Lemmy or Piefed?
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 like the onboarding of Piefed better, because it allows you to select things you might be interested in as part of the process, which is helpful. Overall, it’s a much more guided approach.
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
95 replies
Lemmy.
The PieFed dev has some pretty extreme views and goes out of his way to censor and limit what users can do.
I prefer Lemmy.
because unlike Piefed there are no hardcoded instance or user blocks.Although, you do have to find a lemmy instance that isn't defederated. I like being able to see a multitude of opinions and manually block people/communities that I feel don't contribute to discussion.Edit: The blocklists can be edited by the instance admin. As far as I can tell the user blocks I was confusing with Tesseract. Apologies to the piefed devs for spreading bad information.
PieFed has no hardcoded instance or user blocks. You were lied to by bad people.
I was just repeating what I've heard elsewhere. It does appear that the included blocklists can be edited. I have mixed feelings about labeling certain websites.
Fair enough.
How websites are labelled is up to the instance admin. It used to be that all labels were warnings but in the latest version of PieFed it became possible to use neutral or positive icons as well:
It still says 'warning type' and 'warning on posts' in the UI which is an oversight I've just noticed!
This change was a result of criticism I read. Often when people write that stuff they think they have discovered some nefarious thing that exists that way because I want it to. The fact is it was all thrown together very quickly so it's not always well thought-out but when people don't like things I listen and make changes. Nothing is set in stone.
I appreciate you clarifying. I didn't realize you were the developer. You reminded me the importance of verifying information before posting about it.
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.
PieFed has some sensible defaults but all blocks can be changed by the server admin. They're not hard-coded.
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.
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.
Quite interesting discussions. I like the fact that @[email protected] gets involved to explain things.
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.
What. Check out the modlog, they ban more people than anyone.
The software is open and has zero political or ideological leaning is what that person and I mean.
Yours, on the other hand, is not, and does. I’m sure I’m tagged by default on Piefed already as “low quality” or something of the sort, purely because people downvote me because I’m not in the echo chamber of allowed opinions. Over the last few days I’ve had like 300 downvotes to about 15 upvotes just on about 3 comments in the one topic, where my comments are 100% factually, undeniably, demonstrably, correct - but people don’t like it because they think it’s “pro Apple”, and the echo chamber says they have to hate Apple.
That would make Piefed put a giant target on my head, wouldn’t it? Basically telling everyone “block this guy and ban him from your communities”. Lemmy doesn’t do that.
You also have a curated-by-you list of banned sources, which includes basically everything anyone left of centre would call “right wing”, which in reality is anything that isn’t left wing biased. Lemmy doesn’t.
Of the 12,730 accounts that were active in the last week, there are 60 with the so-called "low quality" indicator, or 0.4%.
And this is in an environment where people cast 32 times more upvotes than downvotes so to earn that badge you need to be super super completely absolutely unpopular. Consistently.
You're part of a pretty special group.
Maybe try being less of an asshole? See how that goes for you.
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. Lemmy.ml is not about foss and privacy.
The software feature of having a instance description is innocuous but it's being used for deception.
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.
Again so it hopefully gets through this time - Lemmy, the software, has zero ideological biases or authoritarian behaviour built in. Piefed does. You might be a far more rational and unbiased person than the Lemmy devs, but your software isn’t.
Just as an FYI: Lemmy has a big update 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.
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.
Main dev: @[email protected]
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: 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.
Main dev: @[email protected]
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).
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 used to be a political hot-head, which meant I cheered certain people I wouldn’t touch with a pole these days. I tend to avoid stupid people and situations as I mature.
It is one thing to hold an opinion; it is another to limit which opinions others can see.
Lemmy devs hold a very radical and strong opinion, but they don't enforce it on anybody else. You can have any instances posting whatever. This fosters a healthy and open discussion and political development.
PieFed dev enforces certain optics by limiting the sources viewable through it, and some of the choices raises eyebrows in a major way. For example, did you know PieFed bans WikiLeaks? No matter the political stance, you'd rather be able to cite that. This open censorship limits political discussion and serves to reinforce Rimu's political line instead of going for an honest intellectual exchange.
We have plenty of spaces trying to shape people's opinion. Fediverse is the direct response to this threat among many. Why would we want to turn Threadiverse into this again?
Again, with that said, I tried to give a more neutral outline. Objectively, Lemmy the software is politically neutral, while PieFed is not. If you share the values baked into PieFed, you may end up enjoying this experience. But overall, this is often seen as problematic around these parts.
lemmy is lighter on resources if you care about your internet usage footprint. and far more stable overall.
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.
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?
Mostly because I didn't know mbin has had that feature for ages.
what UI 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.
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, @[email protected]
Can you link to some good meme accounts on mastodon?
I like @[email protected] , @[email protected] , and @[email protected] (this is technically a bluesky account via a bridge to give credit where credit is due)
I would also recommend @[email protected] but I think they might have stopped posting? idk maybe follow anyway in case they come back
(also hi y'all! sorry I'm a little late for follow friday)
That sounds useful. I’ll give it a try
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.
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.
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, promote North Korea, promote 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
Oof... They're even more problematic than I realised, then.
That’s interesting. Although your link is dead and doesn’t let me proceed.
Link is working but here is alternative: https://feddit.online/post/593416
Getting error on that too: Response error: No object found. with status 400
If you give me the topic perhaps i can search it rather
Documentation of Lemmy.ml's Extremism [Megathread]
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected]
![email protected]
Just open the link in a new browser where you aren't signed in and it should work unless you've been IP Banned
Found it. Thanks
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.
Except for that banner I mentioned. Sure, instance owners COULD try to remove it every update; but they don't.
Lemmy's lack of features is why Lemmys community is how it is and that suits the Lemmy devs and their political goals perfectly.
It’s not really lacking anything important though.
Piefed’s features are why its community is how it is - an echo chamber that encourages dogpiling, unfair blocks, and bans.
Piefed has (had?) some weird opinionated behaviours that to me make it seem worth avoiding https://lemmy.ml/comment/23662293
I agree about the attitude score he calculates but saying the word stupid is ableism is silly.
Think about it. If you are stupid, and nobody can tell you that, you get a society full of very stupid people.
Humans do stupid things and we should tell eachother. It's fine if someone thinks I'm stupid. It's an opinion, and I want to live in a society where people are allowed to have that opinion.
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.
I think you shouldn't have removed it because saying something is stupid is not ableism.
Anyway, most people like piefed and I think its great with many alternatives. In a project like this you will get many opinions. Listen to the ones that make sense and ignore the ones that are stupid. Yes, I called something stupid. It's not ableism for gods sake.
I think your attitude score is stupid. But that's my opinion and in the end it's up to you, since it's your software. It's fine. Your intension is to create better discussions which is good. How to do it is not so easy.
Abelism or not it took seconds to change so I don't mind.
Attitude has turned out to be a lot less useful than I hoped...
Yeah. I think hacker news has some decent ideas about how to manage these things. You can ask chat gpt about some details to get the idea, but I think its something along the lines of users not being able to affect a discussion with voting until they have some sort of reputation. And I believe that reputation has to come from reactions by the community.
I think if you ask chat gpt about that and have a discussion, some good ideas could surface. They have karma but it's a ladder system where users get more options only after contributing successfully to the community, not just by time.
Interesting, thanks
If you want to nitpick you'd be better off replying directly to the comment I linked to.
Piefed.world has a different admin and different policies— more open and less controversial ones
You could say the same thing about Lemmy then—lemmy.world is different from lemmy.ml
There are some piefed instances that have forked and rolled back the controversial decisions by the dev. Take a look at quokk.au.
Lol, that’s certainly true, however, the controversial views of the Lemmy devs and that of Lemmy.ML are a lot more extreme than the piefed dev and that of piefed.social, and as a result, piefed.social, its dev, and the instance overall have a lot less distance between them than lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.
Lemmy devs have never ever put their opinions into the codebase..
Yes. There are both similarities and differences in the comparison.
Thankfully, with piefed, it’s both transparent and simple for admins to disable during setup. Also the difference between piefed.social and all of the other PF instances.
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
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.
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, flairs, 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.
The vote quota can be set to whatever the instance admin desires. Just like any other terms of service, it's up to the admin what they give away for free and under what conditions.
afaik only piefed.zip and multiverse.soulism.net have chosen to increase it, though.
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.
There is a 99% chance it won't effect them because 99% of people don't vote more than the quota. I was very careful about that.
Thanks to both of you. In the end if the data backs up what you’re saying then so be it. I’m obnoxious to what the quota is, but I doubt I’d go beyond any quota.
Cool.
Btw if the default UI of piefed isn't doing it for you, try https://b.piefed.social/ or https://p.piefed.social/. Use the same login.
Thanks, these look much more pleasant to view on mobile than the default definitely. I’ve been using the Mlem app so far; I’ll explore the web UIs
What are the available options for piefed clients on Android?
i use lemmy because theres a frontend that looks exactly like old reddit. https://old.lemmy.today/
Has it been working for you? It's been down for me all weekend
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 https://old.lemmy.zip/ instead
Thanks for the suggestion.
That is down, as is old.slrpnk.net, I'll give old.lemmy.zip a shot and see what happens to it
seems to be working now btw!
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.
It's actually a fun coincidence, the Mali TLD used to be free, so they picked it, but it's not free anymore
On the other hand, Piefed also has a bit of a weird social credit system that I'm not a fan of.
You mean earning tokens or referring to something else?
It's a little overstated. Piefed has some indicators to show when someone is usually downvoted more than upvoted, which can help people in moderation decisions, or it can be ignored
There's also some controversy over a configurable limit to number of votes per day, in case an admin is worried about someone being more of a voting bot than an engaged user
But most piefed admins have configured things in ways they are more comfortable with
They don't like how you're limited in the number of up and down votes you can submit daily.
Personally I've never hit the limit.
Good to know. Thanks
I was wondering what the .ml (it’s certain that Mali isn’t some important country in the Fediverse) represented. Very interesting to know
It doesn't mean Marxist-Leninist. It's a coincidence. The Lemmy devs said they started using the domain because .ml domains were free.
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.
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".
mbin!
+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.
Oh wow, I thought I was the only mbinaut here.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
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.
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 face of facts, situations, etc. Glad the Fediverse is what it is—diverse.
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 happy it's there.
we dont need following individual users. It is a discuss community, not mastodon or pixelfed
What.
what you see
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.
Thanks for sharing