Welcome to a new era of interconnected content discussion with PieFed – a link aggregator, a forum, a hub of social interaction and information, built for the fediverse. Our focus is on individual control, safety, and decentralised power.
Like other platforms in the fediverse, we are a self-governed space for social link aggregation and conversation. We operate without the influence of corporate entities – ensuring that your experience is free of advertisements, invasive tracking, or secret algorithms. On our platform, content is grouped into communities, allowing you to engage with topics of interest and disregard the irrelevant ones. We utilise a voting system to highlight the best content.
Video introduction the codebase
I believe one of the killer features is the ability to aggregate different communities.
Multi-communities? Really? 😍
Yes really. Here’s an example - see the communities at the top, and hashtags at the bottom.
On second thought, that’s not a fantastic example of categories, so here and here are better ones.
There’s a lot that is not yet implemented in PieFed, like no preview feature for writing messages or user tagging (e.g. @openstars@piefed.social does not send me a notification), yet it already has several features that Lemmy does not - it’s so exciting to watch it develop!:-)
Codebase is clean too.
I haven’t looked but that’s great to know as well:-).
Still no multi communities at the user level (hopefully soon)
The reason my first example wasn’t a good one was that this meme community (!tech_memes@lemmy.world) wasn’t part of the organized hierarchy of Home -> Topics -> Chilling -> Memes, but rather the generic Home -> Communities (as in, all of them in aggregate) -> Technology Memes@lemmy.world. So yeah, it’s a very new community, although !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca is older but the same happens with it too. Therefore I assume that it requires an admin approval to bundle these “Topics” together, and it definitely doesn’t strike me as something that an individual user could put together.
Then again, someone (perhaps you? or me?) could send requests to the admin to add communities to topic areas, or perhaps modify the codebase directly if it were placed into a file and people granted access (whereupon once again, the admin would have to approve - although in this case a mechanism would also be needed to assess the differences and apply them).
Anyway, there’s a LOT of polish that PieFed lacks, and this doesn’t even crack the top half imho, next to things like user mentions (@openstars@piefed.social) and Notifications properly taking you to the actual thing that you are being notified about (a goodly fraction of the time it does not, right now.
On the other hand, Lemmy has no such thing as “Categories” or “Topics” of any kind so… anything that PieFed has along these lines is surely better than the nothing that exists in that regard there, right?
Therefore I assume that it requires an admin approval to bundle these “Topics” together, and it definitely doesn’t strike me as something that an individual user could put together.
That’s why I’m saying it’s not personal multi communities, which is something people are definitely looking forward (most upvoted Lemmy GitHub issue)
I remember discussing personal multicommunities with @rimu@piefed.social a while ago, at the time it was not a priority for Piefed, maybe they’ll revisit in the future.
Yeah I agree with their reasoning, since what is there now is pretty good, so it would be merely a refinement of an existing goodness, compared to so much else needing to done elsewhere e.g. making an API to allow existing apps to use PieFed in addition to Lemmy.
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain where things are at for folks!
I’ll have to wait and see if an Android client that supports it shows up, it looks really neat!
You are most welcome:-).
An app? Apparently an API is in development for it, but it’s still in alpha stage. Even so, there’s a bunch of new features in PieFed that Lemmy does not have, such as Categories of Communities, so in some ways it would be a downgrade to use an app.
I just use Firefox to access https://PieFed.social, and it works fine. Well, mostly, bc even though PieFed has things that Lemmy lacks, it lacks some polish compared to the Lemmy web UI that has had more development work put into it. This is where an app would come in handy - if you didn’t need all the new features that PieFed offers and just want Lemmy without the “Lemmy” part:-). (And didn’t want to use Mbin, which iirc also lacks an API and thus ability to access via an app.)
Edit: One cool thing is that PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust, so the development process should move forward more quickly since more people know the former language while the latter is reportedly quite difficult. And another cool thing is that the developers are SUPER responsive:-).
Still not at the personal level
Finally! That is a great feature!
Yeah, that’s really awesome
Can I aggregate all threads that link to the same URL so I can view all comments on that URL in one page?
Ideally across all instances of mastodon and Lemmy and others?
Hello from Piefed! I was a regular on Lemmy and Mastodon for years, but I migrated to Piefed because it is much more lightweight.
The features page shows some differences between Piefed and Lemmy - https://join.piefed.social/features/ Mostly, I appreciate that it is written in Python, so more developers in the community may easily understand and contribute to the code base, and that it is so lightweight. When I connect to the internet I always have to consider data caps, so it’s a relief when websites make a genuine effort to be efficient. I can reliably browse the fediverse through Piefed even when my access is throttled to 50Kbps download.
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I assume since it’s using the same protocol, it can.
Does it require JavaScript? Does it load in Tor Browser on strict mode?
Some features of the site (like responding to your comment) require JS, but I just tried blocking JS with uBlock and I was able to use most of the site perfectly fine.
I am not sure about strict mode on Tor, but you should totally report back if it works. Give it a shot!
Sounds great!
But I suspect that the Lemmy backend is faster since it’s in Rust. Also Rust codebases are much easier to maintain since it’s a strict language.
Faster?
Speed is literally not even a concern, the only thing I want more of is people. Make it easier to sign up or something
Federation speed is a serious backbone concern. It aligns with perceived reliability. If it seems like comments votes or posts aren’t “going where they’re supposed to” then people can lose faith in the platform
In my experience it’s very snappy, and with minimal JavaScript (if at all). Hell, it’s even somewhat usable in Lynx, though I couldn’t sign in.
Lynx - Now that’s a name I have not heard in a long long time.
And uses less data - helpful for using a mobile data plan. Those numbers shown in the article are all the more impressive even for sending 5x more posts on the home screen than Lemmy’s default, even while still sending >4/5 less data - i.e. it’s more like sending roughly only 1/25th the data per post, if I’m reading that right.
I would curious to see if you could access piefed using Voyager for Lemmy as a front end. It’s about the only decent app for Lemmy that doesn’t squash things on my iPhone mini with text zoom enabled
You can’t, no. PieFed and Lemmy are operating in similar spaces, but are completely different architecturally. PieFed doesn’t yet have an API. Unlike Lemmy (and a lot of other modern web platforms), it doesn’t need one to operate, so copying Lemmy’s to the extent that you’d be able to plug in something like Voyager would be overkill. It would probably also be against the TOS for Voyager (Jerboa actively prevents it’s use with anything other than Lemmy, even if the API is the same).
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Curious to see if people haven’t heard about it, Piefed seems to be mentioned quite often
Tbf you’re on Lemmy 24/7 so you’ll hear about things much earlier than many others. I’ve also been on Piefed for a minute.
But I’ve come to understand how slowly knowledge propagates through large numbers of people, at least via this medium. First with the APIcaplyse, when I realized that virtually nobody on reddit had even heard of the API changes, let alone moving to Lemmy. And then on Lemmy itself with various major events/dramas that people were totally unaware of until much later.
Piefed is developing rapidly and seems like a worthy alternative to Lemmy and Mbin. The private voting feature is also really cool.
No need to be on Lemmy that much, just watching !fedimemes@feddit.uk you would see Piefed mentioned every week
Same here, on !fediverse@lemmy.world
I’m on Lemmy all the time and I didn’t know that community. But thanks for sharing, this is what I’m talking about.
I’m on Lemmy all the time
Seeding a new spot takes work
I’d heard of it already, since apparently I had added it to my block list, but for the love of me I cannot remember why. Looks like a pretty nice and standard Lemmy visualizer.
Private votes sounds pretty cool
Does it support importing Lemmy subscriptions?
doesn’t seem to have a good dark mode, i also use wefwef/voyager ,thunder and phtn instead of lemmy-ui so… any apps? also seemingly no community creation yet.
On my account I use the (dark) theme Card Shadow. I had an issue with it where I needed to disable the Dark Reader extension in Firefox. Lemmy ignored that but it actively messed up PieFed, though after disabling it, PieFed works perfectly for me.
https://piefed.social/communities has a create local and add remote buttons that look like they would create communities, though I did not text them out.
Edit: and the Create Local option has a “local only” checkbox, i.e. the default being to share the newly created community with Lemmy and Mbin instances via the ActivityPub protocol.
Interesting… I’m very happy with the instance I’m on and with Lemmy but if I decide to self host I might set up piefed instead.
So is it a fork of Lemmy?
Can I access it via Eternity app? Is it basically another instance?
