Written in a common programming language that many developers understand and which has a bright future ahead of it. Python, of course!
Not to be a complete downer, there are some good ideas which this project has, but I am really skeptical if Python is a good choice for this kind of application. Especally if it has to run on servers.
Python is slower than compiled languages, it’s true, but it’s still very fast. Bottlenecks are more likely to come from external connections to the frontend, other APIs, and database than from the server codebase itself.
if mastodon can work for most of the fediverse on ruby, python cal be viable. not to mention how much of the parts of the internet we enjoyed were written in php. claiming python is not suitable for webservices is ultimately kinda wild given how much it gets used for exactly that
Python is pretty performant for web services to be fair. But maybe social media isn’t ideal for it?
I was wondering what the differences to Lemmy are, luckily they have this on their website:
Differences between Lemmy and PieFed:
Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/pics@lemmy.world
People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
Hide all posts based on keyword filters. Keyboard shortcuts.
Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
Better UI design (somewhat subjective!) Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)
Voting is private.
Seems like a few nice QoL changes, but nothing substantial yet. We’ll have to see where it goes in the future.
Personally I’d rather see a sort of P2P Lemmy that gives much more tools for community sovreignty.
Much more automoderation tools, optional automatic deletion tools, custom scoring algorithms, a solid per-community user reputation system that mods can filter/rank posts by, powerful client side content filters (like ML sentiment or topic filters), etc. One that covers anything from private chats, to group chats, to discord-like communities, to fully private Lemmy-like communities to fully public Lemmy-like communities. All in a secure and private manner.
Like a one stop shop for communication, that heavily emphasizes community and user sovreignty, covering anything from ephemeral chats to archival public content. I find the current ActivityPub ecosystem sorely lacking in those regards. We have some of those features but more bolted on rather than baked in.
They posted another update 2 days ago with another set of features: https://piefed.social/post/248560