Fediverse interoperability: PieFed vs Lemmy

submitted by elena edited

Hello everyone! I'm new here... I had been testing Fediverse interoperability on Lemmy but I didn't like what I saw: there were several quirks and flaws that made no sense to me. Several people mentioned PieFed as an alternative and that's why I'm here - I'd like to compare/contrast features and see if PieFed does things differently.

I should mention that I have a blog whose mission is to introduce the Fediverse to non-technical people, to get them to leave the walled gardens of Big Tech: The Future is Federated . I've been doing a show and tell of interoperability between Mastodon and Pixelfed , Friendica and the rest of the Fediverse and I've shown what happens when you federate a Wordpress blog . My new focus in on the "Threadiverse", so Lemmy it is.

I was disappointed when I published my first post on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/post/18635732) and noticed that:
1) hashtags don't work
2) account mentions don't work either (and I was told they do federate in comments, not the first post - whaaaat?!?)

It's cool I was able to find my original post on here (https://piefed.social/post/198179) and I wonder if you have any tips / words of advice regading things that PieFed does and Lemmy doesn't do. I'm really curious.

And please bear with me, I'm going to mention my Mastodon account ( @_elena@mastodon.social ) and my Lemmy account (@elena@lemmy.world) to see if anything happens when I hit post. And bear with me one more time and let me try hashtags here, like #TheFutureisFederated.

Thanks for your patience with this newbie! πŸ˜…

Elena

Edit: I included the URL of my Mastodon profile to see if it would federate

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10 Comments

piefedderatedd , edited

I wonder if you have any tips / words of advice regading things that PieFed does and Lemmy doesn't do.

PieFed has Topics which Lemmy doesn't have. So with PieFed you can subscribe to a lot of communities at once. Or you can start a post in PieFed inside a topic and then PieFed will ask you in which community you want to post. PieFed also can let you follow a user, and let you subscribe or un-subscribe from posts or comments.

More here : https://join.piefed.social/features/ -> Differences between Lemmy and PieFed

Some things I like about Lemmy, and what PieFed does not (?) yet have :

  • Easy to cross-post to other communities. This is useful to avoid letting others seeing a lot of posts in a row.
  • Detection of an earlier post with the same title so one can decide to stop posting a duplicate.
  • Auto suggestion when wanting to mention someone with @
elena [OP]

Thank you so much for these insights!

Andrew

PieFed is newer than Lemmy - it's only been in development for a year and is just now coming out of the 'beta' testing phase. As you will have seen, the Mentions and the in-text Hashtag didn't do anything - we'd need to scan the post body and regex the stuff out, and that's not been implemented yet (the Issue for it is here)

Ludrol

Thanks for the blog post. I didn't really know about piefed so that was a great surprise. I really like that they implemented multireddit-like functionality. I have already discovered couple of communities that otherwise I wouldn't have subscribed to.

@_elena@mastodon.social

elena [OP]

I'm glad to hear you found my post useful 😊

I'm really enjoying all the content aggregators of the Fediverse πŸ€—

Rentlar

Hashtags just do not work currently in lemmy, as far as I can tell. There have been some work arounds over the months to automatically tag posts, and in Lemmy 0.19.14 there are apparently automatic tags based on the community name.

Mentions do work in the comments and don't in the post title or body. I agree that they should work everywhere.

An idea I've been floating in my head is to refine the automatic hashtag idea to manual moderator assigned hashtags, which could then be filtered by Lemmy and other fediverse clients to better group Lemmy posts across communities. I've spent my spare time this week translating the Photon interface for Lemmy so I haven't been able to think seriously about how to implement. Maybe I'll check for existing noise in the issue log and make a new issue about it if it's not there.

hendrik , edited

Go to pieded.social, sign up and see for yourself. It has a different set of features. Should be pretty much interoperable, though. I like it more than Lemmy. YMMV.

elena [OP] , edited

Testing out comment federation, please don’t mind me πŸ™ˆ

Pinging @_elena@mastodon.social @elena@friendica.opensocial.space and @elenarossini@pixelfed.social (because, why not) πŸ™ˆ as well as @elena@lemmy.world and @elena@fedia.io

elena [OP]

One more interoperability test, this time with my new Friendica instance πŸ‘‹ @elena@poliverso.org

abff08f4813c

I keep getting surprised by what integrations pyfedi supports. For example I didn't realize it supported microblogs/mastodon.