- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Today the first of Feb is Global Switch day, Spread awareness of the Fediverse in your communities.
Isn’t lemmy the reddit of the fediverse?
Lemmy and Piefed are both Reddit alternatives. I’m not sure what all the pros and cons are of each, but Lemmy’s developers are tankies so probably better to direct users and funding to a different project. I’m only on Lemmy because I wasn’t aware of Piefed when I first joined.
Lol, posting Piefed as an alternative to reddit to Lemmy…
Also, PeerTube is super obtuse to get an account and has almost no reach. You almost have to personally know someone who has a server or host your own. There’s a reason why video hosting has gotten so corporatized: it’s expensive. That said, almost “no one” used Mastodon for nearly a decade and it’s finally starting to take off, so maybe it just needs another decade or two.
A lot of people hesitate to promote lemmy because of how transphobic / authoritarian the lead devs are. It’s unfortunate, but if you’re concerned about that then piefed really is the more attractive option (I like my comment history too much to have switched yet but… man, it’s getting hard to justify not having done it.)
And obviously the Piefed codebase is so politically and ethically agreeable… /s
No one likes the lemmy lead devs or their stances. But, to my knowledge, they just keep doing their own thing over at
.mland never channel it into their actual codebase.When I first started here, I was on Kbin, and switched to lemmy because it was so much better. I considered switching to Piefed exactly because of these reasons you mentioned (I’ve already switched lemmy instances, comment history is not an issue for me), but when I looked into it there were so many just frankly aggravating things about the way it works and filters stuff by default (not to mention being written in Python, but that’s completely tangential) that I couldn’t do it.
Sure, lemmy developers have backwards principles. But at least their software doesn’t. I completely get why someone would use Piefed instead, especially if they’re trans or of some other demographic directly targeted by the lemmy developers, but I wouldn’t do it myself (unless it gets better, of course).
And obviously the Piefed codebase is so politically and ethically agreeable… /s
People are more likely to donate to a project that they actually use. If more people are using piefed, it means more money going to that project rather than a bunch of tankies. So I can see why people who disagree with the Lemmy devs might want to direct people elsewhere even if the software itself is apolitical.
It’s a testament to (if nothing else) the ability of the piefed devs to behave like adults that I know nothing about them personally. Nu/Des are horrible people, both politically and interpersonally, but that’s the beauty of FOSS: Those of us comfortable with separating the software from the creators get to stick with the software we prefer over one that lacks features or broad support (i.e. all the piefed apps I’ve tried have been pretty rough). Same energy as why people still use windows instead of linux.
I’d argue that it is more because so many people have hate comms and groups set up specifically to target the lemmy devs. Idk why people hate Des so much
Theee are hate comms for the lemmy devs? I’ve failed run across them, huh.
There’s even a user who manually mirrors stuff posted on ml because they hate the devs that much
I’m not entirely sure what that means.
mbin should be on there too IMO. similar to Lemmy but it federates properly with microblog stuff.
UX is everything.
Because I don’t want to give people more descion fatigue I picked the one I felt had the best UX
the ux is dependent on the app or webapp (usually tied to an instance) you are using, and mbin is the same ux as Lemmy like 90% of the time. there is only one mobile app (Interstellar) but its no worse than most Lemmy apps. i think the better federation alone would be enough to make it more popular if Lemmy wasnt the only thing being recommended for threads.
Also, to avoid doing unpaid labour for Jeff Bezos, go from Goodreads to Bookwyrm!
Bookwyrm is cool, it just needs more attention and interaction. It would be cool if it could expand into other forms of media (games, movies) like NeoDB, which again feels like posting into the void.
There’s also StoryGraph - it’s not federated, but ran by a tiny UK company, but seems pretty popular. I like the content warnings feature and stuff like readers rating the pacing and moods of the books, which is then displayed with graphs on the book page, but they have also introduced some AI features :/ (fortunately opt-in)
I’m a little behind on this, what does goodreads have to do with bezos?
In 2013 Goodreads was sold to Amazon 😭
It’s impressive how Goodreads has been owned by 10+ years by the company with the largest cloud infrastructure and supposedly great engineers, and still it loads like shitty personal blog from the 2000s. It’s pretty obvious it was just bought so they could redirect traffic to Kindle store, just like IMDB redirects to Amazon Prime.

I am unreasonably angry about the stretched icons.
Hey, hey you.

Get some.
It makes it look like a shitpost at a glance lol
Loops is mid. The community is pretty inactive, and the iOS build is quite buggy and lacking.
Tiktok -> tiktok with less content and login required unless you like the 10 videos we have chosen for you.
I checked out Loops again last week, it’s alright but needs more content. I think it’ll get there if it keeps chugging along as it’s been doing.
It’s still in Beta.
Content volume will increase over time but requiring login killed it for me.
Heck they’re even mimicking tiktok login begging techniques
I’m 1 foot out of Reddit
Welcome!
Since your Lemmy account is only 3 days old, I would recommend switching over to PieFed. It’s a much nicer experience and federates with all the same servers that Lemmy does, so you’re seeing the same posts but in a better way. You’re on lemmy.zip, and the same devs run piefed.zip.
With a little curation of your community subscriptions, you can get a very similar experience to Reddit but better.
What do you prefer about piefed? Lemmy seems perfect to me.
I like the interface more than the Lemmy interface, but it also has a number of cool features that Lemmy doesn’t have. And the update schedule is crazy good. PieFed 1.5 has only been out about 3 weeks, and the dev just released 1.6 today with more features, updates, and fixes.
Not to mention that there is some… questionable… behavior by the Lemmy devs. While the PieFed dev may not be perfect, he doesn’t have the baggage the Lemmy devs do, and I feel better using the PieFed software. It all connects to the same stuff.
TikTok -> driving rusty nails through your nipples
And also don’t forget to donate to your devs!
And instance admins!
Maybe I am just noob at using it. But calling pixelfed a substitution to instagram, is maybe just a little reach… Pixelfed I found buggy, slow and dead community wise? Anyone to prove me wrong?
What about streaming?
Peertube or Owncast
Should be Lemmy over piefed.
I’ve seen the Reddit users be more receptive of PieFed over Lemmy. In a post suggesting Lemmy, the Reddit users will just comment that it looks ugly, it’s confusing, devs are tankies, etc. Posts suggesting PieFed get less complaints and more signups.
Also I think the instance choice is easier for PieFed compared to Lemmy. If you tell people to use Lemmy, they’ll probably end up on lemmy.world which is overpopulated, or lemmy.ml…
Instead of recommending Lemmy in general, you should recommend a specific instance which matches the audience. For example someone posted about piefed.ca in /r/BuyCanadian. Or you can link to a different frontend like vger.app.
I did make a redesign to join-lemmy.org recently so that new users can reach the registration page with a single click. I am also curious about any suggestions you have to improve the onboarding.
join-lemmy.org looks much improved now! And yes linking directly to an instance is the way to go, I would’ve put URLs in this promotional image instead of just names
I’m not sure if I have any specific ideas at the moment. It’s possible Lemmy has just reached a saturation point with Reddit where the people still on Reddit are the ones who bounced off Lemmy before, so they won’t give it another chance anytime soon, but they haven’t tried PieFed yet. Maybe the optimal strategy is to cycle between the recommendations to catch everyone with whatever suits them best. I think we should also try changing out the Mastodon recommendation and see if something else catches people who haven’t already switched to Fediverse microblogging.
I think PieFed’s idea of asking new users what they want/don’t want to see is a good idea.
I made a couple of “Help Design Lemmy” posts in [email protected] recently to get feedback and ideas, which was very helpful. I will continue to make such posts to improve join-lemmy.org, and also Lemmy itself.
Had a look at the Piefed signup now, choosing categories like that is a good idea. But the question is how these categories get curated. We have something similar with the instance topics on join-lemmy.org but no one is really helping to maintain them. So for community categories it would probably similar. In 1.0 we will have some improvements for discovery, like multi-communities and a “suggested communities” collection which can be set by local admins.
For the Mastodon recommendation there isnt any good alternative software that I can see. So its probably best to recommend a single Mastodon instance, depending on the target audience.
That person was me.
I’ve promoted Lemmy in the past only to be met with comments complaining about the ‘dogshit UX’ and tankeis.
So I switched to promoting PieFed instead, and have had no such complaints.
And so you decided to spread that misinformation further, instead of simply replying that it is wrong? I’m also very curious in what ways you consider Piefed’s UI better than Lemmy.
Good UX is all about removing friction and making users have to click less and think less.
Users these days are expect their hands to be held and things to just work, that sadly is just the reality.
Let me start off with saying, I started on Lemmy and even donated to Lemmy, PieFed can only grow because it’s standing on the shoulders of giants (lemmy)
My alt is AnonomousWolf, you can look it up, since I joined I complained about bat UX, but people told me to GTFO. PieFed fixes many of those issues I complained about.
Let me do a quick test and walk you through my thought possesses and UX. I’ll make 2 comments in this post, one for lemmy.ml one for piefed.social
– open https://lemmy.ml/
– met with a list of posts, most images too small for me to see or read.
– click on first post so that I can see the image - https://lemmy.ml/post/42503928 – taken to a page where I still can’t see the image I clicked to see – Click on the image, now I can see it.– See some comments
– now I need to click back to continue– see another interesting post, image to small, can’t see so I have to click – https://lemmy.ml/post/42501566
– Still can’t see image so I click on the image – now I’m taken to https://mecha.so/comet#overview
– WTF, why am I on a different site? Why am I here,where are the comments – Realisze I can’t distinguish between Image posts and Links to a different site. – Why is this so confusing to browse?Sounds like you are specifically looking for a client focused on image browsing. In that case I would suggest linking to vger.app, phtn.app or blorp which I linked in another comment. Lemmy 1.0 will also have a card view which admins can set as default, where images are already expanded.
see another interesting post, image to small, can’t see so I have to click – https://lemmy.ml/post/42501566
This is only the link preview (indicated by the arrow icon), not an image post. Is the icon too small?
It’s honestly bonkers to have a community hosted on Lemmy this hostile to Lemmy as software and the developers.
Are you referring to [email protected]? This wasn’t posted by the mods.
This comm is often full of comments pushing lemmy alternatives, with PieFed being the new frontrunner.
You’d think the post here would include Lemmy, which I believe is still the most active platform
But it’s the same platform! They all interoperate!
I understand, but most of us are here from the efforts of all those who built Lemmy and it was deliberately left off here as an alternative
Isn’t that because people are canceling it for some reason? I haven’t kept up with it enough to form an opinion, but I understand a lot of people want to ditch the project over something they don’t like about the dev(s).
The devs are Marxist-Leninists. They administrate the .ml instance with that in mind, and they will often ban or strictly moderate low effort anti-China content like depicting Xi as Winnie the Pooh (they see this as racist because yellow bear) and spam posts about Tienanmen Square. I’ve seen people claim they are pro-Russia, but most of what I’ve seen would fall under anti-NATO opinions than pro-Russia. I have never gotten the impression that Putin is popular in .ml, hexbear, or lemmygrad.
But they really just stick to their instance and don’t push their politics on the software’s development.
People on Lemmy don’t need to be told about Lemmy though?
People on Lemmy don’t really need to be told about most of these. What’s your point? You and I both know this image was made for people outside Lemmy. In fact, it was updated to remove Lemmy
Is this bait? There is hardly any hostility here towards the software and the Lemmy devs want to push the world towards being an authoritarian hellscape. If anything they dont get enough shit.
The user is from .ml, it’s a bad-faith post imo.
The user has been on this platform since 2020, long before .world existed and .dbzer0 was a twinkle in dbzer0’s eye. Yes, the user chooses to stay on the instance that gets updated first and stays federated with all of .world, PieFed, and also the lifeboat chapo community that did and has continued to produce the funniest leftist content on the platform.
I’ve been in this comm for years. It’s the number one organizing spot for anti-lemmy developers to push their alternatives. There was a Java one before PieFed took off. And when you look under the surface, the reasons these are developed are pretty much always because anti-communism.
You see it’s actually people like y’all that scream “witch” at users, accuse them of interacting with bad faith, and spread FUD in this platform.
Deb’s a tankie with the most bullshit oppinions ever seen on earth.
Who is deb?
Developer
Not true.
Demonstrably true. Try saying anything contrary to a tankie talking point on .ml and see how long before you get banned. May I suggest “Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine” for starters, or “China committed unjustifiable atrocities against peaceful protestors”.
Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine.
In fact, Russia is an expansionist state with rampant nationalism and homophobia and led by an obvious fascist. I support the political autonomy of Ukrainians.
Catch me in the modlogs.
Now, I believe all of that, but I can also believe that there are geopolitical forces making the situation more nuanced and complex
You’re replying to one of the Lemmy devs. Hearing them say it’s not true when they literally run .ml as a tankie community is hilarious.
Because so many keep getting told it’s by tankies and stop thinking immediately after that





















