You must log in or register to comment.
My concern about Lemmy is more that it is developed by authoritarian communists than if the programming language it is based on is less popular
Basically my reason for switching to piefed.
This crusade you have going on against the idea of Rust is getting borderline obsessive. Like when you called it an ‘incomplete’ language and never explained what that actually means.
Setting aside the mountain of evidence that you are ignoring here (that I might have a life on the week of Christmas, how you are the one following me across multiple posts, how you seem unwilling to do an internet search on your own to satisfy any actual curiosity you might have about why Rust is not a great language for someone to learn), I will clarify: I have zero beef about the existence of that language, it seems a fine one for anyone who wants to use it, have at it, enjoy yourself.
The underlying point of this post though - although its real purpose was an attempt at humor, but PLEASE don’t ask me to explain “humor” to you as well - is to point out not the existence of the language but its choice to use in this software implementation, which leads to its pace of development being far behind that of PieFed. One primary reason for that being that more contributors seem willing to help out, and their time seems to work to greater effect in terms of constantly adding new features to the project.
But you are taking this far more seriously than I meant to.
I don’t mind development being a little slower if it means the software is more stable and performant.
Now, that said, I can’t really speak to the fact that Rust is more performant or stable than some other language X, as I don’t know enough to make such statements. 😅
I’m just saying.
That is a good point… although I wonder how relevant it is with the current number of users of Lemmy.
It could become a future issue if Lemmy / PieFed were to ever take off?
You’re the one who’s been writing walls of text about this exact thing incessantly for months, sorry I find your ‘humour’ tiresome. And it’s not stalking to remember things I’ve seen you say in the past.
The reason that Lemmy is slow to develop is not because of Rust, but because of Tankie devs who spend more time managing propaganda and enforcing censorship in and out of their respective instances rather than actually developing the damn software.
I’ve heard that about Dessalines, but not Nutomic, yet for whatever reason Lemmy feature requests sit unanswered for multiple YEARS at a time, compared to like weeks to months on PieFed.
People can do whatever they want to. For myself, I prefer more rather than fewer features, and responsive devs to unresponsive ones.
If you block someone they can’t reply to your posts btw.
They can still message you.
Do with this information what you will.
The point of ActivityPub is that this exact conversation doesn’t matter.
I don’t see the point is this dick measuring between piefed and Lemmy, and it is becoming a bit annoying. Don’t we have enough problems as is?
Its because piefed is looking to de-federate from Lemmy as a whole.
And it’s mostly just Piefed people spewing this stuff; often about how their “sports team” is “superior”.
Quite sad reallySwitched from Lemmy to PieFed last year and literally see zero difference between both and have never read this rhetoric anywhere.
Please give us links to name and shame otherwise You are making shit up.
Yeah sure I’m gonna sift through weeks if not months of random post and comment history for some NFT ape clown; LMAO
Edit: also L + ratio
Edit: literally look at this post and OOP’s comments in it’s thread
Seems you’re the angry person having to comment on this.
A bit of Christmas banter, some healthy competition, what is not to like IMO?
Yeah they just talking smack with no evidence.
There’s not enough Piefed users to begin with. Most people are just happy the services exist.
I’m just happy to have an option available that wasn’t coded by proud authoritarian bootlickers. Hopefully as more PieFed instances spin up and as more people move to them we can start defederating .ml.
Not who you replied to, but I know that I’ve seen a handful of such posts over the past week. But no, I’m not going to try to find them. Maybe if I see one in the next day or two, I’ll remember this post and add it.
Individuals might push for that or want that to happen, but it only matters what actual developers or instance owners say.
Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed says that PieFed uses 5x less data (on e.g. a mobile connection) despite showing 5x more posts, i.e. overall a landing page is 25-fold more efficient per post than Lemmy.
I doubt this has anything whatsoever to do with Rust and more about choices as to what data is sent when.
As it should be.
Switched from Lemmy to PieFed last year and literally see zero difference between both and have never read this rhetoric anywhere.
It’s literally from the OP in this thread, please read things.
If this is a dig at Lemmy, Lemmy uses Rust. You’d know that’s a popular language if you’ve kept up with programming news anytime in the last 5 years.
Notice how the OP specifically said well-known and widely used. Yes Rust is currently cool, but way way more people can actually work productively with Python.
Notice how the OP specifically said well-known and widely used.
I did notice. If Rust isn’t “widely used”, then I’ll need to let Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Mozilla, Huawei, Meta, the Linux kernel devs, and a fuckload of open-source projects know that they actually don’t exist.
It’s plently widely used, and unlike
a scripting language(edit: Python), it’s performant – as server software should be. Rust is not a hard language to use or learn either, and it’s great for large projects.Rust is not a hard language to use or learn
Rust is a superb language, but it is famously not easy to learn.
I’ve learned dozens of languages over 40 years. Rust is one of the hardest I have tried to use for serious projects. It introduces completely new concepts that need to be deeply understood to be productive. It’s also one of the most convenient, well-tooled, and expressive languages I’ve used. But c’mon, as languages go, Rust is deep into BDSM territory.
As someone who routinely works on a complicated C++ codebase, had to use C, Python, and Java all the time through school, has had to use absolute trash like JavaScript and PHP, and has dabbled in languages similar-ish to Rust like Go and Swift, Rust to me is simple to work with.
The compiler is extremely helpful when I do something wrong, it has sensible conventions like immutability by default, Cargo is a streamlined build system, I’ve found the documentation easy to read, I actually prefer curly brace-delimited scopes to tabbed ones and explicit type declarations for readability, and in the obvious comparison to C/C++, Rust lacks extremely common memory footguns.
Obviously compared to Python – with its mountain of syntax sugar and a library for everything – Rust is going to be more difficult. But for languages in general? Rust is not at all one of the harder ones I’ve learned or used.
(Btw I hate Java; it’s the worst language I’ve ever used.)
How many times have you spent an entire day not moving forward on a project because you couldn’t figure out what the borrow checker was trying to tell you? Maybe you’re just a 10X developer. I feel quite qualified to inform you that for we mere mortals, Rust can very fairly be described as a relatively hard language.
Rust has completely unique paradigms not expressed in any other language! Things that no one coming to Rust has prior experience with. If you cannot admit that makes it harder than some random language that just fucks with syntax, …dude
While I agree with the general sentiment, scripting languages are perfectly fine to use for server software. Would you call hackernews slow? Its been running on lisp (originally Arc, now common lisp) for its entire existence. Another fun example of popular interpreter is, y’know, the JVM.
Common Lisp could be compiled, so not the best example.
Lua is a way better example, since Lua scripts often finish in the time it takes Python to get going at all. And that’s with interpreted Lua, without JIT. I once straight up had to recheck if I left the dummy static output in there instead of calling my script, because the result was appearing instantly.
There’s also Fennel, a Lisp compiled to Lua on the fly. Since Lua is so snappy, the compilation overhead is unnoticeable.
Performance is an attractive metric because it’s something you can put a number on. It’s measurable, so comparisons are easy.
But there are so many other metrics that are more important.
Still, https://leafo.net/lapis/ looks like something I’d like to try sometime. I don’t know anything about the Lua web framework ecosystem, that’s just the first search result I found. Do you have any recommendations?
I’m more familiar with Lua for desktop scripting — I’m using it whenever I can, if it’s something that’s more than like three lines in Bash and the Lua libraries aren’t too bad. I’m even using it on the phone when dragging around blocks in Automate becomes too much (its minuscule footprint comes handy there). There’s also the excellent automation app Hammerspoon for Mac, which uses Lua for its scripting.
I’ve been vaguely looking now and then into using it for web in the manner of node.js, with asynchrony being handled on the Lua side — but was offput by the fact that many popular Luarocks libraries presumed synchronous workings, and async requires installing different libs if they even exist. Node has it better since the libs were developed to be async from the start. Iirc Luvit is what I was looking at, there are both libs and some kinda frameworks for it.
OpenResty and frameworks for it like Lapis could be the better way to go. Nginx is pretty much mandatory anyway, and afaiu synchronous libs can be used then, leaving it to Nginx to chuck requests into multiple Lua threads. A drawback is that LuaJIT, used in Resty, still supports only Lua 5.1 features, which is pretty damn old.
I haven’t looked into Lua for web in a few years, but since apparently nothing like Hammerspoon with its built-in http server exists for Linux, I’ll need to pick it up again, just to do some custom remote control from the phone.
Wait… PieFed uses Python? Holy shit… as someone who regularly uses both, Rust is such a better fit for something like this on this scale. That’s actually one of the best arguments I’ve heard against PieFed
Python and bootstrap. Honestly, piefed feels like someone’s final cs50 project - which is why I’m hesitant to jump.
Is the project called PyFed?
From what I understand, the limitation in speed/scalability for lemmy/piefed/mbin is the database, not the back end language, so the specific language used appears to matter much less than it would seem.
Piefed has some some pretty great features over lemmy, but for the sysadmin side of things, it has a noticeable improvement regarding network resource usage, and potentially raw speed.
Piefed also appears to be less buggy overall. As an example, Lemmy has suffered from a persistent memory leak that’s been around for years, with no fix in sight. You can see the opinion of our sysadmin who has been running slrpnk.net (lemmy instance) for 5 years now to find that just because lemmy is built in a memory-safe language, it doesn’t automatically translate to a good experience.
Lemmy is so heave that @jeena@piefed.jeena.net replaced his lemmy instance with a piefed instance and it’s using less resources. I like Rust, but like every tool, it has to be used properly.
Heave, ho!
I think for a large project Rust should be easier to manage in the long run.
Well, you’ve got another think coming.
Also it’s safer and much faster than python.
This is like MINIX vs Linux all over again. Yes, the microkernel architecture is a better concept, but the monolithic Linux was a better implementation.
It’s not popular if you rate it by actual usage, which is probably more meaningful than it seeming kind of cool.
if you rate it by actual usage, which is probably more meaningful
I can see those goalposts move right before my eyes!
I have no dog in this fight - flame away - but I’m offended by the sparkle-junkies calling [arbitrary non-rust language] old on a daily basis and somehow deciding some arbitrary measure of popular+shiny is a replacement for ‘good’ in some bizarre idiocratic glorification of naïveté .
& widely used
the comment you’re replying to is saying python, the old less shiny language, is more well known and more widely used by a larger number of developers than rust, the original stinger of the meme. that’s not the goalposts moving. that’s the goalposts being planted firmly at the 100 yard line like how they are in Canadian football
I like the way you phrase things there, pal. 👌
Rust is a good low level language. I’m not sure if it fits this species task the best.
Lemmy uses Rust
Is that the one I keep seeing kneehigh sock memes about?
For rust you need leather socks.
leather kneehighs?
59%(edit: 58% apparently) vs. 15% but who’s counting, right?
-
it’s less about the language than the choice to be welcome to contributors - especially older people who have more free time to devote to unpaid volunteer development, rather than younger people who know Rust but are already working 2-3 jobs
-
more to the point it’s meant in fun :-P
If it’s Python, that’s 58%. SQL is 59% and I would be pretty surprised if piefed is pure SQL
it’s less about the language than the choice to be welcome to contributors - especially older people who have more free time to devote to unpaid volunteer development, rather than younger people who know Rust but are already working 2-3 jobs
This reasoning is really bizarre, btw. Never once heard of someone choosing software because it appealed to older developers.
I’m an older developer. Rust seems so much more interesting to me than yet another python service. Oh boy is it Django??
Piefed is flask + python. Its very easy to read in my opinion. Very boring code. I knew nothing about it but threw a PR in there just for fun.
Django is my goto for personal projects too. And at work we use fastapi. They all kinda blend together now in 2025/26.
Personally I stopped caring about languages a decade into my career. As long as its boring and standard-ish, I’m happy. If it takes me a ton of time getting every dependency under the sun, the project is unstable/constantly breaking, and/or requires me a degree to even look at it, then im not going to contribute.
Lemmy is harder to read as a project than piefed. But both are good. Its not a “vs” we should just let both communities do their thing and be happy someone on their weekends wants to support our sorry asses.
older / younger? dude…
I made an account. Asked a few questions about the platform in their info com, made the mistake of bringing up why the “tankie triad” are pre-emptively blocked, got a bunch of people accusing me of being a tankie and telling me to look at MeanwhileOnGrad and the other com I can’t remember. It’s not for me, but I get why some folks prefer it.
I absolutely, 100% support Piefed and think this whole pissing contest between platforms is ridiculous. We’re all participating in the fediverse. Lemmy was designed to be open-source, to be built on, forked, played with, whatever. Piefed is growing and diversifying the fediverse, same as Lemmy.
We’re all in this together.
You claimed that Lemmy.ml is not authoritarian, were pointed to multiple communities pointing out thousands of instances where it was shown that it is, and still claimed that it is not, nor can be by definition, which you later recanted as a poor wording choice…
Anyway, that was a discussion with one single individual, with almost no up or downvotes that I could see, so essentially a private conversation even if held in a public space. And the individual you conversed with has only a six month old account, has nothing to do with the admin or development team that I am aware of, and mods only a few gaming communities.
That’s not “people”, that’s one person, singular, who has nothing to do with the info community, and I definitely did not see the “bunch of people accusing” you.
Anyway this post was intended as lighthearted fun, though it seems to have struck quite a nerve. Maybe it’s because people on lemmy.ml are calling for literal murder and the downfall of Western civilization (go see for yourself, or e.g. those communities you were referred to catalog such cases if you want an easier time going straight to it), and Lemmy.ml and the Lemmy source code are becoming increasingly interlocked over time, rather than lessening that decency.
That’s not the only account I had where people from piefed pointed me toward those coms and claimed lemmy.ml is authoritarian. You can check this one’s history, too. Admittedly, I conflate what happens on my various accounts, and it was more than one user in that comment section.
By definition, lemmy.ml is not authoritarian, so that’s not a “gotcha.”
I didn’t recant a word choice, I was being diplomatic after the person I was debating with took a (fair) issue with it so I rephrased it.
I find it hard to believe you looked at that whole thread and that’s what you got out of it. I stand by everything I’ve said, even if I’ve had to make the occasional apology, on every account — That’s why I’m transparent about all my accounts in my bio, the place you found my piefed.
And, I mean, why so serious? My nerves aren’t struck, which is why I said I support piefed. Going through my history and writing an essay about it, on the other hand…
Edit: a word, grammar.
Lemmy.ml is ABSOLUTELY authoritarian. Just look at their modlog. They have a vague “rule 1” rule that basically means at the admins discretion. The mods are flaccid and useless while the admins do all the moderation, and on top of that, they even ban people for posting shit in non .ml instances!
Quit with the apologia.
.ml is completely voluntary and I can see everything going on in it. Being dicks isn’t the same thing as being authoritarian. I don’t have a problem with pre-emptive banning as a concept, so we’ll disagree there because trans coms ban people who’ve never posted to them, too.
I don’t know what the “mods are useless” thing is about. Looks like they manage their communities normally?
On top of that, .ml is one of the biggest instances, so “they” is a lot of different people. Kinda like how people say .world is full of trolls, or sh.itjust.works is a nazi bar, or .today is right wing.
Its actually less about Python (or Rust), but about using well established frameworks (Flask in the case of Piefed), compared to a lot of NIH in the case of Lemmy.
Since everyone is jumping to a “programming languages war” under the masquerade of ‘Lemmy vs. PieFed’ let me also point out that the people involved on each project is different… Weren’t some of the lemmy devs facist apologists? I don’t want to spread fake news, but this is an accusation I read more than once. Perhaps someone can share the source to these ideas… I havs interestest to know more
One of the lemmy devs is a huge tankie, like “stalin did nothing wrong but if he did they deserved it” tankie
