Compassion ~ Thought
PieFed is running circles around Lemmy, even with the highly irresponsible code vulnerability disclosures awhile back.
As you know better than I, Friendica struggles mightily with scalability, Mastodon is slow to add new features especially those asked for many years, and Lemmy and Mbin are likewise exceedingly slow, whereas PieFed adds new MAJOR features quarterly even.
My hopes for the future of the entire Threadiverse lies with PieFed.
There are so many fascinating differences in how your comment reply here shows vs. not.
Like on all of https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/70448923 and https://lemmy.world/post/48069327 and even https://piefed.zip/comment/5630582 your most recent comments here do not show up at all, despite it having been sent 2 hours ago. Though somehow your earlier comments are visible, but not your latest ones?
And yet I see them on my instance. I am not sure why, or if your tagging my username specifically helped cause that to happen for this instance but somehow no other instances.
The formatting if I ask to “view markdown source” is messed up - everything is on a single line, and some formatting indicators are missing - but the traditional, regular display mode of the message is perfect.
Interrelation between the different platforms still needs improvements, but it is encouraging to see it get better over time.:-)
I am not sure that you would get this unless I add your user tag @macfranc@poliversity.it ?
It is not your fault. The entire Fediverse is still being built, and it only gets better over time.:-) The fact that Lemmy + PieFed + mBin + nodeBB can intercommunicate at all is fantastic, even though yes there are some kinks remaining to be worked out:-).
My intention was to make light of the reasoning behind criticism of your post, while pointing out to Threadiverse users that once you get past that, the actual content is quite solid. So less “wall of text” than merely “odd-looking introduction”. It’s a good post!
And yeah the giant text looks weird, haha! 😂 Especially since at first it is a repeat of the title, but then goes into new territory after that. I do not know if there is anything that can be done about it though, except further code development on the side of all the myriad varieties of recipients of the message.
Well I still think it’s interesting content, after that.
It is good to always remain curious 🤔🤓🧠
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.
Absolutely! Start here: https://join.piefed.social/features/.
The linked blog is also really interesting to me, e.g. this post: https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/, which shows how 5x less data is sent for 5x more posts e.g. 25x greater data efficiency between server instance and client.
Not if you enjoy wine:-P
It has passed into the realm of pure meme now:-).
It almost seems like the majority of content injects news and politics into itself - e.g. memes, comics, and the like - or at least it does happen super frequently.
One of the most active posts this week, in !Technology@lemmy.world, is https://futurology.today/post/10493000 - and just look at how little moderation it has received, with one of its higher comments (10 upvotes, zero downvotes that I saw) being:
Fuck off u little bitch, u won’t be able to build prisons fast enuff for all of us
And here’s one with 81 upvotes that I won’t even repeat here but just offer a link to, as it calls for murder (Luigi-ing): https://lemmy.world/comment/24053139, among many many others with tens of upvotes that call for the guillotine.
Or another post is https://futurology.today/post/10503178, ostensibly about memes and from a science-oriented instance, with comments such as:
He’ll die evnetually. Hopefully it’s slow and painful.
This one about the sitting USA president.
But I, like you, am here. We must have thick skins, or else we block content that we do not want to see - which someone browsing in guest mode won’t be able to do, at least not until AFTER they’ve made an account, and then learned how to do so. You would have to go to Reddit to ask them why “Out of the tens of thousands of people who’ve read our posts about the fediverse site, only a few hundred have signed up.” Surely it won’t be a singular easy to understand reason, but a plethora of them. Among which is how much of a turn-off this place may be specifically to an American centrist or right-wing, possibly even Trump supporting person.
Yeah, twice, just to really drive home the point of what it might have been…
Appeared to… or did?
I doubt Lemmy will ever do this - e.g. moderator reports still don’t federate to other instances until the release of v1.0, despite the Rexodus having been several years in the past now. Basically any solution would have to be on top of the software without needing any changes within it. Lemmy puts up full-page advertisements for donations but a lot of that funding goes to running Lemmy.ml and seemingly only very little to actual code development.
Although predictably PieFed already has this functionality, for well over a year now. For one it has hashtags, plus user and post flairs, and for another it has categories of communities where someone can look at e.g. news across all regions, or pick let’s say Europe and then choose from various sub-topics below that. Also, while these Topic areas are defined by the instance admins, the otherwise identical concept of topical Feeds are user-customizeable and even shareable, so someone has likely made what you are looking for already, but if not then you could make it and share with others to benefit from your efforts.
At worst even, say when interacting with existing communities that did not want to actively participate in the process of self-sorting their own content, users have keyword filters that can be used so that you as an end-user can do it entirely on your own. Such community discovery and management concerns are a solved problem on PieFed. I say this full well as someone who had the identical issue you described here when I was on Lemmy, and moving to PieFed solved it for me.
The developers are also extremely receptive to feedback, if you needed still more changes made to the code. I sincerely doubt that you will ever get a solution going using Lemmy - this identical (edit: general) concept has already been asked for many times over the years - but switching to PieFed should easily take care of it, offering multiple possibilities to make finding the content that you want easier.
You could host your own instance (of PieFed, Mbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.) and then you’d simply be sending the user-agent info to yourself.
This issue is discussed a bit in the linked post.
The situation is a bit similar to that for NSFW: if all content is not perfectly labeled, then is the tag worthwhile to exist at all?
And mods will abuse the system regardless - e.g. look at how often Lemmy.ml removes posts citing “rule 1”, despite that rule never anywhere anyway in any language stating that you are not allowed to criticize (or not support strongly enough?) Russia, China, or North Korea (or perhaps soon adding the USA and Israel?). Regardless of platform - Reddit, Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. - mods are gonna mod regardless, and some will be better at that task than others.
Though it is still useful to have “rules”, and use them in communities, even if they aren’t properly implemented in all situations. The alternative being 4chan where anything and everything goes - not everyone is looking for that?
I guarantee you that Lemmy has for multiple years already abused non-AI content in a far worse manner: see e.g. the (non-AI) moderation tool santabot. Even so, Lemmy does not abolish the ability to post things, or to vote on it. i.e. the worst excesses of a thing do not preclude good uses for it. Knowledge that Santabot exists may encourage you to stop participating in the entire Threadiverse, but it does not need to? Systemically, the Threadiverse is fairly good, overall?
And now PieFed offers tools to detect AI content. I guarantee you that it will be abused, somewhere/way/when/how. Though at least now it exists, and can be improved? And we can be a part of that process too, by offering realistic suggestions to the development team, which demonstrably listens to and actively solicits such feedback all the time.
What makes the thoughts strong is that their implementation already exists.
Likewise, PieFed saw a number of opportunities to improve things, and rather than simply wishing that something were so, people expended effort to actually code them up so as to make them REAL, i.e. no longer mere thoughts but actions.
e.g. Lemmy offers a marking/tagging for NSFW, which PieFed expanded so that NSFL (gore) is an entirely separate category. Theoretically I could completely hide all NSFL while blurring the thumbnail of NSFW posts, or vice versa, or make both sets semi-transparent, or whatever. The Lemmy software might offer thoughts and prayers along those lines - e.g. theoretically you could dedicate different communities for each type, or even different entire instances (one for NSFW and a separate instance for NSFL?), or perhaps add standardized keywords (not that Lemmy allows keyword filtering innately, as PieFed does, but in case some 3rd party apps wanted to do so?) to distinguish between NSFW vs. NSFL - but multiple years ago now PieFed birthed that thought into a full-blown solution.
In the same manner, PieFed is far beyond the stage of merely beginning to have a couple thoughts along the lines of dealing with AI content: as that linked posts indicates, 5 months ago it already offered a full implementation of a solution.
PieFed has rather strong thoughts on the subject: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1523426/labelling-or-hiding-ai-generated-content.
In short, just as NSFW/NSFL posts or bot accounts are totally fine so long as labeled, so too AI posts are fine… unless unlabeled as such. And if users refuse to label them, then community mods have tools that help them detect and label them for the users.
PieFed’s options for AI content are:
Show
Hide completely
Label as AI
Make post semi-transparent
This method democratically puts powerful tools into the hands of end-users to individually choose what approach works best for them, rather than e.g. make an authoritive declaration such as defederation of instances that often allow AI content.
The world is a less friendly place than it used to be… especially the interwebs.
From what I can see, that is not a back-end restructuring but as far as a new architectural design it will purely affect the front-end UI. Which will begin to look somewhat more similar to PieFed, yet without coming anywhere close to what PieFed offers today, as opposed to what PieFed offered like a year ago. e.g. there will be no ability to hold polls (or to share those custom-built feeds?).
More relevant is that Lemmy 1.0 may take a year or so to become fully deployed across the Threadiverse, if past experience is any judge. The devs say to explicitly expect major breaking bugs and perhaps to avoid deployment in prod as a result. And ofc apps are going to need to catch up as well. This one being a breaking change may lead most older apps unable to connect to an instance that uses the newer software (unless I am misreading that part about the older backwards compatible API).
Lemmy.world in particular, which holds ~50% of Threadiverse users and >90% of the most highly-active communities (unfortunately for the aim of decentralization) is well-known for delaying deployment until the Lemmy code fixes such issues.
So a year from now Lemmy will begin to catch up to some of what PieFed had almost a year ago in the past already, and meanwhile I expect PieFed will not itself be standing still all that time… I am glad to see that Lemmy is still being actively worked on, truly I am, but also I find it hard to actually be excited about that pace, by comparison. Then again, any movement forward still counts, and improves the Fediverse as a whole, so by however much, it is still a good thing! :-)