Fediverse

Hey there!

Howdy!

Where can we read about what they do differently? So far I’ve seen its written in python which is cool since it makes it easier for people to contribute.

Curious to know of they will enable the ability to follow users and subscribe to threads which are two of the biggest missing features on Lemmy in my opinion.

I wonder if they’ll enable parts of the Lemmy api so the Lemmy apps can be used for Piefed

Maybe they can implement Lemmy's API, like what Misskey et al. does with Mastodon's API, so it can use the same apps.

PieFed dev here.

It'll be interesting to see how Python performs.

There's some fun stuff you can do with compiling Python into C. e.g. https://cython.org/ or https://docs.exaloop.io/codon/. But I don't see a need for it as PieFed doesn't really crunch numbers much. Mastodon has a Ruby backend. Kbin uses PHP. Until you get really massive the choice of language doesn't really make a huge difference to performance as most of the work in most web apps is done by the database.

I am a little bit concerned about the limited support for asynchronous I/O in the Flask framework, which could limit scalability at some point. But there are options for the future. Quart claims to be a drop-in replacement for Flask.

In any case, performance is just one factor. For a FOSS project to be successful long term it needs contributions from other developers and with the massive pool of Python developers there are, hopefully I'll be getting some help soon. Also along those lines I have deliberately chosen:

• to code as simply and stupidly as possible, to make it accessible to most skill levels.
• No complicated frameworks, fancy algorithms, or esoteric design patterns. Model View Controller, baby.
• No frontend build process or tool chain (vanilla JS only. No npm).
• Few third party dependencies, only Redis and Postgresql. Mostly.

All this makes setting up an initial development environment, finding the bit you want to change and testing it out fairly quick and easy.

I hope it's these choices that lead to an absolute blizzard of contributions from many people and that's where the true strength of the project will come from.

The database, storage and network are usually the bottlenecks in these kinds of websites, not the programming language. It might add a few ms of latency, but the big lags come from congestion or bad db queries.

I am very inspired by Beehaw and what they're trying to do. I'm building quite opinionated software with my values baked into it and those seem like a good fit for Beehaw. But I don't know any of the people involved so I'd be arriving very late to the party without any knowledge of the terrain or history. Best to stay out of it.

I just want to code, ban nazis, do linux admin and build community infrastructure. :)

One of the good/bad things about Flask is it's quite a small framework which lets the developer do whatever they want (yay!) so it's easy to make an unholy mess (boo!). I hope that I've stayed on the rails with PieFed.

It's a bit sad what has happened in the most recent version of SQLAlchemy - they made it all weird and difficult. PieFed uses an older version which I find very intuitive and simple.

PieFed dev here.

Sorry about that, I've had a hard time getting the captcha working while also having decent XSS protection. I've deployed a probable fix, please try again.

I signed up, no problem. There is a bit of funky behavior (I clicked on the Pie logo, and it changed to the word, "Logo" haha), but overall it looks sharp. I"m trying to figure out where to make suggestions - I'm a dark screen person, and it's got way too much white and blue - colors that suppress melatonin production. I'm mighty fond o' me melatonin.

It's been getting some traction over on Mastodon too. Wouldn't be at all surprised if they've restricted signups.