Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I’m blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.
Whats the catch? Why aren’t we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?
App support is one thing I can think of.
Apps make or break those platforms. Lemmy apps are way better than what Mastodon has for example (but I have to tip my hat to Phanpy). We got really lucky that Lemmy exploded in popularity due to Reddit API changes which meant many app developers gave Lemmy a shot. I probably wouldn’t use Lemmy so much if Voyager didn’t fill the hole Apollo left in my heart.
Voyager is so polished, it elevates the whole experience.
Phanpy is phenomenal and fixes a lot of the problems Mastodon and all microblogging platforms have.
Mona is also a good app.
If it can get apps, ill probably be more on it.
I love you lemmy.world but I would rather like to run my own piefed.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question. Currently it seems it’s got a bit under 1000 users across under 10 servers.
There are now sizeable communities run on Lemmy instances that are reinforced by network effects. There needs to be a significant reason for them to migrate. To that point, the collective project is building communities away from corporate power, not software. The software is a tool to facilitate that. Lemmy has worked well so far in this regard. If someone can show that Piefed can work better and not cost significantly more, it’ll probably get adopted for new communities. If the difference is drastic, we may even see migrations from Lemmy.
We won’t 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.
Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/
There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It’s what you do with it that counts.
https://piefed.social is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won’t increase as more users come on board.
PieFed is also really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that. I haven’t bothered to add S3 storage code because we just don’t need it (yet).
Anyway, all this focus on costs and downsides is only half the coin. There are massive benefits that come from using Python:
- Easy and fun
- Fast development velocity
- Huge amounts of developers know Python
- Extensive and mature libraries with good documentation
- Good readability
- Cross-platform without re-compiling
For a FOSS project where volunteer contributions from people play a big part these things are really important. There are many ways a project can fail (not just technical reasons but social & governance too) and running out of CPU is way way down on the list.
using Python
Full disclosure: I like Python a lot and have written a lot of it.
That said, if not for my recent work experiences, I would be absolutely horrified at the idea of using Python for such a project. Between the type system and being interpreted, the performance and runtime issues are pretty painful. That and the historical greater dependence on external application servers really makes Python-based services something that really sucks to administer.
However, as I noted, I have also recently seen Python performing far faster than it has any right to with highly-optimized use of multi-processing and offloading the server stuff to Go.
I think I’m going to have to take a look at Piefed source this weekend.
Cool! Before you dive in, check this out https://join.piefed.social/docs/developers/
These performance results are only from the browser side, but dont cover server performance. The database for lemmy.ml is 60 GB, and that is with 6 years of history. Not sure where your 10x claim comes from. The lemmy.ml server costs 70 Euros per month and doesnt have much loa, with almost 10 times as many active users.
The lemmy.ml server costs 70 Euros per month and doesnt have much loa, with almost 10 times as many active users.
I know the 0.03€ per user per month has been known for a while, but it still impresses me.
That’s nice info, thanks! Do you know why the db difference?
I’ve never seen a Lemmy DB, sorry. But I hang out in the Lemmy matrix rooms and read about admins struggling with their 300 GB databases quite often.
Can confirm. When we took over the running of feddit.uk migrating the images took forever as it was around 300GB.
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I second this. Lemmy is written in Rust where as piefed is written in Python. When it comes to running a high-performance webserver, Lemmy has the advantage.
Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spent in IO, not compute, and if you’re running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you’re running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.
Its written in python, but I don’t think the overhead is too much because the bottleneck is DB performance.
It has support for lemmy’s protocol, so the network effect really isn’t an issue.Its written in piefed,
Small lapsus ha ha
Thanks.
All your saying is, it looks better. I am not using any Lemmy webfrontend, I’ve always been using the apps that are available, many of which are absolutely polished.
There’s more than that.
Stuff like feeds, topics and better onboarding.For people that care about that sort of thing, that’s great. I just need the ability to subscribe to communities and comment on posts and Lemmy has been great for that while using voyager
I run a Pixelfed instance. The code is faaaaaaaarrrrr from polished. Its buggy and the admin interface either doesn’t work or is poorly implemented. I’d rather run and moderate Lemmy than Pixelfed. I have considered just shutting it down several times. I run the instance https://social.photo/.
Piefed is another federated social aggregator https://piefed.social/ akin to Lemmy.
I know, I read it wrong. Because I’m a ding dong. :(
I meant as a user.
Thanks, I’m a ding dong anyway.
It doesn’t really surprise me that pixelfed is buggy ngl. It is still polished to the end user.
Lmao, spot on! Thanks!
My biggest issue with Piefed is how much space the UI uses. Last I checked it didn’t have a “compact mode” like current Lemmy or Alexandrite. Browsing communities is also a bit awkward since it shows you so many topics without a way to sort or remove them.
Ok. Watch this space: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/540
Great!
Compact mode has been added now, FYI. Screenshots at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/540#issuecomment-3788240
That looks perfect, thanks for your work!
Very cool!
Thank for your feedback.
Maybe you can tell them ? I’m giving feedback to piefed dev on their UI, suggesting ideas is also part of PieFed’s development. :)
Probably app support. If Lemmy didn’t have wefwef/voyager during the API debacle of 2023, I probably would not have stuck around. The default UI is terrible for mobile.
The default UI is terrible for mobile.
I’m definitely in the minority, but I prefer the Web UI on mobile to apps
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user? Remember the majority of users don’t post, comment or otherwise interact with the platform beyond voting.
For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there’s a decent amount.
The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one’s uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.
Keyword filtering is about to be merged into Lemmy. Other features will also be added over time.
Will there be a release with that feature before Lemmy 1.0, or will it be delivered with Lemmy 1.0?
It could be backported, but there are now significant changes between the 0.19 and development branches, so it would take some work.
Fair point, but mobile apps and inertia seem to outweigh those additional features
If you use a mobile app then whether your account is on Lemmy or PieFed makes no difference - most of your experience will be determined by which app you choose.
Indeed, but at the moment only Interstellar has alpha support for Piefed.
Once the Thunder for is released, and Voyager, Arctic, Summit etc start to support Piefed, then it will be the case.
As I said, it has a lot more polish. Its easier to discover communities, and it has feeds.
Two questions for you, I’m genuinely curious, I hope they don’t come up as agressive
- why are you still using your Lemm.ee account instead of Piefed
- why create this post here instead of !fediverse@piefed.social ?
why create this post here instead of !fediverse@piefed.social ?
This community is much bigger? He’s asking a question so probably wants input from the most people possible.
It is, but there’s only one way to make Piefed grow, it’s to start getting Piefed communities more active.
Lemmy covers pretty much all the topics the current Threadiverse is interested in, so at some point posters have to accept to post to smaller communities.
I’m not saying everyone has to do it, but as OP states that Piefed is more polished, I was surprised
Does it really matter when you can access the same content from Piefed? It’s one of fedi’s great strengths that different experiences can be tailored on the same platform.
Yep! We should probably move some comms to piefed, so that .world doesn’t control too much, but not to piefed specifically.
There’s also three Fediverse comms (here, ml and zip) like do we really need another one?
not to piefed specifically.
Why not? I’m not saying to move everything, but a few communities to Piefed could be nice. A few to Mbin too to keep everyone happy.
It doesn’t matter, true. We can see every comments in a crossposted post. But on the other hand Blaze is also right. :)
I told him the same thing about its lemmy repport that i wished something less lemmy centric. :)
I told him the same thing about its lemmy repport that i wished something less lemmy centric. :)
With our current situation, it’s just that most of the things are going to happen on Lemmy. New app update? it’s a Lemmy app. New monthly active user milestone reached? Lemmy is probably the main reason.
Hopefully things will get more balanced over time, but we can’t expect a perfect 1/3 split of posts between the three platforms.
This comm is much bigger, and I happened to be on my .ee account at the time.
e: And I’ve used this account for longer, so I don’t want to abandon it.
And I’ve used this account for longer, so I don’t want to abandon it.
Probably the main reason why people won’t move to Piefed either
Why aren’t we suggesting Mbin over Lemmy, actually? Because it seems like it has the same options. And Mbin even has an app (not just the PWA function)!
There’s quite a few nice apps for Lemmy. I’m using Connect for Lemmy on android and it’s wonderful.
Oh, I’m aware that both Lemmy and Mastodon have good apps. I’m just pointing out that if the ‘argument’ is that alternatives don’t have an app, MBin does have one.
Mbin has Interstellar, it’s pretty good.
It really is, from my limited use. I use the PWA on my (very old) phone and Firefox on desktop. But I like Interstellar.
Yes, you are right. Mbin is far more advanced than Lemmy. And PieFed more avanced than Lemmy, less then Mbin.
There are lot neat features in Mbin and PieFed so i wish we consider all options before pushing Lemmy everywhere. I also wish more app support from both of them.
I wish we try to remain neutral because, i strongly believe that the 3 softwares can inspire each other.
Totally agree with you that everyone in the fediverse should be working together. Especially the amazing devs.
Interstellar works with PieFed now although the API it uses is only enabled on one instance https://preferred.social as we’re still testing it out.
Is Interstellar support complete? I thought it was still in alpha/beta phase
Definitely alpha, yeah. But moving fast!
Looks like preferred is invite only at this time.
“Invite code (see post on flagship instance)”
Invite code is here: https://piefed.social/post/484755
again, the apps are the killer.
iirc, piefed’s api is very similar to lemmy’s, so apps could support both.
- apps
- alternative front ends
- Comments view / chat view
I never knew what it was because I’m a bit desensitised to new apps / app names.
Edit: using https://phtn.app/ has made Lemmy extremely pleasant to use too. I haven’t had a better experience on any platform.
For me…
Because the PWA font is too small and can’t be enlarged.
Because there’s no ‘back to top’ button so have to kill the app to refresh.
Because there’s no app.
But sometimes I use it anyway because the combining of articles is so much better than seeing the same article three or four times in a row in Voyager.
