Lemmy or Piefed?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ride@piefed.social⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I’m not new to link aggregators/communities, but new to those outside of Reddit. About a month ago I joined Lemmy and today my curiosity led me to Piefed, although I’ve come across the name before. My research told me Piefed is developing at a much faster pace than Lemmy, is that true? I’ve also gotten to know it doesn’t really matter for the average user which of the platforms one joins. So I’m specifically posting this question on a community on Lemmy through my Piefed account. I’m based in Europe if that makes a difference, which I believe it doesn’t. Nonetheless I’m happy to read your thoughts. Thanks

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communism@lemmy.ml ⁨41⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
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.

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dkppunk@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
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.

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Loco_Mex@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Lemmy.

The PieFed dev has some pretty extreme views and goes out of his way to censor and limit what users can do.

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GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- ride@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Quite interesting discussions. I like the fact that @rimu@piefed.social is getting involved to explain things.
  
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- orgrinrt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    ideologically posed to keep the thing open, for the people, by the people
    
    What. Check out the modlog, they ban more people than anyone.
    
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- rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  It’s up to the mods and admins what they do with PieFed’s functions. Anything can be misused, even simple stuff. Like for example lemmy.ml has a description “a community for Foss and privacy enthusiasts” set by the admins and then ridicules and bans anyone who pushes back against the .ml political line on China.
  
  The software feature of having a instance description is innocuous but it’s being used for deception.
  
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  - GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Those are in no way the same thing. Lemmy having community descriptions that individual mods and admins can lie in is not the same as Piefed having automated “hey everyone, block and ban these users preemptively!” messages or banning everything that’s not on one side of politics.
    
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CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- Pamasich@kbin.earth ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Mostly because I didn’t know mbin has had that feature for ages.
    
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- slemptastrophe@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Can you link to some good meme accounts on mastodon?
  
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  - CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I like @vicfroh@mastodon.social , @i0null@infosec.exchange , and @funnysnarkyjoke.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy (this is technically a bluesky account via a bridge to give credit where credit is due)
    
    I would also recommend @nonfedimemes@wetdry.world but I think they might have stopped posting? idk maybe follow anyway in case they come back
    
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- ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  That sounds useful. I’ll give it a try
  
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- stopforgettingit@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  what 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.
  
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  - CombatWombat@feddit.online ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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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Schwim@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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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- ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I was getting annoyed with the duplicated posts as well. But I don’t see that on Piefed, I guess a big plus for Piefed.
  
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FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Cons of each:

Piefed is a lot newer and is therefor in some areas still under construction.

Lemmy is maintained by people who also run the ML instance promote Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea, 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
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- toothpaste_sandwich@thebrainbin.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Oof... They're even more problematic than I realised, then.
  
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- GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yet even with lemmys people being like that, their software is free from bias and authoritarian-style features that are made to stifle free speech and to encourage an ideological echo chamber, unlike Piefed.
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Lemmy’s lack of features is why Lemmys community is how it is and that suits the Lemmy devs and their goals perfectly.
    
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  - FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Except for that banner I mentioned. Sure, instance owners COULD try to remove it every update; but they don’t.
    
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- ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  That’s interesting. Although your link is dead and doesn’t let me proceed.
  
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  - FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Link is working but here is alternative: https://feddit.online/post/593416
    
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mondoman712@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Piefed has (had?) some weird opinionated behaviours that to me make it seem worth avoiding lemmy.ml/comment/23662293

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- 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Caking code stupid is ableism? :)
  
  All coders are ableism generators then.
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I removed the word ‘stupid’ from the code 3 months ago, the function is now called ‘reply_is_low_effort’.
    
    The haters don’t bother keeping their propaganda up to date.
    
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  - mondoman712@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    If you want to nitpick you’d be better off replying directly to the comment I linked to.
    
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- homes@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Piefed.world has a different admin and different policies
  
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  - ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    You could say the same thing about Lemmy then—lemmy.world is different from lemmy.ml
    
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HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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

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Dookieman12@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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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  - ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    You mean earning tokens or referring to something else?
    
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- ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I was wondering what the .ml (it’s certain that Mali isn’t some important country in the Fediverse) represented. Very interesting to know
  
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  - communism@lemmy.ml ⁨43⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    It doesn’t mean Marxist-Leninist. It’s a coincidence. The Lemmy devs said they started using the domain because .ml domains were free.
    
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- FleetwoodLinux@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  It’s actually a fun coincidence, the Mali TLD used to be free, so they picked it, but it’s not free anymore
  
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Allero@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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.

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).

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- ride@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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 avoid stupid people and situations as I mature. I used to me a political hot-head, which meant I cheered certain people I wouldn’t touch with a pole these days.
  
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BladeFederation@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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PlzGibHugs@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  The vote quota can be set to whatever the instance admin desires.
  
  afaik only piefed.zip and multiverse.soulism.net have chosen to increase it, though.
  
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  - PlzGibHugs@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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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chris@l.roofo.cc ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
mbin!

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- unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  +1 for mbin. The dev(s?) doesn't seem to be as problematic as the Lemmy dev and it federates with a whole range of fediverse systems. The only real complaints I had with it turned out to be me misunderstanding how it works (for instance not noticing that some of the stuff on my feed is Peertube since it's just really well integrated), so now that I understand that, I'm extremely happy with it.
  
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- Infrapink@thebrainbin.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Oh wow, I thought I was the only mbinaut here.
  
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  - palordrolap@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    There are dozens of us! Dozens!
    
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Wren@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It depends on your values and what kind of experience you want. For me, I couldn’t find a piefed instance that met all my criteria.

I wanted no instances blocked, no flagged users for low karma (I didn’t want karma to matter at all,) able to see greentext communities (4chan screenshots are blocked on some, if not all piefed instances,) and be able to see the modlog.

Piefed has additional features that lemmy lacks, like following individual users and multi-coms, but it wasn’t enough to get me to switch.

I like the openness of the lemmyverse, since there’s more room for individuality between the instances without a developer ideologically holding the reins, though I’ve heard Rimu has walked back their more controversial decisions. For all the criticisms of ML and Grad, the developers affiliations don’t pollute the wider fediverse.

Whichever you choose, make sure you look into the instances as well, since they have unique features, blocklists, and supports for apps.

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- ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Thanks for this. At the end of the day I think political or personal views are just what they are. We often tend to find others controversial because we hold entrenched positions ourselves. We must, however, be willing to adjust those positions in the fact of facts, situations, etc. Glad the Fediverse is what it is—diverse.
  
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  - Wren@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Same here. I’m glad it allows for growth and forks rather than a collapse when schisms occur. It’s why I keep saying I don’t like piefed, but I’m glad it’s there.
    
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- maxihuenu@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  we dont need following individual users. It is a discuss community, not mastodon or pixelfed
  
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  - Wren@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    What.
    
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hexagonwin@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
i use lemmy because theres a frontend that looks exactly like old reddit. old.lemmy.today

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- mehquestion@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Has it been working for you? It’s been down for me all weekend
  
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  - hexagonwin@lemmy.today ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    was on my phone when commenting that, checking now yeah it’s down for me as well…
    
    anyone who wants to check out that interface can take a look at old.lemmy.zip instead
    
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anticurrent@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
lemmy is lighter on resources if you care about your internet usage footprint. and far more stable overall.

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rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- MahouOwl@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I’m relatively new here so I’ll probably get used to it eventually, however right now I still instinctively go to the top right to get to my account before realizing “Oh wait, it’s not there”.
  
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one_old_coder@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I started with Lemmy but moved to Piefed because it was compatible, had more features, and was faster to load. Nowadays, I don’t know if any is better, but I’m happy with the Piefed.

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- ride@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Thanks for sharing
  
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quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What are the available options for piefed clients on Android?

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