Being able to follow individual users, in addition to communities, is enough to tip the scales for me in favor of piefed. There's a lot of content on the fediverse that is inaccessible from the threadiverse, and getting pixelfed photographers and mastodon meme accounts in my feed has been a huge improvement for me.

I found Piefed to have some minor refinements to Lemmy, enough so that I moved to it for everyday browsing. Probably the most important for me is the combining of multi-community duplicate posts. The way I browse(All/New) will often result in seeing the identical post crossposted to 5-10 other communities. In Lemmy, it results in endless scrolling of duplicate content, especially if more than one person happens to be doing it at a certain time. In Piefed, when it works correctly, I'll see only one example of the post and it will offer a dropdown if I'd rather see it from another community. Things like that really help soften the rough edges of the fediverse.

I've also heard that it's more quickly developed than Lemmy but I have no firsthand knowledge of that.

At the end of the day, you can see the exact same feed regardless of which your using so just pick the one that makes your time on the fediverse more pleasant.

Piefed has (had?) some weird opinionated behaviours that to me make it seem worth avoiding https://lemmy.ml/comment/23662293

Cons of each:

1. Piefed is a lot newer and is therefor in some areas still under construction.

2. Lemmy is maintained by people who also run the ML instance promote Russia's invasion of Ukraine, promote North Korea, promote Donald Trump, etc. The have postulated that Trans people are a "liberal psyop" and they think the word liberal is synonymous with right-wing fascism. The periodically add a banner to every instance running lemmy begging for money to fund their extremist activities. LINK TO MEGATHREAD

Personally like Lemmy. Both the Lemmy devs and the Piefed dev have their faults, but its been a while since I can remember that controversy crossing the barrier into the source code on the Lemmy side. Its been fairly recent for Piefed with upvote limiting, and PJ leaving over it

Piefed is ideologically driven by the creator, and encourages pre-emptive banning and blocking users who don’t just participate in echo chamber behaviour.

Lemmys devs might be ideologically captured too, but their software isn’t, so it’s the better option.

If I'd already had a Lemmy account I'd probably have just stuck with that but yeah Piefed has more features. The combined comments from cross posts are really nice.

mbin!

The head developer(s) of Lemmy are hardcore Marxist/Maoist/Leninist. The "ml" in Lemmy.ml means "Marxist/Leninist". They openly ask for donations so they can quit their jobs, develop Lemmy full-time, and use Lemmy to spread their beliefs.

PieFed was created specifically so people could contribute to the Fediverse without contributing to the advancement of Marxist/Leninist ideologies.

Lemmy.

The PieFed dev has some pretty extreme views and goes out of his way to censor and limit what users can do.

I'm using PieFed at the moment, although its more a matter of avoiding the Lemmy devs' hate and support of violence.

PieFed is definitely developing faster, and has a host of features Lemmy doesn't as a result. PieFed has following users, de-duplication of posts, flairs, among other stuff, which Lemmy still lacks. That said, the PieFed dev has some very weird opinions on social media design, so for every new feature, there's an anti-feature. For example, I love the extra moderation tools, but the voting quota limits the ability for more dedicated users to contribute. Its mostly a dislike of internet culture and those who spend a lot of time online, so PieFed tends to discourage things like memes. All-in-all, I'd say PieFed is better, but if you care about the specific downsides, you can easily disagree.

i use lemmy because theres a frontend that looks exactly like old reddit. https://old.lemmy.today/

It depends on your values and what kind of experience you want. For me, I couldn't find a piefed instance that met all my criteria.

I wanted no instances blocked, no flagged users for low karma (I didn't want karma to matter at all,) able to see greentext communities (4chan screenshots are blocked on some, if not all piefed instances,) and be able to see the modlog.

Piefed has additional features that lemmy lacks, like following individual users and multi-coms, but it wasn't enough to get me to switch.

I like the openness of the lemmyverse, since there's more room for individuality between the instances without a developer ideologically holding the reins, though I've heard Rimu has walked back their more controversial decisions. For all the criticisms of ML and Grad, the developers affiliations don't pollute the wider fediverse.

Whichever you choose, make sure you look into the instances as well, since they have unique features, blocklists, and supports for apps.

Lemmy

Technically: less often updated, may have less of the shiny features. Some see it as positive: Lemmy stays out of the user's way.

Ideologically: devs are far-left, but the project itself is neutral. Wherever you find yourself politically, you'll find a place.

Main dev: @Nutomic@lemmy.ml

Overall: Lemmy is a good option if you want to see the "raw" Threadiverse. Less bells and whistles, no content or moderational filters pushed on the user aside from what instance admins and users themselves decide.

PieFed

Technically: fast-paced development, "move fast and break stuff", highly experimental, but feature-rich.

Ideologically: Liberal/moderate, enforced. All PieFed instances filter out "radical" left- or right-wing content (see no-qanon PieFed list), all user filters come on top of this list instead of replacing it. It also suffers from the backlash on some of the decisions made, such as vote throttling.

Main dev: @Rimu@piefed.social

Overall: PieFed is a shiny and new, fast-paced, but also opinionated and controversial project. Whether it's going to be a "peace of mind" or "power tripping dev hellscape" software is only for you to experience.

Potential compromise: PyLova

PyLova is a fork of PieFed designed specifically to cut out opinionated pieces while keeping the technology.

However, it's only currently present on quokk.au, which is itself opinionated (anarchist, far left).

Just as an FYI: Lemmy has a big update for the front and backend in the pipeline. You can see it on https://voyager.lemmy.ml/. I think this might bring some nice improvements.

So technical aspects might soom-ish change.

I have an account on both, both servers run by the same guy.

They're both functionally equivalent. One doesn't surface data significantly better than the other. For a webpage, Piefed moves a little faster on an average release. I prefer the user acct in the upper right with drop down rather than center top page with a dropdown.

I prefer seeing up and down votes upfront on my posts.

I like lemmy's interface a bit better. I like the speed and cleanliness of piefed.

no wrong answers.

lemmy is lighter on resources if you care about your internet usage footprint. and far more stable overall.

I started with Lemmy but moved to Piefed because it was compatible, had more features, and was faster to load. Nowadays, I don't know if any is better, but I'm happy with the Piefed.