Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world gAlienLifeform @lemmy.world 1mo ago

Questions about PieFed

I've seen people bring this up as another federated aggregator just recently, and I have a few questions,

What advantages/disadvantages does it have over Lemmy? I'm more interested in user experience stuff (I have PTSD from moderating a community on reddit years ago and way too little free time to be an admin), but the technical stuff is interesting (even if I only like 40% understand it).
Can I see and interact with PieFed instances and communities from a federated Lemmy instance? What about the other way around?
Is there a way for people to migrate an account from Lemmy to PieFed? What about the other way around?
What android app options are available for PieFed? Sorry, "the website is the app" is not how I like to do it
Any other questions you think I should be asking?

33 comments

What advantages/disadvantages does it have over Lemmy?

It has more features, such as flairs, a way to move communities somewhere else, the ability to see comments from all crossposts, multi-communities, and it has a much faster development pace. The UX still needs some work, but that can be improved over time.

From a technical perspective it's made with Python which is much, much easier to use than Rust and attracts more contributors. From what I understand it's easier to host too.

Can I see and interact with PieFed instances and communities from a federated Lemmy instance? What about the other way around?

Yes and yes.

Is there a way for people to migrate an account from Lemmy to PieFed? What about the other way around?

You can export your Lemmy account settings and import them to Piefed, but not the other way around.

What android app options are available for PieFed?

https://interstellar.jwr.one/
- with Python which is much, much easier to use than Rust and attracts more contributors. From what I understand it's easier to host too.
  
  I can't imagine it's much easier than Lemmy. As far as self hosting goes Lemmy is pretty standard. And with PieFed being python it's bound to be less efficient at the same scale.
  
  Surprisingly, from what I read, it's much, much more efficient
- I should check this out, now that lemm.ee is going out.
- You can export your Lemmy account settings and import them to Piefed, but not the other way around
  
  Does account settings include a user's subscribed communities?
  
  Yes.
- Hello, hope you do not mind additional questions.
  
  If I block an instance on PieFed, do their votes count?
  
  Not sure unfortunately.
Found this through a Google search: Piefed has a few nice features that Lemmy and Mbin lack:

instance blocking

comments combination, posts only appear once

keyword filter

topics (admin-managed feeds)

user-managed feeds, public and private

tags

flairs

multi communities

Yes & yes. They're built on ActivityPub and interact with each other, though the things that PieFed offers that Lemmy doesn't (like tags) aren't visible from Lemmy. And Lemmy can subscribe and interact with posts from PieFed.

Yes. There is a way to export all your details through the Lemmy settings and import through PieFed settings, and vice versa.

App support is sparse at the moment, but the Interstellar app (https://interstellar.jwr.one/) for Android works with PieFed.

Can't think of anything.
- Lemmy does have instance blocking.
  
  Piefed instance blocking blocks users comments as well
  
  Lemmy instance blocking only hides communities, not users
- Would you know if there's a way to export from Mbin to Piefed?
  
  I find it kinda funny how Piefed seems to have blew up over mbin lol
  
  I don't think we support mbin export/import ATM, but I've not tried
  
  I added Lemmy export and import to piefed a while back.
  
  I have a note to go work on the piefed export to Lemmy import on my List. It worked a while ago but seems unhappy at the moment. I'll add mbin export to the List as well.
It's much better at federation than Lemmy.

But the coolest thing is that it does not need to be a competition. Both platforms can do good in the federation.

But if you want to give it a try Piefed.social
- But the coolest thing is that it does not need to be a competition. Both platforms can do good in the federation.
  
  100% agreed, I'd even go further and say that having a diversity of systems makes for a more resilient ActivityPub ecosystem. It's not only non-competitive, it's inherently cooperative.
  
  The fact that PieFed and Lemmy work interchangeably with each other is wonderful, and that plus the fact that I'm lazy means I'm probably going to keep primarily going through lemmy.world for now, but I'm definitely going to keep thinking about it and checking up on it.
- It's much better at federation than Lemmy.
  
  Do you have an example or source for what this means? Like is it faster/more efficient to propagate things, more featureful in what it federates, etc.?
  
  Peertube channels seem to have real issues on Lemmy. They fixed the links earlier in the year...then it broke again. That's just one instance.
  
  Piefed works out of the box and if you upvote, it shows up on the peertube instance. Comments as well. Take a look at !peertube@lemmy.world on both lemmy.world and piefed.social. you can see the difference when clicking on someone's account.
I want to know about the people behind it. Is it some backyard developers or is it a company?
- Backyard in your terms. Rimu is the main dev, lots more of us helping.
  
  It's not a company.
  
  He's an awesome person.
  
  That's good to hear.
It is more opinionated than Lemmy. Comments with -10 score are automatically collapsed, users with low karma have icon next to their name, 4Chan screenshots are automatically reported.
- The comment collapsing I think is fine; Lemmy-style forums already heavily rely on voting to move content around, and I think net -10 is a pretty good indicator that the comment in question has bad info, is a troll, or is otherwise not good content (as voted by the local community).
  
  The low karma icon I'm seeing out in the wild and honestly, so far every time I see someone with that icon I look at that profile and sure enough there really are a lot of downvoted comments and antagonistic behavior. It's probably handy to determine whether someone is sealioning, trolling, or just otherwise has a lot of bad takes (again, as voted by their local community) before deciding whether to waste energy trying to engage in a thoughtful conversation.
  
  4chan screenshots being reported is pretty opinionated (the rationale being that it's not about the content itself, it's about the normalization of 4chan and the enablement of the alt-right pipeline it provides), but hopefully it's at least optional?
- No greentext stories?
According to the dev and some people, the frontend is more performant than Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin due to the smaller data sizes. I read that it was because the dev came from some african (?) city where they only had like what, 2G internet connections? As for the disadvantages, I can't say I find it great that it is written in Python. I don't like interpreted languages in production. That's all. Comparing the performance of it and the backend of Lemmy wouldn't be fair, since Lemmy's backend is written in Rust (compiled).

Yes. Though not all features are federated (yet), for example flairs.

Unless platforms start implementing the DID standard, this will be hacky to accomplish without weird artifacts. One other way is to do it how Mastodon does it, but that does not bring your content with it.

Afaik only Interstellar supports it atm.

No.

I don't see myself switching to it anytime soon.
Is it possible to follow accounts on Piefed?
- Yes. You can follow a user and get notifications when they post something.
  
  You can follow a user, a community, an individual post, a comment, a topic (collection of communities), and a feed (user made collections of communities).
  
  Then you get notifications for posts/replies as relevant.
  
  Thank you
- Yep!

33 comments