This is a unique experiment in the Fediverse.
What’s going on?
To explain what’s happening with my account:
I’ve created a new art form.
I don’t mean this in a pretentious “guy in a turtleneck sniffing his own farts” way. I mean, literally, I’ve invented a form of art that hasn’t been done before. And to understand it, you first need to understand what’s happening.
The Backstory
A long time ago, I organized photos into categories and themes for an ARG (alternate reality game) centered around r/Sizz. But then Reddit went and enshittified itself, forcing me to abandon the original plan.
From that, I learned a crucial lesson:
- Never depend on an external platform to host my work.
- Always build redundancies so the work can survive.
Keep that in mind—it’s key to what happens next.
The Problem with the Fediverse
I tried migrating the ARG to my personal server, atomicpoet.org, but I hit a wall:
The Fediverse makes it really hard to build an art community, and by extension, an ARG. The platform favors certain topics—politics and tech do well, but art? Not so much.
At first, I was frustrated. But then I had an idea:
What if the same content could look completely different depending on where you view it?
The Breakthrough
Mastodon and Lemmy attract different audiences, which means people interpret the same post in completely different ways. What if I leaned into that?
That’s when I discovered Piefed.
- Its moderation tools gave me exactly what I needed.
- Its masonry-style layout prioritized images over text—perfect for what I was building.
How It Works
On Mastodon, my posts look like scattered poetry, fiction, and chaotic personal musings:
🔗 Example
But on Piefed, those same posts take on an aesthetically unified theme:
🔗 Example
Two completely different experiences—from the exact same content. The way each platform processes posts creates a divergent reality.
The Artform
Think of it like this:
- My personal account = a light beam
- ActivityPub = a prism
- Piefed communities = different “colors” refracting from that prism
Each community on Piefed has its own theme and patterns:
🔗 Lumoura
🔗 Blue
🔗 Dustbloom
🔗 Sizz
Look closely, and you’ll see that these patterns form a larger story—one I’ll eventually compile into multiple books.
The Big Reveal
Instead of making you guess the “game,” I’m telling you upfront: this is how it works.
And none of it would be possible without ActivityPub and the way different platforms interpret content.
@fediverse@lemmy.world
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The two examples look the same to me
It’s cool and all. But a completely new art form? I think you’re overselling it…then again, if it’s a marketing tactic, it’s a solid one.
You’ve rediscovered Social Media Branch Planting.
With a Mastodonian Trumpeting and a Fediverse Floorish.
Is it Art?
Is it New?Only Time and The Culture Vultures will tell.
I do
n’t meanthis in a pretentious “guy in a turtleneck sniffing his own farts” way.
Digging your energy though, love seeing this excitement!
That sounds awesome!
Maybe PieFed’s new feeds feature could be used to combine communities in interesting ways - https://piefed.social/post/500805
The fediverse really do be like that sometimes.
But seriously, this is very cool and I love to see people being creative and sharing things like this. I saw your earlier post about this and it seemed like a great idea.
Also Piefed is awesome and it’s great to see more people discovering and talking about it.
So is piefed an app or another type of fediverse? I’m not sure I understand. It looks like it talks to both Mastodon and Lemmy, but I could be wrong.
It’s another type of content aggregator like Lemmy and Mbin. Totally unique software, not just an app.
It’s not as well known because it only started development a little over a year ago, well after the APIcalypse when most of the Lemmy userbase came over from reddit. But it’s been improving rapidly and already has a lot of innovative features that Lemmy lacks. I believe that one of those features is better compatibility with Mastodon, but I’m not entirely sure. It’s also written in Python which makes it easy for a variety of developers to contribute if they so wish.
Its exceptionally good at federation and has a unique(?) solution to multiple like communities (Topics). Topics can be lemmy communities, but can also be peertube channels. Example: https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome
It also has anonymous downvoting so you don’t have the issue like lemmy where admins know exactly how everyone votes across all of lemmy.
Indeed.
Although the private voting feature isn’t all that effective. First of all it doesn’t work with trusted instances (which includes many of the big ones), and secondly it only obscures the voter identity, it doesn’t completely randomize it.
See these posts for context.
https://piefed.social/post/408115#post_replies
https://piefed.social/post/205362#comment_2496068
I don’t necessarily think these limitations are a bad thing, because totally private voting could theoretically be a vector for bad actors to manipulate the visibility of content on the fediverse. This solution provides some protection for the average user but also makes it possible for admins to identify vote manipulation if it becomes a problem.
Its a lemmy alternative written in Flask (Python). Piefed has got more moderation features and is probably faster to develop being written in Python. Both lemmy and piefed can talk to Mastodon (and obv to each other too).
