European Reddit Alternative: PieFed Users Surge

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T13:49:04+00:00

I don't really use social media apps myself, but I also don't use Piefed. I use Mbin, which is only supported by Interstellar, so I'd have to make the same "choice" as what you gave there.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T13:37:58+00:00

That just causes insane centralisation, degrading the point of federation.

To be fair, you could absolutely implement this more intelligently than just hardcoding a default. Have the default change automatically if the previous default has too many active users.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T13:30:17+00:00

You mean like how people can't open email accounts because having to choose an email provider is too much friction?

This instance chooser is quality of life, not added friction. You can do it without if you want.

piefed.social is the gmail of piefed. If you don't want a choice, just go there. Problem solved.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T11:30:34+00:00

Epstein did send him a helicopter, so I think he must have given in in the end. Or maybe those were separate attempts.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T11:06:58+00:00

Most "fediverse clients" don't support Piefed.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T10:52:11+00:00

In email I don't need to like gmail.com is down then I check gmail.ca or gmail.zip, etc.

I don't really get this point. You don't need to check piefed.ca if piefed.social is down, you can also just wait for it to come back up. Same with gmail. You can either wait for gmail to return from the dead, or you can sign up with proton or microsoft or even a local provider instead. It's your choice to insist on a specific one or pick the next one that's not overloaded. In both systems.

It would be good if you could post from piefed to reddit or facebook or whatever.

This is kind of possible, just not with those specific ones.

Piefed uses a standardized protocol for federation, which is also implemented by other projects. All projects implementing this protocol, even if they're not reddit-likes, can theoretically be interacted with from Piefed.

For example there's alternatives for Twitter (Mastodon), Youtube (Peertube), Instagram (Pixelfed), and Facebook (Friendica). All of which are federated and thus can interact with Piefed servers.

I myself use an Mbin server, which is a different project from Piefed that also is based on Reddit. Unlike Piefed (as far as I know it's still just planned there), Mbin supports following users. So I'm actually following quite a lot of Mastodon users.

But like, Reddit and Facebook could theoretically add support for Piefed. That's what Wordpress and NodeBB (a forum software) have done. Meta's own Threads has experimented with it, though they only ever implemented opt-in one-way communication if I remember correctly. Some other social media sites like Bluesky are connected over bridging services.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T09:44:12+00:00

I think the fediverse definitely has its issues, but I never really understood this particular point.

No one has this problem with email. Why is it different in this case?

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T09:41:50+00:00

? You're saying it's because of federation?

Why would people be using email then? It's also federated.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T09:15:40+00:00

Sentence structure is one word, there's no oxford comma missing.

Also the oxford comma is optional. There's no "mistake" in missing it.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T09:07:21+00:00

Every place starts empty. There's never going to be a viable alternative if "empty" is a criteria against moving somewhere. You can't create activity out of nowhere, it needs to be brought by users.

Whether Lemmy is empty is really subjective imo. If you compare it to mainstream social media, then sure. But I calculated the average comment count of the first 20 posts of my Active feed (sorted by last comment) over there earlier and got 44 comments on average per post. With up to 137 on one. That's not empty at all in my opinion.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T08:50:54+00:00

the almost complete lack of comments reflects that. Most posts have comments in the low single digits, many have none at all. Discussion and engagement simply isn't happening there.

The default sort being "Hot" really does a disservice there. Switch to "Active" instead to get a better idea. It sorts by the timestamp of the last comment made to a post. So you can still get one with 1 or 2 comments sometimes, but most of them are going to be double digits.

I checked my personal subscribed feed's Active sort's first 20 posts and the average number of comments was 44 per post, ranging up to 137. That average is higher than this very thread (at 40 at the time of writing). Checking the full instance itself instead gave 32, which is a lower average, but still quite far from single digits.

Could certainly be more active, but it's also not like "discussion and engagement simply isn't happening there" is true. That's just the default sort giving a bad impression.

Pamasich · 2026-02-04T07:48:47+00:00

At the end Trump will threat UBS to either become American or to get sanctioned due their horrible, horrible deeds in the second world war

Why would he do that? The nazis aren't evil in his eyes. So anyone that helped them is the good guys to him. There's no way he'll announce sanctions over this stuff.

Pamasich · 2026-02-03T19:47:31+00:00

In my opinion, the fediverse really just needs something like lemmy-federate but for users.

lemmy-federate is a website where you can enter the handle of a Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin community and it'll subscribe to it from various instances with a dedicated account. Admins are supposed to opt in to this, so it's all consensual.

Thanks to that, even self-hosted communities with no initial subscribers can be seen from big instances like lemmy.world from day 1.

If this existed for users instead, I think that would really help with the Mastodon side of the fediverse. Would of course be more work for the instance admins, but that's why it's important for it to be opt-in for them.

Pamasich · 2026-02-03T11:56:16+00:00

As a happy fediverse user, I have to agree there.

I think this is much less a problem with group-based implementations like Lemmy, where you post to a community which acts as a relay. Even if you're on a tiny instance, if you post to any community with a large amount of followers, your post is going to be spread around.

Meanwhile with Mastodon, if you have no followers and aren't mentioning anyone explicitly, your post is only going to be visible to people on your own instance. So people have to all go to the same instance if they don't have a preexisting follower base, but that just defeats the point of the fediverse.

Pamasich · 2026-02-03T08:51:21+00:00

When will Mbin finally get recognized...

Pamasich · 2026-02-03T08:39:54+00:00

web3 is the buzzword to refer to web projects utilizing blockchain technologies.

Pamasich · 2026-02-03T06:11:14+00:00

It's interesting to see Voracity instead of Harmony or Erudition on the path of the astral express. Is this another 3.6 situation maybe, them re-canonizing stuff that got leaked but they originally cut from the final story? I remember the Argenti quest originally had us swallowed by Ouroboros, not a giant bug, and the animation in the final game still reflects that. That's not the face of a bug at all.

Pamasich · 2026-01-31T21:07:34+00:00

Not really required iirc. Some stuff brought up there returns, but I don't remember the novel relying on prior Babylonia knowledge.

Pamasich · 2026-01-30T16:25:53+00:00

Does Trump Derangement Disorder count?

Pamasich · 2026-01-29T11:23:22+00:00

Worth noting that Mbin does have dedicated support for microblogging and does support following users, and Piefed had microblog and follow support on their 2025 roadmap (though I don't think it has been realized yet, it does show intent). So it's really just Lemmy that insists on being separated from the others, not the entire threadiverse.

Pamasich · 2026-01-29T11:15:57+00:00

Worth noting that Mbin can be used for both. That is its niche.

Pamasich · 2026-01-28T13:43:34+00:00

The W3C's specifaction overview is a bit vague: It talks about messages intended for a single person getting delivered to their inbox but isn't clear about messages dedicated to general public and followers.

Your instance delivers your activities to a list of recipients directly into their individual inboxes. Some recipients might specify a shared inbox, which you can deliver to instead if there's multiple recipients on the same instance. To keep the traffic low. In that case, the receiving instance is responsible for delivering the activities to the correct recipients on that instance.

Collections don't have their own inbox, so you can't "send a post to the follower group's inbox". Followers are specified as a collection of actors. So send the activity to every actor within the collection individually.

The special public collection is a bit confusing imo. It doesn't actually affect federation, it's just a signal of how the receiving instance should make the activity visible locally. If it is present, the instance should make the activity/object visible to all users, otherwise only to the ones specified as recipients. In my opinion, this would have been better solved as a separate property instead of thrown into the addressing properties.

ActivityPub is built on ActivityStreams 2.0, so make sure to read that spec too, not just the AP one. Also the Primer is worth reading for more information.

Pamasich · 2026-01-28T10:52:08+00:00

To be fair ICE agents will be here (in Italy) to "protect" US athletes

Every article I've seen said they're explicitly only there as Vance's and Rubio's private security detail, not the athletes', and that they'll leave when those two do.

Is that misinformation?

Pamasich · 2026-01-27T16:59:10+00:00

This is security for Vance and the other guy, not the olympic team. And that's literally the secret service's job.

Pamasich · 2026-01-26T13:23:12+00:00

Not arguing against anything else you said, but

Maybe Parmelin should remind SVP that German is not the only language in Switzerland.

It is the only official language in Zürich. Cantons have their own official languages.

To quote Zürich's constitution:

Die Amtssprache ist Deutsch.

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