I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers an the .ml instance. The issue of funding a project with people openly expressing opinions many find distasteful and it being the biggest reddit alternative on the fediverse came up, so here’s a topic to discuss it.
What should we do? What are the options?
Answer: No fork necessary, there are Piefed and Mbin.
The thought-police strike again.
Once every couple months someone makes a post saying “I just found out the Lemmy devs are TANKIES! Won’t someone do something about it?” No one has expressed real interest in forking Lemmy, though plenty of people have expressed interest in someone else forking Lemmy for them.
Most of the dev interest seems to be on Piefed right now. For some reason Mbin hasn’t seemed to really take off, I don’t see people talking about it as much.
Mbin is just kinda weird. I guess there aren’t too many people who are after a Reddit-like that also care too much about microblogging. Or maybe they do but the microblogging part of Mbin is just an inferior experience to Bluesky or Mastodon anyway? Or maybe people just dislike having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
having to call shitposts in meme communities “articles” in “magazines”?
That is super clunky and I do hate it.
They are insane. But their views don’t seem to ever make it into the code, so I don’t mind for now.
It’s actually pretty interesting.
I recall one incident in lemmy’s infancy where one of the devs tried to ban the use of certain words, but then the community (rightfully) pushed back and said “no, that’s stupid.”
Reactionary forks don’t have a great record of success (or even getting off the ground).
Piefed already exists (although I contest the use of “reactionary” here)
It’s also not a fork
PieFed is not even a fork, btw, it’s a completely different software
Yes I know, but I was just speaking generally.
I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers
For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.
Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!
As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.
Move to PieFed
I’ll check it out. Thanks.
What is the difference with Lemmy? What’s better and worse with Piefed?
PieFed is newer so maybe missing a couple features with some clients, but in general is much better managed and more actively developed. It has some features above Lemmy already too. It will win in the end IMO.
Here is ChatGPT’s take on the differences:
PieFed
- Community topics & categories — lets admins organize communities into shareable broader topics.
- Feeds — user-created bundles of communities (like multireddits).
- Image-heavy gallery views for communities.
Lemmy
- Traditional community per instance model without built-in topic categories (though users can simulate via tags/feeds).
🛠️
Moderation & Safety Tools
PieFed
- Richer moderation toolkit — including stronger instance-level blocks, IP bans, and admin tools.
- Keyword filters and block instance content hiding.
- Emphasis on trust/safety tooling and reputation signals.
Lemmy
- Standard moderation hierarchy (instance admins + community mods).
- Moderation tools are improving but generally less opinionated than PieFed’s “healthy community” features.
👤
User Experience & UI
PieFed
- Keyboard shortcuts, cleaner UI design (subjective).
- Private voting option: votes can be hidden from the federation.
- Comment collapsing at −10 score by default.
- Low reputation indicators for consistently downvoted users.
Lemmy
- Mature, widely supported UI with more third-party apps and tools.
- Some features (like comment UI or search) are subject to continued refinement.
🔌
API & Ecosystem
PieFed
- API support is still maturing; some features in the web UI don’t yet have API endpoints.
- Some third-party clients are beginning to support PieFed but it’s not as broad yet.
Lemmy
- Established API used by many clients, so almost all functionality is accessible to apps.
🚧
Maturity & Stability
PieFed
- Newer project, rapidly evolving, occasionally incomplete features or polish.
Lemmy
- More mature with a larger community and more stable tooling thanks to years of development.
📌
Interoperability
Both PieFed and Lemmy speak the same ActivityPub-based “threadiverse” protocol, meaning:
- You can interact with communities from either platform regardless of which software you use.
- Posts, comments, up/downvotes, and interactions federate across instances and platforms.
I don’t see the point in boycotting something that’s free and doesn’t make money off of selling my data. I suppose you aren’t obligated to donate to it, but that was already true.
I suppose OTOH, I’m not pro-tankie, but I at least prefer tankies to the fascists and authoritarian capitalists (or whatever you want to call them) that run mainstream media. Harm reduction is the name of the game IMO, not finding a platform with a perfect set of political values aligning with yours (at least for me, I haven’t run into many leftists who are also committed to nonviolence due to pragmatic reasons). The russia/ukraine stuff in that thread you link does look nasty, on the other other hand
I think that Richard Stallman is a despicable person. Never stopped me from using and supporting the development of Emacs and GNU tools for the past 25+ years.
Is the code good? Are you prepared to make any potential fork viable and useful in ways that Lemmy isn’t so people have a tangible, non-ideological reason to choose your software over Lemmy? Do you have a long term goal for funding and maintaining a fork?
That said, Piefed is already a thing, and it federates with Lemmy. It’s where I’m commenting from right now. It has a better on boarding process and does a better job surfacing things I care about.
I write opensource software, I donate to opensource, I use opensource. I however can’t do everything. That is why the question is “we” not “hey @gerowen@piefed.social why don’t you make a fork, you lazy bastard”. Code is not the only way to contribute to a project and I’m willing to donate to lemmy alternatives while it is still possible for me.
Piefed might be where I start donating. Gotta check it out first.
If you want to, go ahead.
But Lemmy isn’t a small project. Can you really bear the maintenance burden alone?
And Piefed & Mbin already exist, just recommend them over Lemmy then? They are also supposed to be easier to maintain, so fork them if you want to fork something.
I have the mindset of taking any idea that works for yourself and use it for your purposes. Like we should be stealing ideas from big tech and foss-ing them. Id assume big tech is worse than this maintainer
But what would the fork look like? Finding the maintainer contribution and rewriting them?
This has been rethreaded so many times I feel like it deserves an entry in knowyourmeme. Opinions are like asses, everyone has one, everyone things someone else’s stink, in the end, what matters is you can support Lemmy without actually supporting the developers (eg.: support your local instance).
I don’t see a “we” in this, follow the free software way: Don’t like it? Fork it yourself or don’t use it.
It will become a problem for us if lemmy isn’t funded, won’t it?
Only if Lemmy was the only Reddit alternative. As so many people are saying though, it’s not.
e.g. PieFed not only exists but it has surpassed Lemmy in most ways in terms of feature development. And it continues to add new features at an astonishing pace.
There is no hope for “Lemmy” reaching the mainstream in my mind, but with PieFed leading the way, and Mbin also exists (that sounds mean so I’ll clarify: it has <1k users worldwide iirc), and yes a fork of Lemmy could be created if necessary, there is hope for the Threadiverse (federated threaded-based conversational platforms) overall.
Try out PieFed, even just the sign up wizard will leave you amazed. Donate to both its development and the operation costs of the instance that you choose (PieFed.social, PieFed.zip, several others to choose from).
Then probably something else will be funded in the same amount. That will be either PieFed or mBin.
No. If the project is interesting enough for people spending their time developing and using it there will always be running Lemmy instances. The need for funding over the amount people are willing to dedicate to a hobby project is the death of a project like this.
Just don’t give money to the instance they own that is pro russian occupation and pro china human right abuses
You can use mbin if you want out of the Lemmy codebase, it’s a separate codebase that does the same thing.
Not only the same thing, some features are even better compared to Lemmy.
