Ask Lemmy

I see a lot of piefed posts on Lemmy - are we not federated across so that we're getting the milk without needing to buy the cow?

Why vs when we can just interop?

We are not like traditional websites. When one community does well, we can all do well.

Piefed users comment and post to lemmy and via versa.

Piefed and Lemmy are act-pub/fediverse software systems, same with Mastodon and many others. Since Lemmy and Piefed are so similar in their structure though as link aggregators that people vote and comment on you could think of them as the same network with different clients.

I switched from Lemmy to Piefed somewhere around piefed's 1.15 version as I recall. On a technical front Piefed is a solid margin ahead in admin and usability features, at least as of when I switched. I haven't noticed a major performance difference, but mine is a single user instance so that might be better shown at a larger scale. Lemmy was a bit easier to deploy initially since there wasn't a need to have anything compile locally but rather just pull an image and go.

Ethically, I'm less concerned using Piefed than Lemmy. The devs of Lemmy are notoriously vocal in their support of Russia/China/Korea, and basically anything that could be considered in opposition of western liberal/progressive policies. This is troublesome since there is the potential for updates being made that help create even more aggressively divisive bubbles than we already have in many parts of the fedi. Those could be applied to any software of course, but the Lemmy devs make their stances quite visible in that regard.

I thought PieFed and Lemmy were one and the same.

I am not savvy on how this place is structured.

I have no idea. I'm a vanilla, semi-norm who came from Reddit, mainly because they banned me after 15 years of active and mostly chill engagement.

I'm basically just a slightly opinionated guy who's interested in what other people have to say on a variety of subjects.

I'm only dimly aware of PieFeed. I like lemmy as it feels like early Reddit and I access it through the boost app on Android, which was the peak Reddit experience before they locked down the APIs.

I've no interest in spreading myself over multiple platforms - I just want access to other humans via the path of least resistance.

With this in mind, is PieFace better? And if so, in what way?

I switched to piefed to help it grow, although for me the lemmy experience is still superior, due to the difference in clients available for Android.

On Android, the Voyager Lemmy client is better than the Blorp Piefed client.

Since the blorp Dev reads these comments (thanks for making us free software!), here's my list of features to bring blorp up to parity, from most to least important:

1. Choose what type of link to share by default: community link, poster's link, my instance link, or blorp link, or other.... Currently when I want to share something, I have to open it on Voyager to get a link.
2. Ability to select text in comments. Voyager has this in the context menu.
3. Ability to hide read posts. Blorp has this setting but it doesn't work. When I open piefed I see old posts, but on Voyager I see fresh stuff.
4. Ability to download .webp images. Downloads fail, but I can "share" the file to a file manager and save it that way.
5. Put the profile button on the bottom stripe so it is easier to reach.

Piefed Game Changer number 1: Custom feeds, ex:

• https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
• https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent

that way I can look at non-tech non-politics stuff (either few memes or all memes) when I want.

Piefed Game Changer number 2: Scheduled posts. That way when I got free time I can make a bunch of posts and schedule them over the next couple days or weeks.

I still keep a Lemmy account bc a couple things are still easier there. Plus to see what the posts look like to other people.

Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:

• a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
• the ability to combine comments from multiple communities under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
• the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.

On the sysadmin side of things, it'd bring some nice advantages regarding network resource usage and page loading speed, and benefits from using tried and tested industry standard frameworks (I.e, Flask), instead of bespoke solutions.

I don't really understand the difference between the two. Don't they essentially do the same thing, connect to the same communities, etc? (Apart from some minor details)

I picked Mbin

I used Lemmy for a few years, but switched to PieFed recently. They offer very similar functionality. PieFed suits me slightly better. I would be happy with either. And I'm still using Voyager.

I was using Lemmy, I now use Piefed and I quite satisfied (it's not perfect, sure, neither am I ;).

Can't recall why I switched but I know there was some technical reason.

To me, they're just two ways (among a few more) of accessing the same fediverse. I use the Web UI, on a desktop computer as I don't do social media on my phone.

I'm on Lemmy (db0) because, at the time, I thought PieFed was just another instance, and I chose the instance I liked best without much thought behind what software it ran.

db0 has talked about spinning up a PieFed instance, but I would have to join it and I'd have two accounts. I'm not sure I want to manage two accounts. AFAIK they are not talking about converting to PieFed (if such a thing is possible).

On the tech side, the two mostly federate with one another. I (maybe mistakenly) called out a PieFed user for not posting a link. They thought they did. And they did — it was visible on PieFed, but it was not visible to Lemmy. So they apologised and posted the link in the body of their text, and I apologised for not understanding how things worked. So that is an issue Lemmy (the people who make the software) would have to address, and then db0 would have to update the code on their server (I believe).

So I think as long as they continue to federate to one another, it's fine to just use what you want. If one starts to pull ahead and the other is not catching up, it might be wise to switch, especially if there is a way to pull all your subscriptions, blocks, and managed communities from one to the other.

I have no idea about the ethics of using either.

I’ve been testing both for some time and the differences are pretty minor. What I really like about PieFed comes down to two things: how it groups cross-posts and their comments (on the web version), and the moderation tools. The downside is that there are a lot fewer mobile apps that support it.

Cross-posting is an amazing feature that’s still massively underused.

IMO they're both good and deserve our weight, I do think they can work off each other.

I use Lemmy because their mobile app support is much better and Jerboa (the Lemmy maintainers' app) has everything I need and not a single bit more. I think it would be great for Piefed to get more app support.

There are a lot of features that I think Lemmy can benefit from emulating from Piefed, like the option to show comments from crossposted threads, filters, and more granular moderation capability. I heard Piefed is a lot lighter on resources, so if I were to self-host I might use that one. Also I have no idea how many of Lemmy's shortcomings are due to be addressed in their planned 1.0 release.

Lemmy development is slow whereas Piefed is a bit faster, I think each is great in their own right. Not everyone agrees with me here, but I think the Lemmy developers do a good job keeping their personal beliefs to their own instance, rather than let it infiltrate the code base. Same with Piefed. I think the development of both should be encouraged rather than trying to find rifts and making it a team sport.

PieFed, which i used first, is harder to navigate. It seems to have blocked a lot of content from other instances and i'm not sure why

I like piefed.

I dont have a client, just the web ui in my phones browser is fine.

It honestly just feels exactly like lemmy to me, but I prefer not to support lemmy for ideological reasons.

Lemmy is established, having existed very long before. But also they work together. So unless you have some major issue there's no real reason to up and switch.

Having two softwares actually contributes to the decentralizing of the fediverse IMO, as long as we don't devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users....

Piefed has some critical features like, non-nsfw blur, flairs, ability to disable notifications from relies on posts and more information is exposed to admins.