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What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I'm blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.

Whats the catch? Why aren't we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?

App support is one thing I can think of.

150 comments
  • Do we have to recommand it? Do to the nature of the threadiverse, Lemmy content is available on PieFed and PieFed content is available on Lemmy. It is mostly a matter of chosing an instance. We could surely add an PieFed recommendation to our go to threadiverse instance but is there instance culture there yet?

    Shouldn't we recommand it first to active user, the ones that create and animate communities, the ones that would create new feeds making those instances more alive?

  • I think it's good that PieFed is so small, that means they can move faster and innovate more without fearing that things will break for thousands of people. I think it's good that a project like PieFed can try things and see what works and sticks and this is then a good indicator for projects like Lemmy to copy what is good and leave out what is not good.

  • We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it's not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question. Currently it seems it's got a bit under 1000 users across under 10 servers.

    There are now sizeable communities run on Lemmy instances that are reinforced by network effects. There needs to be a significant reason for them to migrate. To that point, the collective project is building communities away from corporate power, not software. The software is a tool to facilitate that. Lemmy has worked well so far in this regard. If someone can show that Piefed can work better and not cost significantly more, it'll probably get adopted for new communities. If the difference is drastic, we may even see migrations from Lemmy.

  • My biggest issue with Piefed is how much space the UI uses. Last I checked it didn't have a "compact mode" like current Lemmy or Alexandrite. Browsing communities is also a bit awkward since it shows you so many topics without a way to sort or remove them.

  • Why aren't we suggesting Mbin over Lemmy, actually? Because it seems like it has the same options. And Mbin even has an app (not just the PWA function)!

    • There's quite a few nice apps for Lemmy. I'm using Connect for Lemmy on android and it's wonderful.

      • Oh, I'm aware that both Lemmy and Mastodon have good apps. I'm just pointing out that if the 'argument' is that alternatives don't have an app, MBin does have one.

    • Yes, you are right. Mbin is far more advanced than Lemmy. And PieFed more avanced than Lemmy, less then Mbin.

      There are lot neat features in Mbin and PieFed so i wish we consider all options before pushing Lemmy everywhere. I also wish more app support from both of them.

      I wish we try to remain neutral because, i strongly believe that the 3 softwares can inspire each other.

    • Interstellar works with PieFed now although the API it uses is only enabled on one instance https://preferred.social/ as we're still testing it out.

    • again, the apps are the killer.

      iirc, piefed's api is very similar to lemmy's, so apps could support both.

  • I never knew what it was because I'm a bit desensitised to knew apps / app names.

    Edit: using https://phtn.app/ has made Lemmy extremely pleasant to use too. I haven't had a better experience on any platform.

  • Generally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web.

    Particularly in relation to piefed: it seems to be focused on the exact opposite (giving more power to the server admins) and it takes a good page of social engineering / "nudge theory" principles to guide its design. Much like Mastodon, it seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture.

    • [PieFed] seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture

      Yea, I get this same feeling. It's not that I mind that culture or being mindful of how people behave and such - I just don't think that is the domain of the software to decide. Individual instances can decide that for themselves, but the software shouldn't influence that kind of thing, I feel.

    • It may be a bit opiniated, but it's nice to see a different approach from Lemmy devs who don't see the need for any additional moderation tool.

      I brought up mod mail during the AMA, it has been considered too complex to implement. A moderation panel with an overview of the mod queue would be nice too, but not a priority.

      I'm not saying Piefed is perfect, but at least they prioritize that aspect.

      • We are working on new moderation features all the time, for example 1.0 will correctly federate instance bans which is quite complicated to get right. There will also be a plugin system which allows for much more flexible mod tools. Its just that our time is very limited for all the work that needs to be done on a project with over 50k active users.

      • "moderation duties" and "regular participants" in a forum system have such different use cases, it makes no sense to try to make it work with the software itself.

        It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators, instead of trying to shoehorn it in the existing API. But I don't really think that this is something that really bothers people enough, given that last time I asked if I could get 20 people interested to sponsor the development of the moderation tool, and to this day only one person showed up.

    • If only activitypub c2s didn't suck.

      • ActivityPub C2S is not the the solution. It still requires a server and it still keeps the admins in control of everything.

        ActivityPods seems to be going in the right direction, though...

150 comments