I’m considering launching a server for some fediverse applications for a niche group. Since the Lemm.ee announcement, I got back in to PieFed, partially because my company blocks xxx.zip (lemmy.zip, etc). I would want to make these fediverse services easily available and reachable to newcomers.
I’m thinking of sticking with Lemmy and maybe the photon UI instead of the default, or have the default hosted at another address. I like the features of PieFed, but I think that the lack of apps could be a barrier to entry.
I’d like to hear others’ thoughts as well. Lemmy seems to be more ubiquitous and has better app support, so I think that would be better so serve. I don’t think that hosting both would be a good idea, as it’d create fragmentation in an already niche area.
Running both rn with the same magnitude of mau and piefed is using significantly fewer resources. Unless you expect 100s of mau’s I say ignore the concerns about piefed’s scalability.
As for apps, those are more or less in the pipeline, piefed didn’t have an API at all until a while ago and it’s just now getting to a point where it’s reasonable for developers to implement it. Voyager recently added Piefed support and iirc Photon also works with Piefed.
photon doesn’t work yet but support is being worked on
I would also recommend lemmy. It’s more established, has a strong community footing. And above all, it seems to be well written (in terms of code) and has tons of clients (UIs/apps). And like the other comment says, I’m not convinced about the performance of piefed
A comment I came across like two weeks ago puts it quite well:
I haven’t used piefed myself but I wouldn’t want to switch to it because I feel like it gives more power to downvotes and karma (or “reputation” as they call it):
- Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
- People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
Those are three of the twelve points listed as differences to lemmy on their features page.
I also don’t agree with some of the points in their article on “PieFed features for growing healthy communities”.
from: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/17119490
the comments’ thread is also quite interestingPlus it’s written in Python and has only a few hundred MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales
EDIT: Regarding Lemmy frontends, I suggest you take at how the instance I’m on handles it. They append a single char in front of the url to signify the various frontends
you can also be opinionated and swap out the frontend. lemdro.id does it
IMO letting the default be default and offering other options is the best. Why? Bc the frontents are inconsistent and may only partially offer features lemmy-ui has or in a different way. Like leave the default bc it’s the thing people are used to but give the freedom of choice having various frontends “natively” on your instance
You can still use the lemmy-ui frontend on lemdro.id, it’s just at l.lemdro.id and not the default. You’ve got all the choice in the world still.
I’m a big fan of people being opinionated about things. If you want something a certain way, do it! That’s the beauty of the fediverse and open source in general. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use my instance!
In-general, we work closely with the photon dev to maintain feature parity with the default frontend, and we also get some neat and useful moderation features too.
