe it would be more fair to discount votes on those communities altogether
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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.
Get my downvote and out
