I switched to piefed to help it grow, although for me the lemmy experience is still superior, due to the difference in clients available for Android.

On Android, the Voyager Lemmy client is better than the Blorp Piefed client.

Since the blorp Dev reads these comments (thanks for making us free software!), here’s my list of features to bring blorp up to parity, from most to least important:

1. Choose what type of link to share by default: community link, poster’s link, my instance link, or blorp link, or other… Currently when I want to share something, I have to open it on Voyager to get a link.
2. Ability to select text in comments. Voyager has this in the context menu.
3. Ability to hide read posts. Blorp has this setting but it doesn’t work. When I open piefed I see old posts, but on Voyager I see fresh stuff.
4. Ability to download .webp images. Downloads fail, but I can “share” the file to a file manager and save it that way.
5. Put the profile button on the bottom stripe so it is easier to reach.

I see a lot of piefed posts on Lemmy - are we not federated across so that we’re getting the milk without needing to buy the cow?

I have no idea. I’m a vanilla, semi-norm who came from Reddit, mainly because they banned me after 15 years of active and mostly chill engagement.

I’m basically just a slightly opinionated guy who’s interested in what other people have to say on a variety of subjects.

I’m only dimly aware of PieFeed. I like lemmy as it feels like early Reddit and I access it through the boost app on Android, which was the peak Reddit experience before they locked down the APIs.

I’ve no interest in spreading myself over multiple platforms - I just want access to other humans via the path of least resistance.

With this in mind, is PieFace better? And if so, in what way?

Why vs when we can just interop?

We are not like traditional websites. When one community does well, we can all do well.

Piefed users comment and post to lemmy and via versa.

Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:

• a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
• the ability to combine comments from multiple communities under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
• the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.

On the sysadmin side of things, it’d bring some nice advantages regarding network resource usage and page loading speed, and benefits from using tried and tested industry standard frameworks (I.e, Flask), instead of bespoke solutions.

Piefed and Lemmy are act-pub/fediverse software systems, same with Mastodon and many others. Since Lemmy and Piefed are so similar in their structure though as link aggregators that people vote and comment on you could think of them as the same network with different clients.

I switched from Lemmy to Piefed somewhere around piefed’s 1.15 version as I recall. On a technical front Piefed is a solid margin ahead in admin and usability features, at least as of when I switched. I haven’t noticed a major performance difference, but mine is a single user instance so that might be better shown at a larger scale. Lemmy was a bit easier to deploy initially since there wasn’t a need to have anything compile locally but rather just pull an image and go.

Ethically, I’m less concerned using Piefed than Lemmy. The devs of Lemmy are notoriously vocal in their support of Russia/China/Korea, and basically anything that could be considered in opposition of western liberal/progressive policies. This is troublesome since there is the potential for updates being made that help create even more aggressively divisive bubbles than we already have in many parts of the fedi. Those could be applied to any software of course, but the Lemmy devs make their stances quite visible in that regard.

My understanding is that PieFed gives you access to everything on Lemmy without directly supporting tankies.