this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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[–] manxu@piefed.social 49 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Please remember that for every hater, there are 100 enthusiastic supporters, and for every criticism, 100 people that use the platform quietly but avidly.

You've built something great. Something I love to use, like a great many people. And if we are quiet about our fondness for piefed, it's not because of lack of enthusiasm.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 27 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Thank you.

Of course most people don't want to get involved in a messy scene so they keep quiet. I should do that more often!

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago

It is not so easy to do when you are capable of so much.

[–] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago

so much drama from others, so much great work from you.

stay the course if you can.

i flip flop between Lemmy and Piefed :) and like both

[–] squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi 36 points 1 month ago

With all the drama lately, I had many moments where I thought this can't be good for your health. It isn't good for mine, that's why I didn't engage in the threads and focused on more positive things. Most of Threadiverse development and conversation is way more positive, but the drama can paint it in a different light if you're deep in it. PieFed has brought so much joy to so many of us and continues to do so. Thank you for all your work. I hope you can find some peace in all this.

[–] Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Props for trying a new approach, good luck!

That being said, I hope you continue to engage with the community at least on the development side.

The "leftists" (emphasis on the quotes) on Threadi are full of shit. They are mostly edgelords or demagogues who don't have any beliefs, it's an online roleplay/aesthetic thing for them.

I am not just talking about personal conflicts. I am from Ukraine and its ironic to see alleged leftists support the genocidal imperialist policies of an authoritarian plutocracy (this isn't limited to tankies, DB0 enables such narratives as well) using comical "but BATO expansion!!!" type arguements.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

continue to engage with the community at least on the development side.

Certainly, it's a FOSS project so I can't just vanish into an ivory tower :D

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 0 points 1 month ago

Ivory towers are expensive after all!

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Fortunately, SLRPNK and MULTIVERSE are around to debunk the db0 and Hexbear stuff. We're way more leftist.

[–] Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Solarpunk seems cool enough, I follow communities on their instance on some non-politicial topics.

Haven't really been exposed to Multiverse communities.

Good communities and content are always appreciated.

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh, we don't have any non political communities, we only have woke leftist communities. But if you like TRON, we have !armagetron@multiverse.soulism.net

[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 23 points 1 month ago

I think this is a good move.

A few months ago you and Piefed were widely, almost universally seen as helpful and neutral. I think your proposed change will move your and Piefed's reputation back toward that.

As always, make sure you are taking care of yourself first.

[–] inari@piefed.zip 19 points 1 month ago

Thanks for your service, and take care of yourself!

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Frankly, I've been low-key worried about this.

I was a user for almost 2yrs on Lemm.ee, and noticed first-hand how the founder and head admin Sunaurus gradually got dragged in to the muck by this stuff. It almost seemed like the more he strove to inject professionalism and structure in to the project, the more toxic users the project seemed to attract, and the more of an overall drain it became. Something like that, anyway. All this was also hard on the other supporting admins, and I believe they too got burned out over time, fading away. Well, I was sad and angry seeing how that went, and fairly devastated when the plug finally got pulled.

Me, I come from long experience modding (and a bit of admining) webforums, and have seen this kind of thing there, too. The showrunner really does need to build insulation and practice good, healthy web-habits to survive over time. Then again, it's undoubtedly trickier when one is also the dev of a custom project. Here's wishing you the best, mate. <3

Btw, it's coming up on a year that my project has been hosted here, and I'd like to make a Paypal donation representative of that time-frame. (I'll have to look in to a monthly donation at a later time, as I have some decisions to make, there) I've looked at the three donation services but am unsure which would be the simplest to use for a one-timer. Ko-fi, I'm guessing?

EDIT: there are currently 2 downvotes upon this message. That is so funny.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yep it was thinking about lemm.ee and dubvee that made me see the overall pattern. It seems obvious now.

Ko-fi is fine, thanks!

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 11 points 1 month ago

Done. 🙂

(could not have been easier, thanks)

[–] notabot@piefed.social 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

First off, thank you for creating an excellent system, it's been much appreciated. I've been one of those users with a feature request, and I was struck by both how fast and cheerfully you addressed it, but also by how much of a toll that level of responsiveness must have taken on you.

Well done for realising you need to step back a bit before it broke you completely, not all manage that. From experience, putting in proper channels for feature requests, issue reports, and even general communications, can make a huge difference to the stress of managing a big project, and give you a lot more control over how much you're dealing with, rather than trying to drink from the firehose that the internet can be. I hope it works for you, and you can go on enjoying working on it.

As you step back from the front line a bit, could you allow others to help in both dealing with public interactions and even the development? I've noticed that Piefed seems to be a one-man project, and that shows through in some places. Bringing in a few more people might help ease the load, bring new perspectives, and even avoid some of the more contentious issues that have come up.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Piefed seems to be a one-man project

There are a couple dedicated others who assist with 'help' and 'meta' stuff, and also have some involvement in the core project, possibly on the bug-testing side, I'm not sure. Snoopy, Skavau, ~~WBC~~ wjs018, travis-jeans I'm thinking?

But yeah, more helpers in the right places couldn't hurt!

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Over the past six months, rimu has ~4X more commits to the project than I do, and then it is a steep drop off from there (other than a ton of individual css fixes by travis-jeans). So, it is not entirely a one person show, but it mostly is. Part of that is that rimu is just really quick. We will talk over an idea, and then he will implement it faster than I can even make the git branch.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago

Gotcha; thanks for clarifying.

Pardon for butchering your handle, above. It's been fixed.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Although unpleasant for me personally this growth is a good problem for PieFed to have.

Take care. You've been doing a phenomenal job. Full stop. Guess your own wellbeing is first and foremost important to yourself... But I guess we all also like to see you prevail, not become burnt-out, so you can continue to deliver lots of nice features to us in the future. Bit selfish, I guess, but that's my perspective. And I tend to agree with your leadership decisions. It's probably never easy in large(r) groups of people. But I think you've lead the project into all sorts of right directions. And I'd love to see us continue that way. If we somehow can manage to pull it off. It's been the right way from early on.

(Plus: We can listen to haters and adapt... But we can never let the hate itself win.)

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Please take care of yourself first. Piefed isn't going anywhere, you could take a week or two away and delegate the sysadmin duties of Piefed.social to wjs.

You've done a great job building this whole software from the ground up. You definitely deserve a bit of time off.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Theres a LOT of people talking about "dark patterns" that dont read the code. Its frustrating.

I like what piefed does. I dont like the discourse and FUD over things that dont exist. Its a FREE service thats also open source...seriously.

I feel like people are used to complaining to multi-billion dollar agencies in order to get things working. Instead of opening up the code and diving in. And then fixing or forking the issue out.

I have another popular git project and there are people (the main creators of Laravel in this case) that think the library should not exist. But its still being downloaded in the millions. Once a project is big enough, theres always some supposive controversy just because it exists.

So in a way, congrats @rimu@piefed.social ! You made it!

[–] Hond@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Hello,

am silent piefed enjoyer and very happy. Idk and idc about any recent drama. Thank you for all your work!

[–] Beth@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago

Make an alt of course. And don’t engage with goofballs. It’ll save you a lot of grief.

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 5 points 1 month ago

Good luck, and stay in good health!

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Seems like a healthy and natural progression of someone who's built something that's become popular and needs to focus. Nice!

[–] runsmooth@kopitalk.net 5 points 1 month ago

Congratulations, Rimu! And to PieFed!

An amazing milestone. Kudos to the developers and the volunteers who made this all possible.

In a world experiencing such disruption and rising inflation, people reaching out to form community and share information have become more important than ever before. I hope to see these "third" spaces protected, and that these spaces prosper.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 1 month ago

Good move. An unfortunate reality when your project grows too big you gotta step back slightly and be a little ninja in hiding

[–] ex_06@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure if you are referring to some particular situations but I totally get the feeling

Maybe it's time to rework the issues pipeline.

No more chats, no more zulip, no more GitHub issues

A piefed community for feature requests and one for issues, with a bot chained to linear or similar and mods to help you without being devs or learning git etc

Single source of truth, on your own platform :o

P.S. and deep focus timeblocks or communication timeblocks

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Chats still have their value before getting to Codeberg.

Codeberg is nice to track the work.

They all have their use.

[–] ex_06@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

no one said to not use codeberg, i just said to deactivate issues there

unifying the place where people talk and report

some people prioritize the git forge for this and leave out the rest, but this basically says ''we don't want you'' to all non developers

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Deactivitating issues there would hide visibility on the work being done and planned.

This is the 1.7 roadmap: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/projects/37608

It helps to see what is being worked on.

but this basically says ‘’we don’t want you’’ to all non developers

Everyone is welcome to discuss things on !piefed_dev@piefed.social , the Zulip or Matrix groups.

[–] ex_06@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

Everyone is welcome to discuss things on !piefed_dev@piefed.social , the Zulip or Matrix groups.

yes, but we would go back to having more sources of truth that are heavier on the devs, even because of the repetitions and scattering of the same topics

why do you take single part of my message and answer to them like they are not part of the whole message blaze :(

first i said that single source of truth etc and then i pointed out that the single source has not to be dev oriented, don't answer to my second point with the issue of the first point

Deactivitating issues there would hide visibility on the work being done and planned

that is not true, there are a lot of kanbans and ticketing software that can be used; to be fair, i should have said deactivating the possibility to open and comment except by mantainers

and in the system i proposed, you could still join and comment issues and features on piefed anyway (if you are not one of the piefed people)

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Honestly if I was working as a dev in the project I think I would like a point where its just devs talking. When I mention stuff or whatnot I realize im peanut gallery. Its important to get input from the full community but at some point you should narrow down when it comes to actually deciding on what stuff to do. I do see wisdom in not having stuff to fractured though. I personally would like to see all greater community discussion be done in a community and Im not part of development but I think it would be good to limit that to one thing.

[–] Blaze@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago

I think it would be good to limit that to one thing.

There's definitely a different feeling between a public Piefed community, the Matrix/Zulip chats with a small group of enthusiasts, and then the Codeberg where people discuss specific technical topics on one issue.

Having the different feelings/vibes help to have different people finding which one they prefer.

[–] cinoreus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Even though I do disagree with you ideologically in some parts, yeah it's a good idea to not engage too much online, especially when getting the hate. It would only ruin your mental health.

Though I wish you read this, good pieces of software are ideologically neutral, mostly because there's little you can do once the code is public. You commented saying you don't want your platform to be misused by right wingers or something like that, that's a byproduct of free open source software, which honestly you don't have much control over because the code is public.

Your frustration with politics is valid tho, I ain't gonna say anything about that. I just feel you should detach your ideologies from the platform cause it's only going to hurt you.