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.
I think it’s good that PieFed is so small, that means they can move faster and innovate more without fearing that things will break for thousands of people. I think it’s good that a project like PieFed can try things and see what works and sticks and this is then a good indicator for projects like Lemmy to copy what is good and leave out what is not good.
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
I also like the default UI, even if it’s not the prettiest. But for mindless scrolling I prefer Voyager.
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.
Phanpy is phenomenal and fixes a lot of the problems Mastodon and all microblogging platforms have.
Mona is also a good app.
Voyager is so polished, it elevates the whole experience.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Migrating the images as in media? The discussion is about database sizes.
The biggest DB I have is the one from alien.top, which got close to deal with 600k mirrored bots and 10M posts + comments. The database was clocking around 25GB.
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.
While theoretically true, the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL for that, I somewhat doubt that Piefed being written in Python will have much noticeable effect in reality.
the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL
Postgres being a bottleneck is a first for me. Not saying it’s not possible, just… It’s postgres. Wondering if it’s more an issue with ORM, etc.
Postgres is so quick if you know how to use it…
You don’t even need to know how to use it very well, in my experience.
Really depends on many factors. If you have everything in RAM, almost nothing matters.
If your dataset outgrows the capacity, various things start to matter, based on your workload. Random reads need to have good indices (also writes with unique columns), OLAPs benefit from work_mem, >100M rows will need good partitioning, OLTP may even need some custom solutions if you need to keep a long history, but not for every transaction.
But even with >B of rows, Postgres can handle it with relative ease, if you know what you’re doing. Usually even on a hardware you would consider absolutely inadequate (last year I migrated our company DB from MySQL to Postgres, and with even more data and more complex workflows we downsized our RAM by more than half).
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.
If you want it to be “free to most users”, the cost of data storage and IO will completely dominate over the cost of CPU.
There are plenty of good arguments to prefer Rust over python for a distributed application, but “language efficiency” is not one of them.
Anyway, if you are biased in favor of Rust and want a decent argument to justify it, I will let you use ‘It’s easier to compile Rust to WASM and have the application run on the browser, while compiling python in a cross-platform way is a nightmare’, free of charge.
Ease of cross-compiling is really one of my favorite things about Rust. It can run anywhere with little coaxing needed.
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.
I don’t think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They’ve got room to grow.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
People can start posting about PieFed on Reddit and see how the Reddit users react.
But how is that not a concern if you’re interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 new users in a few days. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That’s not gonna be great for you or the new users.
I think it’s unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don’t even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.
There’s already been some comments about PieFed and they didn’t result in huge surges.
Sure but does the rate of growth matter? The post asks about recommending Piefed instead of Lemmy. I presume the point is that the number of Piefed users would grow if we did that. So whether a thread produces 10, 1000, or 10000 users in a day, the number of users would grow over time. Then I think the question remains, if my Piefed instance costs $10/mo to run today, would it cost $100 with 10000 users or $1000, or more, or less?
The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.
Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.
If people start recommending PieFed now, it’s on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.
Yeah, that makes sense for the defect class of performance problems. I’m more concerned with the inherent performance (compute) disadvantages of Python. Perhaps they wouldn’t matter, hard to know without load testing.
I didn’t downvote.
Well, i thought the same about rust and python. i’m not a dev and lack understanding on their component.
My opinion became more nuanced with Lemmy. I have read there spike in ressource usage with lemmy on server.
So, I believe the language matter but also its features, the way you think how people will use it. Its core design.
When you manage a social network, the most fondamental feature is the moderation board. I find this area is lacking on Lemmy. Crosspost ? Duplicate everywhere, on my timeline, i get 4-5 time the same post…so i believe it miss some design thinking.
From what i see, the various lemmy-bot (most of them are written in python i think ?) and alternative frontend are improving lemmy experience. For example, how do you add an mod with lemmy-web-ui ?
I also believe that being written in Rust make it harder for new devs to help. But in later time we will see a change.
I’m not sure if it answer part of your question, but there are area where lemmy can improve : https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/
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/.
It doesn’t really surprise me that pixelfed is buggy ngl. It is still polished to the end user.
Lmao, spot on! Thanks!
People are talking about Piefed not Pixelfed
I know, I read it wrong :(
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.
- apps
- alternative front ends
- Comments view / chat view
I never knew what it was because I’m a bit desensitised to knew 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.
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.
That is exactly the main reason I created my own theme, but yeah there should be a official compact theme, especially for the mobile phone.
Ok. Watch this space: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/540
Great!
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. :)
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 does have one.
…for Android. Nothing for iOS.
Valid point
True, MBin is small so I’m not surprised they cater to the bigger platform.
On Android, software can be made with free tools, released on Github/Gitlab/Forgejo/etc, and pushed into an F-Droid repo. Heck, you might not even need the F-Droid side, you can just throw an APK up at your free host of choice. Plus, I don’t think there’s a language restriction in terms of what can be compiled for Android (I’ll make my ignorance known here). Apple is not an open platform. One language is accepted, they have one way to develop software, one (overstuffed) place to download that software from. It is much more difficult to develop an app for iOS compared to Android. And if you try to monetize it, people will use a PWA.
To make it clear, this is not meant to be a debate on Apple. This is just my take on why free fediverse software is much more likely to show up on Android.
Agreed.
You may not be from the US, but in the US smartphone market, as of late 2024, iOS (Apple) holds a larger market share than Android, with iOS at around 58% and Android at 42%.
I’m not, I was talking worldwide.
The US isn’t the only country, and I bet people using the fediverse skew heavily toward android in the US anyway.
I wasn’t trying to be derogatory, I know that outside the US Android is the dominant platform, but in the US it’s iOS. (I actually thought the percentage of iOS users would have been a little higher.)
That’s an interesting assumption that the Fediverse skews Android, I’d like to see some numbers on that.
I don’t really have a positive thing to say about people who want to stick to Apple as their primary device ecosystem.
If you want to debate Apple, start another thread. This post is about Mbin and Piefied, and for me, I use Voyager on iOS to surf Lemmy. I don’t want to switch to or recommend Mbin or Piefied if there’s not an app for it and the best I can do is a PWA.
Don’t try to hijack the thread to push your anti Apple agenda. You can dislike Apple all you want, just not in this thread.
This post is not about Mbin, only about Piefed (not Piefied).
Don’t try to tell people what they can or can not talk about in this thread while disregarding it yourself.
Woooo boy you told me! 🙄
Actually this thread is about Piefed (spelled correctly just for you), not correcting people who are correcting people, so now you’re in the wrong.
You’ll excuse me, but my eyes rolled so hard, I have to go try to get them back to the front.
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!
again, the apps are the killer.
iirc, piefed’s api is very similar to lemmy’s, so apps could support both.
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.
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user?
I don’t think it’s always easy to pinpoint UX issues and user friction. Sometimes these things just don’t stick with mainstream users. I say it’s worth a try to see which platform the average Reddit user will prefer.
But if you’re gonna use from a phone, Lemmy’s selection of mobile apps is unbeatable.
Fair point. It probably hard to see these things when you’ve been in the thick of Lemmy for as long as most of us here have. It’s easy to dismiss not liking lemmy-ui because alternative frontends exist (written from Photon), but does that matter when the overwhelming majority of instances use it as their landing page.
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 [email protected] ?
why create this post here instead of [email protected] ?
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
Generally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web.
Particularly in relation to piefed: it seems to be focused on the exact opposite (giving more power to the server admins) and it takes a good page of social engineering / “nudge theory” principles to guide its design. Much like Mastodon, it seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture.
[PieFed] seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture
Yea, I get this same feeling. It’s not that I mind that culture or being mindful of how people behave and such - I just don’t think that is the domain of the software to decide. Individual instances can decide that for themselves, but the software shouldn’t influence that kind of thing, I feel.
It may be a bit opiniated, but it’s nice to see a different approach from Lemmy devs who don’t see the need for any additional moderation tool.
I brought up mod mail during the AMA, it has been considered too complex to implement. A moderation panel with an overview of the mod queue would be nice too, but not a priority.
I’m not saying Piefed is perfect, but at least they prioritize that aspect.
We are working on new moderation features all the time, for example 1.0 will correctly federate instance bans which is quite complicated to get right. There will also be a plugin system which allows for much more flexible mod tools. Its just that our time is very limited for all the work that needs to be done on a project with over 50k active users.
This comment was not supposed to be a huge critique of Lemmy, more like a comparison.
Everybody is aware that you do what you can with the resources you have.
Fair enough, its just a bit strange that this particular critique comes up regularly.
I just gave it a try, this is what the moderation panel looks like on Piefed:
Maybe this makes it more clear
“moderation duties” and “regular participants” in a forum system have such different use cases, it makes no sense to try to make it work with the software itself.
It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators, instead of trying to shoehorn it in the existing API. But I don’t really think that this is something that really bothers people enough, given that last time I asked if I could get 20 people interested to sponsor the development of the moderation tool, and to this day only one person showed up.
It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators,
Piefed built it in their software without a separate tool
And by doing so, it makes it available only for moderators with accounts on piefed. What is the current TAM? 20 people?
A separate tool could connect to any server federating “Report” activities. What is the current TAM? Any moderator of a group, no matter if their account is on Lemmy/PieFed/PixelFed/Misskey/Mastodon…
20 people?
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7
360 currently, so around 18 times that.
A separate tool could connect to any server federating “Report” activities.
The appetite seems limited as you pointed out yourself in the comment above.
360 currently
Please, read things in context. I’m talking about moderators.
Are all the 360 PieFed users also community moderators?
I can add a piefed account as a mod to a community I mod right now.
Those features also impact all Piefed users.
If only activitypub c2s didn’t suck.
ActivityPub C2S is not the the solution. It still requires a server and it still keeps the admins in control of everything.
ActivityPods seems to be going in the right direction, though…
Is there even a second instance running piefed? I’ve only seen piefed.social
There’s feddit.online and some personal ones I’ve seen knocking about.
Thanks
Is there a way to see version number? Everything else seems way slower than the flagship instance and even that seems slower than every Lemmy instance
Seems they’re all running the same version, or Piefed doesn’t tag releases:
piefed.social nodeinfo
curl -s https://piefed.social/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq { "openRegistrations": true, "protocols": [ "activitypub" ], "software": { "name": "PieFed", "version": "0.1" }, "usage": { "localComments": 12382, "localPosts": 1169, "users": { "activeHalfyear": 561, "activeMonth": 309, "total": 800 } }, "version": "2.0" }feddit.online nodeinfo
curl -s https://feddit.online/nodeinfo/2.0 | jq { "openRegistrations": true, "protocols": [ "activitypub" ], "software": { "name": "PieFed", "version": "0.1" }, "usage": { "localComments": 503, "localPosts": 214, "users": { "activeHalfyear": 85, "activeMonth": 34, "total": 85 } }, "version": "2.0" }Yeah, we don’t have versioning yet because there are so few instances and it’s a rolling release so to say. So most people update just every now and then. Most of the admins are in a matrix chanel together also.
There are no tags as of now. Everyone is running the main branch from Git. I suppose that’s going to change at some point when PieFed deems itself ready.
You guys are a lot braver than me lol, I’d never run the Lemmy main branch in prod.
Running a main branch in production is beyond insanity.
Welcome to the jungle
I’ve been running my one person instance for 8 month or something ;)
feddit.online, iirc. check join.piefed.social
