What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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/.
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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 Piefied, 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.
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Woooo boy you told me!
Actually this thread is about Piefied, 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.
Very good.
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Is there even a second instance running piefed? I've only seen piefed.social
I've been running my one person instance for 8 month or something
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Seems they're all running the same version, or Piefed doesn't tag releases:
::: spoiler 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" }:::
::: spoiler 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.
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Apps make or break those platforms. Lemmy apps are way better than even anything Mastodon has. 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.
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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/.
I meant as a user.
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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.
Thats literally what I said.
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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 already 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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/
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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).
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Personally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web.
Piefed goes in the opposite direction, giving more power to the server admins and taking a good page of social engineering / "nudge theory" principles to apply in 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.
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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 already 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.
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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.
