- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.
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People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
While that’s true, I don’t believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven’t ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven’t seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don’t have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not “filters”, just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone’s reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that… but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed.
This is the first time I’m hearing most of this, except the part about Piefed having more moderation tools. Do you have any links to additional information?
Absolutely! Start here: https://join.piefed.social/features/.
The linked blog is also really interesting to me, e.g. this post: https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/, which shows how 5x less data is sent for 5x more posts e.g. 25x greater data efficiency between server instance and client.
Thanks, that was interesting about the network utilization. For a while now I’ve been trying to evaluate the resource efficiency of Lemmy vs. PieFed for my own curiosity. Rust has been shown to be much more resource efficient on the server, using a lot less RAM and CPU from what I recall reading in the past, but I hadn’t thought about the differences in network utilization that could counteract that efficiency, and I was also not aware that Lemmy was so reliant on Javascript. Javascript is still supposed to be quite more resource efficient than Python, but much less so than Rust since it’s still an interpreted language (an extremely optimized one, but still has inherent limits compared to compiled languages). I would still like to know about PieFed requiring less maintenance and the Lemmy database issues requiring constant restarts, if you have any links to information about that. Thanks.
One very popular account that you probably have already heard is here: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed.
Another informative discussion relates to the upcoming (in 2026) switch of slrpnk.net from Lemmy to PieFed, see e.g. https://slrpnk.net/comment/18799445. Some highlighted nuggets from that:
the main bottleneck on performance is the database itself, and at that point the language the frontend is written in doesn’t seem to make much of a practical difference
the core issue with Lemmy is really that it is very annoying to run and maintain, has huge memory issues (ironically given that it is written in Rust) that the devs ignore since years, and the image integration is a stuff of nightmares. In addition, the upstream devs are often actively hostile to sensible suggestions how to improve things and the proposed solutions by them often make things actively worse (latest case in point: the next version will hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities). After nearly 5 years of running Lemmy, I am ready to cut my losses and rather give Piefed a try, and so far the devs and community around it has been very welcoming and actually have lots of sensible ideas.
(Note that the proposed hard-coding issue has been somewhat walked back, as in it will still be hardcoded to some instance but it only remains lemmy.ml by default yet can be changed. Using a single instance as the ultimate source of truth though, it will still be subject to issues of defederation.)
The Lemmy backend causes the Postgres database to use more and more RAM, to the point that it crashes with out of memory issues randomly and causes other processes to go down with it. I have reported the issue multiple times and I am not the only one with the problem since many years,
There are also some further links there to older discussions and additional blog posts, such as https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/.
See also notes for developers at https://join.piefed.social/docs/developers/, e.g. it mentions PieFed relying upon the Flask framework, and the code repository at https://codeberg.org/*removed*/pyfedi, which reportedly the Docker containerization makes it fairly straightforward to install? (I have no personal experience with that though, or Docker containers at all myself.)
In my mind, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy and has been for like a year now. Nobody knows how scalable any of these approaches would be to handle like a million of people, but on the other hand the entire Threadiverse has only ~35k active users currently (last I checked) and that is already down from our peak at 55k just after the Rexodus. i.e., scalability is the least of our concerns right now, and can be postponed for another day, in lieu of aspects such as features proferred to users and ease of use to instance admins.
Then again, FOSS is FOSS, so I wish both Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) the absolute best of success - when one is improved, we all benefit due to the federated nature of content shared via ActivityPub Protocol. I just think that Lemmy has little hope for the future, while PieFed continually impresses me. Nothing is perfect, but on the whole I hear the best things about it, and I have little doubt you’ll enjoy having delved deeper into learning about it, based on so many stories shared in e.g. [email protected] that have said exactly that.
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
I know you probably didn’t mean this, but I don’t think accessibility barriers are good. Diversity of thought is strength and bad comments naturally sink to the bottom.
After seeing how many terrorist ideologies have been allowed to thrive by claiming First Amendment protection since 2016.
No.
“Diversity of thought” my ass. I’m sure your wonderfully-diverse thoughts are just what all of us need to hear, but if they can’t pass muster under human moderation, they’re not worth platforming.
Pretending these comments only come from “stupid” people is abelist and provably false.
I am defending those with barriers, not fascists.
Plenty of stupid people in the fediverse so I dont think we will win any prices for that, guys. And plenty of people who think they are smarter than average, and zero people who think they are dumber than average. The usual stuff.
