Welcome to a new era of interconnected content discussion with PieFed – a link aggregator, a forum, a hub of social interaction and information, built for the fediverse. Our focus is on individual control, safety, and decentralised power.
Like other platforms in the fediverse, we are a self-governed space for social link aggregation and conversation. We operate without the influence of corporate entities – ensuring that your experience is free of advertisements, invasive tracking, or secret algorithms. On our platform, content is grouped into communities, allowing you to engage with topics of interest and disregard the irrelevant ones. We utilise a voting system to highlight the best content.
Video introduction the codebase
Hello from Piefed! I was a regular on Lemmy and Mastodon for years, but I migrated to Piefed because it is much more lightweight.
The features page shows some differences between Piefed and Lemmy - https://join.piefed.social/features/ Mostly, I appreciate that it is written in Python, so more developers in the community may easily understand and contribute to the code base, and that it is so lightweight. When I connect to the internet I always have to consider data caps, so it’s a relief when websites make a genuine effort to be efficient. I can reliably browse the fediverse through Piefed even when my access is throttled to 50Kbps download.
The lightweight claim is a bit of a stretch. You’re counting content that gets cached in the browser.
Well, regardless what tech stack makes it possible, when my phone data is throttled to ~55kbps Piefed is perfectly usable and most sites are not.
Does it require JavaScript? Does it load in Tor Browser on strict mode?
Some features of the site (like responding to your comment) require JS, but I just tried blocking JS with uBlock and I was able to use most of the site perfectly fine.
I am not sure about strict mode on Tor, but you should totally report back if it works. Give it a shot!
Sounds great!
But I suspect that the Lemmy backend is faster since it’s in Rust. Also Rust codebases are much easier to maintain since it’s a strict language.
Faster?
Speed is literally not even a concern, the only thing I want more of is people. Make it easier to sign up or something
I mean it connects to lemmy, kinda like mbin.
Federation speed is a serious backbone concern. It aligns with perceived reliability. If it seems like comments votes or posts aren’t “going where they’re supposed to” then people can lose faith in the platform
In my experience it’s very snappy, and with minimal JavaScript (if at all). Hell, it’s even somewhat usable in Lynx, though I couldn’t sign in.
Lynx - Now that’s a name I have not heard in a long long time.
I can log in with lynx… It sets a few cookies and then I’m logged in… Though I haven’t tried signing up, if you mean sign up as in register a new account.
Might have been a user error then! Admittedly I did not try very hard.
There’s also a low bandwidth mode available. It’s an impressive platform in general.
And uses less data - helpful for using a mobile data plan. Those numbers shown in the article are all the more impressive even for sending 5x more posts on the home screen than Lemmy’s default, even while still sending >4/5 less data - i.e. it’s more like sending roughly only 1/25th the data per post, if I’m reading that right.
Curious to see if people haven’t heard about it, Piefed seems to be mentioned quite often
Tbf you’re on Lemmy 24/7 so you’ll hear about things much earlier than many others. I’ve also been on Piefed for a minute.
But I’ve come to understand how slowly knowledge propagates through large numbers of people, at least via this medium. First with the APIcaplyse, when I realized that virtually nobody on reddit had even heard of the API changes, let alone moving to Lemmy. And then on Lemmy itself with various major events/dramas that people were totally unaware of until much later.
Piefed is developing rapidly and seems like a worthy alternative to Lemmy and Mbin. The private voting feature is also really cool.
No need to be on Lemmy that much, just watching !fedimemes@feddit.uk you would see Piefed mentioned every week
Same here, on !fediverse@lemmy.world
I’m on Lemmy all the time and I didn’t know that community. But thanks for sharing, this is what I’m talking about.
I’m on Lemmy all the time
Seeding a new spot takes work
I’d heard of it already, since apparently I had added it to my block list, but for the love of me I cannot remember why. Looks like a pretty nice and standard Lemmy visualizer.
mahn kbin is dead. long live mbin. at least use more recent stats
I would curious to see if you could access piefed using Voyager for Lemmy as a front end. It’s about the only decent app for Lemmy that doesn’t squash things on my iPhone mini with text zoom enabled
You can’t, no. PieFed and Lemmy are operating in similar spaces, but are completely different architecturally. PieFed doesn’t yet have an API. Unlike Lemmy (and a lot of other modern web platforms), it doesn’t need one to operate, so copying Lemmy’s to the extent that you’d be able to plug in something like Voyager would be overkill. It would probably also be against the TOS for Voyager (Jerboa actively prevents it’s use with anything other than Lemmy, even if the API is the same).
To be completely honest, if you want a healthy 3rd party app ecosystem, the official UI and backend need to be completely separated with a publicly documented API.
Biggest win with Lemmy, and biggest fluff with kbin. And it shows when it comes to 3rd party app ecosystem. People wanted to build apps for kbin….
It would probably also be against the TOS for Voyager (Jerboa actively prevents it’s use with anything other than Lemmy, even if the API is the same).
nothing like that in voyager terms
Oh okay. Might be though, in the future, if platforms (like Sublinks) get released - it’s not really a relevant issue at the mo.
Private votes sounds pretty cool
doesn’t seem to have a good dark mode, i also use wefwef/voyager ,thunder and phtn instead of lemmy-ui so… any apps? also seemingly no community creation yet.
yep, it show’s under 1 day on wefwef/voyager.
i think I’ll still stay on lemmy.
they have a theme of the colours of the trans flag, Steal?
If you can find a lemmy trans flag theme that we can easily import, I’m all ears :)
id assume creating your own would be easy but I don’t manage a large lemmy instance so how would i know?
On my account I use the (dark) theme Card Shadow. I had an issue with it where I needed to disable the Dark Reader extension in Firefox. Lemmy ignored that but it actively messed up PieFed, though after disabling it, PieFed works perfectly for me.
https://piefed.social/communities has a create local and add remote buttons that look like they would create communities, though I did not text them out.
Edit: and the Create Local option has a “local only” checkbox, i.e. the default being to share the newly created community with Lemmy and Mbin instances via the ActivityPub protocol.
Does it support importing Lemmy subscriptions?
Yes. I added that myself a couple months ago 😎
edit: you have to export your lemmy user settings. that comes down as a .json file. Then you make a piefed user, and there is an import settings in the piefed user profile.
it will also attempt to import any blocks/bans of users/communities you had in the lemmy settings. But if the instance of piefed you are on does not ‘l\know’ about those users/communities it wont add them to bans list. But of course that means the community in question is not federated to the instance you are on, so half-dozen-of-one-six-of-the-other really.
Interesting… I’m very happy with the instance I’m on and with Lemmy but if I decide to self host I might set up piefed instead.
So is it a fork of Lemmy?
it’s inspired by lemmy but seeks to addres; community concerns stemming from that programming is a form of communication and the things the lemmy project owners value as messaging are vile
I’m not sure what that even means. Does that mean it’s right wing? If software can even be right wing or left wing.
Two of the developers are scary communist tankies. And no, I don’t think software can be right wing or left wing. Maybe if it’s centralized, like X, but the developers of Lemmy can’t interfere with Lemmy servers they don’t admin, and it’s open source (lots of other people contribute to the Lemmy source code at this point and so would be able to spot things added in).
Personally, I think the right way to advertise other competitors on the fediverse isnt to fear monger about the developers, but to say what features the alternatives have that might be good. Also, it is nice to have competitors, so also just to advertise based on the availability of alternative options, since it is nice to have those just in case.
The Lemmy devs? I’m aware of this. I’m a right winger and that doesn’t affect me nearly as much as the far left communities of Lemmy users.
The features are all I care about. Eventually I’ll find the right people here and be able to build the communities I want.
They must have been talking about the Lemmy devs (the main PieFed dev is a lefty but no-one has ever accused him of being a tankie). To give you an idea: piefed.social blocks lemmygrad and hexbear, but it also block hilariouschaos (set up by the old exploding-heads guys).
Ooh I didn’t know that the exploding-heads guy did anything else.
Why block instances though? I’ve never been a fan of that, I just let people block me.
I couldn’t really do justice to his opinions about things like that. I just replied because I recognised your name, and wanted to let you know that the software / instance wouldn’t be a good fit for you.
hilariouschaos (set up by the old exploding-heads guys)
…really? I always got the impression that the admin is some teenage girl
I’m a right winger and that doesn’t affect me nearly as much as the far left communities of Lemmy users.
I am surprised that you have survived this long. I am rather moderate left, and even after blocking the main extreme left instances, I still question my presence when I see the amount of far left populism that gets acclaimed here.
A lot of it is disengaging from political communities and making my own. So far the people who leave comments now haven’t been that but, but we’ll see how long that lasts 😂
I am rather moderate left
blocking the main extreme left instances
Sounds like you’re plenty interested in hearing from conservatives. 🤔
Anyone who tries to express themselves politely and rationally is welcomed.
Exactly. I 100% agree with that sentiment.
not a fork, its its own code base built from scratch.
Can I access it via Eternity app? Is it basically another instance?
It’s not compatible with apps yet, unfortunately.
Though there’s a feature request for that where db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com said that he would be excited to work on!:-)
Sadly, I don’t have enough time for that atm.
Ah, so sorry to hear that! I got excited to hear that you were excited to work on it too… :-P
Thank you for telling me so I won’t spread misinformation about it. I hope you get to where you have more time irl soon - whether you choose to spend it on that topic, on Lemmy at all, or touch grass or sth else instead (our health is important!!!). Take good care of yourself (and then get back to work! only if/when you want to ofc:-P).
I’m always hacking at something. It’s just different priorities
Hehe, always never not be hacking, yes absolutely:-).
no apps yet. work on an alpha API is in progress though, so soon™ hehe
This code: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha
Its mostly freamon and rimu working on that part. Iirc its meant to be lemmy api compatible, but i think there are some adaptations needed to accomadate the piefed way differences.
Freamon got a fork of a lemmy app to sort-of work back in september (https://matrix.to/#/!NVUzKiFppMtECaxHQm:matrix.org/$KJqJfus8DVy-B64AC8uWEQ9oiGsRA04AReRF-05nQYA?via=matrix.org&via=tchncs.de&via=jeena.net) so the alpha api stuff has been coming in since then.
Yay! I will have hope in an upcoming API then:-). Thanks for sharing.
