4d ago

Lemmy or Mbin users, have you tried Piefed?

List of instances: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list

Piefed has a few nice features that Lemmy and Mbin lack

instance blocking
comments combination, posts only appear once
keyword filter
topics (admin-managed feeds)
user-managed feeds, public and private
ability to reduce the amount of Trump and Musk content

It doesn't have an app yet, but it's in progress

At the moment, it only has 352 monthly active users, so it seems like people aren't very interested in it yet

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7

Is this the lack of app, or is there anything else?

35 comments

I prefer how mbin looks it seems much cleaner. Also on my phone piefed is a mess, text appearing on top of other text or icons making it hard to use.

Apps are in development. I'm testing it right now. Writing this from Piefed in Interstellar, which recently started supporting Piefed.
I'm also testing Pferd, developed by the Piefed devs.
Both are very early in development, some bugs here and there, but I like that there are different options already. I could see myself switching to Piefed when apps are stable.
The ideal situation would be if my favorite Lemmy app Voyager would start to support Piefed, but I don't know if that's a possibility.
- Hello @aeharding@lemmy.world,
  Are you planning to support Piefed at some point in the future?
  
  @aeharding@vger.social

For me I moved over for the killer feature - post combining.
Each post has the comments from multiple instances under it, rather than the usual thing where you see the same post multiple times from each instance / community when scrolling all. So much nicer.
- Forgot about this one, added to the OP

I'm gun-shy after my experience getting settled in with kbin. That said, here we go.
- Me too, but my first jump was to StarTrek.website which at the time was exceedingly slow, like half the time it wouldn't even connect to let me read anything, and every vote or comment waited for over a minute and then had a strong chance to fail.
  Discuss.Online on the other hand is one of the best-run instances across the entire Threadiverse.
  But even so, the call of these awesome features on PieFed very much enticed me to check it out too:-).
  
  Yeah, I've got a now-defunct lemmy instance, one that's still up but is running v18.something and hasn't had another active user in over a year, and another that I couldn't use with non-local instances because everything was so delayed I was basically interacting with 3 days ago.
  On one hand, it sucks that there's so many issues to experience. On the other hand, it's nice that none of these are absolute dealbreakers, especially now that exporting settings/subs is so easy.

Is this the lack of app, or is there anything else?
Probably that and most people just being happy where they are.
- Probably. I was just surprised quite a few people aren't aware that feeds/multi reddits are available on Piefed, the point came up a few times in the AMA yesterday
  
  For sure awareness is part of it, most people here probably don't care nearly as much about platform developments as we do. I'll also be honest, I was on Reddit for like 4-5 years and didn't use a multi-Reddit once, I imagine a lot people are like me and just don't care about them.

There's two reasons I still like Lemmy.
It's very easy to post, easier than piefed.
Also lack of app makes it a pretty slow Firefox app.
Other than that, I love the platform. It's easy to set up, the dev is awesome, and the code is really easy to look at.

My biggest beef with PieFed is its lack of "polish".
there is a "preview" option for new posts, but not for comments, even though 99% of what I do is reply to existing posts or comments
the Notifications feature needs serious work: a medium fraction of the time when I click it's pointing to something that doesn't exist, or if it does it won't actually take me there
the search feature sucks, as too does Reddit's, but Lemmy's is amazing
oh yeah, once you begin a list like this it's super annoying to try to stop, as every line afterwards will try to continue it (even with intervening empty lines)
All of which is a fantastic place to be, when the feature set is even larger than Lemmy's, and in several ways begins to exceed that of Reddit even (in terms of democratization of moderation features). PieFed has its annoyances, which given its super rapid pace of development I have little doubt will be fixed sooner rather than later, but it's like getting in on the ground floor for something that's REALLY going to grow, if only bc every single thing that people are asking for, ends up being added as a feature extremely quickly. Mastodon could really stand to learn something from how PieFed is developed (ignoring user requests, especially celebrities that are necessary to help the platform really take off, and even ignoring actual code written and offered to it? es no bueno).

posts only appear once
Mbin doesn't have the comment combining, but it also combines duplicate posts into one.
I don't think Mbin's approach is perfect, but I actually like Piefed's less.

We've established accounts and histories on Lemmy. Those things are nice but PieFed isn't stable or proven yet, and the upcoming Lemmy 1.0 release should have some of this.
- But Piefed also has some advantages by being a new/smaller project and both projects inspire each other, as pointed out by nutomic in this thread of the AMA.
  Lemmy is a very large project already, so it takes a lot of effort to implement new features, because they have to meet high standards for quality and performance and also work together with all the existing features. A project like Piefed is much smaller and can implement new features more quickly. This allows for more experimentation, and successful features can later be added to Lemmy.
  
  Sure, doesn't change the fact that switching takes effort, and we lose our comment and post histories. And then we have to rediscover all of our feeds...
  Don't get me wrong I hope their development goes well, but I (and I think a lot of people) aren't going to switch just because there's a few new features in PieFed. But who knows, one day that could change.
- upcoming Lemmy 1.0 release
  Lemmy 1.0 is planned for autumn 2025, Piefed might be an alternative in the meantime
  established accounts and histories
  Keep your username and profile picture, you'll be recognized

instance blocking
keyword filter
These are things that I absolutely do on Lemmy today, are we sure these features are lacking? I guess it could be something that my Lemmy client is doing and not a feature built into Lemmy.
- In the default Lemmy web UI
  instances can only be muted, not completely blocked (communities don't appear, but users still do)
  there is no keyword filter
  Clients such as yours do

I've been here for a while now. To me, the UI is more comfortable than Lemmy. At the time I switched, I hadn't found a Lemmy app I really loved, so the PWA here is okay for now. I do really like the Topics feature, especially as a way to simplify building a feed for new users.

Personally I lack the Comments view, including the (x new comments) that allow to quickly catch up with an ongoing discussion
The UI also seems more cluttered than Lemmy Web UI? But that's mostly personal preference I guess

Ping @rimu@piefed.social @OpenStars@piefed.social @fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com

There is another way to read this graph. In fact it is slowly gaining more and more user. We jumped from 100 people to 300 people. The MAU has doubled.
We are pretty close to the tipping point and i invite users from jlai.lu to try out. So more people will tell about PieFed as you do. I regulary present all PieFed features and will probably do an english version soon, just for you 😁
I'm not worried about that and fully commited to it. :)
For our instance jlai.lu, i think they are slowly convainced by PieFed but we need to take our time. I do lot communication about it because it is a good software. Each update improve it in a tremendous way. I enjoy it a lot and the best part are our thought on how to improve our relationship between mod team and users.
Some part lacks polishing but it's a very good beggining. I give them lot feedback.
However to benefit from PieFed to the fullest, we need to migrate our communities to PieFed. For example : managing vote per communities, using tags, moderation and admin board, or waching peertube channel, or later mastodon...And that's not an easy task.
We need :
migration tool
mobile app
the ability to schedule our post : https://lemming.schedule.org/
And some option as [comment view/mod view], notification board that would help our users and mod team.
PieFied is written in Python, the first language of lot developpers. So the development will be easier. Once those areas are covered, we may jump.
Our instance is small and we have a hard time convaincing french redditor as their mods simply delete any comment about Jlai.lu.
But i see a way to get out of this bottleneck : Nastodon. Why ? Because when french reddit users will see our communities an tremendous activities with pixelfeed, peertube, owncast, loops...They may joins us. They would no longer have the excuse : "it is empty." "There is only 100 people" because those number are irrevalent in the fediverse.
Mastodon's users may be also interested in forum discussion. We may come back to the forum era.
We if you don't know abouc PieFed, come and give a try. I hope you will enjoy it :3

35 comments