I looked at the code recently. It’s really good, way better than the UI made me expect.

There is now, see the PieFed meta community.

Sorry about that, it sounds very frustrating.

I’ve found that a field used to store account timezones was too short for yours. I’ve increased the size now so your next registration attempt will succeed.

Does it work ok in your phone web browser?

More apps will follow, I expect.

Interstellar - https://interstellar.jwr.one/

Yeah I think it’d be worth getting the voting buttons working, those are pretty key functionality.

The icons being stored in a font is kinda problematic (some browsers choke, large font file) but on the other hand it’s so great being able to set the color of them in CSS, which I found difficult when they are a SVG.

In https://piefed.social/user/settings there are two different compact modes to choose from, which shrink the images to varying degrees.

I don’t know of any way to determine how JS-heavy a link is.

Yeah. But in this case the Topics menu can be quite heavy as it lists every community that the current user is subscribed to. Instead of generating that menu (and sending it to the client) on every page load, when it probably won’t even be used, PieFed makes an ajax call (only possible with JS) to retrieve the topics menu when it’s clicked. Same for ‘Feeds’.

This cut the amount of HTML being sent to the browser by around 50% (depends on how many communities you subscribe to but PieFed makes it extremely easy to subscribe to dozens of communities with a single click so many people have hundreds) and eased load on the server too. Some of the more under-powered instances run noticeably faster now.

Voting, lol. Kinda important.

Dropdown menus. They’re not really needed but life sucks without them.

Can’t manually switch between dark and light mode (only automatically based on browser settings).

There’s probably more but I haven’t seriously tried to use PieFed for long without JS. Fundamentally it’s built HTML and CSS first, with sprinkles of JS added on for funsies rather than the modern way of being all about JS.

Yes.

PieFed uses very minimal javascript (it 95% works with JS entirely disabled) and you can access all the same communities and posts.

Try it at https://piefed.social/ or any of these other instances - https://join.piefed.social/try

“Do you regularly watch videos by Jordan Peterson?” kinda needs to become one of those before-first-date screening questions.

We won’t 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.

Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:

https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/

https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/

There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It’s what you do with it that counts.

https://piefed.social/ is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won’t increase as more users come on board.

PieFed is also really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that. I haven’t bothered to add S3 storage code because we just don’t need it (yet).

Anyway, all this focus on costs and downsides is only half the coin. There are massive benefits that come from using Python:

• Easy and fun
• Fast development velocity
• Huge amounts of developers know Python
• Extensive and mature libraries with good documentation
• Good readability
• Cross-platform without re-compiling

For a FOSS project where volunteer contributions from people play a big part these things are really important. There are many ways a project can fail (not just technical reasons but social & governance too) and running out of CPU is way way down on the list.

PieFed dev here.

PieFed is closer to Lemmy, yeah. Microblogs (i.e. the ability to follow mastodon profiles and have their posts show up in your timeline) are on the roadmap for this year.

Currently, Mastodon users can follow Piefed accounts and the posts from PieFed will show up in the Mastodon user’s timeline. Those posts, viewed in mastodon, can be replied to there and the the reply will show up in PieFed. But not the other way around.