The fediverse is working. I am now following (using Mastodon) a "Learning Rust" community on Lemmy [1], who I found through them commenting on my peertube video [2] using Lemmy.
Us sitting here with our fiber internet and recent model phones have it pretty good. But the “i” in iPhone stands for “inequality”. Most people in the world still have pretty bad internet and old/slow phones. For a platform to be widely adopted and to serve the needs of those who often miss out, it needs to be frugal in network and cpu usage.
Lemmy
Kbin
PieFed
Home page
4.5 MB
1.65 MB
700 KB – 930 KB
Viewing a post
360 KB
826 KB (varies)
29 KB
Home pages
Due to Lemmy’s javascript-heavy software architecture, visiting a Lemmy home page involves downloading . And this only gets you 20 posts! Also community thumbnails, even if displayed as a 22px by 22px icon are served directly from their home instances, unresized, which can often be multiple megabytes in size. The home page of lemmy.nz is currently weighing over 9 MB.
Kbin’s home page comes in at a respectable 1.65 MB due to relying less on JavaScript. However it is let down by not using loading=”lazy” on images so they all need to be loaded immediately and by generating post thumbnails that are twice as big as they need to be.
When viewing a post, we can assume various assets (CSS, JS and some images) are cached due to loading the home page first.
The picture looks similar when viewing a post, which is a bit surprising. One of the usual benefits of the JS-heavy SPA architecture used by Lemmy is that once all the ‘app’ is loaded into the browser, subsequent pages only involve a small API call. However, going to a page in Lemmy involves two API calls (one for the page and one for the comments) both of which return quite a bit of data. If you look at the ‘get the comments on this post’ JSON response you can see the developers have fallen into the classic SPA pitfall of “over-fetching“. They’re retrieving a whole haystack from the backend and then using JavaScript to find the needle they want, which involves transferring the haystack over the internet. Ideally the backend would find the needle and just send that to the frontend.
Kbin sends more data than it needs to when viewing a post, again because of not using loading=”lazy” which causes every profile picture of the commenters to be loaded at once. Making this simple fix would bring the weight down, from ~800 KB to around 50 KB.
PieFed only sends 10 KB – 30 KB to show a post, but it varies depending on the number and length of comments. This could be reduced even more by minifying the HTML response but with PieFed under active development I prefer the source to be as readable as possible to aid in debugging.
This is no accident. It is the result of choices made very early on in the development process, well before any code was written. These choices were made based on certain priorities and values which will continue to shape PieFed in the future as it grows. In a world where digital access remains unequal, prioritizing accessible and fast-loading websites isn’t just about technology; it’s a step towards a more inclusive and equitable society.
Welche #Reddit Alternativen gibt es denn gerade?
Ich habe #Lemmy und #kbin auf dem Schirm und habe nur ein unbestimmtes Gefühl dass es an Lemmy viel Kritik gab, vielleicht auch an Kbin. Habt ihr mir da mehr Infos?
Hintergrund: Ich würde r/fellnasen auch gerne hier im Fediverse haben. Die Community hier ist wahrscheinlich sehr klein aber einen Versuch wäre es ja wert. #Ratten#haustiere
The #Lemmy developers host an AMA, talking about decentralisation, platform identity and a roadmap
@nodebb talks about how they are thinking about what federating forums actually means, and how their implementation of #ActivityPub will look like
Project Tapestry by @Iconfactory is a Kickstarter to build an App that gives you a single chronological feed from a variety of sources, such as #mastodon, #bluesky and #rss
Quand #Lemmy a pas envie de te faire marrer (parce qu'il est pas là pour ça, Lemmy), il fait ça. Tu crois quoi ? Que Motörhead c'est des clowns ???
(en plus les clowns en vrai ça fait un peu peur, cf Terry Pratchett)https://youtu.be/ET07vTF_y94?si=VuyUENh4EOrNRMoK
#Sharkey's recent vulnerability and their handling of it is still miles better than #Lemmy's #XSS exploit which actually took down a big instance and is something even more elementary than what Sharkey experienced.
Like seriously, the first thing you do when #Markdown parsing is involved is to sanitize the hell out of it, both in the Markdown input and the HTML output. And you put up a strict #CSP for good measure. Lemmy spectacularly failed on both counts, despite existing as a project for years and a lot more instances (and therefore users, which rivals #Mastodon) using their software!
I can cut some slack for the Sharkey devs here because:
they're relatively new (only months since the project started)
it only affected note imports from #Twitter which is already niche enough
it was easy to mitigate (just disable note import)
it didn't affect single-user instances IIUC
I haven't seen any Sharkey instance get actually exploited by this
they're taking steps to make sure this shit doesn't happen again (haven't seen this from Lemmy yet, and last I checked their CSP is still shit)
So this is not worth blowing over in the #fediverse. Your assessment is exaggerated, this energy could've been spent somewhere else, and you owe the Sharkey devs an apology.
Having #reddit host (and therefore own) the conversation space on any subject is ridiculous. But the way #Lemmy & #kbin work presents the same problem. Basically they are not really decentralized etc. But if there were no communities/magazines, if hashtags only served that sorting function, and we instead merged the best parts of those conversation tools with the decentralized feed of #mastodon etc, we'd have something better than the closed corporate silos could ever provide. #fediverse
It is still early enough in the #redditmigration that #lemmy or #kbin can easily be replaced if something superior comes along. So if #piefed or #sublinks can develop their consumer facing products better and faster then they will inevitably get the community support. And since sublinks uses the existing Lemmy API it might have the best chance to do so.
You never know, the current Lemmy devs might be pushed aside tomorrow, anything could happen.
Is there a way to follow #Lemmy communities through Mastodon in a way where you would only get new posts into your timeline? So filtering out the comments?
Ugh, the naturally chaotic use of #hashtags on #Mastodon can make it very frustrating to use one of them for specific topics. I want to try and find other people talking about #GenerativeAI and particularly #AIArt like #StableDiffusion, but the last two are swarmed with just people posting images. How does one make a tag that is both easy to (think of to) tag with, and signifies discussion on a topic, instead of image-posting?
It's very much why things like #Lemmy are necessary.