PieFed is seeing quite steady growth, nice to see.
Anyone know what that blip was?
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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So wait, is this just people through Piefed, or does this encompass Lemmy and like the other members of the fediverse?
Sorry for the dumb question, I'm from Reddit and tbh don't quite understand this service.
You are now on the "Threadiverse", the subset of the Fediverse (interconnected software using the ActivityPub Protocol to communicate) that uses threaded-based discussions centered around communities, unlike e.g. the user-centric microblogging platforms that most people think of when you say "Fediverse" (aka Mastodon, the Twitter/X replacement, although btw we call the latter Xhitter bc it is perfectly just the right amount of derogatory:-P).
Software in the Threadiverse includes Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin that combines both threaded-based Threadiverse and user-centric microblogging Fediverse. Also nodeBB, flarum at one point was said to be joining it, and there were some other projects that died out (Sublinks).
In the wider Fediverse there is also Friendica (Facebook replacement), Pixelfed (Instagram replacement), Loops (I forget if federation is enabled for that yet, Tiktok replacement), and so on. Theoretically they can all talk to one another using the ActivityPub Protocol, and being on PieFed you will occasionally see comments or even posts from any/all/most of these, but in practice each type of content is more optimized for the platform that it is aimed at, and the interconnections are clunky. e.g. PieFed has so many more features than Lemmy that the latter doesn't know what to do with, so it has to simply ignore it - e.g. user polls, or user or post flairs, etc.
Most of the time though, Lemmy and PieFed are seamlessly interconnected. e.g. some of the people replying to you are on PieFed instances, while others are on servers running Lemmy, and unless you dig a bit into each one individually, you can't really even tell which are which at a glance. The Threadiverse is just great that way - like on Reddit (The Bad Place), if a single person (Steve Huffman) did not like something, then nobody can argue against him, whereas here, if you get banned then in the worst case someone can spin up their own personal instance (running PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, or whatever) and still be connected to the same identical network - here someone is known by their reputation, not landed gentry whose attention is sold to advertising firms for the sake of profits.
This graph is PieFed by itself, Lemmy is still the majority of the users here
I am a refuge from reddit, as I understand it, incompletely, lemmy is it's own thing, piefed is a new one, with some differences in moderation and moderator tools. Lemmy has a lot of tankie influence is a big factor, communists, they are kind of dicks, to put it lightly.
I think there is a third one too, they can all talk to each other on here.
Tankies give communists a bad name. I'm a communist and I made a communist piefed instance to get away from the tankies
Many of the people on ml and hexbear are cool, I had good conversations. But the leadership as such is the problem. You are right, there is nothing wrong with communists, these guys are tools of fascists. You better believe it. And china is not communist.
This is why I've moved away from Lemmy and now do my monthly donations to Piefed.
Thank you for your contributions, SatansMaggotyCumFart
Yup. I actually pulled my Lemmy donations when Nutomic started his begging campaign last year with his "come on guys my kids need to eat" sob story while still refusing to actually apologize for his transphobia and still defending Dessalines problematic... Everything.
Fucking dumpster fire. Piefed is the way
And they add new features at less than half the rate the piefed devs too. Too busy posting about how the Uyghur reeducation camps are ethical to write code, I guess.
And the quality of their code sucks. They're using Rust, which is the most memory safe programming language, yet a Lemmy server eats twice as much memory as a piefed server with twice the users.
My first account on my first day or so I said something on one of their threads, thinking they were just super politically correct leftists, and they jumped all over me. Followed me around for months, the entire time I was on that instance really, some made non tankie instance accounts just to troll me. Pathetic really, but I got sick of it, I can give better than they can but I don't want to get in pissing matches with trolls all the time.
They've actually never followed me out of their echo chambers I think because the light it bright and it hurts their eyes.
You see, I didn't know they were communists, so didn't see why they would be offended by my comment, so defended it, like 50 replies if not more to hundreds of comments from multiple users jumping on my shit, until one of the cool ones explained to me they were communists mostly living outside the US, so I started ignoring them. But one of their enforcer types demanded I apologize and I told him to eat a dick or something, so that didn't help.
They're not communists, they're Stalinists. Communism is a stateless, moneyless, classless society. They want the people's authoritarian regime to step on their necks with the people's boot.
Communism has been successfully practiced for 60,000 years, but every tankie state either collapses or goes capitalist.
As I called them when they insulted me, the long palsied arm of russian intelligence.
Lemmy is software. PieFed is software. And they have the same content. Okay, people hate the email comparison, but I'm gonna make one anyway :)
So: Google has programmed a web service that receives and sends so called emails for its users. And then another company, called Microsoft, has programmed another web service, that receives and sends those emails as well. "Email" is not a product of either Google or Microsoft. Email is not even software. Email is kind of... Nothing. It's just a protocol. Email as a concept is just the data that travels between various email servers. Email is nothing more than an agreed-upon standard that various web servers programmed by a lot of different teams are all able to interpret more or less in the same manner.
The word for that is protocol. Email is not a program programmed by either Google or Microsoft. Email is a protocol.
And the same goes with this thing called ActivityPub. PieFed is one server software, programmed by a certain Rimu.
And then Lemmy is another server software.
...written by a Marxist-Maoist person who likes supporting various genocides because authoritarianism is awesomeness or something.And then there's also MBin. And bunch of other similar server softwares. This conversation we are now having is being relayed to the world by a server in the address http://piefed.social/. It basically shouts out all the activity that takes place under this post to whatever server cares to listen. And then the other server can replicate the content.
The "shouting out all activity" is done using a protocol called ActivityPub.
So, here's this very conversation you are reading, seen from:
As you can see, each of the links points to a different server. But it's still the precisely same content.
When it comes to moderation: The admin on anarchist.nexus can only moderate stuff that is either:
If a user from lemmy.ml is being an ass on a community hosted on kbin.melroy.org, the admin of anarchist.nexus cannot really do much anything at all about them. However, they can completely severe the connection to either of those two servers. That is called defederation. For example, many servers have indeed defederated from lemmy.ml, because the admins of that server allow their users to behave like asses towards people living under occupations by authoritarian colonial empires. And either you basically give those people free reign, or you severe the connection to the offending server. Users of servers that have defederated lemmy.ml have a much better experience, because they miss most of the tankie content. And people who are not pro-authoritarianism don't really have any reason to stay on that server, so they tend to migrate to something that is okay with the concept of human rights.
For example piefed.social ~~has defederated from lemmy.ml~~ (EDIT: correction, no, it hasn't But it has defederated from two instances that are even worse). That means, you are very unlikely to see tankie shit in the comments of this post. Anything coming from communities hosted on piefed.social (such as this one is!) or from users on piefed.social is invisible for users of lemmy.ml. And the other way around.
It's a very interesting way to do moderation: You either moderate your server's users in a sensible way, or your server gets cut off by other servers.
Defederations are done on a per-server basis. That means, comment chains can look very different depending on where you're reading it from. Piefed.zip does federate with lemmy.ml, so a community running on piefed.zip is able to have comments from users of lemmy.ml. But a user of piefed.social will not see the comments made by users of lemmy.ml – nor any replies to them! That's why many people don't like to reply to users from lemmy.ml: A lot of people will be unable to see your reply! If you want to say something to a user on lemmy.ml, better write a top-level comment and tag them. Of course, any replies to their comment is invisible for a huge share of Fediverse readers.
A detail: Piefed.social has not defederated from lemmy.ml. It has defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear though.
I was against any sort of censorship of other groups, until I got a taste of those guys, not just .ml, the worst are hexbear in my experience. The thing is a lot of their users are actually cool, but there is like a hierarchy, it's not a collective so much as a top down operation, with enforcers or sorts. Their users need permission to accept a new theory on something.
But you can have some good conversations, until the enforcers notice you again.
You almost have to cut these guys off, there's a danger doing that to too many groups over disagreements and making echo chambers, but as others pointed out, not defederating has led new users to be chased off the site after being abused by those dickheads.
Mbin is the other big one. Also NodeBB has recently started federating with the Threadiverse too.
This is just piefed, not including Lemmy users.