Welcome to a new era of interconnected content discussion with PieFed – a link aggregator, a forum, a hub of social interaction and information, built for the fediverse. Our focus is on individual control, safety, and decentralised power.
Like other platforms in the fediverse, we are a self-governed space for social link aggregation and conversation. We operate without the influence of corporate entities – ensuring that your experience is free of advertisements, invasive tracking, or secret algorithms. On our platform, content is grouped into communities, allowing you to engage with topics of interest and disregard the irrelevant ones. We utilise a voting system to highlight the best content.
Video introduction the codebase
Yes really. Here's an example - see the communities at the top, and hashtags at the bottom.
On second thought, that's not a fantastic example of categories, so here and here are better ones.
There's a lot that is not yet implemented in PieFed, like no preview feature for writing messages or user tagging (e.g. @openstars@piefed.social does not send me a notification), yet it already has several features that Lemmy does not - it's so exciting to watch it develop!:-)
Codebase is clean too.
I haven't looked but that's great to know as well:-).
Still no multi communities at the user level (hopefully soon)
The reason my first example wasn't a good one was that this meme community (!tech_memes@lemmy.world) wasn't part of the organized hierarchy of Home -> Topics -> Chilling -> Memes, but rather the generic Home -> Communities (as in, all of them in aggregate) -> Technology Memes@lemmy.world. So yeah, it's a very new community, although !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca is older but the same happens with it too. Therefore I assume that it requires an admin approval to bundle these "Topics" together, and it definitely doesn't strike me as something that an individual user could put together.
Then again, someone (perhaps you? or me?) could send requests to the admin to add communities to topic areas, or perhaps modify the codebase directly if it were placed into a file and people granted access (whereupon once again, the admin would have to approve - although in this case a mechanism would also be needed to assess the differences and apply them).
Anyway, there's a LOT of polish that PieFed lacks, and this doesn't even crack the top half imho, next to things like user mentions (@openstars@piefed.social) and Notifications properly taking you to the actual thing that you are being notified about (a goodly fraction of the time it does not, right now.
On the other hand, Lemmy has no such thing as "Categories" or "Topics" of any kind so... anything that PieFed has along these lines is surely better than the nothing that exists in that regard there, right?
That's why I'm saying it's not personal multi communities, which is something people are definitely looking forward (most upvoted Lemmy GitHub issue)
I remember discussing personal multicommunities with @rimu@piefed.social a while ago, at the time it was not a priority for Piefed, maybe they'll revisit in the future.
Yeah I agree with their reasoning, since what is there now is pretty good, so it would be merely a refinement of an existing goodness, compared to so much else needing to done elsewhere e.g. making an API to allow existing apps to use PieFed in addition to Lemmy.
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain where things are at for folks!
I'll have to wait and see if an Android client that supports it shows up, it looks really neat!
You are most welcome:-).
An app? Apparently an API is in development for it, but it's still in alpha stage. Even so, there's a bunch of new features in PieFed that Lemmy does not have, such as Categories of Communities, so in some ways it would be a downgrade to use an app.
I just use Firefox to access https://piefed.social/, and it works fine. Well, mostly, bc even though PieFed has things that Lemmy lacks, it lacks some polish compared to the Lemmy web UI that has had more development work put into it. This is where an app would come in handy - if you didn't need all the new features that PieFed offers and just want Lemmy without the "Lemmy" part:-). (And didn't want to use Mbin, which iirc also lacks an API and thus ability to access via an app.)
Edit: One cool thing is that PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust, so the development process should move forward more quickly since more people know the former language while the latter is reportedly quite difficult. And another cool thing is that the developers are SUPER responsive:-).