What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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/comment 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.
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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.
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.
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I think it's unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post/comment 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?
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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 spend 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.
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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.
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Is there even a second instance running piefed? I've only seen piefed.social
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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.
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.
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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 this 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.
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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.
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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
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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:
::: 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" }:::
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MBin does have one.
…for Android. Nothing for iOS.
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Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spend 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.
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MBin does have one.
…for Android. Nothing for iOS.
I don't really have a positive thing to say about people who want to stick to Apple as their primary device ecosystem.
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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.
