Fediverse memes

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.

Python and bootstrap. Honestly, piefed feels like someone's final cs50 project - which is why I'm hesitant to jump.

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.

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.

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.

I would be surprised if you'd argue that more devs can write Rust than Python.

Web servers spent most of their time with IO, because the real work is mostly done by the DB. That's why especially Node is very fast and influential design wise. But PHP, Ruby and Python are all very popular and valid choices for web servers. In the end, if you need real performance you have to scale horizontally anyways. And the small gains you make in a compiled language matter even less.

Coming from a Python and Java background Rust is way harder to learn. Don't get me wrong, i like Rust, but it feels way harder. But i agree that its great for large projects and performance-wise!

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.

I like the way you phrase things there, pal. 👌

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.