this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Fedigrow
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Gonna go out-of-topic from the post but I need this to get this off my chest:
Do you know what prompted me to contribute to PieFed's code?
Recently, a developer of Lemmy straight up posted a link to a website to a China propaganda in a community in my Lemmy instance. Yes, a propaganda.
Tbf, slrpnk.net receives a lot of China-related posts, and that's due to China out-competing other countries in many sectors (EV, for example), and in those post OP usually critical enough to acknowledge that while China achievement is good, the crimes Chinese government has done shouldn't be ignored.
But the post is different. From the domain name, the "About Us" section of the website, the bias in the article. Clearly this was posted with an ill intention. A developer of a platform uses the platform to spread propaganda. Disgusting
I downvoted said post, but I hesitated to call it out. Because, I'm gonna be honest--I'm genuinely scared of interacting with those kind of people. And I don't want to have a deep discussion about politics or propaganda anyway. I'm not that kind of person.
This made me realize, I also don't tell people I use fediverse or don't reach out to other forums to open a community in Lemmy. This is because the fediverse, or at least Lemmy have a bad reputation: tankie.
There is a saying in my country that says "One person ate jackfruit, everyone got the sap". The genocide deniers ate the jackfruit, and everyone got the sap. The genocide deniers ruined fediverse's name and everyone else got the consequence. I don't wanna recommend people to use softwares made by those terrible people, and I doubt most people want to use softwares that has a reputation of being a genocide deniers playgrounds.
Honestly OP from the link in the post (https://feddit.org/post/4920887) kind of made a good point.
At this point, I would prefer just quitting Lemmy altogether.
But I remembered, the fediverse is an open source effort. I use open source software a lot. I feel like I need to give back something. And I have a community that still needed moderating.
And recently I found PieFed that is still in early days but show some great promise. I happen to understand HTMX (I use it in my personal projects) and Python (I learned it way back in junior high). Seems perfect to me, so I contributed one.
Honestly, it feels kinda unfair to me that software made by a genocide deniers gets the funding, meanwhile a software made by a good person (PieFed) has to be a hobby project.
Welcome to Lemmy. Now you know why a lot of people are hoping for Piefed to reach feature-parity with Lemmy.
Thank you for contributing to the codebase by the way
Why not mbin? Is it because PieFed is more reddit like?
I actually liked kbin/mbin. I used it before moving to Lemmy. I just can't code in PHP (and I have had some trauma using it while doing internship)
Isn't slrpnk.net an anarchist instance? Or at least db0 seemed to think that it was, and I would believe that he would know more about such than I. So if it is not merely allowing but advocating for fewer restrictions about what can or cannot be posted, leaving the end-users to have to make their own decisions about valuation judgements, then that would not surprise me so much? As in, it's not that the design of the places desires such content, so much as it makes it feel welcomed alongside everything else.
100% of the times I've told peple that I use Lemmy I have come to later regret it. A Nazi bar - or in this case the leftist equivalent - is not something that generally speaking, one should advertise as desiring to go to. And it would seem that we very much spread the messages of the Alt-Left here, giving such content a pass b/c while "Alt-Right = bad, surely the opposite cannot also be bad?", i.e. "I sure hope that these leopards don't eat my face off?!"
Yet as you say, what is the alternative - Reddit? PieFed isn't ready for the masses, though I am so happy that you are helping to get it closer to being thus:-). In the meantime, there is also dubvee.org to consider, even though it's marketed for a specific region inside the USA, it does a helluvalot to kick out tankies. Or, while I need to switch over to a standard Lemmy instance for so many things (to search for content, or find specific comments in a post that I just can't easily do on PieFed), PieFed is getting halfway usable already on a daily basis (again, not fully, but for many tasks).
It makes sense to me why Lemmy got that funding: it was first. The early bird gets the worm, that's just how it is. Lemmy.World admins expressed a muted desire to potentially switch to another non-Lemmy software - Sublinks, although that project hasn't seen many updates in the last half a year? - and they may consider switching to PieFed as well. Or considering how many people seem to want to leave it, an exodus may happen naturally. In any case, it's simply not time for that yet, b/c there are so very many problems with the implementation atm - indeed it is earlier in its development cycle than Lemmy, with fewer resources to help speed it along too.
Otoh, PieFed is in a language that more people know, and so if more people contribute as you have, it could easily catch up and even surpass Lemmy! (that uses Rust, which is reputedly significantly harder to learn even for people who already know C++)
In any case, kudos for choosing to be a contributor - we all like to hear that!:-) There is no reason for Lemmy to disappear entirely, and rather it's fantastic to have additional choices for a user to consider when we can see both of them fully functional side-by-side and pick what we think will work best for our own needs:-).