this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025

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Lemmy.ca's Main Community

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We have launched a PieFed instance! (lemmy.ca)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca

59 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Would you like some pie? Check it out here: https://piefed.ca/

What is PieFed

PieFed follows a similar format as Lemmy and Mbin. Those that are familiar with Lemmy will find it very similar, with some additional features including topic lists, optional private voting, new mod and admin tools, crosspost de-duplication, community wikis, etc. Thanks to how the fediverse works, you can use either lemmy.ca or piefed.ca to interact freely!

We will put together some guides on our non-profit's website at some point. In the meantime, we have created !newtopiefed@piefed.ca for us to learn from each other. There is also the official !piefed_help@piefed.social community which has a similar purpose.

We have done some testing and we are learning as we go, but please bear with us while this new platform gets going 🙂

Other Links & FAQ

lemmy.ca is not migrating to PieFed. We will run both instances at the same time. You can use whichever one you prefer.
Learn about the differences between PieFed & Lemmy: https://join.piefed.social/features/
A tour of the community moderation features in PieFed: https://piefed.social/post/844065
One of the first mobile apps to implement support for PieFed, with more to come: https://interstellar.jwr.one/

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[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago

Awesome, is part of the motivation here to guard a bit against the unpopularity of the Lemmy devs / lemmy.ml?

I do somewhat feel like they've made people a bit more skeptical of the Lemmy name, PieFed might be an easier sell as a reddit alt.

[–] mintiefresh@lemmy.ca 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I'm not quite sure what this is and why I should use this over Lemmy .... but I'd like to give it a try lol! Also very cool how the Fediverse allows for different entry points and view the same content.

Congrats on the expansion!

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

We're also learning as we go :) In addition to the features mentioned in the post, a big one for regional instances like ours might be the topic lists (once we set those up anyway)

Congrats on the expansion!

Thanks!

[–] mintiefresh@piefed.ca 4 points 3 days ago

Whoa! This is really cool!

[–] otter@piefed.ca 51 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Hello from PieFed

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 13 points 5 days ago

Hola desde el mismo lugar de siempre. (Lemmy).

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 8 points 5 days ago

Hello ✌️ 😄

[–] RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It would be nice if they had ability to collapse comments.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The two diagonal arrows next to the vote arrows under a comment allows to collapse comments

[–] RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago

nice

[–] rimu@piefed.social 25 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Congratulations!

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 10 points 5 days ago

Thank you for your hard work :)

[–] BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 20 points 5 days ago

Stuff like this really helps reinforce why the fediverse is the best platform. Portability is no joke.

[–] faxed@lemmy.ca 26 points 5 days ago (1 children)

[–] Bo7a@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Mmmmmmmmmmm. Sugar Pie. My birthday treat!

[–] RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Pics and memes look better on pied. Oh boy how many accounts am I going to have now?

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

Happy cake day!

[–] psychadlligoat@piefed.social 9 points 4 days ago

Trying out PieFed after 2 years of Lemmy and it's looking more and more like Voyager has ended it's time on my phone

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m just happy we have another Canadian instance

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago

Well... It's the same management. It gives users another option for how to consume but it doesn't add a lot of diversity. No fault implied.

[–] CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Pie flavor. I'm stoked that Piefed has Atkinson Hyperlegible as a font choice! It's my favorite font, especially for ereaders.

[–] SethranKada@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 days ago

That's awesome!

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Excellent work folks!

The true power of federation showing itself here. In this case, it's two software packages with the same server/admin team -- which basically future proofs both.

I'd make a recommendation: have some sort of cross-pollination tool. Basically, pull the database of all subscribed communities on Lemmy.ca and have a bot subscribe to the same on PieFed, and vice versa. Probably easy to do if you have server-side access.

Furthermore, in the ideal world, "Local" from the Lemmy instance includes the piefed.ca local commuities. This might be a harder ask. The reason would be to prevent bisecting the Local feeds.

Finally, ideally there is a community migration tool, to cross between Lemmy and PieFed if a community wants to move from one side to the other. This would be a bigger project, but would future proof Fedican even further should either piece of software become badly maintained.

Well, okay, I just created a year's worth of work for a programmer. How can I help?

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I’d make a recommendation: have some sort of cross-pollination tool. Basically, pull the database of all subscribed communities on Lemmy.ca and have a bot subscribe to the same on PieFed, and vice versa. Probably easy to do if you have server-side access.

This is actually somewhat built into PieFed. Users can import from a lemmy account, and admins can do a bulk community import of the local communities on a particular instance (filtering by number of posts and users in the past week in those communities). However, it's buggy. Eventually it would be nice to have tools to synchronize administration between the instances so that we don't need to repeat actions on both instances.

Furthermore, in the ideal world, “Local” from the Lemmy instance includes the piefed.ca local commuities. This might be a harder ask. The reason would be to prevent bisecting the Local feeds.

Agreed :) PieFed does have a 'popular' feed, so another solution would be to have a default feed that we have more control over (ex. picking specific instances or communities). As long as the exact breakdown is communicated to the user, perhaps as a 'learn more' button in the existing "Create an account to tailor this feed to your interests.", I don't think people will mind the admins customizing it to fit the instance. We've discussed in the past whether it is better to have the default logged out view be 'local' or 'popular', and this might help with that problem too.

Finally, ideally there is a community migration tool, to cross between Lemmy and PieFed if a community wants to move from one side to the other

This actually exists for the Lemmy -> PieFed direction! @blaze posted some information about it here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/16976004

It could be better, since right now while the PieFed instance does get a copy of all the posts, the Lemmy instance doesn't know about it. Hopefully the various platforms can coordinate some common solution.

Also happy cake day! 🥳

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

Whoa! Cakeday on Lemmy! Thanks!

Also, great notes! :D

[–] Nils@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I noticed that the option "local" is pretty much empty on piefed.ca I wonder if we create the same communities there and group them together would work.

Here is their repo, https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues I imagine you can propose some of those ideas there.

I think one of the problems on migrating users right now is how lemmy stores password compared to piefed. https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/712 - But technically, it should work if you ask the user to write a new password.

[–] Sunshine@piefed.ca 10 points 5 days ago

Hello from the other side!

[–] viking@infosec.pub 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Is the API active? I want to use PieFed over Lemmy, but don't like to join so called "flagship instances", they always go overboard with moderation at some point.

So instead of joining piefed.social I signed up with .au, only to find out that the admin never bothered to activate the api, so can't use any apps, and posts aren't federating outwards properly.

Edit: Confirmed working, registration sent.

Edit 2: Approved within 5 min, thanks for that!

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yep the API is on as of earlier today. It's not listed in the docs yet, which is probably why the au instance doesn't have it on.

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Is the API similar to that of Lemmy's?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

Very similar. I expect app devs will have an easy time of it.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The API is new I believe, piefed.social enabled it recently as well

https://piefed.social/post/817564

Welcome to piefed.ca :)

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[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 5 days ago

Oh great!

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Nice. Already registered.

~~Is there a recommended android app for it?~~

I just saw the FAQ section after.

[–] CreatingMachines@fedia.io 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Oh, Piefed has the ability to see threading and micro-blogging posts?

[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You might be thinking of Mbin, the other one of the "big three" (more like big one and the other two). Mbin's biggest differentiating feature is microblog support. It's hard to boil PieFed down to one main feature compared to Lemmy/Mbin, but anonymous voting and de-duplication of reposts might be the main ones. However, its focus is still on the (Lemmy-style) threaded side of the fediverse.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Example showing comments across reposts in 6 different communities.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Out of curiosity, can a community opt out of its comments being bundled with others?

After seeing it in action, I think that's actually a nifty feature that most communities and the threadiverse as a whole would benefit from, but I could also potentially foresee a minority of communities not wanting to increase their comments exposure to that degree.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thinking a bit bigger - I'd like to see a 'private community' feature which limits the visibility of posts inside to community members only. With an optional approval process to join.

That would take care of the comment bundling issue too.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I think there would still be a desire for the relative in-between setting of just opting out of the bundling. My reasoning is that a community may want to be open to be viewed and commented by anyone so that they continue to grow and have more participation, either by search or random encounter from the /all view, as that allows slow organic growth with relatively few people wanting to go in there and derail conversations.

With bundling, that community will be seen by far more non-members than ever before if a popular link is posted around to multiple communities, inviting a significant amount of outside participation, and the potential for a much increased need to keep things on topic, or to step in and moderate drama from other communities with wildly different perspectives.

Without the ability to opt out of bundling, this leaves only the two extremes of potentially unwanted isolation, or potentially unwanted increased outside participation.

The only other option would be for a community to request their admin defederate from the troublesome community, or from the outside instance entirely, which is using a mallet to solve something that could be done with scalpel.

I do think the bundling is quite nice overall, and I don't foresee a problem with it being the default, but I do strongly see the need for that middle ground option to opt-out, personally. The way Lemmy currently operates by default is effectively that middle-ground option that is missing from Piefed.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

the two extremes of potentially unwanted isolation, or potentially unwanted increased outside participation.

Yes that's a good way to put it. Thanks.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago

Cheers for hearing me out! :)

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Honestly, I think it's one of the most undercutting, least thought out features in piefed, that focuses entirely on the immediaye convenience of the end user over the health of the discussion groups and servers that make up the network.

It's the eating a tub of icing for supper of social media features.

[–] MBM@lemmings.world 4 points 5 days ago

Along those lines: it also only shows the sidebar of the first community

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[–] Nerrad@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Does PieFed have an api yet that lets it work with Lemmy apps?

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 days ago

There is an API but it is slightly different from Lemmy, and it's very new, which is why the app list is small. Right now that includes !interstellar@kbin.earth and using the website as a PWA. As more people use it, more apps should implement support.

The PieFed dev docs say that the API is 95% similar, so hopefully it should be easy enough for app developers to implement

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