Digg already came and went again

There are a lot of owls. But also cat, dogs, etc - https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome

It's not decentralized although it tried really hard to be.

I don't want to google/remember the exact details but IIRC basically they run a centralized identity server that is impossible to avoid. At best, you can set up an island instance that doesn't federate with BlueSky proper (like Truth Social vs Mastodon).

Wow, thanks for the effort post, I had no idea lol. I guess leftist infighting prevails even on Lemmy, but I personally do find leftist who think Russia Good because USA bad are cringe.

Anyways, can I ask you more about PieFed? It sounds like it’s another technology (which is my jazz ngl, I am trying to not get so involved in politics as I’ve been in the past, sorry for changing the topic so abruptly), are you saying PieFed can federate with Lemmy fully? That we can all interact here despite using (I assume) different technologies? That’s insane.

If there is an iOS app I’m all into trying it. Do tell me more if you’re willing to. and thank you for the warm welcome.

Look up Redlib

I guess the longstanding assumption is that any media that succeeds must also succeed with porn. It’s been true for every major media technology innovation before from the printing press to VHS. However some may confuse the causal direction of this. Having porn won’t necessarily make something succeed.

Algo's for discoverability are needed Quiblr does it nicely but im not sure if the project is still supported and there is no app

Maybe pushing Piefed instead of lemmy would be the way to go. Piefed has a more beginner friendly UI and makes it easier to find new communities

It's been so many over the years and I really don't recall the names of a lot of instances I've been on. I'm here on .zip because .wtf was having major stability issues a while back. Every time I'd get on, it was down. This happened for days/weeks at a time and I got irritated. Prior to that it was .world, similar story. Lots of stability issues on days and times I'd normally try to hop on there. Plus there was an update fiasco, or some other issue I don't recall, that took it down for a bit. Prior to that I was on one of the kbin instances that is gone entirely now.

I don't recall the first instance I joined when I first signed up. I had read that new folks should help spread the load by going to lesser used instances instead of all signing up for the big ones. That first instance was only around for maybe a couple of months. There was one that used the "magazine" concept for subscriptions, maybe kbin, I dunno.

As I said, it's been a lot and I've been around long enough that I can't recall all the names. Plus, the kicker to all this? Those site status trackers are highly, highly unreliable. When lemmy.world was down, at one point for like a full day or so, the site monitoring link showed all green. It's one reason I stopped even bothering to try and troubleshoot on my end in case it's something I've done because that started to become a major waste of my time.

There's one major oversight here that needs to be addressed if Lemmy/Piefed were to suddenly gain a glut of new users. How bans work.

Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you'll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once. These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they've interacted in.

The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn't block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won't federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won't even know. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.

Yes PieFed can federate with Lemmy fully, although the reverse is not true since there are just tons of features present in PieFed that are lacking in Lemmy - a few that are relevant here are community polls, user and post flairs, and hashtags, none of which Lemmy can display since Lemmy does not realize that such things exist. There are also still yet another ton of features that are not as directly relevant to this discussion as well, but highly worth switching to use PieFed for, such as categories of communities, user-customizeable and shareable Feeds, the ability to choose whether to receive or arguably more important to cease receiving notifications for pretty much anything at all (comments written by other people, users, whole entire communities - this one most useful for low-volume and/or highly interesting content, or you may quickly become overwhelmed, and yet the notifications also allow you to separate the different types of triggers for them so even then you can still use your PieFed instance even if you are not fully caught up).

Both Lemmy and PieFed are different implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol, both - along with Mbin and some others (nodeBB, perhaps soon flarum, etc.) - are part of the Threadiverse, which is the subset of the Fediverse that is centered not on users as Mastodon or Friendica are but rather on topic-based (aka threaded) centered around communities of a particular interest, like Reddit (except fuck spez).

So Lemmy lacks entirely some post types that PieFed has, since it does not know how to render those (e.g. user polls), and for those types that do overlap, the PieFed version is usually a much-enhanced version - e.g. it collects together all comments across all cross-posts, so that you can visualize them all at once without having to keep clicking on each one individually. This really helps with discovering new communities that you might not become aware of otherwise.

PieFed also has a new user sign-up wizard that walks you through all the questions, signing you up to communities that you express interest in, and asking if you want any content filters, e.g. how many posts do you want to see with keywords like Trump or Musk - all, none (not perfect, e.g. that keyword filter will not block images of the topic in question), or just some. The problem of onboarding new users is entirely solved now with PieFed!

Here is the major caveat: PieFed is new, and while all of the above is available both via its webpage browser UI, and also encoded into its API for use by 3rd party apps, many of the latter have not yet caught up to implementing all of the available features. I don't use 3rd party apps so I am not really current on that state, though I will note that even using PieFed as the back-end still offers strong advantages over Lemmy, even if the rest of the daily interactions are identical - e.g. PieFed offers the ability to block all users from an instance, whereas Lemmy only claims to offer that but... it does not. That said, note that the 3rd party apps don't usually allow you to set up such features (yet), though imho having to visit the webpage interface rarely to set up each such aspect just once is not so bad, whereupon after that your app would continue to show the data being sent by your PieFed instance. Having vs. not having the feature in the first place is much more important to me than having super convenient access to it within a particular app of choice.

I am not the best person to ask for recommendations there, but I did enjoy Voyager when I was checking apps out, and it is the most popular one (also Blorp is supposed to be really good at integrating with PieFed? I've never tried it so I have no idea).

Definitely check out https://join.piefed.social/, and maybe start with https://join.piefed.social/features/. The devs are super responsive, amenable to feedback, and very active in communities such as !piefed_meta@piefed.social.

Whatever the reason may be - usage of Python + flask vs. Rust and having to customize all UI elements, or perhaps simply programmer skill - that allows significantly faster development time, PieFed unquestionably has the lead over Lemmy in pretty much all respects (faster, more stable, lighter-weight code, see outsider perspectives such as this one), except that ofc Lemmy was first and so has many more users. But again, you will see all Lemmy posts on an instance that runs PieFed, even though the reverse is not true. Case in point: I am on PieFed right now, while you are on Lemmy, and since none of those more advanced features are involved (like polls), this impedes us not at all. Likewise people could comment here from Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc. - for Fediverse content the absolute best experience will be had from using the software that is designed for, but others can work and I see comments from instances running those other software platforms in this community all the time.

Breathe in the free air of FOSS. No Algorithm pushing things at you. Yes in-fighting because we are humans (would you like to be forced to read MAGA content?), but this is a very different atmosphere from Reddit! You are going to love it here!

I've found that tor canvwork. Just refresh the connection until reddit doesn't block. Same for VPN location. Just choose other locations until one works.

There's only a few communities I'd be interested in seeing come over and they've already made it clear they're not interested in moving because of reddits enshittification. I don't think lemmy should cater to people who can't be bothered to get over the small initial hump of choosing an instance. We don't need more users just for the sake of more users anyway. People like that aren't bringing anything to the table anyway.

Blorp dev here. Thanks for the mention. If you happen to try my app, please don’t hesitate to reach out with feedback!

I’m working on expanding PieFed support as quickly as possible. The main things I’m missing are creation of poll posts and creation of event posts. You’re already able to view polls and events in the app. PieFed doesn’t yet have a way to pull the list of your subscribed feeds, but that will be added very soon.

If anyone wants to make a good argument for why X feature should be prioritized ahead of Rexit, I’m happy to reprioritize my work accordingly.

Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.

I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: "do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, moderate, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?" etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.

Otherwise you're either forcing users to do this research on their own ("ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks") or they're going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don't like.

A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don't know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine the bugs turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won't be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.

Thank you so much for this I have to say I am really enjoying my time on Lemmy right now, between interacting or just reading comment, it feels that I’m actually talking to humans again.

I swear I’m either going crazy or the majority of people are either paid shills promoting far-right political brain rot, trolls, or outright bots. Interactions don’t feel authentic like they do here, people are talking past each other all the time.

The few days I’ve been here feel like a breath of fresh air. Thank you again for the break down of PieFed vs Lemmy instances. I’ll definitely study it more when I’m back on my laptop and ultimately decide if the features are something I want to use (frankly de-duplication alone is already worth it, but I’ll have a look). Cheers !

I really hope the patience for trying to learn what the fediverse instances are and how to actually get an account dissuades a lot of the reactionaries and impending tiktok brainrot lol

It's a shame because once you get it, it's actually kinda fun. Like choosing a Harry Potter house lol

The front page of leminal.space is a soothing experience everytime I log on. Their slogan is literally:

Take a break from the slow-burn apocalypse of late stage capitalism's race to the bottom

Lemmy has pretty active communities for both bunnies and foxes.