Submitted 3 weeks ago by Irelephant@lemm.ee to fediverse@lemmy.world
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.
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.
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.
We won't 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.
Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/
There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It's what you do with it that counts.
https://piefed.social is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won't increase as more users come on board.
PieFed is already really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that.
using Python
Full disclosure: I like Python a lot and have written a lot of it.
That said, if not for my recent work experiences, I would be absolutely horrified at the idea of using Python for such a project. Between the type system and being interpreted, the performance and runtime issues are pretty painful. That and the historical greater dependence on external application servers really makes Python-based services something that really sucks to administer.
However, as I noted, I have also recently seen Python performing far faster than it has any right to with highly-optimized use of multi-processing and offloading the server stuff to Go.
I think I’m going to have to take a look at Piefed source this weekend.
These performance results are only from the browser side, but dont cover server performance. The database for lemmy.ml is 60 GB, and that is with 6 years of history. Not sure where your 10x claim comes from. The lemmy.ml server costs 70 Euros per month and doesnt have much load.
That’s nice info, thanks! Do you know why the db difference?
Thats super impressive. I need to take a look at hosting a personal instance just for the fun of it if its really what it costs.
I second this. Lemmy is written in Rust where as piefed is written in Python. When it comes to running a high-performance webserver, Lemmy has the advantage.
While theoretically true, the main bottleneck with Lemmy seems to be the database performance, so with both projects depending on PostgreSQL for that, I somewhat doubt that Piefed being written in Python will have much noticeable effect in reality.
Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spend in IO, not compute, and if you’re running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you’re running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.
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.
I don’t think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They’ve got room to grow.
piefed.fediverse.observer/list
People can start posting about PieFed on Reddit and see how the Reddit users react.
But how is that not a concern if you’re interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 users. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That’s not gonna be great for you or the new users.
Its written in piefed, but I don’t think the overhead is too much because the bottleneck is DB performance.
It has support for lemmy’s protocol, so the network effect really isn’t an issue.
Its written in piefed,
Small lapsus ha ha
All your saying is, it looks better. I am not using any Lemmy webfrontend, I’ve always been using the apps that are available, many of which are absolutely polished.
There’s more than that.
Stuff like feeds, topics and better onboarding.
I run a Pixelfed instance. The code is faaaaaaaarrrrr from polished. Its buggy and the admin interface either doesn’t work or is poorly implemented. I’d rather run and moderate Lemmy than Pixelfed. I have considered just shutting it down several times. I run the instance social.photo.
For people that care about that sort of thing, that’s great. I just need the ability to subscribe to communities and comment on posts and Lemmy has been great for that while using voyager
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.
Probably app support. If Lemmy didn’t have wefwef/voyager during the API debacle of 2023, I probably would not have stuck around. The default UI is terrible for mobile.
The default UI is terrible for mobile.
I’m definitely in the minority, but I prefer the Web UI on mobile to apps
I also like the default UI, even if it’s not the prettiest. But for mindless scrolling I prefer Voyager.
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.
Ok. Watch this space: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/540
Great!
Compact mode has been added now, FYI. Screenshots at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/540#issuecomment-3788240
Very cool!
That looks perfect, thanks for your work!
That is exactly the main reason I created my own theme, but yeah there should be a official compact theme, especially for the mobile phone.
Thank for your feedback. Maybe you can tell them ? I'm giving feedback to piefed dev on their UI, suggesting ideas is also part on PieFed development. :)
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user? Remember the majority of users don’t post, comment or otherwise interact with the platform beyond voting.
For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there’s a decent amount.
The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one’s uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.
Keyword filtering is about to be merged into Lemmy. Other features will also be added over time.
Fair point, but mobile apps and inertia seem to outweigh those additional features
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user?
I don’t think it’s always easy to pinpoint UX issues and user friction. Sometimes these things just don’t stick with mainstream users. I say it’s worth a try to see which platform the average Reddit user will prefer.
Fair point. It probably hard to see this things when you’ve been in the thick of Lemmy for as long as most of us here have. It’s easy to dismiss not liking lemmy-ui because alternative frontends exist (written from Photon), but does that matter when the overwhelming majority of instances use it as their landing page.
As I said, it has a lot more polish. Its easier to discover communities, and it has feeds.
Two questions for you, I’m genuinely curious, I hope they don’t come up as agressive
Personally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web/
Piefed goes in the opposite direction, giving more power to the server admins and strongly advocates social engineering / “nudge theory” in 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.
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.
“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.
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.
[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.
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…
I never knew what it was because I’m a bit desensitised to knew apps / app names.
Is there even a second instance running piefed? I’ve only seen piefed.social
Is there a way to see version number? Everything else seems way slower than the flagship instance and even that seems slower than every Lemmy instance
There’s feddit.online and some personal ones I’ve seen knocking about.
Thanks
feddit.online, iirc. check join.piefed.social
I've been running my one person instance for 8 month or something ;)
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?
For me…
Because the PWA font is too small and can’t be enlarged
Because there’s no ‘back to top’ button so have to kill the app to refresh.
Because there’s no app.
But sometimes I use it anyway because the combining of articles is so much better than seeing the same article three or four times in a row in Voyager.
misk@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Apps make or break those platforms. Lemmy apps are way better than even anything Mastodon has. We got really lucky that Lemmy exploded in popularity due to Reddit API changes which meant many app developers gave Lemmy a shot. I probably wouldn’t use Lemmy so much if Voyager didn’t fill the hole Apollo left in my heart.
cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Voyager is so polished, it elevates the whole experience.
Ulrich@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Phanpy is phenomenal and fixes a lot of the problems Mastodon and all microblogging platforms have.
SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Mona is also a good app.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If it can get apps, ill probably be more on it.
I love you lemmy.world but I would rather like to run my own piefed.