Voyager now has experimental Piefed support in the App Store and Play Store. F-droid rolling out soon. 🥳
Make sure your app is up to date (v2.37.0 or greater) and enjoy!
P.S. Support is under active development and there are known and unknown issues. Please post any feedback or questions!
Background image credit
https://images.nasa.gov/details/hubble-observes-one-of-a-kind-star-nicknamed-nasty_17754652960_o
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered surprising new clues about a hefty, rapidly aging star whose behavior has never been seen before in our Milky Way galaxy. In fact, the star is so weird that astronomers have nicknamed it “Nasty 1,” a play on its catalog name of NaSt1. The star may represent a brief transitory stage in the evolution of extremely massive stars.
First discovered several decades ago, Nasty 1 was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly evolving star that is much more massive than our sun. The star loses its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.
But Nasty 1 doesn’t look like a typical Wolf-Rayet star. The astronomers using Hubble had expected to see twin lobes of gas flowing from opposite sides of the star, perhaps similar to those emanating from the massive star Eta Carinae, which is a Wolf-Rayet candidate.
Instead, Hubble revealed a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. The vast disk is nearly 2 trillion miles wide, and may have formed from an unseen companion star that snacked on the outer envelope of the newly formed Wolf-Rayet. Based on current estimates, the nebula surrounding the stars is just a few thousand years old, and as close as 3,000 light-years from Earth.
Performance is also much better in my experience.
Lemmy’s backend is very performant, the UI is janky though. Using the lemmy frontend and then an app that just talks to its APIs is night and day.
Piefed is also new, with only about thousand users. Active users are going to be much less than that. It’s also written in Python, we’ll see how that scales.
Lastly, the official instance is behind cloudflare, so all your login credentials are going to CF before it reaches piefed servers. CF is most likely tracking users too. This is a no-go if you give a shit about privacy. But with a CDN, yes it connects faster.
So ya, kinda. It’s too early to tell and also comes with security (MITM) and privacy concern (on the official instance) with the CDN.
It’s nice to see Lemmy and their egotistical devs getting some competition though.
More options FTW.
I honestly don’t get why people always complain about this. The exact same thing can be said of the CDN services provided by Akamai, Amazon (AWS), Google, Microsoft, Fastly, and every other CDN in existence. If you don’t trust CDN’s then you should stop using the internet since most major sites use one CDN or another.
If you really want to be paranoid about your data being sniffed then you should be more concerned about companies that use services like SiteSpect. They basically operate as a MITM on your unencrypted data between the CDN provider and your origin, and their tools are specifically designed to modify that content.
I’m trying my best 🙂
1600 users, 948 monthly active. https://piefed.social/about
Across all instances, about 1500 mau and rising.
Isn’t this the case for most Lemmy instances as well?
Lol yes
Exactly what I was thinking with Python. I love Python, and it definitely enables more devs to contribute and use it, but it is never something I would use for a backend because it will not scale without a lot of work. I don’t know a lick of Rust, but I know that it’s insanely good with scaling and latency, so if I was building a social media platform that I had high hopes in, I would just start with that and learn it.
It’s nice to see that the fediverse can expand laterally though and have many different options. I may open a PieFed account just to see how it goes. I’m optimistic about the future of the fediverse having been here for 3 years.