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.
But how is that not a concern if you’re interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 new users in a few days. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That’s not gonna be great for you or the new users.
I think it’s unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don’t even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.
There’s already been some comments about PieFed and they didn’t result in huge surges.
Sure but does the rate of growth matter? The post asks about recommending Piefed instead of Lemmy. I presume the point is that the number of Piefed users would grow if we did that. So whether a thread produces 10, 1000, or 10000 users in a day, the number of users would grow over time. Then I think the question remains, if my Piefed instance costs $10/mo to run today, would it cost $100 with 10000 users or $1000, or more, or less?
Relevant
The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.
Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.
If people start recommending PieFed now, it’s on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.
Yeah, that makes sense for the defect class of performance problems. I’m more concerned with the inherent performance (compute) disadvantages of Python. Perhaps they wouldn’t matter, hard to know without load testing.
I didn’t downvote.
Well, i thought the same about rust and python. i’m not a dev and lack understanding on their component.
My opinion became more nuanced with Lemmy. I have read there spike in ressource usage with lemmy on server.
So, I believe the language matter but also its features, the way you think how people will use it. Its core design.
When you manage a social network, the most fondamental feature is the moderation board. I find this area is lacking on Lemmy. Crosspost ? Duplicate everywhere, on my timeline, i get 4-5 time the same post…so i believe it miss some design thinking.
From what i see, the various lemmy-bot (most of them are written in python i think ?) and alternative frontend are improving lemmy experience. For example, how do you add an mod with lemmy-web-ui ?
I also believe that being written in Rust make it harder for new devs to help. But in later time we will see a change.
I’m not sure if it answer part of your question, but there are area where lemmy can improve : https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/