What harms people is not the lack of knowledge but unwillingness to learn.
That said, there is only so much attention span to go around:-).
I believe that is more valid for Mastodon instances than for Lemmy ones.
Except that you are still correct in the operational sense that most will not bother. See e.g. the migration to BlueSky rather than Mastodon.
PieFed really might make for a qualitative shift though, in offering so many options such as categories of communities (akin to multi-Reddits), and polling, and flairs (both user and post) that Reddit users were used to and it makes them feel really like they are "slumming it" coming over to Lemmy that lacks all of that. The categories of communities and user-customizable and shareable feeds in particular really help with "content discovery", as too does PieFed's wizard that walks a first-time user through the process of setting up and joining what the user indicates that they are interested in.
In contrast, Lemmy users are supposed to go... (somewhere? but where? where are these "somewhere"s ever mentioned? on a side-bar somewhere? extremely rarely I would believe they might be, but the vast majority of the time usually not) to find the content that they want to see. Often they end up browsing All rather than Subscribed, and get so frustrated with that that they simply leave Lemmy altogether, and then report their complaints over in r/RedditAlternatives. PieFed solved that particular problem though, as well as several others, so at this point I think any discussion about "the learning curve" needs to be split into one for Lemmy, where it really does remain too complicated for the average Reddit non-technical normie, vs. PieFed where it does not anymore.
And I need to be careful or else this will turn into a HUGE tangent, but also the political extremism and bOtH sIdEs SaMe-ism on "Lemmy" is an enormous turn-off for people as well. Yes they can block each troll on an individual basis, or the same with communities, no they can't TRULY block an entire instance (that horribly mis-named function would have been better termed a "community muting" rather than "instance blocking", which still allows comments from users on that instance to appear everywhere else, plus able to reply and even trigger notifications, etc. - IT IS NOT A BLOCK). Anyway, how this relates is that mainstream non-technical normies just get overwhelmed, and don't enjoy the political extremism having to be an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, with most of the ways presented by the software to opt-out not TRULY opting "out" rather than merely claiming to do so. In contrast, one of the first things that PieFed does is to set up a block-list of keywords, offering the options All, None, and even a third one Some to allow the content at a lower frequency. I have never put any words into it... but I appreciate that the feature exists, for the sake of those who want / need it to be able to enjoy their social media of choice.
I predict that for all these reasons plus a few others, Lemmy will continue to die off. The die-hard userbase seems not to care actually, even being oddly proud of this? While PieFed - which just increased its userbase +400% - will continue to grow, and maybe PieFed will actually be the thing that captures more of the Reddit users. Lemmy certainly will not be, nor Mbin, and I cannot say for certain that PieFed will, just that it seems to me to be the only thing that possibly could (Sublinks seems dead in the water atm, due to the primary - only? - dev having a baby).
Many of us stopped actually "engaging" on Reddit long before we finally left it - the amount of trolls just waiting to pounce on anything at all that was said just got too damn high!
There are (so MANY!) trolls here too, but you can block them all and then breathe an enormous sigh of relief and finally enjoy the rest - I am saying that here that is at least possible, whereas on Reddit it just simply was not.
Unless they went to PieFed - which many did - and then it would look like a net decrease on those charts for Lemmy.
Mbin has <1k monthly active users. Kbin has <100 total, and if you dig deeper, only one server (in Poland) self-reports as using Kbin.
No PieFed is not included in "Lemmy" in this software b/c it looks at the software that the instance reports as using.
Even Lemmy is not in the millions, its peak was ~55k MAUs somewhere in Spring of 2024. Well, the "posts" counts could be in the millions (according to the Lemmy stats page it was 12.2 million a couple months ago), but those stats can be fairly misleading, so I typically only ever go by monthly active users that seems verifiably closer to what people actually see happening. e.g. so very MANY people have alt accounts all across the Fediverse so the total number of accounts is highly misleading, but the number of "active" ones seems more reliable? (even then it could be an over-counting, especially if bots are active and being counted as well)
40k MAUs is barely even a highly active sub over on Reddit.
Even Mastodon only reports ~700k MAUs, and falling, though at its peak it was closer to 2 million. They really dropped the ball on making the software easier to use - unlike Lemmy (and Mbin and PieFed), each Mastodon instance does NOT show posts from other Mastodon instances, by default - or at least that was true for an exceedingly long time though I thought it was going to change this summer iirc? Maybe that change only affected "searching" for posts though? I don't use Mastodon so don't really care - but I understand why people prefer BlueSky, b/c for them centralization is the point, if that is what it takes to make the software actually work.
A LOT of the criticisms that people on Reddit have about Lemmy actually pertain to Mastodon rather than Lemmy in particular.
The entire federated concept really was not ready for mainstream deployment, at the time of the Rexodus. We here are those with the "early adopter" mindset, which is very much different than the mainstream normie one.
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all "good", but yeah, me too :-P
I just mentioned this in another comment but I'll add it here so you can see it more easily:
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Honestly I do not know - Notifications on PieFed, along with searching, are both features that are still a bit wonky and behind everything else. Side-note: you will legit want to keep your old Lemmy account, and use it especially for searching for content, and also if you choose piefed.social whenever that goes down for upgrades, which it does far more often than a normal instance (it literally says that btw, it deploys new features sooner than other instances so it is the "test bed" to try them out:-D but if that bothers you then use one of the other ones like piefed.zip, piefed.world, etc.).
So that one may be a bad example for me to use... but on the other hand, Lemmy has been out for YEARS and that feature requested for YEARS, whereas PieFed is still being built and new features are added WEEKLY. So I would expect to see that feature "soon" on PieFed, whereas on Lemmy I would expect to see it "never" (b/c of the authoritarian mindset precluding them even wanting to do it). Just like so many other of the continually growing set of features offered by PieFed.
Not to get too deep into the tankie bashing, but nevertheless it does seem worth pointing out that the philosophies of the Lemmy devs have gotten them into some financial trouble, as people do not want to interact with them, e.g. to first learn the super-difficult (even compared to C++!!) Rust coding language and then try to contribute code. In contrast, pretty much every programmer already knows Python and so a lot of people can - and do - contribute to PieFed.
TLDR: PieFed is so much newer than Lemmy and honestly it is a bit behind in some ways, but even so PieFed is already running circles around Lemmy in not only the pace of development but also the raw set of features already developed.
And if I can add: even Reddit stopped adding features YEARS ago, unless you count things like those Doge coins that generate profit for the company but do not add anything new to the user-base. To see a thread-based forum platform actively adding brand-new features... damn it is so refreshing! (and yes Lemmy does that too, but on the scale of YEARS rather than, again, mere WEEKS)
I don't rightly know but... to a first degree of approximation, if both are fully compliant with the ActivityPub protocol then why would it? (they are not I would guess, but that is a more nuanced take than I have knowledge of:-D)
It is the same set of considerations that govern Lemmy instances: the admins are irl people who have whatever ideas they like to see happen in the world, and it's their personal machines and effort that they are putting into administering the instance, so they get to do whatever they please. If you like those philosophies (which they tend to say in their sidebars), then you can make an account on them - FOR FREE - and if not, then you are free to go elsewhere.
Fwiw, piefed.zip avoids defederation as much as possible iirc and has an affinity for gaming topics, piefed.social is one of the oldest but note that it tests deployment of all the newest features, so it can break more readily than a more stable instance, piefed.ca is located in Canada and geared towards people who live there but like the Lemmy version, all are welcomed, and piefed.world is run by the same admins who handle lemmy.world, with all that that entails - some people love that fact, others will hate it, and again it's all fine and good bc there is room for us all to coexist peacefully across the Threadiverse:-).
Yes the lemm.ee switch-over crowd is over so it will be interesting to see the more natural growth after that.
e.g. from January to March PieFed (edit: 's Monthly Active Users) more than doubled in size long before lemm.ee's troubles were widely announced.
Typically as people hear about the new features and are astonished by how PieFed offers exactly what people have been outright begging to see brought to Lemmy (heck, in some cases even Reddit) but they simply won't do it. In fairness, perhaps they cannot, given their current pace of development, but also their prioritization may differ from those of the end-users (I have noticed that particularly things that involve federation between instances - e.g. modlog actions - typically receive much lower prioritization than things that will work inside a singular instance, perhaps reflecting the bias that the main Lemmy devs are also the admins of their own personal instance? for good or for ill, it is what is is: this is their platform, and if someone does not like it then they are free to go ahead and make their own from scratch, which both Kbin, before it was forked to Mbin, and now PieFed have done just that:-D).
I love it too, but it is something that does not happen "naturally". A lot of people feel intimidated by e.g. someone spinning up a bot that will send 20-100 identical messages at someone (yes that's a real story that I was reading about earlier today), and while that one is on the extreme side, more mundane methods of trolling work almost as well for a fraction of the effort.
So thank you for your efforts to resist the trend and create a space where people can actually enjoy things:-).
At a rough glance, it looks like PieFed's active users went up by roughly the same number as Lemmy's went down!
Although that's just the last couple of months - on top of that, the "Threadiverse" (including Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, and flarum, though the wider "Fediverse" also includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other stuff that isn't based on community forums like we do here; note from here on I'll focus exclusively on Lemmy) activity has been going down for quite awhile now, basically since the Rexodus.
According to people talking on r/Redditalternatives, Lemmy just isn't interesting enough. Before Blaze's (and others) heroic efforts to counteract it, previously the other top reason was that it was too confusing to have to pick an instance first before signing up (which is a legitimate thing for Mastodon even if not so much for Lemmy).
I get it: not everyone uses Arch Linux and hates Windows hard enough for this audience. Purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Also Lemmy can be so incredibly toxic - sharing any kind of nuance will almost certainly be lost in the flood of people piling on not even for what someone says but if it sounds vaguely like something else that is popular to hate on. Argumentative people are just looking for excuses to argue, period. You personally have helped with that a ton, thank you so much for caring and sharing positivity vibes 😽❣️!! You are helping people not want to leave and go back to Reddit (which sounds odd I know, but remember that the tiny niche subs there really are different than the larger ones, and people can be much kinder in them than the more popular subs there, or the more popular communities here).
PieFed, like Mbin, was written from the ground up, and in a totally different language than Lemmy.
But it interoperates with Lemmy, so yeah it's very similar. Except the LARGE list of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks, and a handful of features that Lemmy still does better on.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
But also, PieFed is written in Python that is a heck of a lot easier to code in than Rust, so the fact that PieFed not only caught up to Lemmy but has already surpassed it in SO MANY ways is a strong indicator of its future success.
But aside from the tankies building in tankie philosophy right into the core of the Lemmy software, it depends on whether someone wants those additional features or not. Like polls, flairs (both user and post), categories of communities, which btw are user customizable and shareable, combining all comments across all cross-posts (helping to reverse the fragmentation effect inherent in federated platforms), and so much more.
I bet that if you tried out PieFed for a day, you'd fall in love with it. You can also do entirely different workflows with it, like trigger notifications to be sent to you that really helps you to stay on top of posts from communities that are very low-volume (and so have trouble making it into your Subscribed feed, like poetry rather than politics or worshipping Arch Linux), but those are likely to take more than a day to figure out - there's definitely a learning curve. Also note that ymmv with regard to the different apps not (yet!) fully utilizing all the features offered by the PieFed back-end.
PieFed MAUs increased by 400%.
Number must go up.
These products are looking to be sold... and propping up the entire economic bubble in the meantime.
Whether they "work" is entirely besides the point.
WHAT!? I am genuinely curious why you think this?
For one thing PieFed was only centralized for a bit there at its start, whereas now there are already numerous piefed instances. It is true that piefed.social is still the #1 instance (much as lemmy.world had 80% of the Lemmy userbase at some point - but you still remain there even now so that does not seem to bother you?), but now piefed.blahaj.zone (not even 3 months old yet!!!!!), and piefed.world each have >100 active users, and piefed.ca, feddit.online, piefed.zip, quokk.au, piefed.au, etc. each have multiple tens of users.
More to the point, PieFed is FOSS. You could download the code and have your own personal instance spun up by the end of the day tomorrow.
I am guessing that you mean that the opinions of a single dev (Rimu) have an exagerated effect on the development of the code - which was definitely true in the past, but he also listens to feedback, apologies when he is wrong, and is amenable to going in other directions when the community wants that. The private voting debacle is one such example: I argued against it from the start, but he did it anyway, then abolished it and apologized to people when it received heavy criticism. You can read a really frank discussion about the topic where dbzer0 was considering whether to make a PieFed instance. Look especially at the comment starting with "I don’t trust Piefed at all - they’re far too eager to curate my experience, and they’ve reintroduced all of the reputation anti-features (plus more) that were part of what drove me away from Reddit and the absence of which is part of what I like about Lemmy and Mbin."
TLDR: it was a new project back then, and things were different. Also you might be unaware of the history of the development of Lemmy too, and of lemmy.world. These things are common, and nowhere close to be unique to PieFed. BlueSky on the other hand is corporate and so WILL be enshittified, eventually. PieFed on the other hand is just a better Lemmy :-).