this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Recently we've seen a spike in PieFed users, a lot of this came form raising awareness of PieFed's existence on Reddit.

Here's some info you'd need if you want to help raise awareness of PieFed on reddit.

Reddit uses AI to make a summary of a users behavior that it shows to mods, and will flag people who seem spammy eg.
image

Steps to make a successful reddit post:

  1. Don’t have a sus account
  2. Make it a image post with a nice catching image (Most important)
  3. Don’t include any links away from reddit in the post, don’t even add it to the comments (have others do that)

Sucesfull posts examples:

  1. https://piefed.social/c/fedibridge/p/1711535/post-with-5k-views-in-1h-promoting-the-fediverse
  2. https://piefed.social/c/fedibridge/p/1727090/post-promoting-the-fedrivers-on-r-degoogle-on-globalswitchday
  3. https://piefed.social/c/fedigrow/p/1720677/post-mentioning-piefed-ca-in-r-buycanadian

These 3 posts got ~500,000 views between them

  • Don't go and spam reddit with low effort content. It can do more harm than good.
  • Don't post to the same sub more than once a month
  • Don't post links in the comments of your own post unless it's already gone viral, instead let others post links or let people figure it out for themselves.

I've tried to promote Lemmy in the past, but Immediately I get comments of people complaining about the UI, UX and tankies which kills all momentum. I've had much better success with PieFed so sticking to that going forward.

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[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It's a hyperbole. It's not unethical. But many people don't like it/hate it.

  1. An image is just more expensive than text. Text is usually ~1 byte per character. An uncompressed image is ~3bytes per pixel. Of course, most images are compressed, and compression does a lot of heavy lifting. But still. Also, you don't need to uncompress plain text. More amount of bytes means more storage expense, more network expense, and worse user experience due to latency.
  2. We have plenty of tools that work for text. You can copy-paste it. You can easily edit it with just a keyboard. It is easily configurable via fonts and font sizes.
  3. Accessibility: text can be read by screen readers. Images (without alt text) cannot. Maybe there are some fancy screen readers that OCR images, but then it's the case of point 1.
  4. Text is easily indexable. Which means that it's searchable. If the reddit search tool were any good, it could find the post. Not for images. Alternatively, 3rd party search tools such as google and DDG work.

There's probably many more points.

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The post will get ZERO traction if it's not a image post, I've tried.

Did you read what my post was about?

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not saying that you shouldn't do what you do. You just asked why someone would be against doing an image post when it could be a text post and I answered.

What you are doing cannot be done with text posts because of reason 2 and 3.

Text posts simply don't get the same message across though, which is why they aren't as effective.

You can communicate a LOT more info in a short time-span with a image.

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Also, you don’t need to uncompress plain text.

Content-Encoding: gzip would like a word. :P

Agreed on all points other than that nitpick

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

To be clear, Ek is talking about posting image posts on Reddit who allow video uploads. I don't think this is a problem there. Moreover, the infographics are more successful at getting attention than just plain-text comment-posts. It is what it is.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

Just cringe for us oldheads