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?
I’m gonna fuckin buy it and milk it and treat it tenderly
I’m going to just fuck it.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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
fuck off then nazi
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.
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.
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.
I picked Mbin
There are dozens of us!
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.
Hardcoded censorship is a no no
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.
My understanding is that PieFed gives you access to everything on Lemmy without directly supporting tankies.
Tankies imo is such a creepy new word that came out of nowhere. Do real people actually use this word?
I’ve never seen or heard a person in real life call someone a tankie, its seemingly exclusively used online.
Do you ever see many people in real life support brutal dictatorships killing citizens?
I’ve never seen a Nazi in person, but I sure as fuck aren’t going to pretend they don’t exist. I do hang out in leftist groups in real life and see many tankies and have heard the term used in person.
The fuck kinda misinformation is this?
Tankies has been a word used by those of us on the left to describe the authoritarian leftists who supported the Soviet’s sending in tanks to kill student protesters in Hungary in 1956. Oh and it’s not new, we’ve been saying it for 70 years.
I have used both tankie and vatnik (ватник?) directly and unironically, both face-to-face and online.
Lemmy is established, having existed very long before. But also they work together. So unless you have some major issue there’s no real reason to up and switch.
Having two softwares actually contributes to the decentralizing of the fediverse IMO, as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users…
as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users
Some people seem to find this hard. I might be one of the PieFed devs, but there are certainly reasons that people might want to use lemmy instead and I think they do some things better. No one platform is going to be the best.
Yup, I use Lemmy because imho, the whole idea of social reputation feels a bit too like Reddit’s karma thing. But on the other hand, Piefed also has its nice customisation options.
So imho they’re complementary, the most important is that they’re both decentralised.
The reputation score (sum of upvotes - downvotes) is something that only admins can see. I absolutely agree with a lot of the criticisms people have with reputations systems like this or reddit’s karma, but at the same time, it is one of the most reliable and highest signal to noise indicators of spam/scam/etc. accounts out there. If we were to remove it entirely, it would take away a powerful tool for flagging accounts like that to admins earlier rather than later. Oftentimes, we can spot accounts like that even before they get reported by other users because users are much more likely to downvote/block than go through the trouble of creating a report.
To address your other reply in the same place, ngrok is not affiliated with X’s (twitter’s) Grok. ngrok is a service that provides https tunneling much easier than manually managing domains. Developers often use this for proof-of-concept stuff or testing features that need SSL because ngrok addresses can be created and destroyed easier and quicker than manually managing your own dns.
In actuality, I didn’t even realize that ngrok was a sponsor. Or, was a sponsor at some point. Is this still accurate @rimu@piefed.social?
Yep https://ngrok.com/ is not affiliated with Musk at all. Their ‘sponsorship’ is that they provide me with a VPN service for free which they normally charge $10 per month for. @birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Oh, and to ask (putting it as a new comment so you get pung), I’ve been looking at the Piefed page out of curiosity, and it’s very clear and insightful - but I see Ngrok being mentioned as a funder, and I’m a bit worried. How can you be sure that they are not affilated with Musk’s Grok to any extent?
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.
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!
As soon as I can microblog straight to my own profile I’m sold. On mbin I had to make an admin only magazine for my microblogs to all be in one place.
Could you describe your problem in more detail?
Microblogs are always associated to your profile. If you want to post something which is not meant for a specific magazine, the
randommagazine is what you need to use. It is a pseudo-magazine (and so not federated as a community) which aggregates all microblog posts which are not attached to a real magazine.Yeah but like. Why not just straight to a profile? That’s what masto does.
What exactly do you mean “to a profile”? Can you give an example of the difference (I never used Mastodon)?
Well tumblr and Twitter are the same way. There are no magazines / subforums / subreddits / individual communities (or weren’t last I used them). Your profile has your post and people follow other users individually. You can tag your posts but you can use just about as many tags as you want the post isn’t bound to any one tag. The only specific thing they’re bound to is literally just your personal profile (or anyone who reblogs / retweets / retweets / reposts it to their own profile). A microblog is literally a completely different format to a forum / message board style post while kbin treats it like a forum post lite.
That is not really correct, posts are represented differently from threads in Mbin (internally and in the UI). You don’t have to post to a specific magazine / community. If you want your post to just float around in the Fediverse (so have the post associated with just your account + hashtags) you choose the
randommagazine for the post.
I admit that this is not really intuitive and therandommagazine is a crutch for this platform to handle plain posts. To make it a bit easier to grasp I created a PR to select therandommagazine if one is not on a magazine page.But all of what you described is possible with Mbin. As an example I created this post (using the form on the generic microblog page) which you can see under posts on my local account. I would like to add links to federated Mbin and Mastodon instances, but nobody follows me, so remote instances don’t pull posts.
What is currently not possible is to follow hashtags (but you can list posts), but I am going to implement this soon.
