I think there’s a lot of development going on with the lemmy UI, for example the lemm.ee developer has next.lemm.ee for his new UI design beta. I’m looking out for a golden age of lemmy UI development where everyone’s copying each other’s functionality and they all continually improve until it ends up being about whichever interface personally prefer, like we had with 3rd party reddit apps.
To be clear to others, though, PieFed is itself its own lemmy instance first, but it’s open source so works as an example UI that could be implemented by any other instance. Every instance of lemmy is potentially different, not just in which version of lemmy code they use but any number of modifications the instance admin may choose to apply.
PieFed is an entirely different implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, similar to Mbin (and Kbin before it), and the Sublinks project that hasn’t seen updates in a long while (the developer had a baby:-). PieFed has its own UI, with many themes and configuration elements (normal vs. compact vs. super compact mode, as well as List vs. Tile vs. Wide Tile display of posts), and app support in Interstellar and a not-official-yet fork of Thunder.
Those two apps also support Lemmy and the former also supports Mbin. So a lot of these things are interchangeable, but what I want to convey here is that PieFed is an alternative back-end, not merely a new UI for “Lemmy” (bc with those apps someone can have the same UI they are already used to, but swap out a Lemmy instance with a PieFed one).
And that’s important to have another source of these forum/thread based software, bc otherwise development gets stagnated and locked in to a single dev teams viewpoint. e.g. Lemmy is actually more authoritian than Reddit itself is in a number of ways - yes there is a modlog, but there is no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod, nor even a way to know which mod did it when the modlog (if you even noticed that your content was affected and went looking) simply says it was a “mod” who did it. Lemmy offers enormous freedom to instance admins, who typically offer much freedom to moderators, but individual users have actually fewer “rights” than on Reddit - e.g. again the right to even be told that your content was removed, or to ask someone why.
In contrast, PieFed offers a very large set of features designed for democratization of moderation, e.g. keyword filtering, labels placed next to user account names (example: this account is less than two weeks old, or this account posts ten times more often than comments so may be an unregistered bot, or this account receives and gives ten times more downvotes than upvotes so is a highly contentious/toxic user), all designed to put the power of choosing what content goes where in the hands of the end user, rather than require moderator decisions for each and every tiny matter.
i.e. Lemmy was designed by people kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic to be a less feature-complete replacement for that exact experience, whereas PieFed in contrast is blazing new ground that even Reddit had not bothered to offer such things to their users (all new features on Reddit for years now have been designed to maximize profits, not make users happy with what they are seeing, very unfortunately). Even if you choose not to use it (yet? although I challenge anyone to go through the sign-up wizard process and not become enthused by what you see), it’s really quite an exciting project!
I think there’s a lot of development going on with the lemmy UI, for example the lemm.ee developer has next.lemm.ee for his new UI design beta. I’m looking out for a golden age of lemmy UI development where everyone’s copying each other’s functionality and they all continually improve until it ends up being about whichever interface personally prefer, like we had with 3rd party reddit apps.
To be clear to others, though, PieFed is itself its own lemmy instance first, but it’s open source so works as an example UI that could be implemented by any other instance. Every instance of lemmy is potentially different, not just in which version of lemmy code they use but any number of modifications the instance admin may choose to apply.
No, PieFed is not in any way Lemmy. Maybe you are thinking of Tesseract, the alternative Lemmy front-end? See e.g. https://t.lemmy.world/ or https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/.
PieFed is an entirely different implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, similar to Mbin (and Kbin before it), and the Sublinks project that hasn’t seen updates in a long while (the developer had a baby:-). PieFed has its own UI, with many themes and configuration elements (normal vs. compact vs. super compact mode, as well as List vs. Tile vs. Wide Tile display of posts), and app support in Interstellar and a not-official-yet fork of Thunder.
Those two apps also support Lemmy and the former also supports Mbin. So a lot of these things are interchangeable, but what I want to convey here is that PieFed is an alternative back-end, not merely a new UI for “Lemmy” (bc with those apps someone can have the same UI they are already used to, but swap out a Lemmy instance with a PieFed one).
And that’s important to have another source of these forum/thread based software, bc otherwise development gets stagnated and locked in to a single dev teams viewpoint. e.g. Lemmy is actually more authoritian than Reddit itself is in a number of ways - yes there is a modlog, but there is no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod, nor even a way to know which mod did it when the modlog (if you even noticed that your content was affected and went looking) simply says it was a “mod” who did it. Lemmy offers enormous freedom to instance admins, who typically offer much freedom to moderators, but individual users have actually fewer “rights” than on Reddit - e.g. again the right to even be told that your content was removed, or to ask someone why.
In contrast, PieFed offers a very large set of features designed for democratization of moderation, e.g. keyword filtering, labels placed next to user account names (example: this account is less than two weeks old, or this account posts ten times more often than comments so may be an unregistered bot, or this account receives and gives ten times more downvotes than upvotes so is a highly contentious/toxic user), all designed to put the power of choosing what content goes where in the hands of the end user, rather than require moderator decisions for each and every tiny matter.
i.e. Lemmy was designed by people kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic to be a less feature-complete replacement for that exact experience, whereas PieFed in contrast is blazing new ground that even Reddit had not bothered to offer such things to their users (all new features on Reddit for years now have been designed to maximize profits, not make users happy with what they are seeing, very unfortunately). Even if you choose not to use it (yet? although I challenge anyone to go through the sign-up wizard process and not become enthused by what you see), it’s really quite an exciting project!