Cool! Before you dive in, check this out https://join.piefed.social/docs/developers/

I’ve never seen a Lemmy DB, sorry. But I hang out in the Lemmy matrix rooms and read about admins struggling with their 300 GB databases quite often.

Ok. Watch this space: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/540

Definitely alpha, yeah. But moving fast!

We won’t 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.

Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:

https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/

https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/

There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It’s what you do with it that counts.

https://piefed.social/ is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won’t increase as more users come on board.

PieFed is also really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that. I haven’t bothered to add S3 storage code because we just don’t need it (yet).

Anyway, all this focus on costs and downsides is only half the coin. There are massive benefits that come from using Python:

• Easy and fun
• Fast development velocity
• Huge amounts of developers know Python
• Extensive and mature libraries with good documentation
• Good readability
• Cross-platform without re-compiling

For a FOSS project where volunteer contributions from people play a big part these things are really important. There are many ways a project can fail (not just technical reasons but social & governance too) and running out of CPU is way way down on the list.

Welcome to the jungle

If you use a mobile app then whether your account is on Lemmy or PieFed makes no difference - most of your experience will be determined by which app you choose.

Interstellar works with PieFed now although the API it uses is only enabled on one instance https://preferred.social/ as we’re still testing it out.

IMO poor security is more about a lack of eyes on the code. Projects that have a single developer and a lower user-base will be pretty easy money.

I can’t wait to find out which project has the most security holes 🔥

Any guesses?

PieFed accounts are free and take 2 mins to create. Check it out :)

Good point, yep.

On the other hand it would also help people find communities they are interested in but haven’t subscribed to yet.

Like normal - the comments are not actually merged, they are still in reply to separate posts. The appearance of merging is just at the user interface level.

Every post has a <link rel="canonical" href="https://lemmy.instance/whatever"> tag on it which links to the version of the post on the author’s instance.

Yes, somewhat. But viewing a post usually doesn’t happen in isolation - before coming to this page the viewer will have just seen a teaser of the post, containing the community icon and name OR have been browsing that community. It’s not as bad in context.

Use https://news.feedseer.com/ to summarize your Mastodon feed. Works great.

Wow, no dark mode on a photo app. Photos look great on a dark background…

Every few months Dansup announces that Groups are imminent.

Good news - https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/

When we do get a real mobile app out the door (not just a PWA), it’ll be hard to keep it up to date with the web app. So many moving parts. We’ll need to either slow down the charge or let the mobile app lag quite a lot.

It’d be so much better if everyone just used the PWA.

Yes, url is the only reliable way I could think of to match posts.

For image posts we could use a hash of the image data. But image cross-posts are not common so it doesn’t seem urgent.