I have received word that there are people combing through the PieFed code looking for anything that might be harmful. This is excellent and can only make PieFed better and less harmful.
We appreciate their interest in PieFed and look forward to answering any questions and showing people around the code. Please join us at https://chat.piefed.social/ or https://matrix.to/#/#piefed-developers:matrix.org.
There’s no need to listen to rumors and amateur speculation when we’re right here and happy to help. Come on in, the water’s fine!
Performance is something developers like to use as a way to assess quality but there are far more important things (which are harder to put a number on to be objective about) like how easy it is for new developers to contribute to. Besides, it’s what you do with it that counts - e.g. despite Lemmy being written in Rust people are finding it much heavier on the server than PieFed.
People can make slow software using any language or framework.
I don’t have a way to know whether code that others contribute is written by AI (except when the quality is really bad, then the PR is rejected) so I bet there’s some in there but I avoid it. I can’t afford the brain-rot of becoming dependent, at my age the rot is happening naturally pretty fast already. There is a whole spectrum of ways to do AI-assisted dev and it’s changing all the time so I’m not trying to police that and just focus on the quality of the code in the PR.
Does piefed image proxy by default? I noticed the homepage for lemmy.today is really heavy since the proxy’d images seem to be full resolution. I ask this since that thread is about people saying piefed runs smoother they said image proxy is by default on lemmy due to CSAM issues. The network utilization blogpost also seems kind of disingenuous since it puts equal weight on the network utilization on javascript, image compression, and a bad api pattern by the lemmy dev. Through those are issues it seems like its 99% you guys more heavily downscale the images vs lemmy.world (Though I like your guy’s solution better).
Do you also manage the piefed.social servers? What kind of cpu/bandwidth/memory utilization do you guys run for the instances serving the api gateway, am curious about the infra setup in general.
The image thing is complicated.
I run piefed.social’s infrastructure, it’s just a medium-sized VPS that has the database, web app, api, etc all in one. There’s also an old server at my home that’s used for some auxiliary stuff like translation services which are shared across all PieFed instances and which runs chat.piefed.social and translate.piefed.social.