Hello m@teys,
I’ve been waiting for this a long time (half a year), personally. After seeing the surge in piefed instances, i.e. blahaj, .ca, .zip, quokk.au, and .world creating their own instances, and clients guaranteeing future piefed support, we’ve been thinking about potentially opening an instance in the future. Not a guarantee, just an idea. This isn’t a voting thread, just a discussion. Later on we’ll actually vote on this.
Do note that this thread will not guarantee an instance; we are discussing a hypothetical. Suggestions? Ideas? Criticisms? make your voice heard.
Have a good week!
pie picture comes from here
governance type: sense check
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/fxomt
This is a non-voting post. Known users should leave comments with your thoughts on the subject.
I am only tangentially aware what’s going with the developments so far in the developer community. I’m thinking about it and so I’m going back to how I got here from Reddit myself. These are just my two cents.
There some realities to deal with which are end user cases. I think the major push off of reddit to Lemmy was the closing of the third party apps. This is what provided Reddit usability for a large scale of its base. When developers left reddit their userbase went with them because that was the app they liked.
The benefits were clear, safety from enshittification, freedom of speech, and the same advertisement free user experience from third party apps with responsive user interfaces. It’s hard to admit there was a swath of users who probably moved because they used SYNC for Android and strongly disliked the mobile reddit UX. That whole period has cooled off now and people probably have less change energy in them now then before.
I would think that that to make a successful leap from Lemmy to Piefed, there would probably have to be a clear migration path that is relatively seamless. All communities, post history, and app compatibility would have to come with it.
Now with that being said, I wouldn’t want to burden the maintainers of any instances with additional overhead however I do trust them to be more aware of the inner workings of the systems they host than myself. Sometimes it’s worth standing up an environment to see if it’s abilities can stand the test of your use case.
For that reason alone I would be for standing up alternatives at least to try them out.
Thanks
Here’s my two cents:
Because there’s no direct integration with Lemmy, and we start with an empty piefed instance. I’ll have to create a user and all that, and I “just” quit Reddit so it’s not very appealing to me, even if piefed has better features.
I would create an account if everyone migrates, or if I can click a “move to piefed” button that copies all my comments and posts.
Wdym no direct integration?
Sadly those two are not possible for us to do now, but the lemmy instance will always be the top priority.
It would be direct integration (maybe I chose the wrong term) if piefed could share the database with Lemmy, then uses only had to start using the new features in piefed.
Because they are two different activitypub implementations I would not expect easy migration to be possible in the near future or ever, most likely only if it becomes a part of activitypub.
deleted by creator
A comment in this thread by @WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com put it quite well:
rimu has said he’ll make it more neutral
I’ll believe it when I see it.
It’s an odd thing - the Lemmy devs are notoriously opinionated and intolerant, and are constantly castigated for it, but I don’t recall ever seeing even a single hint of their opinions or even their intolerance baked into the Lemmy software.
Piefed, meanwhile, is a direct reflection of the dev’s biases right from the start, and with everything from the curated subscription lists to the karma and private voting, seems designed explicitly for the purpose of empowering bias.
Say what you will about Dessalines and Nutomic - at least they keep their biases to their own instance and out of the Lemmy software. And further, they appear to have gone to some lengths to make the software as neutral as possible - not only not reflecting any specific bias but limited in ways that make it difficult for it to even be used to impose bias.
And the same can NOT be said for Rimu and Piefed.
this is kind of where i’m at. i’d like a lemmy alternative bc i am not a fan of the red fash, but piefed ain’t it chief.
I dont really care, but I won’t be using piefed. the default UI doesn’t allow me to adjust the size of thumbnails as i see fit: tiny and on the left. that’s a deal breaker for me, even if it’s petty.
I do not like new reddit and i have never liked new reddit and i have tried new reddit and will not be using new reddit. piefed UI is a new reddit ripoff.
or i guess a lot of social media platforms do that layout, Twitter FB insta. thankfully i dont waste my time with that shit either. I waste my time with YOU nerds and I am happy with that
Piefed has a custom CSS section in the settings that allows you to resize the thumbnails as you see fit
interesting! still easier to just not use it than to learn CSS
not to mention, Voyager… like the whole reason I came to Fediverse to begin with was the loss of RIF app
I don’t know any CSS, hopefully other people share theirs: https://piefed.social/post/875579
okay, maybe this is becoming doable
Voyager has PieFed support now.
nice!
i like lemmy a lot. i also like that piefed seems to have better mod tools (at least i am told so). as one of the many people who lost their lemm.ee account to mod burnout, i think the important thing is what you like to work on.
if you can only support one plattform, choose the one you like better - i will most likely follow db0 for its governance.
if you can support both platforms and have fun doing so, i don’t see a downside in it.
Thanks for your input! Don’t worry, we’ll keep both instances alive.
My first thought when seeing the pic was “Is it AI?”. I need a vacation. From life.
A comment I came across a while ago puts it quite well:
I haven’t used piefed myself but I wouldn’t want to switch to it because I feel like it gives more power to downvotes and karma (or “reputation” as they call it):
- Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
- 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.
- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
Those are three of the twelve points listed as differences to lemmy on their features page.
I also don’t agree with some of the points in their article on “PieFed features for growing healthy communities”.
from: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/17119490
the comments’ thread is also quite interestingPlus it’s written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales
Slightly edited from an older comment of mine:
EDIT: as such I believe that operating a Piefed instance would be a waste resources and actually harmful considering the fragmentation it would cause for little to no benefit at all (also it seems much better set up for a new Reddit with all the .world’ers flooding over there and the anti-features)
I think rimu has made the karma system to be optional (i.e. in the admin settings, not hardcoded) so we’d just disable it anyway. I think the second feature should only apply to mods/admins, since its a very useful tool. #1 #3 i agree, they are not good.
I’ll address each point in the Piefed Features for growing healthy communities:
Find people who have low karma
This applies to admins, and while not really that effective, its okay to have.
Find people who downvote too much
This is a very useful tool, since this is a big problem on lemmy. Same thing; only for admins
Spot spam easily
Sounds like a good idea; but with feature #3 as you pointed out, this might cause some new-user shitposters to get falsely flagged, but we would disable it anyway.
Don’t award karma in low-quality communities
This is now opt-in, and we would disable it.
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Low.20reputation.20communities/near/1872
Warnings on unusual communities
We would add nothing to communities, anyway; users are free to do whatever they want, themselves. (maybe to our own instance communities like /0 and governance? But not much honestly.
Icons next to comments by low karma accounts
As i said before, probably should only be seen by admins/mods.
Icon for new accounts
No problem here; most clients do this anyway.
Automatically delete content based on phrases in user name
Sounds very useful, and which is why piefed didn’t struggle at all with nicole.
Report accounts, not just posts
Good idea.
Instance-wide domain block
We have this on lemmy too
Automatic reporting of 4chan content
Not a good idea imo. We’d disable it.
Plus it’s written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales
We’ll always have this lemmy instance anyway :) but afaik it scales fine, and has some optimizations coming along soon.
Genuine question: Lemmy provides a good, solid backbone and API, right? And a lot of 3rd party tools & clients make up for it’s “deficits”, even in admin tools. So why do we need a big monolith and risk fragmentation, even if the features are “native”?
Clients can only do so much sadly. For example, they can’t make polls, user flairs, implement passkeys, following threads, disabling, proper blocking implementations, and etc.
Even then, the features that clients can somewhat implement (like post tags) rely on others using the same client, and aren’t considered as a standard.
For the karma features, we’ll be sure to disable it if we made our own instance. And as we said; the lemmy instance will always be active and the main instance.
True that, I suppose Piefed has it’s advantages with a faster development pace.
Although I’m still sceptical, especially regarding fragmentationSkepticism makes sense, though if we were to make an instance we’d definitely start small at first (maybe invite-only?) and then see how it scales, just in case.
Example
- !schedule@lemmings.world used to be the way to schedule posts on Lemmy.
- However, over time the experience wasn’t always the best, and quite regularly users would have issue getting their posts out
- Piefed now has an built-in scheduler feature, which makes it easier to manage
Don’t award karma in low-quality communities
Bad idea.
This is now opt-in, and configurable by admins
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Low.20reputation.20communities/near/1872
I know :) just addressing the albeit outdated post she linked.
Instagram is written in a much more heavy python framework, but it scaled fine.
I’d be willing to bet that the backend isn’t
Its the backend. It uses django which is more resource intensive than flask, which piefed uses.
Huh, TIL. Though some websites say they made the performance intensive stuff like image processing in C++
On python those libaries are usually written in C anyway.
Why would you go through the pain of maintaining another service? What is the actual benefit for you as an instance manager, but also for the user?
I’d rather have few very good maintained services, than the opposite.
From my admin POV, lemmy lacks in a lot of ways that just makes it harder for me to get stuff done.
From my user POV, lemmy lacks features like flairs/tags, actually working blocking, feeds, etc.
It’s not too much of a pain, since dbzer0 doesn’t take much work to keep running.
I’ve been a sys engineer for a long time. You have to know that it just adds up. A tiny service here, a tiny service there, some custom code here and there. If you will fully manage it, go for it. Then piefed will be up as long as you or a successor manages it. This setup will not affect lemmy and db0 and that’s all I want and care for.
Thank you :) it will not affect lemmy.dbzer0 at all, and we don’t bother modifying the source code of lemmy/piefed (besides themes) but besides that, it should hopefully be smooth sailing if it happened.
Against this idea as it merely causes significantly more work the instance maintainers with (imo) quite limited benefits. I’d only be in favour if lemmy began crashing and burning for whatever reason.
I don’t think it’s a good idea, but i don’t care so long as the lemmy instance stays open.
I think people’s concerns over the politics of the developers are overblown and fragmenting into a new project weakens the fediverse - especially when I don’t see anything wrong with the software that is being done differently in piefed.
I think people’s concerns over the politics of the developers are overblown.
It seems a little unnatural because people are trying to hide their racism, xenophobia, western superiority mentality, but the developers also made a lot of political posts to frame them as CCP talking heads. They should have just used alt accounts like rest of the internet platform owners. Rookie mistake.
But, at least they’re honest about what they are and not covertly creating a foss product by hiding some sinister motive to rugpull later, like bluesky.
I missed something I think, what’s wrong with Bluesky?
Bluesky will with 100% certainty turn to shit once the investors start sinking their claws into it. Every platform that is driven by profit will eventually turn to enshittification just like reddit is doing right now. Its inevitable. I’d rather set my focus on something like Lemmy or piefed which isn’t profit driven and can be forked.
Bluesky has a protocol, and advertises itself as decentralised.
This is true/false depending on your defintion of decentralised.
The main problem is that almost all users are on bluesky’s servers, and it was originally very expensive to run another node (this has since been fixed).
FWIW, bluesky is run by people who do care about it. The source of enshittification I see happening to them is investors demanding a return on their investment. They seem aware of this, they said they consider the organisation to be a future adversary.
I made two posts about it: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47335289 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47394310
I mean, unless you’re closing here I don’t mind what you do. I think this is the best instance. I think the leadership is top notch.
I’m a happy guy
I think that, for most dbzer0 users (and quite a few landlubbers like me), being able to choose between a Lemmy and a PieFed instances is only positive. What you need to take into account is the additional work this incurs towards you guys, the admins; you’ll be maintaining two instances instead of just one.
Maintaining the instance isn’t too big of a problem, but thank you for your input!
Growing is usually good. Do the expanded tools to the admins warrant the additional headache?
Sometimes being small and having your own dark little corner of the internet where the “normies” don’t hang out is OK too.
A lot of forums started with a barrier of entry that required a small bit of tech savvy to get there. Not that picking an instance to get on the fediverse is that hard, but if it’s keeping someone at bay, that might be preferable.
We don’t have interest in being mainstream, we like dbzer0 how it is. It’s mainly about the faster development/extra features, and shouldn’t be a problem to manage
Some of my thoughts:
I value the community that we have and the style of communication that makes Lemmy different from other forum type software.
I very much dislike the political views of its creators.
I have an account on Piefed and while it’s not terrible, it’s still not as nice as here. I think it can get there over time.
Thanks for your input. To clarify we don’t want a 100% switch, just a new instance alongside this one
