It turns out there is a Lemmy alternative with categories - anyone got stories about it?

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨WaterWaiver@aussie.zone⁩ to ⁨meta@aussie.zone⁩

Holy crap, there is lemmy but with categories combining many communities:

I hate having to choose between visiting each community individually or seeing all my subscriptions in one place (I’m not always in the mood for news, gaming and memes).

Took a while to find the sourcecode , for some reason my search engine doesn’t want to show codeberg:

PieFed A Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask.

Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to. No fancy design patterns or algorithms.

Easy setup, easy to manage - few dependencies and extra software required.

AGPL.

First class moderation tools.

Feels like lemmy. Smells like lemmy. Talks like lemmy. Technically isn’t a ‘variant’ but an ‘alternative’ because the code isn’t a fork, but from my lazy ass user perspective it’s totally a variant.

Image vs link posts are more clearly presented too. On lemmy I have to squint at the icon in the corner of an image to work out if clicking on it will make it bigger or take me to a different website. Inconsistent and fiddly, especially when I’m tired.

Anyone here tried hosting it and can comment on whether it’s a PITA or not? It’s an interpreted language so the presumption is it would be crap, but for all I know it might have better overarching architecture that makes up for it.

Also, would I be considered an aussie.zone traitor if I started using piefed.au more? Anyone know the people running it to make sure they’re not secretly kiwis?

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Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I made an account on quokk.au, though I haven’t used it much. If I were joining the threadiverse today, I’d probably look for Piefed rather than Lemmy.

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eureka@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I haven’t tried any Piefeds or mbins. My impression is similar to yours: interpreted language and “no fancy design patterns” gives me the idea it’s probably great for quickly prototyping new features like categories and moderation tools, possibly at the cost of performance. If you’re looking at hosting, maybe reach out to a few piefed admins, ask what they think about it and if/when they tried Lemmy for a comparison.

The great thing about the Fediverse is afaik you can test other instances and even other softwares while still getting access to the same communities and posts.

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WaterWaiver@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Huh, it looks like the groups (of communities) are instance-specific. piefed.social has lots, piefed.au doesn’t. Then there are “feeds” which… look like the same thing as groups? Of which piefed.au has Australian-specific ones (including a lot of auzzie.zone communities). I’ll have to find out if any of these are portable across instances or not, or if I’m stuck using multiple sites to access the fediverse >:|

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moseschrute@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m working on a Lemmy/PieFed client called Blorp that allows you to login to multiple accounts at once. However I don’t yet implement any PieFed specific features that Lemmy doesn’t have (e.g. categories).

PieFed has only recently had a stable v1 release, but based on my interactions with there devs, I’m very optimistic about their future.

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- WaterWaiver@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t understand. Blorp looks like another backend you host as a website. But you call it a “client”. What exactly does it do and not do compared to compare to lemmy and piefed?
  
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  - Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    afaict Blorp is a Lemmy client. You know how on your phone, you can get to Lemmy through a web browser, but also through an app like Voyager or Jerboa? Well those apps, and the front-end of the website, are all called clients. And it’s also possible to have alternative web URLs that access the same server.
    
    So there’s ttrpg.network, which is the name of the instance and also where the default lemmy-ui is hosted. But there’s also old.ttrpg.network, which accesses the same instance backend, but has an alternative client designed to look like old reddit, called Mlmym.
    
    To me, Blorp looks like another alternative front end to Lemmy.
    
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  - moseschrute@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Lemmy, PieFed, and mbin/kbin all provide APIs that let you pull data (communities, posts, users) from their backend. A client knows how to connect to the API, pull the data, and present it to the user. Lemmy, PieFed, and mbin all have a default client they ship with, but the Lemmy client only speaks Lemmy, the PieFed client only speaks piefed, etc.
    
    Blorp, among other multi platform clients, speaks Lemmy and PieFed. Blorp can be self hosted, but it’s not a backend like Lemmy, PieFed, etc. Blorp reads/writes data via these APIs, but it doesn’t store any data on a server.
    
    Idk if I explained that well. Does that make any sense?
    
    Other way to think about it is email. Gmail is both a email server and a client. Blorp is like using a 3rd party email client that connects to Gmail and Yahoo.
    
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