Ask Lemmy

That seems far too simplistic imho. Instance admins have done this for years and can tell you how quickly things fall behind: if you want to federate with any other instances (the entire point behind the federated model?), then you need to maintain compatibility. Fortunately Lemmy is fairly mature and far less likely to release groundbreaking changes than it did in the past.

But also, you have to learn to code in Rust, which even people who already know C++ seem to find very difficult, for a number of reasons including major lack of support by a standard library (such as C++ itself has in its STL), which in Rust is still fairly primitive iirc, forcing the user to build every tiny little thing from scratch, or use less well-written and tested code, possibly so poor as to negate the advantages of having chosen Rust over some other, more commonly useful language like C++.

And then you'd be doing all of that entirely on your own, and maintaining it in perpetuity. Don't get me wrong, several people have done exactly that (Admiral Patrick, developer of the Tesseract front-end, comes to mind).

But all of that seems like it would be even slower, compared to PieFed releasing new features practically weekly? And also it is Python, which is a much easier language. And also you could work along with others, fixing bugs in your code that you did not spot, and vice versa. I'm not seeing the advantages there to what you are proposing: I mean yes obviously there are "advantages", but relatively speaking I mean, they seem much smaller than if someone put the same amount of effort towards improving PieFed, which would then be shared and maintained world-wide even if you got sick or busy irl or something?

And even if you were right, that doing this with Lemmy would work out well, for how much longer would that remain true - six months? - before PieFed absolutely blows the set of features that Lemmy uses out of the water? Imagine social media that is actually fun to use, and where the computer automates the most common tasks so as to not require menial labor every hour of the day, as Lemmy does (I am speaking of the requirement for manual moderation efforts)? That much has already come to pass, to various degrees, in many ways on PieFed. e.g. in Lemmy you could search for every cross-posting across all instances wherever you can find them, then click on each one, and read through the comments, making sure to get the version of the community that is accessible from the instance you are on rather than follow a link taking you to a different one... but why do all that work, when PieFed provides it ready-made, instantly upon loading the post?

Starting with PieFed is starting ahead of Lemmy, in most ways (not all though: Lemmy's search functionality is still way better, and reportedly about to get even better still by allowing limiting of search terms specifically to post titles separately from message contents).

Unless you just want to learn Rust for other reasons. 😁