In recent weeks, I have posted an absolutely staggering amount of content on Lemmy.
My goal is simply to support the platform. I hate huge corporations.
Now I’m taking a break. I won’t post anything or I’ll post very little (I still feel a little guilty!! Who will post new content 😢?)
But I need to focus on improving my own life and relax.
However… I’m just curious.
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Don’t even need to acknowledge the flairs and polls; sign me the fuck up.
Honestly I do not know - Notifications on PieFed, along with searching, are both features that are still a bit wonky and behind everything else. Side-note: you will legit want to keep your old Lemmy account, and use it especially for searching for content, and also if you choose piefed.social whenever that goes down for upgrades, which it does far more often than a normal instance (it literally says that btw, it deploys new features sooner than other instances so it is the “test bed” to try them out:-D but if that bothers you then use one of the other ones like piefed.zip, piefed.world, etc.).
So that one may be a bad example for me to use… but on the other hand, Lemmy has been out for YEARS and that feature requested for YEARS, whereas PieFed is still being built and new features are added WEEKLY. So I would expect to see that feature “soon” on PieFed, whereas on Lemmy I would expect to see it “never” (b/c of the authoritarian mindset precluding them even wanting to do it). Just like so many other of the continually growing set of features offered by PieFed.
Not to get too deep into the tankie bashing, but nevertheless it does seem worth pointing out that the philosophies of the Lemmy devs have gotten them into some financial trouble, as people do not want to interact with them, e.g. to first learn the super-difficult (even compared to C++!!) Rust coding language and then try to contribute code. In contrast, pretty much every programmer already knows Python and so a lot of people can - and do - contribute to PieFed.
TLDR: PieFed is so much newer than Lemmy and honestly it is a bit behind in some ways, but even so PieFed is already running circles around Lemmy in not only the pace of development but also the raw set of features already developed.
And if I can add: even Reddit stopped adding features YEARS ago, unless you count things like those Doge coins that generate profit for the company but do not add anything new to the user-base. To see a thread-based forum platform actively adding brand-new features… damn it is so refreshing! (and yes Lemmy does that too, but on the scale of YEARS rather than, again, mere WEEKS)