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I looked into making yet another account, this time on piefed, but didn’t like the automatic blocking of a few communities. Yeah, I’m a massive hypocrite because I argued hard for the defederation of maga.place from sh.itjust.works, but since coming to lemmy.today I don’t like the idea of automatic defederation where the users don’t have input.
Are there any piefed instances that don’t block anything? Or, is there a way for me to befriend everyone on my account?
piefed.zip is likely the one that doesn’t block anything if it is modelled after lemmy.zip here.
Disclaimer: I checked into piefed shit again and this unexpectedly turned into a whole thing.
I found this here https://join.piefed.social/features/ :
Default Blocks – Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and Nazi instances are blocked out of the box.
Does that mean they can’t be unblocked? And now I’m seeing:
Authoritarian Inoculation – Feature to reduce the impact of authoritarian propaganda.
That gave me pause, not because I want to promote authoritarian propaganda, but I’m concerned about someone else deciding what’s authoritarian.
And:
Low Reputation Indicator – Identifies consistently downvoted users.
This feels like karma. I’m alright with rule-breaking stuff getting deleted and people getting banned for bad behavior, but I don’t think people should be flagged for consistently going against the popular narrative. If they’re being assholes users can report them.
I found this here https://join.piefed.social/features/ :
Note how that link points to PieFed.social. Yes, those are defederated at the instance level, so a user cannot work around that - Lemmy defederation works the same way. However, PieFed.zip is a separate instance from PieFed.socual, and does not defederate from much at all.
Low Reputation Indicator
I find that feature very helpful. It’s merely a visual indicator placed next to the username, which is very different than the software making decisions for me on what content to show or not, and that indicator helps clue me in that responding to e.g. an argumentative person is unlikely to enhance my day. Also while I don’t recall the details on how it is set, imagine if you will that someone receives 10x more downvotes total than upvotes. Such an account is usually a troll. Most people get downvotes occasionally, but that would not trigger the indicator to be shown (and again, even if it somehow did, it’s just a visual icon, not a block or anything).
Lemmy is FAR more known for authoritative censorship than PieFed. Particularly those instances mentioned like hexbear and the infamous lemmy.ml where you cannot criticize Russia, China, or North Korea without being banned from every community on the entire instance including those you’ve never even heard of.
Authoritarian Inoculation – Feature to reduce the impact of authoritarian propaganda.
That’s just the anti-propaganda links on the side.
Upvotes mean jack, where’s the community engagement
HERE’S YOUR COMMUNITY YOU FECKIN EEDJIT
floss your limey
teeth with my asshairTo the lovely tory rat that reported my comment as “bigotry”, sorry, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants don’t get to play that card. Go boil your babby yed along yer mum’s yams.
Can’t imagine why people don’t want to hang around y’all
The english are worth a good jab of tough love to the ribs, “Y’all” aint with jack
never did care for piefed, none of the features it’s added so far are particularly appealing to me
Keeping an eye on smaller communities thanks to personal feeds is nice.
the latest feature I’ve found is that when an admin deletes your account on their end it produces a ‘not found’ page, overall the software seems much better at filtering out dissent- ironic considering a primary complaint they have is ‘authoritarian developers’ influencing the software in some nebulous way
I’m quite sure it’s similar on Lemmy: if an admin purges a user, their profile won’t be accessible anymore
the way it works on lemmy there’s still some transparency, for example you can still see that the account existed, and has had posts removed by mod so you can figure out the context lemmy has it’s own issues too, like the fact that you can’t see the removed posts; iirc they’re planning to change that.
in fact on piefed, if you wanted to review the modlog to see who has been getting account deleted, it doesn’t let you see beyond page 1
the next button resets the search
Was that account purged or banned? IIRC there’s a difference, and purged accounts would show ab empty profile without any posts
Good point about the modlog page 2, @rimu@piefed.social or @wjs018@piefed.social can this be fixed quickly? If not I’ll make a Codeberg issue
Lemmy is fine though what are you on about
Okay but it is developed by authoritarian communists. I mean it doesn’t have to annoy you, but it definitely annoys me.
I don’t like the devs but at the same time it’s not like they wield much power over users outside of the flagship instance, lemmy.ml. That’s the nice thing about decentralized FOSS social media. Can even make a fork if they ever did something unpopular.
But they administrate their flag ship instance, which for a long time was the first instance new users registrated on, only to then see on what power trips the Admins are on. The missing separation of development of administration is literally the only critic point I have. If course, Lemmy is decentralized and that is a great thing. Over time, lemmy.ml already lost relevance and it will lose more as lemmy grows. But people tend to think “oh, so this is the official instance I better join there”, just to then face opinions promoting North Korea or denying Russia’s guilt in the invasion of Ukraine and so on. Check out the media bias in Lemmy.ml’s news communities, it is insane.
Check !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for many examples.
Well, it works. But Piefed is developing more features quicker atm.
Doesn’t matter to me, I’m still using the old reddit theme on .world and that’s what I want to keep using.
Piefed or Lemmy, it’s the same content, so you’re arguing about either UI or philosophical differences (Lemmy devs are tankies or whatever).
I’d consider Piefed if they had an old reddit UI available, but that’s never gonna happen and I absolutely cannot stand either Lemmy’s or Piefed’s UI.
I’d consider Piefed if they had an old reddit UI available, but that’s never gonna happen
Why would that never happen?
Well, for one, the old Reddit interface’s appeal is fairly limited in general. Most people use apps anymore, I feel like in general desktop users are not catered to even in default interfaces. Of people who do use the desktop, more of them are likely to be new(er) Reddit users who probably find the Lemmy/Piefed default UI to be superior to Reddit - but the pool of people who prefer old Reddit is dwindling, which doesn’t usually lead to continuing support of things.
As it stands, few Lemmy instances have it and in any case it feels pretty fragile. It has broken a couple times and I think been fixed, but this has led instances to drop it altogether (dbzer0 used to have it, for example, but the lead said it was too much of a hassle and its devs weren’t responding to his questions).
I’m fairly worried that 1.0 is gonna break it, tbh. It never gets any updates that I have noticed, and its functionality is a bit all over the place.
Oh, I had made one for quokk.au a few months ago. It got lost during an update as I didn’t bother to save it, I can probably whip another one up this weekend if I remember.
Edit: This was a wip screenshot I took. It was never 100% the same, but yeah.
It looks great to be honest
So we should all just jump? Meh. Lemmy 1.0 is releasing soon which should help quite a bit.
Not necessarely that’s the beauty of the fediverse. You can enjoy PieFed growth and all it’s content but stick on Lemmy if you don’t feel like moving.
AFAIK the two can federate with eachother so I’m glad we have both.
Thesis: Lemmy is better!
Antithesis: Piefed is better!
Synthesis: Bitch, they’re federated??
No we are a long way off from a 1.0 release yet.
Piefed uses Python which is faster for development but the language is slower. Lemmy is built on Rust. I appreciate some features Piefed has but I do wonder about its scalability.
but the language is slower
it really depends what’s the metric. Most web server stuff is IO-bound not compute-bound so Python can actually be faster than Rust.
I thought Rust was faster for basically every metric?
The entire advantage of Python is supposed to be ease of development, in exchange for slower code execution. It is especially bad in terms of multiprocessing, which Rust is great at.
As I severely lack expertise on back-end development I asked for clarification to the forbidden oracle (AI) but it also told me that Rust is faster. I am not sure whether you feel like debunking an AI comment but if this is false I would love to hear why because from my current understanding Rust is always faster (for back-end development).
AI response
That statement is technically false, but it contains a grain of practical truth that often confuses people.
Here is the breakdown of why that statement is misleading and where the misunderstanding comes from.
The Verdict: False
Rust is almost invariably faster than Python, even in IO-bound tasks.
If you have a web server handling 10,000 concurrent connections that are all waiting on a database (pure IO-bound), the Rust server will use significantly less RAM and CPU to manage those “waiting” connections than the Python server.
Why the statement is wrong (The Technical Reality)
The argument assumes that “IO-bound” means the CPU does zero work. That isn’t true. Even in an IO-heavy application, the application server must do the following:
-
Event Loop Management
The server has to track which connections are waiting and which are ready to resume.- Rust’s async runtimes (like Tokio) are incredibly optimized and have near-zero runtime overhead.
- Python’s
asyncioloop has significant overhead because it is still running interpreted Python code to manage the tasks.
-
Serialization/Deserialization
When the database replies, the server receives raw bytes. It must turn those bytes into objects (JSON parsing, ORM model instantiation). This is CPU-bound work.- Rust does this near-instantly.
- Python is notoriously slow at object instantiation.
-
The GIL (Global Interpreter Lock)
Even if your code is async, Python can only execute one bytecode instruction at a time per process.- If 100 requests come back from the DB at the exact same millisecond, Python has to process them one by one.
- Rust can process them in parallel across all CPU cores.
Where the statement is “Practically” True (The Grain of Truth)
The person making that statement is likely conflating “faster” with “indistinguishable to a human.”
If a database query takes 100ms:
- Rust overhead: 0.1ms → total response ≈ 100.1ms
- Python overhead: 5.0ms → total response ≈ 105.0ms
To the human user, 100.1ms and 105ms feel exactly the same.
In this specific context, you could argue that Python is “just as fast” as Rust because the bottleneck is the database, not the language. But it is incorrect to say Python is faster.
The “Fediverse” Exception (Why it matters for PieFed)
The statement “web servers are IO-bound” is often true for something like a simple blog.
It is less true for the Fediverse.ActivityPub (the protocol PieFed and Lemmy use) involves two things that are heavily CPU-bound, not IO-bound:
-
JSON Parsing
Fediverse servers throw massive JSON blobs at each other constantly.- Python is slow at parsing JSON compared to Rust.
-
Cryptography (RSA Signatures)
Every time a server sends a message to another server, it must cryptographically sign it (HTTP Signatures). Every time it receives a message, it must verify the signature.- Rust handles crypto operations natively and extremely fast.
- Python relies on C-extensions (like
cryptography), which are fast, but the overhead of calling back and forth between Python and C for every single request adds up.
Conclusion
The statement is false.
- Rust is faster at raw execution.
- Rust is faster at handling high concurrency (even IO-bound).
- Python is only “faster” in one metric: development velocity – you can write the code faster in Python, but the code itself will not run faster than Rust.
No, python can be incredibly fast for IO when scaled properly.
You generally don’t run a single process or even program for serving websites. There are task queues, callbacks, microservices etc so the bottleneck is almost never the programming language itself but the tooling and Python’s tooling for web is still miles ahead. Thats why big project ship more Django than Rust and all AI training is running on Python not Rust etc.
Don’t get me wrong Rust is a brilliant language but Python can often be better.
Finally you can outsource high performance tasks to Rust or C from within Python rather easily these days.
Python is an interpreted language, which is fundamentally always slower than a compiled language like Rust. However the main performance bottleneck are actually sql queries, and I believe we make a lot more effort to optimize them compared to Piefed.
-
Lemmy is fine though
except crazy authoritarian tankie leadership? It’s just a matter of time until one of them goes wacky (again) and brings down the entire brand.
It’s good to diversify here.
Who cares if the devs are communists, worst comes to worst you can always fork it while you look for an alternative. Never has come to that though, and it doesn’t look like it will.
Communists isn’t the problem.
Transphobic, genocide deniers are.
What’s the difference? Can I see piefed communities through Lemmy? Or do I need a different account and/or app?
Piefed has more features and different devs. From an user perspective they’re not very different.
How different are the devs? Is it just a fork where they regularly pull the upstream lemmy? Or ground up?
This account is getting pretty old and about due for a nuking and dessalines seems to be speedrunning being the tankie musk (right down to surrounding himself with bot-friends). Lemmy is still good enough software but looking for an offramp if you catch my drift.
Piefed is unrelated at all, afaik.
They’re a bit cavalier with development, though: when they recently rolled out the feature of posts having a ‘selected answer’ a-la StackOverflow, someone pointed out that the marker for the selected answer should be on the post’s data structure, not the comment’s, so a commenter can’t hijack the marker — but the developer replied that they already moved on from that feature and won’t be changing it.
Yes. Entirely different software. Different programming language and tech stack. Also different system requirements and feature set.
Not sure about the developer spirit. PieFed development has traditionally been moving crazy fast and it gets like several new features every month. I think that’s a matter of focus. It comes with consequences, though. But I think overall the project is doing a good job with trying to be compatible to other software. Prioritizing important stuff and doing the right thing. Sometimes some things get done, rather than be 100% perfect. But past experience tells me things often get fixed or changed around once necessary. Not sure if that’s a wise decision here. The JSON exchanged between the servers is probably extra work if changed around later.
things often get fixed or changed around once necessary. Not sure if that’s a wise decision here. The JSON exchanged between the servers is probably extra work if changed around later.
Exactly, changing a protocol is not like changing centralized functionality. Not only it introduces mess that could’ve been avoided and mandates some compatibility measures while every client picks up the modified protocol, but it also allows posts to be messed up while this is fixed — without a way to restore the data as it should be, because false data on the comments is indistinguishable from the user changing the selected answer.
Messing up or losing users’ data should be the biggest no-no in web programming, but some people are remarkably carefree about it.
It’s difficult to discuss development in public places like here. There’s always a hundred things on the backlog. People want this, other people want that and someone needs exactly the opposite if all of it. There are a a bazilion ways users can annoy each other and all of it needs fixing. Then a project needs to be stable and reliable. It also needs new features. Performance needs to be right… It’s a proper nightmare job to balance all of it and maintain a mid-sized project. On top of it people will feel entitled, send in security vulnerabilities, complicated stuff that needs review and messes with things, other devs want something to be cleaned up, changed around, want someone to write more or less unit tests… and that also needs time for a plethora of good communication. And then there’s the actual architecture design and coding, which isn’t easy to begin with.
I didn’t study the code. But I’d bet the representation in the database stays the same, no matter which way it’s phrased on transport. It’s some sql relation between answer and post either way. A UI will also want to know how to style a comment at the point it processes that comment, so it makes sense to have it there. On the other hand it makes more sense for the semantics to have it attached to the post. Then there’s who can edit it. We need to trust incoming notes from third parties anyway. And maybe admins or mods can change it as well. They might be on arbitrary instances. So I’m not even sure if it changes anything with security.
And then there’s always many ways to skin a cat in software development. We can have long meetings to write specifications. We can choose to be a bit more explorative and figure things out along the way. We can even choose to make mistakes and fix them later. I think that’s a great thing with computer programming. Fixing mistakes is usually very cheap compared to for example a mechanical engineer who maybe likes to avoid wrecking a $1m piece of equipment. But that also means software developers have the opportunity to work a different way. And there’s a time for each of the methods. The trick is to apply the correct one at the correct time. I really can’t make a good statement here, I’d need to read the code and judge based on all the nuances I just mentioned. It’s regularly not as simple as something appears from the outside.
Wow, that’s amazing crock of a shit of a speech you have there. You don’t know anything about anything, but you’re ready to pump out a whole pageful about it. It’s quite impressive.
You didn’t study shit, but you bet it’s all fine. You bet the database stays the same, and the protocol is all fine, and nothing is ever bothered by anything. It’s all some ‘SQL’ bullshit, why bother about it when smelly nerds can bother about it all they want, right? It’s just some ‘SQL’ fucking nonsense, it means nothing anyway. Just style the UI and process the comment, and it all goes away, you fucking nerd, why are you ever bothered about anything?
sniff
Oh maybe it might in fact make more sense to have it processed by the post instead of the semantics being attached to the fuck of the comment, what the fuck do I know. Just edit the fuck out of it, it makes more sense on the other hand. We need to trust processing by the semantics of the sense, why not. Who can edit it, incoming parties, yeah! Admins or mods, I’m not even sure.
sniff
Then there’s the skin the cat, we can have many long meetings, the specifications, choose a bit, make mistakes, what the fuck do I know. A bit more explorative, make mistakes, fix them, it’s all fine. That’s the great thing. Fixing mistakes. sniff That’s the great thing with programming. It’s very cheap compared to, uh for example to, uh a mechanical, who maybe likes uh to avoid. But that also means. The opportunity. There’s a time bang for each bang of the methods. bang
sniff
I really can’t make a good statement here. It’s regularly not as simple. The trick is to apply the correct one.
I’d legit rather the software develop and occasionally spaff it up and break the server for a few hours every once in a while rather than the non-moving 5 year plans of Lemmy development.
Also, usually piefed.social is the only instance that gets hit with this as, being the flagship server - it takes the brunt of more ‘experimental’ features. Most other servers don’t upgrade to the latest iteration until they’re sure it’s not going to break them.
Good thing we have both development models and people can just pick what they like. I know which one I prefer. 😆
And seems Lemmy is approaching a release with their efforts of the last years as well, they’re at alpha.17 these days…break the server for a few hours every once in a while
That’s not what botching the protocol does. It opens the way to mess up the posts that shouldn’t be messed up, until the devs get around to fixing it in the protocol and implement the fix on the server and all the clients change their implementation. By that time data on the posts can be irretrievably borked unless someone sits down and retroactively reassigns which answer is the the ‘selected’ one, which again might need an addition to the protocol because it isn’t a central database, except the dev also can’t actually unilaterally decide which is the ‘selected’ answer because the user might’ve changed the selected answer themselves.
Does this sound like ‘breaking the server for a few hours’?
This smells of fresh college-grad coding with people who can’t foresee how their programming decisions affect the software’s workings in the future.
You’ve spent 5 hours now raging against this “mistake”.
A mistake that you didn’t realize is only rolled out on their testing instance.
You have more than one dev stating they are aware of it and it’s on the list to be addressed later, despite claiming you had no way of knowing that. You do as of a decent number of hours ago.
You have another dev stating that this thing you think is a horrible development failure would require DB access to exploit in the way you hypothesized. Together with this only being in the bleeding edge test instance, this invalidates the overwhelming majority of your complaints.
And then you have the sheer balls to tell another commenter their comment was worthless, as it was too much speculation? Your entire fucking thrust is based off not just speculation, but a critical misunderstanding of the situation.
If you have the development background you claim, go make a fucking pull request. I normally hate that sort of shit, but after you’ve pulled the shit you’ve pulled in these comments, throwing your dick around like some sort of hotshot?
Put your money where your mouth is.
I’ve only got ten years experience, mostly in IT infrastructure admin/engineering, but one of the biggest lessons I learned early was to save my criticism until I actually understood what was going on. Another big one was to just not be a dick bag. And to apologize instead of doubling down when I was shown I was wrong.
I guarantee that if you bring this kind of attitude to work, the only reason you’ve lasted is because you’re on a large team. You’d be out in the first month at any of the (smaller) places I’ve worked.
PieFed main devs support human rights.
PieFed is not a fork of Lemmy. It is a different software, but able to share content with Lemmy using the ActivityPub protocol.
For more info: https://join.piefed.social/features/
Are there mobile apps for it as well?
I use Voyager, you can sign in with both Lemmy and Piefed accounts and switch between them easily.
