Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I'm blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.

Whats the catch? Why aren't we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?

App support is one thing I can think of.

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[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 36 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (28 children)

We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it's not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question. Currently it seems it's got a bit under 1000 users across under 10 servers.

There are now sizeable communities run on Lemmy instances that are reinforced by network effects. There needs to be a significant reason for them to migrate. To that point, the collective project is building communities away from corporate power, not software. The software is a tool to facilitate that. Lemmy has worked well so far in this regard. If someone can show that Piefed can work better and not cost significantly more, it'll probably get adopted for new communities. If the difference is drastic, we may even see migrations from Lemmy.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question.

I don't think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They've got room to grow.

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list

People can start posting about PieFed on Reddit and see how the Reddit users react.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

But how is that not a concern if you're interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 new users in a few days. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That's not gonna be great for you or the new users.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

I think it's unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don't even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.

There's already been some comments about PieFed and they didn't result in huge surges.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Sure but does the rate of growth matter? The post asks about recommending Piefed instead of Lemmy. I presume the point is that the number of Piefed users would grow if we did that. So whether a thread produces 10, 1000, or 10000 users in a day, the number of users would grow over time. Then I think the question remains, if my Piefed instance costs $10/mo to run today, would it cost $100 with 10000 users or $1000, or more, or less?

Relevant

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.

Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.

If people start recommending PieFed now, it's on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, that makes sense for the defect class of performance problems. I'm more concerned with the inherent performance (compute) disadvantages of Python. Perhaps they wouldn't matter, hard to know without load testing.

I didn't downvote.

[–] Snoopy@piefed.social 1 points 20 hours ago

Well, i thought the same about rust and python. i'm not a dev and lack understanding on their component.

My opinion became more nuanced with Lemmy. I have read there spike in ressource usage with lemmy on server.

So, I believe the language matter but also its features, the way you think how people will use it. Its core design.

When you manage a social network, the most fondamental feature is the moderation board. I find this area is lacking on Lemmy. Crosspost ? Duplicate everywhere, on my timeline, i get 4-5 time the same post...so i believe it miss some design thinking.

From what i see, the various lemmy-bot (most of them are written in python i think ?) and alternative frontend are improving lemmy experience. For example, how do you add an mod with lemmy-web-ui ?

I also believe that being written in Rust make it harder for new devs to help. But in later time we will see a change.

I'm not sure if it answer part of your question, but there are area where lemmy can improve : https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/

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