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 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] Sibshops@lemm.ee 12 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I second this. Lemmy is written in Rust where as piefed is written in Python. When it comes to running a high-performance webserver, Lemmy has the advantage.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spent in IO, not compute, and if you're running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you're running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 11 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

If you want it to be "free to most users", the cost of data storage and IO will completely dominate over the cost of CPU.

There are plenty of good arguments to prefer Rust over python for a distributed application, but "language efficiency" is not one of them.

Anyway, if you are biased in favor of Rust and want a decent argument to justify it, I will let you use 'It's easier to compile Rust to WASM and have the application run on the browser, while compiling python in a cross-platform way is a nightmare', free of charge.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 hours ago

Ease of cross-compiling is really one of my favorite things about Rust. It can run anywhere with little coaxing needed.

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