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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • They both have features that Lemmy lacks.

    Like PieFed has polls, post flairs, hashtags, categories of communities (basically multi-reddits), which are user customizable and shareable, and a lot more. Though lacking quite a bit of polish such as post and comment previews, and very little to almost no official app support (though an API was recently released and Thunder is being tested, and Interstellar already supports it). It’s newer than Lemmy, but written in Python rather than the difficult Rust language, so in many ways has already surpassed Lemmy in terms of features (and even Reddit in some ways too, especially since the only new features there for the last decade were solely aimed at increasing profits rather than good experiences for the users).

    Mbin’s primary distinction is also supporting federation not only with Lemmy (and PieFed) but also Mastodon. And it has a different interface that some people prefer to Lemmy’s. If you want both the Threadiverse/Forumverse/Whatever and Mastodon integration with a single account, this is the only option atm.

    Both PieFed and Mbin are entirely separate implementations of the ActivityPub protocol, so whether you actually use them or not it is worth celebrating that Lemmy is now not the only one that implements this forum/thread/basically Reddit replacement style (other notable implementations include Friendica a Facebook replacement, and Mastodon an X/Twitter one, Pixelfed I think an Instagram one, etc.). Especially with Lemmy’s association with “tankies” that tends to drive many people away (e.g. 100% of the people that I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl; and Reddit’s r/RedditAlternatives is filled with stories of people who don’t want to come here bc of all the BoTh SiDeS sAmE rhetoric that we allow here, plus Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit even, having a modlog but no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to discuss bc it simply says that a “mod” did it, and you don’t have a right to even so much as be told that your content is now removed! instance admins have much more freedom here, it’s fantastic, but actual users only have what manages to trickle down from them, and the software itself very much reflects an authoritarian mindset, even in comparison to Reddit).

    Btw, fuck spez.

    TLDR: Lemmy isn’t the only game in town, yet we need a name that is both distinct from other Fediverse tools (Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.) while also being inclusive to the other Reddit replacement tools, currently Mbin and PieFed, but in the future including Sublinks, and who knows what else?









  • Lemmy.ml enacts censorship in this manner as well

    I was talking about censorship in general, but you might be right specifically about Luigi mentions on those instances, I would not know.

    There are whole entire communities dedicated to discussion of this effect - e.g. !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works.

    Your example removed comment is fair, although done by a community mod rather than as the OP article here suggests done without the Reddit sub mods even being able to see the comments prior to removal. Then again, Lemmy.World is rather authoritian on the spectrum. You can always move your account to some other instance that you prefer better btw, like lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want a more anarchist experience or slrpnk.net for communism.

    The beauty of Lemmy is not that we are a so-called “free speech platform” - bc we are definitely NOT that! - but rather that we can easily shift over to somewhere else if need be, even spin up our very own instance (that one takes resources, time, and technical knowledge).

    For example, I’ve given up on most of the largest communities on Lemmy.world, most of the time, and subscribe rather to smaller versions elsewhere.






  • For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.

    Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what’s coming up in the future, while it’s just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like “searching” for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy… - for early adopters though, it’s almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).

    There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)


  • It’s been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It’s a step in the right direction I am saying.

    Nothing will ever entirely “solve” anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about “lack of content”. There’s tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for… this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn’t that a “solve”, at least for the issue of content discovery?

    Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net are for, so it’s not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).

    So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like !tenforward@lemmy.world. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.

    And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there’s a !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com and a !lotrmemes@midwest.social, it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn’t that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?

    Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.


  • Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:

    Content is King

    Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn’t have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).

    One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for someone to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from… yet I don’t want to read content from either.

    Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

    There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don’t have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.

    A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.

    There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don’t want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas - which imho is so much better, bc that would also help someone migrating not just from Reddit but from X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or Lemmy, etc. You don’t need an account to see this feature btw - just visit https://piefed.social/ and look at the top.

    Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it’s very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).

    Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

    No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn’t even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of “remove” vs. “allow” content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. “account <2 weeks old”, “may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments”, “controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes”, etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.

    When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it’s going to be so exciting! Right now it’s more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it’s possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It’s very close, I do believe!:-)



  • As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don’t exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.

    Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it’s primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.

    Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it’s so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it’s coming!


  • There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

    SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

    Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

    Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website’s technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World’s lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

    Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don’t know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

    A simple score isn’t going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

    Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.