I’ve made accounts on servers running these different software and the user experience feels similar between them. They’re all FOSS Reddits. I can log into servers running all of em via the same Interstellar app on Android and see the same communities
Are there more notable differences for folks running the server or the mods running the individual communities/subredits?
Or am i misunderstanding them?
Piefed is also written in python. No clue why you would do that when you know that you’re going to be dealing with a massive amount of network traffic, more so than most server infra. Lemmy already struggles with certain amount of traffic and that’s written in rust.
Takes a special kind of person to write federated software and they all seemingly make really really strange decisions when doing so.
The idea behind Python is to get the community to contribute. More people know Python than Assembly or Fortran. At some point, running a FOSS project like Piefed becomes a numbers game. Having more developers is useful in the beginning.
If Piefed grows significantly, it might make sense to rewrite the whole thing in a different language, but right now, contributions matter more than efficiency.
So you set up a nice strawman with assembly and fortran there (which would never be used for a web server) instead of suggesting a realistic option like C# or the JVM, both of which have much larger communities of people that actually know what they’re doing.
You’d get just as many contributions in Java or Kotlin and the quality would be higher as well.
The decisions at the start of the project have the most influence on the project, more so than anything ever will later down the line.
Fair enough. Should have gone with C#. Would make a lot more sense. For some reason, my mind was wandering in all the wrong directions when writing that.
Or you follow the python ethos and when it matters, you profile the code, and rewrite only the modules that need it in a lower level language.
That would make more sense. Best of the both worlds.
Spoiler alert, it happens too in proprietary software, physical engineering, and as soon as there is a corporate structure and a quality department it’s even worse because you need to explain why you want to spend more money, and document the impact which means do a shit load of paperwork for every change
in general I feel the same way about python, but the federation traffic is done with redis queues as a background task and my servers can easily run around 2.5-3k messages per second before spinning up another pod. The rest of the load is, of course, when using the UI, but with most of the load being federation, it’s not that big of a deal when you have a separate container/pod with reasonable resource limits.