The upcoming v1.2 release will include a built-in instance chooser, so every instance will be able to recommend every other instance, without a centralized site like https://joinmastodon.org/ or https://lemmyverse.net/instances. (except those instances that have opted out or closed registrations)
The instance-choosers for other platforms tend to push people towards the bigger instances by prominently displaying the number of users or communities they have, or even worse sorting results by number of users. This seems like a good metric because if lots of people chose it in the past then it must be well-run, right? Right? Heh.
Instead, the PieFed instance chooser sorts by ping (network ping + page load speed) and prominently shows a “Stability” metric which is a combination of various things (daily backups, multiple people having SSH access, financial health, etc). Another key metric is Newbie-friendliness which is whether they have a decent number of topics created, which are used as starter-packs to get new accounts into many communities quickly. Thirdly, the Age is shown, which is the number of months it has been operating. Join brand new instances at your peril.
Another aspect I’ve chosen not to get into is regional or topic focus of instances because most people are into more than one topic, leading to difficult choices. Sorting by ping will tend to show you instances in your country anyway.
The primary language of an instance is really important - people need to be able to communicate with their admins - so I made that a filter.
With new PieFed instances opening up all the time we need to get new people using those instead of everyone clustering together on piefed.social. The sooner we do this the better, in terms of spreading the financial load around and fostering a healthy diversity of instances before one or two instances snowball and end up dominating.
I’m really looking forward to releasing this functionality, in the next couple of weeks.
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You could have a look at Voyager, [email protected] , [email protected] or [email protected] , all of those are good options for apps supporting Piefed!
So the apps supporting Piefed sofar:
- Blorp
- Summit
- Mlem
- Interstellar
- Photon
- Boost
- Thunder
Would be nice to make a support matrix of what pieces features are supported in each one
The og
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What about Summit? There are weekly updates, the app is quite polished
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Hum, seems like it’s been hanging for a few months now, pending on F-droid
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/3053
If you consider Obtainium: https://github.com/idunnololz/summit-for-lemmy
F-Droid takes awhile to accept new apps. I can only speak for the one app I submitted to them, but it took almost a month for my pr to get merged.
After getting merged, updates won’t appear on F-Droid for 3-6 days. That’s because F-Droid has a roughly 3 day build cycle. Depending on where they’re at in their build cycle it’s 3 days best case and 6 days worse case.
This isn’t a knock against F-Droid. Just by their transparent nature builds will lag a little.
Thank you for your insight!
Thanks for this I was installing it thru Aurora but since this comment moved to Obtanium!
Blorp supports Android!
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No worries! There are a lot of sick Lemmy/PieFed clients out there, built by a lot of very talented people. Voyager has been an inspiration for me.
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My experience on voyager is it’s still a bit clunky. But improving.
Good to see you on Anarchist.nexus!
Not sure if you’re on the beta version, but Thunder on testflight (IOS) already supports Piefed. It’s been working well for me so far.
Just discovered this too
https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder/releases/tag/0.8.0-2
Thank you @[email protected]
Very good. I had hard to choose instance because many of them don’t show country of hosting.
Awesome! Any way https://anarchist.nexus/ could be added? (+ to the https://join.piefed.social/ list, if possible :>)
It will show up automatically if you meet some conditions (which you won’t until 1.2 is deployed):
- Running version 1.2 that has the code for the instance chooser (or maybe a custom build like piefed.fan must be)
- Enable the instance chooser in the admin settings
I don’t know all the details as this is something rimu coded up, but I suspect that your instance would then be listed as a choice for any other piefed instances that have the instance chooser enabled and that you are federated with.
Nice, thanks!
I’ll be taking down the list on join.piefed.social as soon as v1.2 comes out :)
Does this function exclude instances the site you are currently on has defederated from? Is there an option for an additional blacklist?
If I ran an instance I would probably not want to see my potential users redirected to instances like hexbear, grad, or exploading heads (had those been piefed instances).
In a similar fashion it could be cool if instances could highlight related ones. A startrek instance could for example choose to promote other sci-fi or fiction related instances up front, giving users the most relevant alternatives first. But that’s more of an extra idea and less of a necessity.
Love the concept of this.
I can’t remember but I agree it should exclude defederated instances.
Really appreciate all the work you and the rest of the Piefed team put into this project. This is a wonderful feature!
Great news, thanks for sharing!
@[email protected] , this is the kind of changes I was talking about
@rimu Here were my ideas on how fediverse onboarding could work, think it would apply to PieFed too – Offer the users one choice to onboard but under the hood round robin between a set of trusted and reliable choices, and also give an offramp for those that want to manually slice, dice and sort.
https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/06/24/the-seven-deadly-fediverse-ux.html
I just read the first point
The key: no single server gets favored. New users get distributed, not funneled into a single mothership.
Servers aren’t identical. They have different defederation policies. Lemmy.world is different from Beehaw.org, which is different from lemmy.zip
How do you define which instance you defederate from in your “one single social home” ?
@rimu If you were interested, I’d be good to DM and discuss how it might work for PieFed.
That doesn’t sound great as I can’t be responsible for choosing which servers is trusted and reliable, both because then I would have centralized that power onto myself and because I have better things to do.
However I have set the criteria for what I think constitutes trustworthiness & reliability and then displayed the degree to which an instance meets those. That avoids giving me the power to exclude an instance and it frees me up to do more productive things.
Sounds like a good approach
An instance maker*. You’re herding your experience choosing terms by depending on the owners’ judgements.
Owning your experience means hosting your own instance.
Lots of thought put into this, Love it
using those instead of everyone clustering together on piefed.social
There is a very easy solution for that, close registration on piefed.social now for some time until it spreads a bit.EVERY Instance of anything in the fediverse needs this. You shouldn’t have to depend on some website to tell you what the best instance is currently when it hasn’t been updated in weeks/months. I mean with PieFeed I just went with piefeed.social cause that was the easiest one to find. pretty much the same with lemmy and when I originally signed up with mastodon.
So I think Pixelfed has a pretty good model, although it is centralized. Instances can opt in our out of being featured on sign up pages. There’s also some basic criteria they must agree to like agreeing to notify users with advanced notice before shutting down, and some basic moderation. In my opinion “uptime” should be added as well.
Yep, what I have so far is pretty similar. This is the form that admins fill out to make their instance appear in the listings:
sorts by ping (network ping + page load speed)
Who’s ping, the users or the servers? If I’m on the other side of the world than the server then my ping and page load will be very different.The user’s ping.
