this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I'm blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.

Whats the catch? Why aren't we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?

App support is one thing I can think of.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

We won't 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.

Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:

https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/

https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/

There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It's what you do with it that counts.

https://piefed.social/ is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won't increase as more users come on board.

PieFed is also really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that. I haven't bothered to add S3 storage code because we just don't need it (yet).

Anyway, all this focus on costs and downsides is only half the coin. There are massive benefits that come from using Python:

  • Easy and fun
  • Fast development velocity
  • Huge amounts of developers know Python
  • Extensive and mature libraries with good documentation
  • Good readability
  • Cross-platform without re-compiling

For a FOSS project where volunteer contributions from people play a big part these things are really important. There are many ways a project can fail (not just technical reasons but social & governance too) and running out of CPU is way way down on the list.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

That's nice info, thanks! Do you know why the db difference?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I've never seen a Lemmy DB, sorry. But I hang out in the Lemmy matrix rooms and read about admins struggling with their 300 GB databases quite often.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can confirm. When we took over the running of feddit.uk migrating the images took forever as it was around 300GB.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Migrating the images as in media? The discussion is about database sizes.

The biggest DB I have is the one from alien.top, which got close to deal with 600k mirrored bots and 10M posts + comments. The database was clocking around 25GB.

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