Since you’re just starting out, I would recommend evaluating Piefed as your platform as opposed to Lemmy. All Lemmy users can still access your content (and all Piefed users can access Lemmy content), so there is no network size hit.
It’s a lot nicer (features, UI/UX) than Lemmy and has a much better development velocity (I’ve personally had some minor features requests get implemented in under a week).
Not to mention, the developers of Lemmy (and their fanboys) are committed supporters of russian genocidal imperialism. They are bad people. I am not even talking about edge cases. Support for North Korea and claiming that the regime is “a vanguard against imperialism” is horrible.
Some nice things about Piefed:
- Better posting algorithm (e.g. ability to show youtube thumbnails when you post a YT link)
- Multi-community comments - when two different communities post the same URL, you get comments from both
- Better moderation features - Users see a badge for suspected spam-style accounts, moderation/blocking is more granular
- Nice “value adds” - Posting flairs, post tags, built-in scheduled posting
- Link re-direction - Your users don’t need to think/understand anything about federation and instances, it all just works out of the box.
I think Rimu (head developer of Piefed) can give you a better perspective than I can. He’s a good guy!
Cheers!
It’s sad that Lemmy as a brand is more well known that Piefed. I can see now that Piefed, would’ve been the better choice, but at this moment, I think it’s a bit to late to transition. Most importantly, I don’t want to kill the momentum that this instance has already seen.
For a transition to make to us, it would require a system that transfers all the data over to Piefed, so that users won’t be majorly impacted. This might be possible, but I don’t have time to look into that right now.
Thank you for making this post though. I think the best thing to do for now, is gather opinions and information. If any of you all have any more things to say about this, feel free to continue commenting.
- ssnoer.
Honestly don’t worry too much about it. Lemmy has more users, has been around a lot longer. A new update (1.0) is coming soon that’ll add a bunch of stuff. It’s a perfectly valid choice, (so is Piefed) and we’re glad to see you on the fediverse either way!
PieFed dev here.
Yes, the ship has pretty much sailed. Moving now would be too disruptive.
There is a way to move a Lemmy community to a PieFed instance and preserve all the content (but someone on the destination instance needs to have joined the community since the beginning, so the content will have been sent there) so if it comes to that it’s an option in the future. See how you go.
That makes sense. Thank you for work.
For sure, I see where you are coming from. Just some thoughts.