Thanks for pointing this out. I am not that active on masto, but I am from the Boston area, so this might be the kick I need to check out that side of the fediverse. I lived in Somerville for 10 years before more recently moving to the burbs. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in this country these days.

Growing up in the US, other responders are correct that school systems vary a lot depending on what state/district you live in. Over the course of my K-12 education, I attended 10 different schools across three states because my family moved a lot. There were times where I would switch schools and suddenly be way ahead in some subject and have completely skipped over some other topics. As an example, I never took a course in world history, but ended up having three separate US history courses because the different districts taught those subjects in different grades.

I do take issue with some of the commenters painting all US schools with a broad brush as terrible. There are excellent schools in the US and excellent school systems. As an example, I currently live in Massachusetts, and if you took it as its own country, it would be one of the best school systems in the world. In general, the states that prioritize education and pay teachers well end up with better educational outcomes. It’s not that surprising really, but a huge portion of the country seems to ignore that fact or spend money in less efficient ways.

My Ph.D. is in rheology and material science. One of the craziest papers I ever remember reading was about the non-Newtonian behavior of frog tongues and saliva. I still think about this paper from time to time. There was a sequence of pictures showing a frog tongue (removed from the rest of the frog) lying on a table, and then somebody touching it with an ungloved finger and showing how sticky it was as they retracted their finger. What they won’t get poor grad students to do…

Link to the paper (pdf warning).

discuss.online is doing it right. There is a significant overlap between discuss.online and lemmy.world’s admin teams, and I generally think they handle it about as well as could be expected of a general-purpose instance of their scale.

As for piefed, I think the primary things that help users filter their experience are the additional blocks that are at their disposal; blocking communities with a word in their name, blocking posts that match keywords, blocking posts that point to certain domains, etc. However, it can only help if a user actually goes through the effort of setting them up.

So, I see you joined ani.social and you have made mention of enjoying Japanese media elsewhere in this thread. In that case, I have some community recommendations for you:

• !anime@ani.social - The most active community for anime discussion (disclosure - I am a community mod)
• !manga@ani.social - The most active community for manga discussion (disclosure - I am a community mod)
• !lightnovels@ani.social - Community for Japanese light novels
• !animemes@ani.social - Memes, but anime
• !anime_irl@ani.social - Other anime memes

There are plenty of other communities out there for specific pieces of media, if you are looking for those as well. Some of the more active ones I am aware of:

• !frieren@ani.social - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - Season 2 is airing right now!
• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Delicious in Dungeon
• !gundam@ani.social - General Gundam community (disclosure - I am a community mod)
• !bocchitherock@sopuli.xyz - Bocchi the Rock
• !onepiece@lemmy.world - One Piece
• !overlord@sopuli.xyz - Overlord
• any of the communities on bookwyr.me - Ascendance of a Bookworm

lemmy.ml defederated from ani.social ages ago, so OP is at least spared on that front.

Pretty easy for me as I tend to not comment too much other than about development issues and bug reports. So, I usually have my user flair set to PieFed Contributor or something along those lines.

The reputation score (sum of upvotes - downvotes) is something that only admins can see. I absolutely agree with a lot of the criticisms people have with reputations systems like this or reddit’s karma, but at the same time, it is one of the most reliable and highest signal to noise indicators of spam/scam/etc. accounts out there. If we were to remove it entirely, it would take away a powerful tool for flagging accounts like that to admins earlier rather than later. Oftentimes, we can spot accounts like that even before they get reported by other users because users are much more likely to downvote/block than go through the trouble of creating a report.

To address your other reply in the same place, ngrok is not affiliated with X’s (twitter’s) Grok. ngrok is a service that provides https tunneling much easier than manually managing domains. Developers often use this for proof-of-concept stuff or testing features that need SSL because ngrok addresses can be created and destroyed easier and quicker than manually managing your own dns.

In actuality, I didn’t even realize that ngrok was a sponsor. Or, was a sponsor at some point. Is this still accurate @rimu@piefed.social?

This isn’t that far away from mine for two people: ~$600-$700 per month in a HCOL area and doing most of the cooking myself as well. I have found that sizing up a recipe for more people is only a marginal increase in cost. So, cooking for two is not just double that of cooking for one, but less.

The thumbtack trick was a game changer for me back when someone shared it with me. I have a dedicated thumbtack in a kitchen drawer now.

Another pleased Bosch owner here. The thing has been solid for about 3 years now since we had to replace an Asko that died.

Some of the other bigger instances out there federate with one or both just fine

I mean, the same is true for other PieFed instances. piefed.zip, for example, is federated with both (same admin team as lemmy.zip).

Like I said, this is inherently opinionated as any kind of defaults would be (themes, colors, user settings, etc.). I just don’t agree that just because an instance is old and active means that it is a positive influence on or provides a positive experience for the average user. Just like I don’t think forums like 4chan should be looked at positively just due to its age and activity. I know there are many that disagree with this, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Specifically, the piefed.social instance is a bit more opinionated than most other instances out there because rimu has pretty strong feelings about social media. Some of my contributions to the code have been to make PieFed less opinionated or to take some of those very strongly opinionated options/filters and make them configurable or optional at an admin level. So far, rimu has been pretty receptive to this kind of contribution.

At the end of the day, I am glad that all three threadiverse software platforms exist (people too often forget about mbin) and have been able to maintain a cordial working relationship. They each have different opinions, defaults, and features that might appeal to some users over others.

Here is the list of defederated instances when a fresh install happens. This is editable in the admin UI after installation is complete. So, if you really want your instance to federate with the good folks of cum.salon, you are more than welcome to.

This is really just intended to provide what we think of as a good set of defaults for a typical user. Of course this is somewhat opinionated, just like something like an operating system has a set of opinionated defaults for stuff like default programs, window styling, etc.

For piefed.social specifically, there are some words/phrases in the filter currently. Most of them are malicious links that have been spammed in the past or phrases that have been present among private message spam waves. Only one racial slur that I see in the list.

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.

as long as we don’t devolve into tribalism and attacks between the two that deter new users

Some people seem to find this hard. I might be one of the PieFed devs, but there are certainly reasons that people might want to use lemmy instead and I think they do some things better. No one platform is going to be the best.

In most cases, when bandwidth/latency is not a bottleneck, the thing that limits page load times is the database (in both lemmy and piefed’s case). So, if an instance has a beefy server they are running their db on, then it is going to snappier most of the time.

Looks like this is a feature for most markdown parsers. In piefed, the same thing happens. I wrote most of the customizations for parsing markdown, but nothing to create relative links like this except for footnotes. So, it must be the default behavior of the markdown library we are using.

Where are you even seeing this in PieFed? This is a glyph in the feather font that we do use for our symbols, but we don’t actually use that symbol anywhere in the codebase.

I run a personal lemmy instance and two personal piefed instances, so I was just doing some comparisons. My instances are mainly used for development and testing, so they are only subscribed to a handful of communities and just have one active user.

You are correct that when it comes to performance, like snappiness and responsiveness, the database is probably going to be the bottleneck. Unless you are scaling up to a huge degree, I would be surprised to see meaningful differences in the number of requests that could be handled due to language differences between rust and python. Yes, python is an interpreted language, but most of the libraries you are using are basically calling other system libraries written in a language like C, and the program can execute way faster than your database I/O can give it data to process anyway.

Here is my usage summary. The lemmy instance has been running for about 1.5 years while the piefed instance has been running for just shy of a year now. I have only included the memory usage and disk since I don’t think either is really CPU hungry or bound in my use case.