Recently joined and started a community for people who want to move away from Lemmy and want to see Lemmy loosen its stranglehold on the threadiverse, if that seems like something interesting to you consider checking out [email protected]
My thought is that Piefed is too eager to curate my experience and too heavily promoted of late to be believably organic
It reeks of an organized, astroturfed attempt to effectively centralize the fediverse.
Following the lemm.ee announcement, moderators were looking for a way to migrate communities
Piefed had such feature: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876492?scrollToComments=true
No need to think of an organized campaign when one platform has a feature that people are looking for
I thought anyone could create a Piefed instance, and it can be interacted with by both mbin and Lemmy?
i presume you’re questioning the assertion that it seems like an attempt to effectively centralize the fediverse?
Yes - anyone is free to start an instance.
However, a new instance is not going to get any communities on Piefed’s preset list of subscrptions, nor is any community which the Piefed devs, for whatever reason, disapprove of or oppose or simply dislike. And that means that if Piefed can gain enough users (by, for instance, astroturfing the appearance of greater popularity than it in fact currently enjoys), then it will be able to effectively gatekeep the fediverse - to undermine or advance existing instances and create an insurmountable barrier to entry for new instances, by granting or withholding positions on its list of communities to which users are automatically subscribed.
Additionally, it seeks to do essentially the same thing to individual users, by instituting a karma system (something that the rest of the fediverse has not coincidentally avoided, since it was and is so easily and often abused on Reddit) and by automatically collapsing responses with 10 or more downvotes (it would be child’s play to use bots to deal out ten downvotes to whoever one pleased). Again, if it can attract enough users, it will then have enough clout to effectively control the narrative not just in its own communities, but throughout the fediverse.
And those potentialities, in combination with the fact that Piefed has gone from being rarely if ever even mentioned at all to, in just the last few days, being mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times a day in threads on virtually any topic, makes me highly suspicious.
Piefed has gone from being rarely if ever even mentioned at all to, in just the last few days, being mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times a day in threads on virtually any topic, makes me highly suspicious.
You make interesting points, but for this specific thing, it almost certainly has to do with the .ee shutdown which was announced just a few days ago, apparently PieFed has fantastic comm transfer tooling so that’s why it’s probably been exploding in discussions since .ee has a number of large comms that are trying to figure out their next steps
That undoubtedly had some effect.
But then, look at this thread for a particularly egregious counterexample.
So I understand, if I created my own instance of Piefed, the original developers have backdoor access to manage my communities?
That’s incorrect, I don’t know why the person you’re replying too is thinking this
I may be misunderstanding
The Piefed developers don’t have backdoor access to remote communities.
What they have access to, is that communities they want to promote during the onboarding process, but that’s not much more different than Lemmy already allowing admins to have “default blocks” for new joiners: https://lemmy.zip/post/33065677
I don’t really agree that it’s an attempt to centralize the fediverse but I do think that the push and praise for it feels extremely unnatural, especially how people are bragging about liking and wanting the reputational features of it, and being able to hide the modlog. Like dude those are the biggest reasons people left Reddit, and now suddenly “people” are just going gaga for those same anti-features. That seems more than fishy to me…
The reputational anti-features are part of what makes me suspicious. I agree entirely with your impression of it.
And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it’s gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.
The other thing though is Piefed’s automated subscription feature, which, if it gains enough clout, will allow it to effectively promote or undermine, as the devs prefer, communities or even entire instances, and to erect a barrier to entry for new communities and new instances, simply by granting or withholding inclusion on its subscription lists. That’s the primary thing that triggers my suspicion.
Well - that and the fact that aside from anti-features like reputation and automated subscriptions, I don’t see anything notable about the software, and to the degree that it differs from lemmy or mbin, it seems if anything to be inferior, which makes the sudden flood of praise just that much more suspicious.
, I don’t see anything notable about the software, and to the degree that it differs from lemmy or mbin,
- consolidated comment view for all crossposts
- actual instance blocking
- multicommunities
- keyword filters
- being able to move communities.
Hopefully this one shouldn’t be used too often
And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it’s gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.
It was gaining momentum anyway, but the big reason was the collapse of lemm.ee - which held many medium-sized communities having to find a new home. A lot (not all) chose piefed.
Beehaw has been asking for better moderation tools for two years, it’s nothing new.
Also the lemm.ee admins burnout made people question how to deal with toxic users
too heavily promoted of late to be believeably organic
No. Its promoted because of its fast development and extra features.
Piefed is decentralised itself.
Piefed isn’t a centralised system itself. There isn’t just one Piefed instance.
I like Piefed, it’s my daily driver, but cancelling Lemmy is probably too much.
The majority of people still haven’t moved from [email protected] ([email protected] ) or [email protected] ([email protected] ), so trying to get them to switch platform based on “cancelling” isn’t productive.
If you want to advocate for your platform, explain what features Piefed has compared to Lemmy (https://join.piefed.social/features/) instead.
And pixelfed is your alternative? That’s not even close to the same usecase.
PieFed not PixelFed.
PieFed is like kbin/lemmy.
Sorry, I must not have been awake enough, I misread it. kbin is dead when I look at the repo, but piefed still looks very young as a project.
kbin is dead when I look at the repo
kbin is dead yeah, but it does have an active fork in Mbin. That’s what I’m using.
Features
Nice things about PieFed:
- Written in a common programming language that many developers understand and which has a bright future ahead of it. Python, of course! This will enable more contributions from a wider range of people than if it was made with Erlang, Ruby, Rust or PHP, for example.
- Constructed in a simple and straightforward manner that new contributors can come to grips with quickly. No fancy algorithms, special design patterns, fragile build process, or front-end framework. Just Flask with sprinklings of vanilla JS and htmx.
- Keep third party dependencies to an absolute minimum, to make server administration easier. Python + database (PostgreSQL) and you’re good to go! Redis optional.
- Consume few resources, to make it cheap to run. Many examples of federated software are bloated Rube Goldberg machines that require hefty servers and serious server administration skills, making money a constant problem. PieFed instances will be small and nimble.
- Emphasise trust, safety and happiness, drawing inspiration from the Mastodon Covenant.
- Built to last using tried and true technology that will still work decades from now.
Differences between Lemmy and PieFed
- Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
- Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
- Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]
- People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
- Hide all posts based on keyword filters.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
- Better UI design (somewhat subjective!)
- Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)
- Voting is private.
- See also features for healthy communities.
- Each community has it’s own wiki.
Mastodon Covenant & “safe spaces” are overmoderated trash. Features for healthy communities consist of Reddity moderation tactics.
Heavy handed moderation is the main reason Reddit disgusts me, so no thanks, & fuck that shit.
[Features][features]
- [Proceeds to list social credit features]
No thanks, if I wanted that I’d go to the CCP, Reddit, or Twitter.
Don’t forget that admins can literally turn the modlog off on their instance to hide mod actions from others and who did them. How can anyone think that accountability limiting features is a good thing, especially coming from Reddit.
As much as public modlogs are required, the lack of accountability of some mods repeatedly reported for power tripping makes me question sometimes if all of this is not in vain.
[email protected] is still the most popular privacy community
[email protected] is still the most popular world news community
On the other hand, there are several features that Lemmy always ignored, and that exist on Piefed
- consolidated comment view for all crossposts
- actual instance blocking
- multicommunities
- keyword filters
As much as public modlogs are required, the lack of accountability of some mods repeatedly reported for power tripping makes me question sometimes if all of this is not in vain.
Maybe it seems that way since mods don’t always or often yield to pressure on YPTB, but if there wasn’t a modlog or if they could hide it and not announce actions publicly. We wouldn’t even know. People would still complain about their bans but there would be no public evidence. No one could make a critical assessment based on the public evidence it would be the banned person’s word against the mods. That’s what a life without the modlog is, that’s what it is on Reddit. I do not believe that real people want to go back to that. Server admins and mods maybe but not people.
On the other hand, there are several features that Lemmy always ignored, and that exist on Piefed
I believe the second, third, and possibly the fourth one are coming in later Lemmy versions.
Enabled and working
No one could make a critical assessment based on the public evidence it would be the banned person’s word against the mods.
I agree. I’ll ask Rimu to enable the modlog on Piefed.social.
It just got enabled on https://piefed.world/modlog (so similar to https://quokk.au/modlog), it should appear in a few hours
I believe the second, third, and possibly the fourth one are coming in later Lemmy versions.
Let’s talk again once they are here.
Edit:
Better UI design
Not from what I’ve seen.
I don’t have a problem with Lemmy as software. I do wish the devs weren’t tankies, but we don’t have to engage with them.
People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
Software enforced echo chambers, as if it wasn’t bad enough.
Everything else looks so good about piefed, sad to see a deal breaker like that.
Yeah this is like the worst feature of Reddit taken to the extreme by the ability to filter out upvotes from communities, but still allowing downvotes from those communities to hurt your score. I can’t support a platform like that.
I will check, but IIRC downvotes on ignored communities aren’t accounted either
That’s not what it says in the building healthy communities section. It said that upvotes in “low quality communities” aren’t counted but downvotes are.
@[email protected], we might want to revisit this, maybe it would be more fair to discount votes on those communities altogether
- Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]
So what you’re saying is that they have a
Social CreditKarma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
Oh a really strict social credit system. Yeah fuck piefed for sure. It’s already bad enough that people maliciously downvote comments on lemmy with alts, giving power to their votes will just make that shit worse.
As much as people give the Lemmy Devs shit they work hard to prevent this from happening on Lemmy, they removed the score API so people couldn’t use Karma bots like Reddit does, they have a publicly exposed modlog so mod actions can be called out and critiqued (piefed has no modlog as far as I can tell). They may have their problems but Lemmy is a far better platform in terms of freedom and open-ness. Piefed is the real Reddit 2.0 complete with it’s own social credit system, designed to make people with less popular opinions (or people at the mercy of downvote brigading) be ostracized.
Those are all optional choices for instances.
So what you’re saying is that they have a Social Credit Karma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.
Not that I’m aware of, members can see what percentage others vote (i.e. do you vote 100% downvotes?) but that’s about it. Mods and admins can see a reputation metric, but that’s not forward facing to the public and simply a way for bad faith actors to be flagged.
Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
You can set it on a per instance or community scale as to if votes count, if you only accept votes from your instance, etc. It’s actually a really handy option to have, maybe you want a community for only local members to vote on policy etc, well now you can filter it so only they can vote in here.
(piefed has no modlog as far as I can tell)
Admins can turn it on/off, I’ve turned it on for my instance. https://quokk.au/modlog
Admins can turn it on/off, I’ve turned it on for my instance. https://quokk.au/modlog
That’s still not really much better. It should be on by default, the whole reason there’s a modlog is for liability. Hiding the modlog isn’t doing anyone any favors, don’t try to tell me that there’s merit to that. Obfuscation of mod actions is hiding them from accountability.
So what you’re saying is that they have a Social Credit Karma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.
Not that I’m aware of, members can see what percentage others vote (i.e. do you vote 100% downvotes?) but that’s about it. Mods and admins can see a reputation metric, but that’s not forward facing to the public and simply a way for bad faith actors to be flagged.
Piefed puts weight on votes, the software punishes for being downvoted a lot. Therefore this is in a sense a social credit system. And it’s made worse by the fact that you can exclude upvotes from counting but downvotes still count in there, so you can make it very difficult to earn
social creditreputation but easy to lose it. That’s not acceptable to me, that’s worse than the environment on Reddit. This isn’t a good thing.
Are you ashamed of your post history or why did you create a new account for this noble cause?
Did…did you start a lemmy community for people to talk about not talking on lemmy…on lemmy?
It appears to be a Piefed community. You can see it on Lemmy through the magic of federation though.
Lemmy isn’t the only platform on the fediverse, nor the only one with communities.
I’m writing from Mbin btw, another platform that’s not Lemmy.
No… I started a Piefed community to discuss Lemmy alternatives and problems with Lemmy, on Piefed, the superior platform.
Why cancel lemmy? it ain’t perfect, but it’s not a bad platform.
Some people for some reason want to cancel or boycott lemmy as a software because they think it’ll hurt the Devs, which is stupid because this is open source software. Not only do the Devs get nothing from people using it without donating but they can’t stop people from using it either, and since it’s opensource, they can’t stop people from modding/forking it either. This whole movement to cancel Lemmy is just reactionary garbage.
Reactionary to what?
It is reactionary to want to cancel an open source project or codebase based on grievances with a particular person or their opinions.
Unrelated, but happy cake day
Oh thanks, I think that’s the first time someone’s said it to me on Lemmy. Which is weird since I’ve had multiple others before. This account is two years old, and I have other accounts too.
Yeah, I don’t even think this one is your main, but hey, here we are
Basically, the devs are tankies and extremely transphobic.
i just say feel free to block the triad of tankies instances, i imagine the complaints are come from there.
Get my downvote and out
You can sell me on Piefed without trying to cancel Lemmy out of nowhere.
How does it compare to mbin as a Lemmy alternative?
Do you know where I can see a list of piefed instances?
Not that you would want to look any where else of course, but…
filter by software.
join.piefed.social has a list somewhere.
Interested, how do I move an instance from Lemmy to piefed?
I’m not a server admin., just a user. The Lemmy instance I’m on setup a Piefed instance in parallel and is giving users the option to use either, or both. I’m still trying to get my head around the history and the pros/cons of each but for now it seems like I’m switching to Piefed. I imagine that if most users move then the Lemmy instance might get shutdown in the future.
I doubt it would get shutdown, all the communities there would have to shut down.
At the moment, you basically have to restart it all with a fresh install of PieFed on your server.
They are working on features options to transfer over and copy the content etc, but that may be many months away still.
So I will stick on Lemmy for the time being. After all I don’t care for down votes, I think votes in general should not be private, because this is like a public plaza what you say is public, and attaching a reputation because of down votes is dangerously bullying and a slippery slope, so piefed doesn’t actually feel like my pie at the moment.
Still maybe I will try a fresh installation just to check it out.
So, are all the posts and stuff on your instance gone?
Were you able to migrate the DB?
I could have, and I still have the old Lemmy server around to do so if I wanted but it wasn’t deemed worth the effort. It was mostly world news, and who reads old news.
On most fediverse softwares its near-impossible to start federating on the same domain without the same keys it had before. Lemmy is the exception.
this explains why most of the images from quokk are broken anyway.
Get a job
I’ve always thought it was really weird and really dumb sentiment to want to cancel Lemmy, as an Open source software. It’s like people think they need to endorse the developers’ views to use Lemmy, or pay them money to use the software. But like that’s really dumb. Lemmy is free and opensource software, the developers have no say in who uses it, it’s also opensource meaning anyone can fork it. So this position just seems weird and reactionary.
One thing that really makes me reluctant about the future of piefed is the fact that it runs on Python. Great for tinkering but it likely won’t scale well, and Python is famous for breaking backwards compatibility. So expect this project to be hosed when Python 4 or 5 comes out and breaks compatibility or syntax with the previous version. I saw this happen with Kodi and other platforms with Python Based plugins, and it’ll most definitely happen again, not to say it can’t happen with something like Rust or Go, but these compiled languages are designed for big projects, python is just one-off scripts, so the ones maintaining languages like Rust, Go, C++ work a bit harder to keep them as functionally compatible as possible so big projects aren’t crippled and trashed by an update.
Anyway that’s my opinion on this whole thing, I don’t believe Piefed is the future, and I do not think Instance Admins should jump at the chance to abandon Lemmy. Maybe for sublinks if it ever comes out, but not for piefed.
Mate,you have a 20 year old perception of python. “good for tinkering”, Cheezus…
Are you denying the problem of Backwards compatibility with python versions? It was and still is a big problem today. I’m still seeing the affects of that though many communities. I don’t really think it’s only good for tinkering but I know its developers clearly do, otherwise they wouldn’t have subjected us to the transition from python 2.7 to python 3 and the fallout that followed, and people wouldn’t have been so eager to comply with them dropping python 2.7 support in all their python integrated envionments before you could say bitrot.
Yeah somehow that doesn’t give me much confidence for the future.
Python 2 transition took decades and EOL was almost a decade ago, get over it. If you still want to use it, use it!
I don’t understand this approach at all. Software evolves and sometimes you need breaking changes. Godot did it as well, but I guess that “great for tinkering” as well.
It fills me with confidence that the language is the most widely used in the world and is not afraid to do what must be done instead of growing stale and unwieldly so that lazy developers don’t learn anything new.
Yes I don’t think that demolishing whole ecosystems is a good thing. I think that it’s a shitty mentality of wanting shiny and new shit and fixing what isn’t broken. I am a believer in legacy support and I find it weird and concerning to see and hear people complain about it. You do realize that if Python had been the Web’s scripting engine instead of JS, a lot of Websites would’ve been, and still would be trashed and unusable due to said breaking changes with zero regard for legacy support. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but it does go to show that legacy support and backwards compatibility is important.
Again, python 2 still exists. nothing would be “trashed”. If you want backwards compatibility just keep using python2. We clearly don’t see things the same way, but given that python is the most popular languge in the world, I’m happy most see it my way.
But python isn’t the webs scripting engine. If it was, browsers would have support for python3 and 2.
What the fuck are you talking about Jesse?
there is nothing wrong with lemmy.
Fwiw, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
I for one am extremely happy to see PieFed flourish, and one of my chief reasons to move to it 8 months ago was specifically to block lemmy.ml.
That said, I have no desire to “cancel” anyone at all - and the Lemmy devs are worthy of respect for their accomplishments, even as they also deserve some criticisms for the way that they run their instance.
I love how the future allows PieFed and Lemmy - and Mbin, nodebb, flarum, friendica, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. - to exist altogether in the Fediverse, without needing any of the others to die out. I even maintain accounts on both PieFed and Lemmy instances, as each currently offers features that the other lacks.
(also, if some of the lemmy instances were to be cancelled, then all of their users would come over to here… think about that for a moment, is that a desirable outcome to you? :-P)
