Lemmy.
The PieFed dev has some pretty extreme views and goes out of his way to censor and limit what users can do.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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The Piefed devs are gigalibs who hard-code in their politics, blocking left-wing instances in the server software itself rather than letting instance admins configure that sort of stuff. Even if you agree with their politics, consider if you want to be using software that actively forbids users from interacting with conflicting politics even if the user wants to. If you agree with the principles of free software, then that doesn't seem to respect user freedom to me.
PieFed has some sensible defaults but all blocks can be changed by the server admin. They're not hard-coded.
I prefer Lemmy because unlike Piefed there are no hardcoded instance or user blocks. Although, you do have to find a lemmy instance that isn't defederated. I like being able to see a multitude of opinions and manually block people/communities that I feel don't contribute to discussion.
PieFed has no hardcoded instance or user blocks. You were lied to by bad people.
I was just repeating what I've heard elsewhere. It does appear that the included blocklists can be edited. I have mixed feelings about labeling certain websites.
Fair enough.
How websites are labelled is up to the instance admin. It used to be that all labels were warnings but in the latest version of PieFed it became possible to use neutral or positive icons as well:
It still says 'warning type' and 'warning on posts' in the UI which is an oversight I've just noticed!
This change was a result of criticism I read. Often when people write that stuff they think they have discovered some nefarious thing that exists that way because I want it to. The fact is it was all thrown together very quickly so it's not always well thought-out but when people don't like things I listen and make changes. Nothing is set in stone.
I appreciate you clarifying. I didn't realize you were the developer. You reminded me the importance of verifying information before posting about it.
I started on Lemmy world and I was happy there for a while. It was my first Fediverse instance and account. Then I noticed all the 🏴☠️ comms were blocked, so I switched to PieFed and I’ve been pretty happy ever since.
Both have pros and cons. I’m not a fan of the admins of Lemmy with ml and I don’t agree with everything Rimu does with Piefed. I use Blorp on my iPhone for both formats. Overall though, I’ve had a better experience on PieFed than Lemmy, even if it’s mostly because I get to see pirate content again.
Piefed is ideologically driven by the creator, and encourages pre-emptive banning and blocking users who don’t just participate in echo chamber behaviour.
Lemmys devs might be ideologically captured too, but their software isn’t, so it’s the better option.
Quite interesting discussions. I like the fact that @rimu@piefed.social gets involved to explain things.
Even if I don’t personally agree with all of the ideology behind the lemmy devs, at least they are ideologically posed to keep the thing open, for the people, by the people. I respect that. A lot, in fact.
Piefed, on the surface, seems a lot less principled, and seems to also attract the non-leftist types by default, perhaps as some kneejerk reaction to the lemmy devs’ ideology. As a rule of thumb that sounds just outright worse to me, as a user, even if it seems not to impact much yet.
This is just me, as a political and ideological layperson, following my fragile principles. I might be betting wrong in doing so, but then again, might be right too. Either way, they work much the same and talk the same protocol, so it seems to me it’s just a choice of principle.
Either will work. Just thought I’d share my two cents.
ideologically posed to keep the thing open, for the people, by the people
What. Check out the modlog, they ban more people than anyone.
The software is open and has zero political or ideological leaning is what that person and I mean.
Yours, on the other hand, is not. I’m sure I’m tagged by default on Piefed already as “low quality” or something of the sort, purely because people downvote me because I’m not in the echo chamber of allowed opinions. Over the last few days I’ve had like 300 downvotes to about 15 upvotes just on about 3 comments in the one topic, where my comments are 100% factually, undeniably, demonstrably, correct - but people don’t like it because they think it’s “pro Apple”, and the echo chamber says they have to hate Apple.
That would make Piefed put a giant target on my head, wouldn’t it? Basically telling everyone “block this guy and ban him from your communities”. Lemmy doesn’t do that.
You also have a curated-by-you list of banned sources, which includes basically everything anyone left of centre would call “right wing”. Lemmy doesn’t.
Of the 12,730 accounts that were active in the last week, there are 60 with the so-called "low quality" indicator, or 0.4%.
And this is in an environment where people cast 32 times more upvotes than downvotes so to earn that badge you need to be super super completely absolutely unpopular. Consistently.
You're part of a pretty special group.
Maybe try being less of an asshole? See how that goes for you.
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Lemmy
Technically: less often updated, may have less of the shiny features. Some see it as positive: Lemmy stays out of the user's way.
Ideologically: devs are far-left, but the project itself is neutral. Wherever you find yourself politically, you'll find a place.
Main dev: @Nutomic@lemmy.ml
Overall: Lemmy is a good option if you want to see the "raw" Threadiverse. Less bells and whistles, no content or moderational filters pushed on the user aside from what instance admins and users themselves decide.
PieFed
Technically: fast-paced development, "move fast and break stuff", highly experimental, but feature-rich.
Ideologically: American liberal/moderate, enforced. All PieFed instances filter out "radical" left- or right-wing content (see no-qanon PieFed list), all user filters come on top of this list instead of replacing it. It also suffers from the backlash on some of the decisions made, such as vote throttling.
Main dev: @Rimu@piefed.social
Overall: PieFed is a shiny and new, fast-paced, but also opinionated and controversial project. Whether it's going to be a "peace of mind" or "power tripping dev hellscape" software is only for you to experience.
Potential compromise: PyLova
PyLova is a fork of PieFed designed specifically to cut out opinionated pieces while keeping the technology.
However, it's only currently present on quokk.au, which is itself opinionated (anarchist, far left).
I don’t get the opinionated part; aren’t we all? Yes, some project theirs more onto others than the rest. Personally, I see myself as humanly common-sense moderate. I used to be a political hot-head, which meant I cheered certain people I wouldn’t touch with a pole these days. I tend to avoid stupid people and situations as I mature.
It is one thing to hold an opinion; it is another to limit which opinions others can see.
Lemmy devs hold a very radical and strong opinion, but they don't enforce it on anybody else. You can have any instances posting whatever. This fosters a healthy and open discussion and political development.
PieFed dev enforces certain optics by limiting the sources viewable through it, and some of the choices raises eyebrows in a major way. For example, did you know PieFed bans WikiLeaks? No matter the political stance, you'd rather be able to cite that. This open censorship limits political discussion and serves to reinforce Rimu's political line instead of going for an honest intellectual exchange.
We have plenty of spaces trying to shape people's opinion. Fediverse is the direct response to this threat among many. Why would we want to turn Threadiverse into this again?
Again, with that said, I tried to give a more neutral outline. Objectively, Lemmy the software is politically neutral, while PieFed is not. If you share the values baked into PieFed, you may end up enjoying this experience. But overall, this is often seen as problematic around these parts.
Just as an FYI: Lemmy has a big update in the pipeline for the front and backend in the pipeline. You can see it on https://voyager.lemmy.ml/. I think this might bring some nice improvements.
So technical aspects might soom-ish change.
lemmy is lighter on resources if you care about your internet usage footprint. and far more stable overall.
Cons of each:
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Piefed is a lot newer and is therefor in some areas still under construction.
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Lemmy is maintained by people who also run the ML instance promote Russia's invasion of Ukraine, promote North Korea, promote Donald Trump, etc. The have postulated that Trans people are a "liberal psyop" and they think the word liberal is synonymous with right-wing fascism. The periodically add a banner to every instance running lemmy begging for money to fund their extremist activities. LINK TO MEGATHREAD
Oof... They're even more problematic than I realised, then.
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Being able to follow individual users, in addition to communities, is enough to tip the scales for me in favor of piefed. There's a lot of content on the fediverse that is inaccessible from the threadiverse, and getting pixelfed photographers and mastodon meme accounts in my feed has been a huge improvement for me.
That's a recent feature though, isn't it? If it's so important to you, why didn't you join Mbin instead which has had it for ages?
what UI do you use as a that lets you add pixelfed and mastdon to your feed? I am on Voyager but it doesn't fully support piefed and I don't see anyway of adding non lemmy fediverse places to it.
I use the pwa. The interface for following users is still pretty clunky — you have to browse the instance on the instances page, and you only see accounts who have interacted with your instance previously. I went to pixelfed.social and gram.social and followed just some random accounts and it has turned out way better than I expected. My favorite is an account that posts photos from a gameboy camera, @harryfk@pixelfed.social
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I found Piefed to have some minor refinements to Lemmy, enough so that I moved to it for everyday browsing. Probably the most important for me is the combining of multi-community duplicate posts. The way I browse(All/New) will often result in seeing the identical post crossposted to 5-10 other communities. In Lemmy, it results in endless scrolling of duplicate content, especially if more than one person happens to be doing it at a certain time. In Piefed, when it works correctly, I'll see only one example of the post and it will offer a dropdown if I'd rather see it from another community. Things like that really help soften the rough edges of the fediverse.
I've also heard that it's more quickly developed than Lemmy but I have no firsthand knowledge of that.
At the end of the day, you can see the exact same feed regardless of which your using so just pick the one that makes your time on the fediverse more pleasant.
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Piefed has (had?) some weird opinionated behaviours that to me make it seem worth avoiding https://lemmy.ml/comment/23662293
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If I'd already had a Lemmy account I'd probably have just stuck with that but yeah Piefed has more features. The combined comments from cross posts are really nice.
Personally like Lemmy. Both the Lemmy devs and the Piefed dev have their faults, but its been a while since I can remember that controversy crossing the barrier into the source code on the Lemmy side. Its been fairly recent for Piefed with upvote limiting, and PJ leaving over it
What are the available options for piefed clients on Android?
I'm using PieFed at the moment, although its more a matter of avoiding the Lemmy devs' hate and support of violence.
PieFed is definitely developing faster, and has a host of features Lemmy doesn't as a result. PieFed has following users, de-duplication of posts, fairs, among other stuff, which Lemmy still lacks. That said, the PieFed dev has some very weird opinions on social media design, so for every new feature, there's an anti-feature. For example, I love the extra moderation tools, but the voting quota limits the ability for more dedicated users to contribute. Its mostly a dislike of internet culture and those who spend a lot of time online, so PieFed tends to discourage things like memes. All-in-all, I'd say PieFed is better, but if you care about the specific downsides, you can easily disagree.
The vote quota can be set to whatever the instance admin desires. Just like any other terms of service, it's up to the admin what they give away for free and under what conditions.
afaik only piefed.zip and multiverse.soulism.net have chosen to increase it, though.
It can be disabled, but IMO, choosing to leave its default so low is pretty hostile towards your most dedicated users. I know you don't agree, but as seen by the pushback you received, many dedicated users in the fediverse’s already small userbase were against that design decision. I'm not trying to attack you, and I'd still rather use PieFed than Lemmy, but a user looking to set up shop somewhere will want to know about design philosophies like that, whether it affects them immediately, or is just something they may be concerned about in the future.
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I have an account on both, both servers run by the same guy.
They're both functionally equivalent. One doesn't surface data significantly better than the other. For a webpage, Piefed moves a little faster on an average release. I prefer the user acct in the upper right with drop down rather than center top page with a dropdown.
I prefer seeing up and down votes upfront on my posts.
I like lemmy's interface a bit better. I like the speed and cleanliness of piefed.
no wrong answers.
The head developer(s) of Lemmy are hardcore Marxist/Maoist/Leninist. The "ml" in Lemmy.ml means "Marxist/Leninist". They openly ask for donations so they can quit their jobs, develop Lemmy full-time, and use Lemmy to spread their beliefs.
PieFed was created specifically so people could contribute to the Fediverse without contributing to the advancement of Marxist/Leninist ideologies.
It's actually a fun coincidence, the Mali TLD used to be free, so they picked it, but it's not free anymore
On the other hand, Piefed also has a bit of a weird social credit system that I'm not a fan of.
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