I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers an the .ml instance. The issue of funding a project with people openly expressing opinions many find distasteful and it being the biggest reddit alternative on the fediverse came up, so here’s a topic to discuss it.
What should we do? What are the options?
Answer: No fork necessary, there are Piefed and Mbin.
Usually it is as this point things turn to shit in opensource/community/fediverse/cooperative. The devs are not the product.
Who will go in holidays with 100% of the team for every product one use ?
Usually it is as this point things turn to shit in opensource/community/fediverse/cooperative. The devs are not the product.
What does this even mean? Who creates something doesn’t matter at all? If that’s the case, then using Microshaft products doesn’t matter, does it? They can provide the infra and software for bombing Gaza but who cares right? They make software that is worth using so we should keep giving them money. No problem.
Please re again my previous message. I didn’t mention any single thing of your list.
Sorry if this has been triggering for you, have a nice Christmas.
What should we do?
There is no “we” and you can start a fork/rewrite if you want to, good luck!
PieFed is essentially what OP means. It exists, it does everything Lemmy does, and a bit more. And it does it faster, both for the user and for server resources.
I just wish .ml was more honest with their rules and policies, so people can actually make an informed decision, before they sign up there.
It’s the Communist tradition to force it on unsuspecting people because they don’t want anything to do with it otherwise.
So far no one who’s able and willing to do the work for a fork has done it so I assume the motivation is low. There’s aternate pieces of software mentioned here that have their pros and cons.
PieFed and mBin exist. Both do everything Lemmy does, and a bit more. They use less resources as well. What reason would there be for forking Lemmy? The only reason Lemmy is the most popular one among these is that it was the first one. Since then, better things have surfaced.
The main advantage of fediverse over, let’s say X, is that you can charge server if you find owner not trustworthy. So just do it, it’s exactly why it was designed in this way, to let you do it easily.
But talking about funding… I might indeed reconsider doing this…
you can block the tankie instances on lemmy, and any community too, i blocked the triad, and politics,.world, and any individual account that are from those tankie instances.
Just a quick note that PieFed allows you to easily block all users from a given instance, like a personal defederation with no need for admin powers. Your way also works, but you’d have to block thousands of users individually, plus new ones that sign up later.
While in contrast the option that looks like it would work easily, the “instance block”, in fact is strongly misleading - still allowing those users to vote on your content, reply to you, submit posts in other communities, DM you, triggering notifications, etc. Essentially it does not “block” the “instance” at all, only muting communities hosted on them.
They are insane. But their views don’t seem to ever make it into the code, so I don’t mind for now.
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It will become a problem for us if lemmy isn’t funded, won’t it?
Only if Lemmy was the only Reddit alternative. As so many people are saying though, it’s not.
e.g. PieFed not only exists but it has surpassed Lemmy in most ways in terms of feature development. And it continues to add new features at an astonishing pace.
There is no hope for “Lemmy” reaching the mainstream in my mind, but with PieFed leading the way, and Mbin also exists (that sounds mean so I’ll clarify: it has <1k users worldwide iirc), and yes a fork of Lemmy could be created if necessary, there is hope for the Threadiverse (federated threaded-based conversational platforms) overall.
Try out PieFed, even just the sign up wizard will leave you amazed. Donate to both its development and the operation costs of the instance that you choose (PieFed.social, PieFed.zip, several others to choose from).
Once every couple months someone makes a post saying “I just found out the Lemmy devs are TANKIES! Won’t someone do something about it?” No one has expressed real interest in forking Lemmy, though plenty of people have expressed interest in someone else forking Lemmy for them.
Most of the dev interest seems to be on Piefed right now. For some reason Mbin hasn’t seemed to really take off, I don’t see people talking about it as much.
Mbin is just kinda weird. I guess there aren’t too many people who are after a Reddit-like that also care too much about microblogging. Or maybe they do but the microblogging part of Mbin is just an inferior experience to Bluesky or Mastodon anyway? Or maybe people just dislike having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
That is super clunky and I do hate it.
The thought-police strike again.
Lemmy works over ActivityPub, which is the thing that provides the federation, and what people has been accostumed to call Lemmy as a whole. But there is more software that works with AP. No need to create a copy, other software can do similar things (for example: mbin, piefed, mastodon, etc).
Move to PieFed
I’ll check it out. Thanks.
What is the difference with Lemmy? What’s better and worse with Piefed?
PieFed is newer so maybe missing a couple features with some clients, but in general is much better managed and more actively developed. It has some features above Lemmy already too. It will win in the end IMO.
Reactionary forks don’t have a great record of success (or even getting off the ground).
Piefed already exists (although I contest the use of “reactionary” here)
PieFed is not even a fork, btw, it’s a completely different software
Yes I know, but I was just speaking generally.
It’s also not a fork
Is the code good? Are you prepared to make any potential fork viable and useful in ways that Lemmy isn’t so people have a tangible, non-ideological reason to choose your software over Lemmy? Do you have a long term goal for funding and maintaining a fork?
That said, Piefed is already a thing, and it federates with Lemmy. It’s where I’m commenting from right now. It has a better on boarding process and does a better job surfacing things I care about.
I write opensource software, I donate to opensource, I use opensource. I however can’t do everything. That is why the question is “we” not “hey @gerowen@piefed.social why don’t you make a fork, you lazy bastard”. Code is not the only way to contribute to a project and I’m willing to donate to lemmy alternatives while it is still possible for me.
Piefed might be where I start donating. Gotta check it out first.
You can use mbin if you want out of the Lemmy codebase, it’s a separate codebase that does the same thing.
Not only the same thing, some features are even better compared to Lemmy.
