Funny enough, the apps here are the identical same as were available for Reddit. Like Boost that so famously was rate-limited by Steve Huffman. But they in turn only wanted to spend so much time in development of the app until (1) the Lemmy codebase itself supported options on the back-end, and (2) the number of people actually using their tools made their efforts feel worthwhile. Why spend an additional 20 hours a week on top of your regular job making features that only a few tens of people will ever use, in an app that only a few hundred ever download, on a platform of mere thousands (the vast majority of which may be either bots or definitely at least alts, some trying to get around bans but all representing the same smaller subset of people irl).

It is a chicken and egg problem wherein Lemmy would have to develop the software enough to make using apps worthwhile first before app devs would bother, and then most users demand apps before becoming willing to make content posts. Except then the Rexodus happened, and all those apps came in basically for free, along with a huge userbase of tens of thousands of people, and the flood of content with it.

An experiment that has partially failed. Lemmy’s peak userbase was ~55k after the Rexodus, but now despite how much worse Reddit continues to make itself (it’s more complex than I said before: Reddit allows for transparency in those few respects, but the culture of current mods choosing to use those options that are available to them is a different matter entirely - after all why would “landed gentry”, as spez called them, bother?), Lemmy’s active userbase has fallen down down down down and down again (stats), and looks like it will never rise even back to that former peak again. Hopefully I am wrong - maybe when Reddit finally kills off old-reddit for good it will happen, but I highly doubt it. That thought terms of the “This will finally be the year of the Linux desktop!” type of wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, PieFed is digging deep into the systemic things that were holding back and replacing all of it with code that actually can be developed quickly (as this past year has proven empirically), essentially restarting the whole project. Which tbf Kbin (now Mbin) also tried, but that project has only ever had ~2k users worldwide, compared to Lemmy’s 30-60k, a large fraction of which PieFed stands to inherit when people get tired of hearing of all the wonderful things that PieFed offers to them, whereas Lemmy is stuck in its rut and increasingly looks like it never will for some matters, and for other matters they will still trickle out on the timescale of years to a decade rather than weeks to a year for Piefed.

Btw, PieFed now retains deleted posts. The portion that the OP first offered and then requested to be deleted is still gone, in respect to how OP owns their own content, but the discussions that ensued independently of the OP are now retained for anyone to continue to see afterwards. e.g. OP asks a question, many people offer answers in response, then OP deletes their question, which now no longer works to also delete all of the answers. PieFed is amazing! 🤩

You are talking theory.

Now, in practice invite the MAGA over to your side, and see what happens.

Good luck!

Translation: consent needs to matter. Tankies do not care about your consent. They want to advance the cycle through the destruction phase to get to the other side that is all magical rainbows and fairy dust - just exactly like Russia, China, and North Korea are so well-known for, obviously.

And they will not let anything get in the way of achieving their goals. Not even facts.

Please do not allow yourself to become used like a tool by the oligarchy. Like both the (leftist) tankies and the (rightist) MAGAs have. They share in common a love for authoritarianism - and guess who gets to be at the top there? Hint: it ain’t us!

Tankies want me and everyone that I have ever known or even met to literally die.

Something something bOtH sIdEs SaMe.

But what they will do is ban you for saying that (if you said it in one of their communities)! 😉

Es ist tatsächlich so.

Next make a meme where PieFed.social had its icon as the Ukrainian flag and then subsequently cycled through just about every cause for weeks before settling back on the iconic pie symbol. The contrast between PieFed and Lemmy was never more apparent to me than that (not a true statement but it feels good to say it so imma leave it here😋🍰🥧).

The authoritarian Lemmy devs don’t give a shit what people actually want, or what others do. They made their own Reddit clone after being kicked out for being too toxic, and honestly that’s fine - they can do as they please, whatever.

Note how in so very many ways Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit. Reddit at least notifies someone that their content has been removed, and offers a modmail to ask questions as to why, and when a mod curates a post, while it does get removed from the community feed, that submission content remains accessible by anyone who has the URL, allowing people the freedom and ability to continue discussions that were already previously started, including the person being moderated.

Lemmy has none of that, and the personal instance of the devs (Lemmy.ml) is extremely well-known for offering instance-wide bans, removing people from communities that they’ve literally never even heard of, in response to someone saying something critical (or not sufficiently obsequious enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea (and, one wonders, how soon will the USA be added to that list?). Which is actually fine by me tbh - they should be free to run their instance however they like - except for:

(1) that fact is nowhere ever explained anywhere on their instance, and the rule most often cited there says nothing whatsoever to that effect, making it disingenuous and completely opaque (and therefore opposed to democratic principles such as transparency, as leaders serve at the will of the people rather than the other way around where Might Makes Right, and power is all that ever matters).

And (2) people donating to further code development are not offered the option to separate out the aforementioned horrible moderation practices from the development of the Lemmy codebase. Which here AGAIN is nowhere explained, AGAIN lacking transparency in how people’s funds are spent, on matters that they often express the polar opposite of consent for.

But anyway, they will do what they will do, while we should also be mindful of what we do as well. Hence why PieFed is such an attractive option, to people that believe in more democratic principles than authoritarian control. You do what you can with what you have to work with. Except the PieFed devs who just started building their own:-).

I hope this explains why PieFed’s operations like up more with how Mastodon works (both European working according to democratic principles) than with Lemmy (authoritarian control following Stalinist principles like the old USSR, China, and North Korea, and again one wonders how much longer until the USA joins in on that, though probably I should not speak too much about such or I will end up in a literal concentration camp).

It is yet another fantastic feature that we’ve been waiting for several years for on Lemmy, but PieFed got to it first (no surprises there). :-)

Yeah someone seems to be following you around downvoting everything you’ve said here - I hope you enjoy the opportunity to live rent-free inside their head 🤪

LW is also European, look it up (despite that, it does attempt to cater towards the desires of former Redditors though, that much is true).

ML users aren’t really communists though - they are leftist MAGAs who believe in alternative facts, only paying lip service to communist principles but not in a genuine manner. i.e. tankies.

But on the other hand, perhaps I should smile more, even as I am being murdered? (Dials gaslighting up to 11) Yes, it is surely I who am in the wrong here, rather than them.

(/s in case it is not abundantly clear)

I mean, if they all want to move to Russia or North Korea or China, go right ahead, I am not stopping anyone from chasing their bliss. Perhaps I should note that they will end up as fodder for a warlord’s lust for conquest, but at the end of the day that is not my call to make as to what to do with your lives.

But damnit I would like to have some tint amount of control about what to do with my own! Including the ability to block them, if I happen to want that. I almost left Lemmy over precisely this issue, preferring instead to simply read books offline than to have to wade through endless immature eternity of September crap. Fortunately, that’s exactly when PieFed started coming up, offering an alternative besides Mbin, and which now offers a heck of a lot more features than either of them.

Actual communists here are on Threadiverse seem quite emotionally capable and are among the more pleasant to chat with. Examples there include slrpnk.net. I used to also say db0 though there always seems pushback nowadays whenever I include it, but I can’t get anyone to give me a solid answer as to why besides unsubstantiated accusations that even on their face looks like pure BS to me. So I guess I’ll keep saying it, just noting that it is a controversial point.:-)

Hexbears on the other hand are trolls, pure and simple, with zero regard for anything other than “the dunk” process of pwning someone - or rather, appearing to, from their own extremely childish POV.

Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml then are the leftist MAGAs, believing in alternative facts rather than living in reality. e.g. most claim that they would move to the likes of North Korea in a heartbeat, except, you know… I guess they took an arrow to the knee or some such. 🤪

I am so glad that I can block people from an entire instance. If I could, I would make an exception to the devs Nutomic and Dessalines out of respect for having offered the Lemmy sourcecode as FOSS, but other than that, I have not missed a single interaction with anyone on Lemmy.ml since I have done so, every time I’ve checked to see what I might be missing. They are the most batshit insane comments across the entirety of the Threadiverse, after Hexbear obviously.

Moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.

Visit ML before any major Western election and browse by Local (its default) and you will easily see: ML calls for the literal and actual fall of all Western civilization including the deaths of most to nearly all peoples therein.

Whereas LW does not want that, go figure. 🤷‍♀️

Something something bOtH sIdEs SaMe.

Often such alts are quite open about who they are, some explicitly stating those facts and e.g. how their alt predates their hexbear account (so not created to get around a ban, but then in the very next sentence proudly announcing how they can use it to that effect, as if that is somehow any better, or even different in the slightest degree?).

I wouldn’t know how to find out for sure in your case without stalking them in return though:-).

Ah I forgot to include this link (I even went to the trouble of looking it up and copying it:-P): https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed tells one story of an irl admin, and https://piefed.social/c/meta/p/1413365/scheduled-maintenance-for-server-upgrades-next-weekend another, both of whom are switching to PieFed, including your very own slrpnk.net sometime in 2026 it would seem.

Also, PieFed sends 25-fold less data per post to the users (though 5x more posts per homepage view, so only 5x less data total if measuring empirically and using that measure rather than a single post page).

So while I’ve never tried personally to run my own instance, either Lemmy or PieFed, everything I’ve heard suggests that people are saying that PieFed uses far less resources. Indeed that might not have been true years in the past (before those above links I posted were written).

There is a Blog with several articles of interest here, if you want, including:

• https://join.piefed.social/2025/11/22/reducing-piefeds-dependence-on-cloudflare/
• https://join.piefed.social/2025/09/11/how-to-use-really-simple-licensing-rsl-to-block-all-ai-crawlers/
• https://join.piefed.social/2025/07/09/tuning-piefed-for-scale/
• https://join.piefed.social/2025/03/19/tuning-postgresql-for-piefed/
• https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
• https://join.piefed.social/2024/03/12/piefed-privacy-control-your-search-visibility/
• https://join.piefed.social/2024/03/07/moderation-the-design-of-social-platforms/
• https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/ - this is wherr I got the 25-fold less data stat from (again that’s 5x less data, but with 5x more posts, hence 25x less data per post)

PieFed really restores my hopes that a Threadiverse platform will be usable in the future, without having to subscribe to authoritarianism!

Moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.

Seriously, I doubt that Lemmy will ever offer tools to foster such community support, seeing as how the authoritarian views of its dev team trend less towards the desires of an individual user and rather more towards the mantra of “I, as an admin/moderator, have decided what you shall know and like Ukraine and Hong Kong and South Korea and Greenland, your choice is to STFU and enjoy it”.

e.g. in Lemmy when a user blocks someone, that someone can still: read, vote on, and reply to your comment, send you DMs, and a later change to the Lemmy software further expanded these rights for blocked users to trigger notifications on behalf of the recipient. On the other side, the rights of the person wanting to do the blocking include: the ability to delete their account and move to some other instance where an actual admin has banned the people that you want blocked. Note that some of what I have said here relates more to “instance blocks” but also some applies to “user blocks” as well. Instance admins have supreme rights, but as an individual end-user, you not so much.

That said, I believe that PieFed offers a solution to what you are looking for. Both generically in terms of offering a far more democratic set of rights to end-users, and specifically in this case by restricting voting to only subscribed members of a community. The latter would help limit the impact of drive-by downvoters arriving casually from browsing by All, as well as more specific brigading attempts. I think another option (I’ve never personally tried to create a community on a PieFed instance, so this is all 2nd-hand info from just reading) is to limit votes to only be allowed from “trusted instances”, with that I think being defined by the instance admin.

And if you did need to spin up an entire instance, PieFed uses fewer resources and is a lot easier to set up and maintain as well (see e.g. https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed). I also love its philosophy of offering democratization of moderation features, providing more tools to increase the capabilities of the end-users rather than restrict it more to the hands of only admins. Learn more at https://join.piefed.social/.

It’s just a thought to consider!:-)