So, it seems like PieFed is becoming a real alternative to lemmy.
What are the differences between these two? From a tech perspective, and also morality/ethics, if you want. Any differences in vision for these services?
Say whatever is on your mind. I want to know.
On which one should we put our weight?
Edit: I will leave this post here, which is a post by one of the devs of Lemmy that enumerates some of the things Lemmy 1.0 has. Lemmy 1.0 seems to be already in alpha stage and is already testable. The feature selection does look fantastic. Here is the post I am referring to: https://lemmy.ml/post/40744781
The language really doesn’t have much to do with things like performance; at least not at the scale that most fedi instances operate at. For PieFed we are using the Flask framework and the overhead of an interpreted language and rendering jinja templates is absolutely negligible compared to the speed of the postgres database. Most of the performance optimizations we have had to make have been related to crafting better db queries or moving things like federation tasks to background workers.
Might Flask have trouble scaling to the size of reddit? Sure, but I don’t think that we necessarily need to optimize for a use case that may never happen and can also be alleviated by scaling out (more instances) rather than up. I know that rimu is already feeling like piefed.social is too big compared to other PieFed instances and has thought about closing registrations because of it. It is one of the reasons he made the built-in instance chooser, to try to move new users to other instances.
I wrote more about my thoughts on the pros/cons of python/flask in another comment.
The main benefit of Rust in our case is not performance, but correctness. Static typing, memory safety and test coverage ensure that things really work. There are no errors from null pointers or anything like that.