I was made aware of Piefed from recent posts about this and went ahead and made an account in case I want to ditch Lemmy altogether in the future, but I'm familiar with how it works and will keep using it for now.

lemmy is permantly shutting down due to admin burnout.

lemmy in general or lemm.ee?

is piefed not a lemmy instance?

It's a totally different software project. Written in Python as opposed to Rust (programming language used for Lemmy).

But it is also part of the fediverse with ActivityPub compatibility, so you can easily browse and subscribe to Lemmy communities and content from PieFed and vice versa.

https://piefed.social/ is the original PieFed instance.

No, but it federates with Lemmy.

Ooooh fight fight fight! (Whatever it takes to leave
.ml alone)

That doesn't make sense I f Thu had a no pornography rule how could they federate with instances that had porn.

While I come from more of the Rust sort of side of things, and I agree with you that I'd rather have widely-used languages having static typing (though I've written more Python than Rust), it's also true that different languages have different degrees of uptake in different areas.

As things stand, Piefed, Lemmy, and Mbin all have an integrated Web frontend and backend, with third party client support via API. That is, they work kind of like Reddit does, not Usenet or IRC servers, where the backends and the frontends are entirely different projects.

I'm confident that Python has vastly more uptake for frontend Web development than Rust does. That means that it's going to be way easier to find contributors who understand how to build a Web UI who know Python than who know Rust.

If there were a split from this approach --- that is, if the UI became decoupled from the backends, and users just used Aphrodite or mlym or whatever, and the backend wound up looking something like Usenet server software, --- then I think that there might be a stronger argument for doing the backend in something like Rust, depending upon how it was structured.

But I think that Rust probably creates a high bar for attracting front-end contributors who are knowledgeable in building Web systems.

I'd also point out that Reddit started out in Common Lisp --- Paul Graham, who was involved with its early days, is a huge fan of Common Lisp --- but eventually was rewritten in Python.

EDIT: There's also Sublinks, in Java, but it doesn't look like it's getting a lot of activity.

You can have a "no local pornography" rule without also defederating from instances that have pornography.

The instance I'm on, lemmy.today, has an admin who disallows local pornography communities on the instance and explicitly says that he's fine with users participating in pornography communities on other instances through his instance. From its server rules:

No local pornography communities (but you are free to subscribe to them on other instances if you wish).

That makes sense if you don't have some sort of desire to block it from users on the server, but just don't want to deal with the administrative hassle that comes with it.