Rust is stable but difficult to work in. The political propaganda not merely tolerated but actively pushed forward by its flagship instance, and things like the Lemmy instance picker "randomly" choosing either Lemmy.ml or hexbear.net literally (if roughly) 90% of the time, and the political rules never anywhere being stated explicitly on lemmy.ml, etc. have led people to greatly reduce or altogether stop funding for Lemmy.

At the same time the Lemmy devs are attacking PieFed, e.g. by running AI to identify vulnerabilities and then rather than offer even so much as 24 hrs notice go ahead and publicly disclose them (yes they "can" do so, but is it "friendly" to have chosen that route?). Also people report from looking at the Lemmy codebase that even though it is written in Rust it is still buggy, e.g. so much so that the underlying database must be constantly rebooting due to memory leakages. Tbf similar arguments if less substantiated claims have been made against PieFed as well. It is for this reason that in 2026 slrpnk.net will switch to PieFed, as quokk.au already did, even while others moved forward more hesitantly, opening up a PieFed alternative even while retaining their older Lemmy instance.

The fact that in Lemmy moderator reports have not federated all this time since the Rexodus (although FINALLY will in the upcoming v1.0 release), shows that the concerns of the more "global" audience for Lemmy are of far lesser consideration - and this is presuming the maximum good-faith assumptions of their programming capabilities.

I have lost virtually all faith that the Fediverse will ever grow much beyond its current state, but what faith I still have leftover I place solidly into the hands of PieFed as the best hope to move forward. We will see, I suppose.

e.g. I now have a single language in the comment listing. In order to do my earlier test in Español I had to go into my Settings and enable that option in the large list, which changed the small list to have just those 2 choices: English and Español. When I began to make the comment in Español, the English option was of course the preselected one until I switched it to post the comment, so the real test was the follow-up second one, when I saw that not English and instead the last-used Español was preselected at that time.

Afterwards I removed Español (using the larger list in Settings) so that my smaller list has just the one language in it again. Which makes the entire per-comment UI element somewhat useless for me, sobre todo porque puedo hablar en cualquier idioma, pero aun así mantenerlo etiquetado como inglés. Vel alius. Ou un autre. Oder ein anderes.

Overall, I enjoy this approach - it seems ideal for someone who switches between a handful of languages, even though tbf that's not what I do myself.

You also set the list in your profile Settings menu, so it’s not this humongous list of all possible languages but just those that you choose to show.

You're talking about this list, right?

There's an equivalent one in Lemmy:

However both are for the content you see, not for the content you create. I just think having some way to "pin" a few convenient languages would be great. PieFed's "last used is the one you're expected to use" strategy works fine for 1 language, but for 2+ it still means digging through a huge list.

Yes it defaults to the last one used.

You also set the list in your profile Settings menu, so it's not this humongous list of all possible languages but just those that you choose to show.

And "undetermined" is not one of the options that shows on outgoing messages.

I feel like people get tired of those of us who constantly say that PieFed offers SIGNIFICANTLY more features than Lemmy does, or will ever do, but OTOH…

People make a whole ruckus because of the political views of the individual devs (from both sides), and also because of Rust vs. Python, but at the end of the day I like how PieFed adds new things to the table. Every new piece of software brings a different vision, different "I can't stand this papercut issue so I'm fixing it", and with it a bunch of new features.

Although... for the Python vs. Rust thing, I get Rust might perform better but I kind of expect people to be more likely to contribute with a Python project.

I feel like people get tired of those of us who constantly say that PieFed offers SIGNIFICANTLY more features than Lemmy does, or will ever do, but OTOH...

I think Lemmy should let you configure one language as default, and as many languages as you want for quick access. Then if you don't mess with the "select language" menu, your posts/comment get your default language. And if you do need to mess with that menu, you'll have an easier time finding the language you want, like this:

(Replace the languages in the "quick access" list with the ones you want.)

"Undetermined" should only appear if the user actively unselected the other languages.

Note by my example you should be allowed to tag a post/comment with 2+ languages. The OP is a prime example of that, sometimes content shows multiple languages at once and there's nothing wrong with it.

Also note this should be separated from the configuration of which languages you're willing to see, that already exists. Being able to read some stuff in a language is definitively not the same as being able to write with it.