Submitted 15 hours ago by NaClKnight@piefed.zip to [deleted]
I’ve made accounts on servers running these different software and the user experience feels similar between them. They’re all FOSS Reddits. I can log into servers running all of em via the same Interstellar app on Android and see the same communities
Are there more notable differences for folks running the server or the mods running the individual communities/subredits?
Or am i misunderstanding them?
lemmy is a piece of opinionated foss software that attempts to be an alternative to reddit, coded by a tankie
kbin is a piece of opinionated foss software that attempts to be an alternative to reddit digg, coded by a gun nut and abandoned. mbin is a continuation
piefed is a piece of opinionated foss software that attempts to be an alternative to reddit, coded by a control freak with (formerly) hard-coded questionable moderation
there’s a couple of others like misskey/sharkey. all of them are broken and wonderful. piefed seems to be more feature-rich. by way of miracle, somehow these are interoperable with each other and in more broken way, with mastodon. i heard there lie horrors within lemmy codebase, and updating it is major pain. these all attempt to do slightly different things and so features provided by each are different (kbi/mbin has separate upvote and boost, and who up/downvoted/boosted is always visible to public, all of that is always technically public, but hidden in lemmy)
Piefed is also written in python. No clue why you would do that when you know that you’re going to be dealing with a massive amount of network traffic, more so than most server infra. Lemmy already struggles with certain amount of traffic and that’s written in rust.
Takes a special kind of person to write federated software and they all seemingly make really really strange decisions when doing so.
they all seemingly make really really strange decisions when doing so.
Spoiler alert, it happens too in proprietary software, physical engineering, and as soon as there is a corporate structure and a quality department it’s even worse because you need to explain why you want to spend more money, and document the impact which means do a shit load of paperwork for every change
The idea behind Python is to get the community to contribute. More people know Python than Assembly or Fortran. At some point, running a FOSS project like Piefed becomes a numbers game. Having more developers is useful in the beginning.
If Piefed grows significantly, it might make sense to rewrite the whole thing in a different language, but right now, contributions matter more than efficiency.
in general I feel the same way about python, but the federation traffic is done with redis queues as a background task and my servers can easily run around 2.5-3k messages per second before spinning up another pod. The rest of the load is, of course, when using the UI, but with most of the load being federation, it’s not that big of a deal when you have a separate container/pod with reasonable resource limits.
Has the hard-coded censorship been removed from PieFed? I thought that was a really weird and concerning choice to include.
Say what you want about Lemmy devs (and I could say a lot) but they don’t seem to have made any major efforts to enforce their views within the platform itself. Just on their servers.
last time i’ve checked yes it’s gone as default, but it’s still an option. lemmy devs openly stated that anyone can do whatever they want on their own instances and they can’t influence it (except that for the longest time they’ve controlled the largest instance, not anymore of course)
They all do basically the same thing and can be connected through ActivityPub. However, they all have a totally different code base as they are separate projects, other than that Mbin is a fork of Kbin. As far as how it is being an admin or mod on any, I can’t speak from experience.
Communities are largely similar, but the underlying hardware and tweaks are slightly different.
Try getting managed-hosting for them, & you’ll see that only some can be hired.
Managed-hosting means that the hirer isn’t having to do all the sysadmin stuff for their instance, like security-updates, they’re able to concentrate on the community, instead.
Horribly-pricey, for the amount of service one can get, from what I’ve seen, but … drastically cheaper than having one’s community obliterated by a missed security-update, & then becoming irrelevant.
I wish there was massively more competition in the managed-hosting space, for fediverse servers.
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schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 15 hours ago
They’re different but compatible pieces of software.
A major difference is that Lemmy doesn’t allow following individual (microblogging) accounts, only communities. The other three allow following both AFAIK.
NaClKnight@piefed.zip 5 hours ago
Aight thanks! This is definitely how I think of them. I don’t code at all or run a community, so most of the differences I am aware of weren’t relevant to me.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
I don’t believe any have the ability to follow individual microblogging accounts unless I’ve overlooked it. I have a PieFed and a mbin account. Following individual accounts for microblogging sounds like mastadon.
Maybe I don’t understand what microblogging is though, that’s like Twitter/Threads right? If so then Mastadon
Gork@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
Is it worth the effort to switch over from Lemmy?
Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 14 hours ago
Unless there’s a particular feature you’re after, like following microblogs, or better mod controls…. Meh, it’s all about the same for the end user.
I shifted to PieFed because I like the direction they’re heading, the flexibility/volume of potential contributors Python provides, and to just generally show support for more options in the fediverse.
PieFed features come more quickly but the apps/front ends are slower to adopt them so it’s not all sunshine and rainbows but the basic functions generally work the same no matter where you are.