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
Piefed has (had?) some weird opinionated behaviours that to me make it seem worth avoiding https://lemmy.ml/comment/23662293
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are the available options for piefed clients on Android?
Lemmy.
The PieFed dev has some pretty extreme views and goes out of his way to censor and limit what users can do.
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.
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?
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
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
I’m not sure what you heard but this should clear it up any misunderstandings.
https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/06/what-piefeds-social-credit-system-actually-does/
It’s actually a fun coincidence, the Mali TLD used to be free, so they picked it, but it’s not free anymore
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.
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
+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 fact 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
lemmy is lighter on resources if you care about your internet usage footprint. and far more stable overall.
Just as an FYI: Lemmy has a big update in the pipeline 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.
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, fairs, 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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]
That sounds useful. I’ll give it a try
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’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.
