List of instances: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Piefed has a few nice features that Lemmy and Mbin lack
- instance blocking
- comments combination, posts only appear once
- keyword filter
- topics (admin-managed feeds)
- user-managed feeds, public and private
- ability to reduce the amount of Trump and Musk content
It doesn’t have an app yet, but it’s in progress
At the moment, it only has 352 monthly active users, so it seems like people aren’t very interested in it yet
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7
Is this the lack of app, or is there anything else?
Yeah, I’ve got a now-defunct lemmy instance, one that’s still up but is running v18.something and hasn’t had another active user in over a year, and another that I couldn’t use with non-local instances because everything was so delayed I was basically interacting with 3 days ago.
On one hand, it sucks that there’s so many issues to experience. On the other hand, it’s nice that none of these are absolute dealbreakers, especially now that exporting settings/subs is so easy.
Yeah I don’t recall the details but I’ve heard people say that Lemmy (and presumably PieFed?) is fairly resource intensive, needing some beefy network resources to keep up. Unless someone is just trying to personally pull down a community or ten for their own reading pleasure, but once you start piling on the interactions (clicks, posts, comments, even votes - every single one of those takes up “resources”) and thus especially as other users start to share the instance, it gets difficult to keep up.
That said, the delay issue specifically with Lemmy.World might be fixed in a month or so… which ofc is what people have been saying for the past half year too:-P.
For features, I definitely strongly recommend PieFed. For Lemmy, I personally recommend Discuss.Online for someone in the USA (lower ping?), with fantastic uptime and next to never having any technical issues, while for someone outside of the USA I think it’s feddit.uk that is the typical recommendation that I’ve seen offered.
I use PieFed as my daily driver though, covering 99% of my Threadiverse activity:-).