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I think from the start, the very beginning, Lemmy had bots doing 20 to 40 upvotes on brand new posts spouting Russian Propoganda.
Its really trivial to set up in decentralized networks like this.
I much prefer the technical architecture of Lemmy over PieFed. I understand the qualms with the core developers, but it feels dirty to move from Rust to Python.
Thats fair, but I don’t make exceptions for that alone. We’re talking about advocates of widespread war and dictatorships.
giving a shit about “upvotes” seems like such a reddit thing to do.
I’m here for replies and conversation and yes…sometimes getting into arguments with dickheads (and…I’ll be honest…sometimes being said dickhead when I’m having a bad day)
I don’t actually care how many internet strangers are giving me made up internet points or not. It’s always just seemed to me to be vacuous and silly as something to “chase”
its how you know if ppl understood your point
Upvotes are a means to an end for site visibility though, which is required to attain conversation in most cases.
I get that. I just mean that I don’t spend time trying to tailor an answer to try to get the most number of upvotes. I’ll say what i want to say, and if people want to upvote me for it or downvote me for it makes no difference whatsoever.
I like being on lemmy and I’ve managed to find piefed instances I have subscribed to so they’re part of my feed, but can anyone tell me if it’s possible to view piefed instances in my “all” view that I’m not subscribed to? I want to be seeing eveeeerything! Thank you!
It is possible. Piefed and Lemmy federate together.
I feel like they should appear automatically in that case, but they’re not.
Piefed communities are less active, and less likely to trend generally.
Ah OK, maybe that’s it - thank you!
Also, “all” is not all. It’s only the communities that others on your instance have subscribed to.
I realised actually that when I search through my federated instances list, not a single piefed instance appears… :/
need to make sure you have selected All when searching. I find piefed instances occasionally, like the TV & movies ones are pretty active I think.
Is there an iOS app for PieFed?
I suggest Thunder or Voyager on Android, and I know they both have an iOS version. Here is more info about PieFed apps: https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app
Awesome, thanks
Thanks for this post. Found my way into a PieFed account because of it. I find the user experience to be much more pleasant indeed. Especially for finding communities across instances and searching for posts/comments in general.
Welcome! Feel free if you have any questions, there’s [email protected]
Wait we’re old now?
Isn’t the average age here like 40?
I thought piefed was a lemmy instance
Different software on the same protocol
That’s so cool. This place is so freaking cool.
It certainly has a lot of potential
No, it’s different software.
Piefed was super slow it should be an image of a senior outrunning the kid with asthma.
How so?
Took more than 60sec to load images or video. Maybe the instance was at fault but my experience wasn’t great so far.
Took more than 60sec to load images or video.
That’s the instance one way or another. Media needs to be accelerated via content delivery network on all platforms or you get speeds of the web in the 90’s. You can get by pretty easily with a handful of users, but most instances get hamstrung pretty quickly if they don’t offload the media to a caching service.
The instance that runs the piefed acct I frequent has database problems, I’ve only put a few dozen comments in there, and loading my profile takes almost a minute. Loading actual media there is fine through.
It kills me because the one thing I do is go back to things I’ve posted and look for more conversation on posts that people make on my posts.
Early lemmy ran into a lot of scale issues too until everyone started running CDN and moving their job runners and database off the webserver and in some cases run multiple servers with a load balancer.
Lemmy is fine though what are you on about
Well, it works. But Piefed is developing more features quicker atm.
Piefed uses Python which is faster for development but the language is slower. Lemmy is built on Rust. I appreciate some features Piefed has but I do wonder about its scalability.
but the language is slower
it really depends what’s the metric. Most web server stuff is IO-bound not compute-bound so Python can actually be faster than Rust.
I thought Rust was faster for basically every metric?
The entire advantage of Python is supposed to be ease of development, in exchange for slower code execution. It is especially bad in terms of multiprocessing, which Rust is great at.
As I severely lack expertise on back-end development I asked for clarification to the forbidden oracle (AI) but it also told me that Rust is faster. I am not sure whether you feel like debunking an AI comment but if this is false I would love to hear why because from my current understanding Rust is always faster (for back-end development).
AI response
That statement is technically false, but it contains a grain of practical truth that often confuses people.
Here is the breakdown of why that statement is misleading and where the misunderstanding comes from.
The Verdict: False
Rust is almost invariably faster than Python, even in IO-bound tasks.
If you have a web server handling 10,000 concurrent connections that are all waiting on a database (pure IO-bound), the Rust server will use significantly less RAM and CPU to manage those “waiting” connections than the Python server.
Why the statement is wrong (The Technical Reality)
The argument assumes that “IO-bound” means the CPU does zero work. That isn’t true. Even in an IO-heavy application, the application server must do the following:
-
Event Loop Management
The server has to track which connections are waiting and which are ready to resume.- Rust’s async runtimes (like Tokio) are incredibly optimized and have near-zero runtime overhead.
- Python’s
asyncioloop has significant overhead because it is still running interpreted Python code to manage the tasks.
-
Serialization/Deserialization
When the database replies, the server receives raw bytes. It must turn those bytes into objects (JSON parsing, ORM model instantiation). This is CPU-bound work.- Rust does this near-instantly.
- Python is notoriously slow at object instantiation.
-
The GIL (Global Interpreter Lock)
Even if your code is async, Python can only execute one bytecode instruction at a time per process.- If 100 requests come back from the DB at the exact same millisecond, Python has to process them one by one.
- Rust can process them in parallel across all CPU cores.
Where the statement is “Practically” True (The Grain of Truth)
The person making that statement is likely conflating “faster” with “indistinguishable to a human.”
If a database query takes 100ms:
- Rust overhead: 0.1ms → total response ≈ 100.1ms
- Python overhead: 5.0ms → total response ≈ 105.0ms
To the human user, 100.1ms and 105ms feel exactly the same.
In this specific context, you could argue that Python is “just as fast” as Rust because the bottleneck is the database, not the language. But it is incorrect to say Python is faster.
The “Fediverse” Exception (Why it matters for PieFed)
The statement “web servers are IO-bound” is often true for something like a simple blog.
It is less true for the Fediverse.ActivityPub (the protocol PieFed and Lemmy use) involves two things that are heavily CPU-bound, not IO-bound:
-
JSON Parsing
Fediverse servers throw massive JSON blobs at each other constantly.- Python is slow at parsing JSON compared to Rust.
-
Cryptography (RSA Signatures)
Every time a server sends a message to another server, it must cryptographically sign it (HTTP Signatures). Every time it receives a message, it must verify the signature.- Rust handles crypto operations natively and extremely fast.
- Python relies on C-extensions (like
cryptography), which are fast, but the overhead of calling back and forth between Python and C for every single request adds up.
Conclusion
The statement is false.
- Rust is faster at raw execution.
- Rust is faster at handling high concurrency (even IO-bound).
- Python is only “faster” in one metric: development velocity – you can write the code faster in Python, but the code itself will not run faster than Rust.
No, python can be incredibly fast for IO when scaled properly.
You generally don’t run a single process or even program for serving websites. There are task queues, callbacks, microservices etc so the bottleneck is almost never the programming language itself but the tooling and Python’s tooling for web is still miles ahead. Thats why big project ship more Django than Rust and all AI training is running on Python not Rust etc.
Don’t get me wrong Rust is a brilliant language but Python can often be better.
Finally you can outsource high performance tasks to Rust or C from within Python rather easily these days.
I thought the biggest problem for Python would be the GIL as it cannot share memory between processes and therefore needs to do use a database or other tool to share between them. Though in hindsight most web related services probably use databases to read and write data and this do not work out of shared process memory.
Python is an interpreted language, which is fundamentally always slower than a compiled language like Rust. However the main performance bottleneck are actually sql queries, and I believe we make a lot more effort to optimize them compared to Piefed.
-
So we should all just jump? Meh. Lemmy 1.0 is releasing soon which should help quite a bit.
AFAIK the two can federate with eachother so I’m glad we have both.
Thesis: Lemmy is better!
Antithesis: Piefed is better!
Synthesis: Bitch, they’re federated??
FUCK YOU HEGEL STOP FOLLOWING ME
Not necessarely that’s the beauty of the fediverse. You can enjoy PieFed growth and all it’s content but stick on Lemmy if you don’t feel like moving.
I vote use both
No we are a long way off from a 1.0 release yet.
Lemmy still has a bigger user base doesn’t it?
Well yes, but you can interact with lemmy on piefed.
If it’s true It’s the main reason to not even think to use piefed.
Not if you want to make use of some of Piefeds tools.
I have to check if Voyager iOS supports it
It does
I mean, I am reading this on PieFed and I do see your comment just fine. As you see mine.
Why is that a reason not to use PieFed? You can obviously just block all instances that run on Lemmy if you somehow don’t like their users!
Ok sorry, I just misunderstood. I thought you couldn’t read lemmy from piefed at all.
The whole point is to not have a centralized system. Development is also part of that, so providing multiple front ends for the same community also works towards that goal.
And boobs and wieners.
Doesn’t matter to me, I’m still using the old reddit theme on .world and that’s what I want to keep using.
Piefed or Lemmy, it’s the same content, so you’re arguing about either UI or philosophical differences (Lemmy devs are tankies or whatever).
I’d consider Piefed if they had an old reddit UI available, but that’s never gonna happen and I absolutely cannot stand either Lemmy’s or Piefed’s UI.
Oh, I had made one for quokk.au a few months ago. It got lost during an update as I didn’t bother to save it, I can probably whip another one up this weekend if I remember.
Edit: This was a wip screenshot I took. It was never 100% the same, but yeah.
Cool, well let me know if you do, I’ll join up. I’m sure if you do there would be several dozen people who would be thrilled! 😂
It looks great to be honest
I’d consider Piefed if they had an old reddit UI available, but that’s never gonna happen
Why would that never happen?
Well, for one, the old Reddit interface’s appeal is fairly limited in general. Most people use apps anymore, I feel like in general desktop users are not catered to even in default interfaces. Of people who do use the desktop, more of them are likely to be new(er) Reddit users who probably find the Lemmy/Piefed default UI to be superior to Reddit - but the pool of people who prefer old Reddit is dwindling, which doesn’t usually lead to continuing support of things.
As it stands, few Lemmy instances have it and in any case it feels pretty fragile. It has broken a couple times and I think been fixed, but this has led instances to drop it altogether (dbzer0 used to have it, for example, but the lead said it was too much of a hassle and its devs weren’t responding to his questions).
I’m fairly worried that 1.0 is gonna break it, tbh. It never gets any updates that I have noticed, and its functionality is a bit all over the place.
Well no, it’s not just UI. Piefed has more features than Lemmy right now.
Fair enough if you’re tethered to lemmy due to an old-reddit style UI, but it’s not purely rooted in UI and ideology.
Yeah, sorry you’re right, like being able to get feeds for small communities, and that sort of thing. But all the actual content is the same, is what I meant. Piefed doesn’t provide any content that you can’t get on Lemmy, just a different way to view it (UI) and organize it (features).
It does have polls. Those are not visible if you use Lemmy, right?
It will also add support for viewing microblogging posts (a.k.a. Mastodon) sometime in the next year. Obviously, that’s still content you can see all of if you use both Mastodon and Lemmy, because Mastodon supports polls as well.But PieFed is the only one that shows both everything Lemmy shows plus the polls.
Lemmy is fine though
except crazy authoritarian tankie leadership? It’s just a matter of time until one of them goes wacky (again) and brings down the entire brand.
It’s good to diversify here.
that is just one instance, in particular lemmy.ml. pretty much everywhere else they make fun of them.
I don’t know which part of Lemmy u talking about. What I get to see is posts and comments ridiculizing or even hating russians (as people) get hundreds of likes.
Who cares if the devs are communists, worst comes to worst you can always fork it while you look for an alternative. Never has come to that though, and it doesn’t look like it will.
I don’t care that they are communists, I care about how they are assholes. I don’t owe assholes anything, certainly not loyalty. They are a toxic influence on the fediverse and should be marginalized. Maybe there was an argument that people should just let them cook when there was not alternative, but that is no longer the case.
Forking rarely succeeds for big projects. Good luck finding new maintainer to spearhead entire code base and rebrand. Much easier to start with a more trustworthy base.
Communists isn’t the problem.
Transphobic, genocide deniers are.
It’s just a matter of time until one of them goes wacky (again)
What happened?
That’s just the tankie triad. there are lemmy instances that aren’t run by nutters, feddit.uk for example
And my guy has almost 25 points
Okay but it is developed by authoritarian communists. I mean it doesn’t have to annoy you, but it definitely annoys me.
I don’t like the devs but at the same time it’s not like they wield much power over users outside of the flagship instance, lemmy.ml. That’s the nice thing about decentralized FOSS social media. Can even make a fork if they ever did something unpopular.
But they administrate their flag ship instance, which for a long time was the first instance new users registrated on, only to then see on what power trips the Admins are on. The missing separation of development of administration is literally the only critic point I have. If course, Lemmy is decentralized and that is a great thing. Over time, lemmy.ml already lost relevance and it will lose more as lemmy grows. But people tend to think “oh, so this is the official instance I better join there”, just to then face opinions promoting North Korea or denying Russia’s guilt in the invasion of Ukraine and so on. Check out the media bias in Lemmy.ml’s news communities, it is insane.
Check [email protected] for many examples.
Chill its a meme
This is the first I’ve heard of piefed, and so I’m just browsing the desktop site. It’s kinda jank, to be honest.
I looked at it when it came out. Seems ok to me, but there wasn’t a reason to migrate from Lemmy.
It has polls, it supports push notifications so phone apps can immediately tell you about notifications, you can write remarks about users that will be shown to you only next to the user’s name, and what I actually find the biggest usability improvement is that I can turn on notifications for any post or any community so that if anyone writes anything to that community, I get a notification. That’s awesome with groups that get like one post every two weeks but where those few posts are all very interesting!
Some people also like that you can group a bunch of communities into one feed that you can view as if they were together just one community. Meaning, if there are copies of the same community on five instances, you can opt to merge their content when viewed from your user account.
it supports push notifications so phone apps can immediately tell you about notifications
Nope, I’m out. Lemmys fine thanks.
Tbf I don’t think you have to have it on.
No worries :)
In what way does it feel jank, in your opinion?
I’ve personally been happy with it, and I would guess the maintainers are used to the way it works and might be blind to things you notice! But, there’s a real good chance that if you can point out specific details that could be improved, they indeed will be improved. At least they’ve done awesome job handling suggestions I’ve made!
I think just general UI stuff across at least the homepage
- Some buttons that wrap touch each other
- There’s a banner at the top (since I don’t have an account) that has weird, off-center margins
- When I first went to the site I guess the Explore dropdown didn’t load so it was an empty dropdown (though it’s now populated so that may have been a one off network request issue)
- If I have scrolled down the page a bit, every time I click an item in the main nav (like Explore) the page scrolls up by about 15 pixels for some reason
- The Piefed logo isn’t horizontally centered with the actual nav items so the text doesn’t line up correctly
This is obviously using Bootstrap to handle the UI, and that’s fine. I’m not knocking that necessarily. But it’s a little jank and rough around the edges. These are things I noticed in, like, 30 seconds.
And this isn’t to say that Lemmy.world is perfect or anything. And I don’t really use the desktop site for Lemmy. I just use Voyager on my pc. But even the Lemmy site feels a little more solid, if that makes sense (even if Lemmy.world is also using Bootstrap).
I was only able to reproduce one of these with some local testing (the not-logged-in banner). What browser are you using? As for the Explore dropdown (and most dropdowns in the web ui), they use htmx to populate, so if there is a network hiccup, then it will just show up empty. Lastly, I believe you on the buttons wrapping weird. I have caught and fixed a lot of those in my time contributing to piefed, so would always appreciate help identifying where it is happening.
A big priority for rimu when making piefed is to keep the request size small to accommodate very poor network connections. From talking with him, he has historically had to deal with extremely tenuous internet access in the past and wants to be able to still function in those environments (a user setting can also enable low bandwidth mode to disable things like images). That is just really hard to do using the javascript frameworks that a lot of modern web interfaces use these days. So, we have compromised and sprinkled in some interactivity where it makes the most sense using tools like htmx or vanilla javascript. However, it can make the site feel a bit like internet 1.0 at times.
With the piefed api maturing, there is now the option to simply use an alternative frontend (photon, blorp, etc.) or a mobile app (voyager, interstellar, etc.) instead. The main area of the site that we have not included in the api is the admin area, so managing things like defederations would still have to be done through the web UI.
Thanks for the feedback!
Incredible optimization! I don’t think Blorp will ever be able to deliver a web experience as low data as the official UI. However, if you download Blorp (or any of the other apps) then you no longer have to send frontend code over the network. The only data that needs to be downloaded at runtime is API requests. Suddenly the network usage looks a lot more similar to the official UI (though I should test to confirm).
Can I also say, as a somewhat normie human, that it’s called PieFed? I might need a little background information on this one.
Though I do participate in a group named Lemmy.
I believe the origin is a portmanteau of python (the language piefed is written in) and fediverse. The pie imagery is more for fun.
Fun fact, the dev server that lives at the bleeding edge of the codebase is called crust.
At least the Codeberg git repository is called pyfedi, which I think could be the original name of this? Py comes from the programming language used, Python. And Fedi is, well, Fedi :)
And then maybe PyFedi became PieFed because Rimu is from New Zealand and those DAMN KIWIS are SERIOUSLY MAD ABOUT PIES! 🤣
It has its rough edges, but I do like it overall.
Does it federate with Lemmy?
Yes.
deleted by creator
Oof. Lemmy as a decrepit grandma is a bit unkind.
Without their pioneering work in the early quiet days and absorbing the first wave of reddit refugees, PieFed wouldn’t have anything to glom onto and build from so there is a symbiosis going on.
The grandma was an exceptionally agile and good-looking woman in her youth, indeed! She was also pioneering a lot of things the following generations are now enjoying! But she’s nevertheless of the previous generation now.
Show me 1 non-twat piefed poster and I’ll make an account
You are winning the race to be a lesser known reddit, congrats
Upvotes mean jack, where’s the community engagement
Upvotes mean nothing when they’re from liberals
HERE’S YOUR COMMUNITY YOU FECKIN EEDJIT
floss your limey
teeth with my asshairTo the lovely tory rat that reported my comment as “bigotry”, sorry, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants don’t get to play that card. Go boil your babby yed along yer mum’s yams.
Can’t imagine why people don’t want to hang around y’all
The english are worth a good jab of tough love to the ribs, “Y’all” aint with jack
