The PieFed UI is strange but more or workable, aside from some things like trying to view a downvote count being incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible. Try writing a long comment in a Lemmy browser interface - it jumps and skips wildly every time you make another key press, it's horrible. Though it looks beautiful when you use it read-only.

Voyager offers a much nicer UX. Though then 90% of PieFed extra features aren't workable, with 100% of them being inaccessible from within the app.

This place is hella confusing to non-technical normies.

Btw PieFed has more or less solved the onboarding problem. Seriously, pick one and make an account even if solely to go through the onboarding wizard and you will be amazed.

Those categories of communities, which are user-customizable and shareable Topic Feeds, are also hella useful, even if only to help you discover communities that you want to subscribe to in your existing account.

Realistically, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy in terms of features. And now PyLova is moving even faster than it (but they mostly tend to share).

A lot of these Reddit comments are from people that seemed to put zero effort into understanding anything. Or perhaps they simply aren't expressing their thoughts well: like those organized Topic Feeds are not difficult to use at all, making one wonder if they didn't bother poking around to click on menus enough to know that they are there, or realize that by subscribing to communities that they like, their main Subscribed Feed would be affected. Such people not coming here may be no great loss?

Well you convinced me to give it a try! I hope I'll be able to interoperate with Lemmy and also export some of my settings.

Honestly I comment mostly from voyager and post mostly from piefed. I hadn't really noticed that. But I guess that can be chalked up to posting much less. I will have to pay attention more next time I do.

PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice of admin team is far more important than platform software, I believe.

That said, PieFed.World in particular always struck me as an unfinished test project - probably bc the Topic Feeds at https://piefed.world/topics are so bare-bones. That is one of the most-requested features that PieFed offers but PW seems to basically ignore them?

Anyway from Voyager you'll never see them in any case:-).

I think there may only be tens of us using the piefed.world interface. It very much is an afterthought. Even the official Mastodon account linked to it hasn't posted in a couple years lol. I have a piefed.social account as well. Though honestly I'm considering trying to spin up my own small personal instance.

PW has nearly 900 users total of which 200 are active as of this past month - it's small but solid.

There's a ton of communities, which have like no or next to no posts - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/wednesday, https://piefed.world/c/snl.

A lot of the content there seems populated exclusively by bots - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/tech, https://piefed.world/c/shit, https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles, etc.

TenForward is an excellent example: compare the PW version at https://piefed.world/c/tenforward to the LW version and there simply is no comparison at all.

It just overall looks like a test that was never finished. Perhaps Rimu scared the LW admin team away. If so, maybe the PyLova development could be an option?

PieFed/PyLova definitely looks ready to be used to make a new instance - if you take the plunge, then I wish you good fortune in that endeavor!

The post bots are a new thing of the last few months. Look at the mod on almost all those communities. Came in and set up shop a while back. To take advantage of the low activity.

I don't have anything against post bots explicitly or modding multiple communities. I have two. However there should be limits

So long as they are labeled as such, I have no issues with it. The intent seems more than clearly to aid rather than deceive.

It's not even about deception. Although deception starts off as aid generally before they are deceived. Hence deception. Realistically an individual cannot properly moderate that many communities. Not even people I know who are on disability and spend all day online can do that and still remain mentally healthy. It's just not a good thing.

Un moderated or poorly moderated communities can also be problematic in their own right. Not to mention creating all these unused communities. Posting all these bot posts to those communities. It grows the local database, for no real purpose. Just the hope that maybe they could catch someone to come in and contribute to the community? Does the good outweigh the bad? And then it leads to assessments somewhat like yours. Of large bot presence. Which if you were looking to grow communities. That sort of thing is generally seen as a detriment. Maybe they think or are looking to try to help. But again I just question it. The efficacy of it. I would rather see fewer but more active maintains communities than a bunch of ghostcoms. Magically getting posts but no engagement. But that's just me LOL. And if I put up my own instance I will probably keep it quite tight.