Ask Lemmy

I joined Lemmy.world a couple years ago after kbin.social closed down, and made a Piefed account a few months ago when people said it was pretty good. I use both daily for different things.

For Lemmy I have found there is a big block button on each community page, so I use it a lot more than on Piefed. I also have my default sort set to top of the last 12 hours and to hide a post after I have viewed it. Sometimes if a post is only an hour or two long and doesn't have a ton of comments I'll wait a few hours to open it to have more comments to read. If it's immediately interesting/relevant I'll open it in a new tab, read it, then leave the tab to refresh later for further discussion since it won't show up on my home page again. I also make heavy use of the Active sort after looking at the first page of 25 (I think) top results, which often leads to finding posts that I maybe wasn't super interested in a day or two ago that now enough comments to make me interested in what the discussion is going on. There's also a bug in the Active sort where the second page doesn't load which is great to me because it encourages me to get off of Lemmy at that point.

All this has led my Lemmy usage to be very focused on what I am interested in, and there is a much higher ratio of posts that I am interested in. When I am bored and want to look at my phone, Lemmy is what I open. It's where I tend to discuss things most frequently because I tend to find posts here first and they are more frequently things I want to speak on.

Piefed is where I go after Lemmy (You'll never guess my username there). It looks like you can block communities, but you have to dig into your account settings and search for the community, which takes more work than I care to give. Unlike Lemmy, you can block keywords in your settings, so I blocked "Trump" and "Musk" when I made the account which has cut out the vast majority of the exhausting posts I would see otherwise (I do leave Politics and World News unblocked on Lemmy to see the biggest politics posts that float to the top). I have my default sort set to top posts of the last 24 hours and since I have no communities blocked I get a lot of comics and memes that I have blocked on Lemmy. The first page loads what feels like 100 posts instead of the 25 on Lemmy. I don't know what the Active sort on Piefed is doing, but I do not care for it. I really like that I can set the default comment sort on Piefed, as it saves me the click and loading time of selecting Top comments every time I load a post.

All this leads my use of Piefed to feel like a funny junk drawer of mostly memes and comics that make me go "heh" every so often and occasionally share a meme to my friend group chat. The top 100 posts of the last day don't change quickly so it usually only feels worthwhile to scroll once, maybe twice a day. I also don't (can't?) hide posts on Piefed which leads to a greater sense of redundancy, which by the time I've reached the bottom of the front page means I probably shouldn't be scrolling more anyway.

If you can, you should make an account with both and see what feels best to you. Maybe you were looking for a more technical answer, but I can only speak to how it feels as an end user. A year ago I did start to throw a couple dollars to Lemmy each month for the server usage.

ActivityPub is the fediverse protocol, lemmy and piefed are software implementations of that protocol.

In a similar way, email is a protocol, and Gmail and Exchange/Outlook are software implementations of that protocol. You can use Gmail to send email to Outlook users. Different people can administer their own Exchange servers on their own domains.

And some features of the software work best with other people who use the same version of the same software, although most things kinda work between different software. Like how calendar invites sometimes act weird between users of different software, but for the most part the core functions work OK.

So lemmy and piefed (and mbin and sublinks and some others) are different software trying to speak to other fediverse services through the ActivityPub protocol. It mostly works, but some of the details don't work exactly the same between each type of software.

I’m only fussy about the UX, and Voyager handles both well, so - win/win!

I've tried them both along with a few different lemmy instances and found .today on lemmy is my best fit.

Since others have covered the technical angle, I'll say I prefer lemmy from a social perspective. My instance doesn't block other instances, banning users only for extreme cases. I prefer to choose my experience for myself without being ideologically guided by someone else's values.

For all the criticisms of the lemmy developers, their biases don't make it into the code. Instances are run according to the admins and user's wishes, which allows .today to operate as openly as possible. Piefed, on the other hand, suffers from the biases of its developer, who not only blocks users but also instances of admins who don't align with them. They have passed along their ban list to other admins as well, getting users banned for disagreeing with them. That's not the behavior of someone I want running my platform of choice.

Along with that. I, personally, don't like the idea of reputation, low score flags, karma or any system based on the votes of users, since they can be easily manipulated. It feels like Piefed is trying to implement a more intense karma system, which was one of my main problems with reddit. I believe each post and comment should stand on its own merit.

I would complete ignore whatever politics of Lemmy or PieFed people try and sway you with. Way too many people on here trying to start drama.

In my experience, Lemmy moves slow but things are very stable. PieFed moves fast adding lots of features that Lemmy is missing, but tends to break things a little more. Both are very useable platforms.

I’ve personally had great interactions with the Lemmy and PieFed devs, and I know they collaborate with each other behind the scenes.

And if you’re unsure, I would just make a PieFed and lemmy account and try both. But the specific PieFed or Lemmy instance you choose might matter just as much as which software you choose.

There's one "platform", the Threadiverse, with three major current software packages (Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin) that provide instances that interoperate. Unlike Reddit, there are those three different software packages that can be used to run instances, not a single codebase. You will choose a home instance (for you, nord.pub, which is PieFed) where your account lives, and which displays most of the content you see. There are also instances that host communities, and some of those probably don't live on your home instance (e.g. you are posting this to the asklemmy community on the lemmy.world instance, which runs Lemmy).

Lemmy was the original software package. It is written in Rust, which tends to be more-popular with systems programmers, which I think probably makes it a harder to get commits; Rust isn't heavily used by Web developers, and a lot of the package is Web backend software. (I say this without any special bias against Rust; I personally would probably prefer writing software in Rust in general.) Some of the developers have hard auth-left positions (like, they want the Soviet Union back and Stalin is top-notch) which is a major turnoff to some users, especially since the main development instance, lemmy.ml, has admins that moderate along those lines in some ways. Lemmy is by far the most-widely-used software package as of this writing. Lemmy also has a number of "alternate Web frontends"

I don't think that this is true of the others, though the PieFed situation may have changed since last I looked. Lemmy also has the most support from mobile clients (though as of this writing, all of the three packages have mobile clients that support them). I can think of a few things that Lemmy can do, like be set up to proxy images for users with a Lemmy home instance, that I don't know if the others can do yet. Lemmy's had a couple of really bad releases in terms of bugs, but nothing really substantial that I can think of recently, though I don't admin an instance. The biggest Lemmy instance is lemmy.world, if you want to take a look at its Web UI.

PieFed was a follow-up, done by a guy in IIRC New Zealand. It's written in Python, a language that tends to be more-used in Web dev. There are far fewer PieFed instances, but I'd say that it's generally been gaining userbase relative to the other two. I feel like the rate of development is generally quicker. I've seen some people saying that PieFed performance is generally better than Lemmy; I have not validated this myself. In general, Rust tends to be more performant than Python if you know what you're doing, but the performance limitations on a package like PieFed and Lemmy are probably I/O and database-related, where the language doesn't play much of a role, so I could believe this. PieFed's Web UI lets one use keystores (like YubiKeys or similar) to authenticate, which I don't believe that Lemmy can do. PieFed has the ability to rewrite links so that links posted by someone else don't send you to another instance off your home instance, which...I'm not completely sold on, but I think is probably the best current fix for the problem of not being able to link to comments and posts on other instances without taking someone off their home instance and is generally easier for users. PieFed's Web UI merges cross-posted articles into a single page of discussion. PieFed used to have better blocking features than Lemmy, could let users do instance blocks, but I think that Lemmy has caught up here. I'm currently using a Lemmy home instance because I'm happy with that instance, but if I were personally to choose a new instance, I'd probably favor a PieFed instance, all else held equal. The biggest PieFed instance is piefed.social.

Mbin is a continuation of a discontinued project, Kbin. Kbin was originally done by some Polish guy, IIRC on an educational grant from the EU. I believe that this was more of a university project for him; he got kind of overwhelmed by the equivalent of a city of people flooding in when Reddit banned third-party clients, hadn't really been planning to change the world. I think that Mbin is mostly being developed by a European set of users, but I haven't spent much time poking at it after the fork from Kbin. It's written in PHP, a language that's pretty backend Web-dev oriented, but also tends not to be used much outside of that area. Its main claim to fame is that it tries to combine both Reddit-like threaded community forum discussions and Twitter/-like microblogging functionality, interoperates with Mastodon. I haven't used it much recently, but last I did, I hit a number of what looked like bugs; I feel like it's presently lagging on development. There are some things that I like about the Web UI, though I found it a bit annoying to rapidly access one's list of subscribed communities. Last I looked, the Lemmy "spoiler" block to hide spoiler text in comments didn't work on Mbin, but that may have been fixed. The biggest Mbin instance is fedia.io.

All three have some subtle incompatibilities in their Markdown syntax, the language that you write your posts and comments in, but they're close enough that it's not generally an issue.

In general, the decision from an end-user standpoint mostly comes down to which you want as your home instance, since they have different Web UIs. If you never use the Web UI, it'll probably matter less; a client like Interstellar talking to a Lemmy instance looks pretty much like when it's talking to a PieFed instance. You'll probably use communities hosted on all three (as you are currently, with !asklemmy@lemmy.world being on Lemmy and your home instance of nord.pub being PieFed) and not notice the difference there.

EDIT: I guess I should probably provide a summary-and-conclusions section:

• Unless you're a developer or administering an instance, the main difference you see is probably in the Web UI that is presented, if you use the Web UI.

• There are some functional differences, though they often have copied successful features from each other.

• Mobile client support exists for all three, but not all mobile clients support all instance types. Interstellar on Android supports all three, if you want to use a single client for all of them.

• You can have accounts on home instances of all three types if you want, so easy enough to try out all three. I presently have my main account on a Lemmy instance, but I also keep an account around on a PieFed instance, which I've occasionally used as a backup if my main home instance is having technical issues or similar so that I can still respond to people; it's a nice option that Reddit doesn't really have. When Reddit goes down, the whole thing is down. The Threadiverse not infrequently has one instance somewhere having some sort of issue, but the thing doesn't go down as a whole.

I used Lemmy for a while, then jumped over to Piefed out of curiosity.

Personally, I can't see a real difference from my own usage. Possibly I can see a few more communities, I'm not even sure, but yeah, for me personally, they both do the same.

Granted might be partly because I'm using Summit for both accounts and generally looking at the same things.

There is also Mbin (I'm on an mbin instance). They are just different interfaces for interacting with the Fediverse. Each has different features and UIs. They have their own mobile clients too, but there are clients that work with multiple platforms as well.

As long as they are federating with one another you can view Lemmy communities from Mbin, Mbin magazines from PieFed, etc.