With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
we need more hornyposting and leftist infighting
I hate being left wing sometimes https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
Probably more NSFW instances? We barely have one.
Peace and love among all progressives ❤️🩹
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/034d2665-bfc6-404e-a094-e36dbdc7a8f9.jpeg
As a new user (I started using PieFed 2 months ago), the UX can surely be improved, but I feel like the main issue is relative to how users are supposed to use the fediverse: I still don’t have a clue on how the fediverse works and how to use it properly.
And I’m motivated in learning to use it.
But for someone who isn’t motivated, it’s a huge “no thanks, goodbye”
this might be the worst image i’ve ever seen.
…also why is bosnia and herzegovina in there twice
it’s weird that, because once you’re in it’s basically seamless. it’s just that first step of picking a server based on your interests that trips people up, because aren’t you supposed to pick interests after you get in? more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
You hear that people? Go set up a camera and show us your genitals! But also, be hot. Or at least interesting. Maybe learn to juggle as you give a blowjob. That’d be fun to watch! If you can do that, the world needs to see it. So why not put it on Lemmy? For the Fediverse!!!
I think we should just hide all of that complexity and just set defaults for everything that the user can decide to change if they want.
BlueSky has 40+ million users, and it’s also technically decentralized like the Fediverse.
aka. you can use the eurosky.social or bluesky.social server etc.
more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.
That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D
Hehe. Yeah, I don’t think we need more content. There’s already some out there. What we really need is more admins run servers to host that stuff. And a bigger admin team for the already existing instance so it doesn’t just randomly go away along with all the content, as well.
Can BlueSky really be called decentralized when 99% of it is bluesky.social?
Still needs infinite scroll.
yeah but, again, it’s seamless. my instance only hosts content in swedish, but that’s not really a problem. sorting by scaled means i still see things that happen locally mixed in with everything else.
No, that’s why I said it’s technically decentralized.
They have 40 million users though, they focused on UX first, and will now hopefully not be dicks and actually become decentralized
I’d also like this, but I feel you’ll get pushback against this on the Fediverse
Perhaps it’s a feature instance’s can set as default or not themselves
It’s Gunther Fehlinger it has to be there, the lore will gobsmack you. Might kill you
Some mobile apps already have it and with the ruling against Meta and YouTube in the USA, I don’t know if having infinite scroll will cause legal problems in the future.
Rexited a long time ago. We must encourage (sensible people) to move to Lemmy and Piefed
I have never understood the importance of choosing an instance, especially at the beginning. Sign up for any one, try it for a while and if you need to change later, you can do so without problems.
On sites like mastodon where followers are essential it can be a problem, in lemmy where karma is not even accumulated, changing servers does not make you lose more than the 5 minutes it takes you to do it
I think it would be nice as an opt-in feature in the user settings
Welcome to PieFed! I see you’ve got an account and you know how to post comments. What else do you need help with?
The other is for Herzegovina and Bosnia.
Ugh I hate infinite scroll. If some people want it, sure, you can implement it as an opt-in feature. But a lot of people use the fediverse to avoid the typical features of corporate social media
Hey! U r dumb and also I’m jorking my peanor
I don’t think you actually want the baggage that ecosystem actually comes with. Like, when it’s working well it has baggage. And you wouldn’t like it when it doesn’t run well.
Let’s be honest, go to any left wing party and you’ll see most people are dating liberals hahaha
I hate infinite scroll. That said, it’s just fancy pagination and if the host’ API supports pagination, whatever frontend should be able to implement that
👍
UNACCEPTABLE
I’m on my 4th instance. Dropped my first be cause of old Lemmy’s autorefreshand other issues. 2 and 3 died as maintainers went away. I had to start over from zero again each time
It’s a bit of a faff to export and import your followed community list
I think so as well. Porn is available in abundance. We don’t really need it here. What I think could be nice is people who like to write erotic fiction as a hobby and post their original content. Or people discuss erotic computer games. Or like relationship advice and NSFW questions in case some country abolishes sex ed. Maybe talking about piracy, mental issues, loss… all the things that are deemed “not advertiser friendly” on commercial platforms. That’d be something positive. But it’s not easy. And it often all gets lumped together under some big NSFW umbrella and 95% of people want to share pron clips anyway.
Not a chance unfortunately, bluesky doesn’t work without an all-seeing-eye that brings people the content they want. At best there will be some satellites running on atproto, fully decentralized, but the core will still be bluesky and it will still be completely centralized
More instances with minimal/no defederation would help. That way you can just tell people to pick one of those instances and it doesn’t matter which one.
Ooh \^^^^^^^^^ second all of this. Sex discourse will always be better than just a constant deluge of questionable nudes.
That is probably true, I do wish for a future where people can migrate to say https://www.eurosky.tech and alternatives, while benefiting from having so many users already
i mean maybe. i initially chose one of those instances for mastodon, but it turns out when you don’t defederate from anyone, others defederate from you because you act as a proxy for the nazis and pedos to reach other instances. so i couldn’t talk to my friends. it’s a bit of a hassle.
I’m not sure what can really be done about that; the fediverse is, by its very nature, pretty complicated. It’s at least as complicated as http or email, and those things are widely used but probably not that well understood by the average person.
I think people are accustomed to using things that they barely understand the inner workings of (car, microwave, computer, etc.) during their daily life. So, I guess my question is, to what degree do people need to know “how the fediverse works” in order to use it?
If anything, we probably have to change the way we talk about the fediverse to make it more streamlined for people. For example, instead of suggesting that people “join lemmy”, it would be better to send them directly to a specific instance that we would like to see grow.
Then there’s the friction of actually joining an instance. Some instances won’t let users view content without registering, and some require you to “apply” for registration, pending approval. Both of those things are reasonable and justifiable, but at the same time I think they do create a barrier of entry that we may not want if we are going to try to attract more users.
I find it really simple. I joined a site, I found communities, I posted.
It was honestly no different to using reddit, well without the spam and shitty far right losers.
PieFed has that. I get to the bottom, it loads another page.
PieFed.zip is very new-user friendly (see very minimal instance blo ck list). I don’t see the requirement for an endless barrage of new instances being a blocker - the amount that we have now is sufficient to handle far more capacity than the entire Threadiverse is currently capable of demanding from the servers.
Quite the opposite: most stories I see about people talking about the Threadiverse is how toxic AF we are, and elitist leftists, not welcoming to liberal centrists e.g. in the USA. So if the goal were to bring on more people from Reddit (setting aside for the morning whether that is truly a worthwhile aim), then more censorship of toxicity is what would more readily make that happen, not less moderation. e.g. one glance at hexbear and your average Redditor will never come back here again:-P.
Those are irl, whereas the toxic AF perpetually online among us here (e.g. hexbear and Lemmygrad and lemmy.ml) are likely not dating at all.
Is there any new development around this or are you just specualting? All I’ve seen so far is discussions about age verification on Reddit, and most of the conversation was about finding workarounds than leaving.
What needs to still improve?
The community here is what needs to improve the most. The majority here is hostile to new users and too prone to demand purity tests from everyone who is just thinking about leaving Reddit.
What do you think about https://phtn.app/ ? Sadly the PieFed support is in Beta for quite a while now, but I do like how clean everything looks. You can also hide away a lot of the complexity but I am not sure if that is the default.
I mean, no? Are you all going to constantly screech at people for not hating capitalism? The people and their behavior are the problem.
I disagree, you def would need to block the worst places. A good new-user friendly instance would block far-right and authoritarian content.
I just avoid harshly criticising the left, while continuing to do so for liberals (but still being welcoming for them), and outright rejecting far-right.
Keep in mind that infighting was often initiated by the CIA, in order to undermine the Black Panthers. Likewise we may see such attempts.
Please explain your definition of toxicity. Or maybe you just did
Reddit already requires it in the UK, afik.
But it’s mostly speculation form my side.
We need more cat forums.
Well, from a technical standpoint I am more prepared as an instance admin. We’re running on powerful dedicated hardware after all.
I didn’t know it, and I’m trying it. The UX is really nice, though I don’t understand why I needed to submit the reasons why I wanted to subscribe, and why I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities… But thanks for the suggestion!
Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.
This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We’re overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.
At least we’re solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.
Doesn’t fedinsfw.app exist?
I used a vpn that put me in the UK and reddit asked for my ID…
And guitars.
People actually like infinite scroll?
do you think the same is true for the hornyposting?
Reddit already requires it in the UK
Yes, and do we have any numbers about UK usage before/after the changes? Do we have any idea of how many people there:
And for those that were not satisfied, what was failing to them? Was the Fediverse so bad that they rather go back to Reddit, or did they just quit social media altogether?
The UK started asking for age verification ~5 months ago. That should give us more than enough data to take a look at this objectively.
No, not ready for another USA spam shit. Other than that, the rest is fine.
What’s the deal with lemmy.ml by the way? I know a few marxist-leninists IRL who, as you say, are quite normal.
Is there beef with that .ml instance on Lemmy? I’m new here as you can see.
yeah but more pictures of cats and dogs.
In Mbin users can enable it if they want.
Many leftists started out as liberals, it makes sense they’d believe others could also change.
-signed, a vegan married to a butcher, so don’t listen to me lol (at least he’s a leftist)
nah, hornypost all you want (keep it to nsfw communities tho if it’s “hard” nsfw)
signed, a vegan married to a butcher,
This sounds hilarious! Thanks for the good laugh! But it is as legit as anything haha, leftist here married to a Christian conservative (at least she doesn’t vote lol 😶🌫️) and yes “I can change her” is definitely on my mind.
This. Tagging is so important… In my opinion we could use some more tags to sort stuff. At least some nsfl and politics tag.
For politics I just use a keyword block. If it contains terms related to that orange or such, I block.
Piefed does have a nsfl tag option, a bot filter, as well moving communities to another instance. Imho, those are the three big things that most fediverse places should have. Being able to move to another instance is a gamechanger, should an instance disappear or get seized by far-right peeps.
no i meant do you think it’s the cia doing it
Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they’re gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.
But I guess it’s still a single point of failure. If they don’t properly ensure there’s several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there’s legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance.
I mean there’s nothing wrong with it? I just think it’s massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the “Fediverse”, a decentral platform…
Not specifically age-verification, but they are considering checks of some sort at some point to deal with the bot problem on there. That’s at least one angle. They’ve also just rolled it out in small scale to suspicious accounts. So whether or not it is done for the purposes of verifying age, or just dealing with bots - I suspect it’ll arrive in the end once they feel they have the capital to do it.
As for the UK specific issues, it’s hard to get a concrete numbers because most people in the UK just switched to a VPN. In the event of Reddit implementing global ID-check measures, it wouldn’t matter what VPN you switched to.
the cia would try anything, but hornyposting isn’t their main thing. They’d try that with high-profile individuals.
I recall them having made a fake sex video of Sukarno or Suharto (the Indonesian leader), and trying to blackmail him. Upon seeing it, he said he was delighted and wanted more, lol.
That is odd, normally you are only asked for a reason when you sign up for a new account and not when you just subscribe to a community. Can you share the community you were trying to subscribe?
I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities That is unfortunately in the nature of the decentralization. Your instance cannot be sure that that the instance the community is on will respond in a timely fashion so it shows it as “pending”. The only thing we could maybe do about this is to be overly optimistic. Most requests to subscribe a community go though without a problem so we could just show it being subscribed even though are are not, but that would introduce other problems.
There’s some anime titties but not enough to go around.
Yea bro, I need it more than reading for the hundred time what Trump will do. I don’t leave in hell, yet feels live living in it.
doesn’t matter where you live, the people living in hell will force it down your throat because they want everyone else to be as miserable as they are.
🫡
My bad choice of wording, they asked me for reasons during sign up, not subscribing to communities. Anyway, thanks for the explanation, any chance you can share also android apps? I’m currently using Summit linked to my PieFed account
You’ve posted a great example.
The authoritarian tankies masquerading as leftists/progressives is a problem too. Esp the mods and not just lemmy.ml.
For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you’re not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.
The paradox situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.
I don’t want people from Reddit here.
The fact that half of Twatter moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon is a blessing.
ActivityPub is by design a data harvesting goldmine, the fact that it flies under the radar is the only saving grace.
My wife started out with tons of republican views, she just didn’t vote ever.
Through conversations about the state of things, poo ting out hypocrisy, and validating the feelings her religious family was telling her to suppress, I’m happy to say I’ve managed to marry a leftist. She didn’t even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.
I’ll take 100,000 leftists married/dating/whatever to 100,000 liberals over 200,000 conservatives any day of the week.
I’d explain it like this:
Social media are built on ‘protocols’. Protocols tell e.g. social media what they can do and how to ‘talk’ to each other.
The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These protocols allow something special that ‘traditional’ social media like Facebook and Instagram don’t: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content.
It’s comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa.
On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an ‘instance’. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies.
Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be ‘federated’ with the latter. If that is not the case, they are ‘defederated’.
Within each instances, there are many communities. There’s a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on.
View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. Lemmy might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones.
An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves.
Some parts of the fediverse allow these leaves to leave and join another tree.
Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, cannot easily go to a forest.
Would that be a good explanation?
Casual endorsement or sympathy for summary executions based on class alone. With or without, “just joking bro”
A failure to accept the possibility that societal collapse will probably hurt more people than it helps.
Every time I think about starting a community about one of my hobbies, I look at a random modlog and realize I don’t want any part of it.
Sign up is still a confusing, exclusionary, inaccessible mess. So, no.
Wow, thanks a lot, this is the best explanation that I was able to find so far!
Im not sure if you are aware but you do not have to create a new Account on there. Photon is another client just like Summit is, so you can login using your piefed.social account. Sadly im not on android anymore but will be coming back soon! There are couple to choose from, just from the looks i like sync and interstellar but im not sure how well they support piefed. Lemmy was first so it was first supported.
https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/ https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app
I’m happy to say I’ve managed to marry a leftist
The Good ending.
We’ve always been ready. Ready for the drama. 🍿
PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.
I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.
And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.
Finally I will add that I’ve never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their announcements or home local communities, and now I don’t see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I took questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don’t see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.
The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But… it’s getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.
She didn’t even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one. Imagine my chagrin after years of rigorously checking the assumptions and programming of my conservative upbringing and converting to liberalism, when I found out that leftism and liberalism are actually different things, with a diversity of opinions and worldviews that I then needed to parse in order to determine where I stand…
::: spoiler more I keep saying “We can’t keep alienating potential allies if we want to unite the working class” but they hit me with the “class traitors don’t matter / we don’t want to work with anyone who was formerly conservative [(as if anyone is to blame for their upbringing…)] / you’re just a fascist apologist who needs to die in the revolution too / only our flavor of leftism is true leftism and anyone who disagrees with us is fascist scum who needs to die in the revolution / if you don’t unquestioningly accept everything we tell you without any nuance then you’re an enemy of the proletariat and need to die in the revolution”
They’re really making leftism as a whole look bad, and they don’t even realize it. I mean, how can you claim to represent the proletariat while simultaneously claiming that 60% or more of the proletariat need to be executed as class traitors? It’s like they’re trying to conform to the caricature that the right-wing depicts “radical leftist liberal communists” as. You’re not going to catch many flies with that vinegar. They’ll say “we don’t need help from fascist shitlibs” and other unironic absurdities of that nature, but if you want a popular uprising then you’re going to need to convince a majority of the population that you’re all on the same team, otherwise you’re nothing but an authoritarian reactionary.
It makes me really not want to take part in their supposed “revolution,” especially when you see what the bolsheviks did to the soviets and anarchists after they helped them win theirs… :::
It’s not a problem on PieFed, it’s mostly been delt with
Gatekeeping, nice.
I don’t think I have ever felt this validated in my entire life, thank you.
The trick is starting a community, but delegating moderation to someone else. Admin ≠ Mod.
Is reddit blocking VPNs now? I don’t use reddit anymore, but sometimes I search something on the web and like it or not, redditors in niche communities have good answers to uncommon questions. Definitely better than can be found on quora or other places.
But it doesn’t let me view them, supposedly because I’m using a VPN now…
If that’s the case, fuck spez and all corporate sellouts. Reddit used to be a mecca for freedom of association…
It’s 2026. We’ve more than accepted that the people who simp for capitalism are the problem.
I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.
Unironically this. We need cute animals. Cats, owls, moths, capibaras, pangolins. If we’re not gonna have one of the true movers of the internet (porn and correcting people who are wrong) we need something good to compensate.
Why would you use local as a source of recommendation instead of all? I find using the local tab very limiting, it will never be as complete as all my tastes and hobbies
Yes. Lemmy is toxic as fuck. They couldn’t possibly make it any worse than it already is.
Tbf piefed.zip doesn’t have much of a local so that makes sense for you, but the user above is on feddit.org, which is a long-running German-language (at least prominent) instance so it does make sense for them in that context if they’re German.
The block unless you’re logged in. It’s very annoying, still have to use reddit occasionally to find some info or something niche (admittedly not as bad as finding something on discord).
Welcome to the Threadiverse! You will enjoy it here, once you find your peers:-).
Lemmy.ml only claims to be for marxist-leninists - for actual real ones you may prefer e.g. slrpnk.net or perhaps lemmy.dbzer0.com. The lemmy.ml admins are (in)famously authoritarian, banning people from communities that they’ve never so much as heard of due to comments made elsewhere, citing a rule that does not exist - nowhere is it written down, yet everyone knows that you are not allowed to criticize Russia, China, or North Korea (or not praise them hard enough?). Mind you, they are free to do as they please, but to enforce an entirely different set of rules than the publicly announced ones… yes that generates much friction across the Threadiverse.
The fact that they (both users and even admins) routinely celebrate murder of everyone who merely lives in a Western civilization (collaborators?) kinda puts most people off from them, and also aside from that, their communication style where your consent does not matter puts aside the rest. They famously brag about creating alt accounts to get around bans - for them no does not mean no, but merely that they have to get a bit more clever about their proselytizing. So yes there’s beef, but mostly despite what they claim, it is not mere political differences, and due more to their incel culture that is the leftist version of MAGA’s Alternative Right, upholding “alternative facts”. Plus in true echo chamber style, banning anyone who attempts to say otherwise, and also in general harassing people in other communities, with appeals to their admins to reign in their users falling on deaf ears.
If you are interested, see an absolute mountain of details in the !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works community, such as the pinned monthly megathread “Documentation of Lemmy.ml’s Extremism [Megathread]“, but you can also read other more focused topics such as “Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide” and “[Transphobia Warning] Nutomic’s Stance on Transgender People”, etc.
Personally I user blocked the entire instance, and have never once regretted that. You do not have that option btw, on a Lemmy instance (unless you use one of the rare 3rd party apps that provides it), you would have to switch to a PieFed instance to get that along with just an absolute ton of other features that Lemmy lacks but PieFed has had for months, and it will take Lemmy years and years to catch up, if ever. Also fair warning you do have something that claims to be a user block of an instance, but it is extremely misleading - to the point of disinformation even - as it merely blocks communities located on that instance while still leaving users on it to read, reply to, and manipulate the vote on your content, as well as to send you DMs, even triggering notifications, and there is no way to stop any of that. A better term than instance block would have been a community muting.
And just in general the level of discourse with people on Lemmy.ml accounts seems to be significantly lower - not always but by far it is generally the case, as the most toxic and generally batshit insane comments that you see tend to come from users on that instance.
So now you know!:-)
Well they blocked every account associated with my IP, so I’m not doing that either.
Are there any third-party reddit readers that circumvent this? Or did their API shenanigans block that, too?
The Left eats its own. The Right too… eventually, though seems to do a better job (especially lately but also historically as well) of putting aside their differences in the short-term in order to strategically attain their goals. e.g. they will accept a trans person of color voting for them… for a time, before they eventually put them to death.
This probably helps explain the global rise of fascism since WWII. Fascism is winning, and will do even more so given modern technology like surveillance tools.
Which makes the attitude of the so-called “leftists” on e.g. hexbear or lemmy.ml seem all the more odd to me. It appears as if the emotional “high” of incel-like whinging supercedes any actual irl progress attempts to be made. It is very juvenile. In their defense (if it can be called thus) they exist inside of echo chambers and so are kept in that juvenile state artificially. Right or so-called “Left”, it is really difficult to break out of such a cult-like existence.
And the Threadiverse does not seem eager to either help them break out or at least protect new users and thereby expand the Threadiverse to a much wider audience, by e.g. defederation. In large part since people prefer to use the Lemmy devs to continue to develop that software, regardless of the consequences that will have upon the state of the Threadiverse overall (tbf, Lemmy was genuinely first there, and yet many of us are only here because first Kbin, then Mbin and now PieFed offers an alternative?). Thus, the enhancement of PieFed is my first real hope there (well, ever since the demise of Ernst’s Kbin) that things can get better.
I use RedReader without an account, connected through a VPN. It’s FOSS, but with these settings, it’s really slow. Okay for text and images, bad for videos.
I’ve been SLOWLY getting into the Fediverse for a little over a year now. My biggest gripe has always been discovery and availability. I feel like there is a lot more effort required to find people/communities I am interested in. Then if/when I do find them they are often not very active.
So yeah I’ll say what everyone else is saying that UX needs some work. I used Lemmy for a while last year and just couldn’t get used to the interface, I’m not Feddit and like this interface more. But it could use some work on mobile imo.
Nothing will ever be truly perfect, it is rather an arms race where defenders construct barriers while attackers jump those hurdles - often easily but it does act as a barrier and some bad actors simply give up rather than do so.
In this case, PieFed has several relevant options, one being a per-community setting that only counts subscribed members of the community, which has the effect of reducing the impact of drive-by downvoters from All, but obviously won’t stop a coordinated attack vector. The former scenario is real though, so the feature has actual benefits despite not stopping everything bad that could possibly happen, as it does improve the state of things incrementally.
Another such feature is the option to only count votes from “trusted” instances. This allows for finer-grained control so that e.g. you could remain federated with an instance, but not allow them to constantly brigade your content. Obviously someone could make accounts on trusted instances to do so, but the subscriber numbers being so low overall for the entire Threadiverse and for Piefed specifically seems to suggest that if it is happening, it is not a huge deal (yet). And the usual measures still apply, e.g. if an account only ever downvotes without ever posting or commenting, then it is likely a brigade account in (a not very decent) disguise.
Sometimes they will get more sophisticated, like repositing comics that seems an easy way to quickly generate many upvotes for the new account. But these seem to be shut down quickly… somehow, and anyway at that point whatever their intentions ultimately were, at least they were positively contributing to the Threadiverse community in the meantime, haha!
Purity testing sucks but “left unity” as a concept has been compromised by tankies
Digg just crying in the corner right now.
From a technical standpoint: No.
I’m on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I’d chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.
Even the biggest instance I’ve ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there’s a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.
The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.
And because of those technical issues…
New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that’s already around can’t keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.
The “culture” would shift practically overnight. I’ve already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don’t do as good a job as I should.
While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught.
If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.
The “culture” would shift practically overnight. I’ve already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don’t do as good a job as I should.
From a technical standpoint: I’m on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I’d chosen became unstable, had long or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning. Even the biggest instance I’ve ever joined, lemmy.world, chokes whenever there’s a mass exodus or a lemmy upgrade. And you can’t even rely on the server status pages to reliably record those outage nor to provide any information about them.
However, that’s also assuming that people from Reddit would even be able t
From a technical standpoint: No.
I’m on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I’d chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.
Even the biggest instance I’ve ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there’s a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.
The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.
And because of those technical issues…
New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that’s already around can’t keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.
From an end-user standpoint: Also no.
The “culture” would shift practically overnight. I’ve already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don’t do as good a job as I should.
While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.
There’s just one little hurdle: choose an instance when joining. Maybe it could just be some sort of “choose for me” and every instance gets equal new users, random. Of course with the option to “nope, I’ll choose instance myself”. Everything else is technical and a casual new user shouldn’t be bothered very much by it. Some are very interested and dig in to the knowledge, some just want to scroll cat pictures and call it a day, and that is fine too.
VPN is irrelevant here if you will need a government ID to access it, what difference does it make what country you pretend to be from
On mobile Voyager is quite nice imo
I hadn’t really tried to be honest, just using my old account until they start asking for age verification, then I’d look at other solutions.
You want the truth? Lemmy isn’t going to get more Redditors here, what you got now is it. And it will eventually die like Digg.
Well, we have seen that when right wing disagrees, they go to the extreme and fucking shoot each other a la Charlie Kirk and that guy who tried to shoot Trump, so…
Byt yeah perfect is the enemy of good…
Yeah IMO getting popular ruined reddit.
I’ve genuinely been thinking about starting nsfw fandom (anime/games) communities centered around more female or queer orientated audiences but I don’t know if I’ll want to deal with moderation and having to keep it active…
The true reddit hornyposting is all in OldSchoolCool
It reminds me of this:
image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/s8/Ca/s8CaV6DFJ0ooe5F.png https://lemmy.zip/post/47438646
But yeah making the process of signing up and using the fediverse easier for users will go a long way. As much as I dont like bluesky, one thing they did right over Mastodon is making the sign up process dead easy for end users.
i just arrived bc that was the last straw of the constant reddit enshittification. so there is at least one.
Teens will probably find a way to verify using fake info. It seems like it’s generally the old and jaded who are willing to dump things out of stubbornness.
Good to know, thanks. I’ve been really meaning to check it out.
How will it die?
May I ask what your prior instances were?
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), are you saying PieFed can federate with Lemmy fully? That we can all interact here despite using (I assume) different technologies? That’s insane.
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
with new reddit, the writing was on the wall. a wave of bans is what helped start lemmy long before the api debaucle. when that happened, there was finally enough content that this became a usable replacement.
we are definitely ready for more content
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 inthe 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.
Sure, but Bluesky did that by not really being federated at all, especially during the early rush.
Bluesky is certainly a step or two better than Twitter, but I would imagine it’s still de facto centralized around the main bsky.social server, as that’s what the vast majority of users are probably using.Nowadays it’s getting more federated, but it seems to still be very far behind where ActivityPub is.
So they avoided the challenges of federation by not really being federated in the first place. Mastodon doesn’t have that luxury, since it was fully federated and self-hostable from the start. There was no half step and nobody else to copy.
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, some, 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 that 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 🍻!
https://leminal.space/pictrs/image/a775e6e1-9c49-4244-9817-ecede03d90cc.gif
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.
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, some, 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.
Dude. I’m saying this completely unironically: A personality quiz recommending you your instance “house” upon sign-up would be fun AF lol 🎉
I knew it would lmao
Necromancy is more an art than a science
Not normal teens either. The tiktok/ipad kid gens who developmentally missed the bus for normal critical thinking skills.
Get ready for sleuths of comment spam with only “Bro thinks” “crash out” and “Not that deep” lmfao
Tbf, the Twitter exodus was kind of a different enshittification. There’s less of a need for filter on that because the issue was “Stay if you’re a nazi” not “Stay if you want to keep tolerating more and more frustrating UI issues and barriers”
So whereas anyone who was looking to leave Twitter we could give the benefit of the doubt because of that implicit filter, it’s not the same for Reddit and I expect swathes of “devil’s advocate” conservative trolls to suddenly pop out of the woodwork looking for new homes [sources of validation].
Swiss IPs tend to get through no problem. Whenever I have that issue I just swap to the Switzerland server.
Wow, discrimination really makes this place that much similar to reddit. I’d really consider who really is the one trashing the place.
That is interesting. I haven’t been following closely but wasn’t the whole api fiasco supposed to solve the bot problem? At least they’re lucid enough to not use the Child Safety^^^TM excuse
One option is to do this for them, and just send the link to the instance most suited to your current audience when recommending using Lemmy, rather than trying to explain what instances are, because you don’t need to know that to use it.
User experience.
It is frustratingly bad for people just wanting to sign up. The idea of creating a single account, tied to a single instance that may or may not be federated is a confusing concept when most places online now are centralized. Then you have to choose which instance you sign up to, then depending on the instance you may need to go through an application or some other hoops to finally have a working account.
The you may later find out your instance is not the community you thought it was, may be un-federated from other communities you wanted to engage with, or the instance just shuts down one day, you loose your account and have to start all over again. That frustration and confusion is enough to turn away most casual and less techy users.
Also, there are lots of apps to pick from, but never a de facto one. While not necessarily a bad thing (in fact it can be generally good!) it does not help with the issues laid out above.
We could certainly keep trying to improve accessibility from a technical standpoint, like trying to make it easier for new accounts to hit the ground running. Basically, focusing on good defaults. I’ve heard people emphasize things like suggestions and starter packs based on simple interest questions for instance. UX is often heavily influenced by what apps you’re using for access however.
To be honest though, when I hear this kind of question, I always end up thinking “quality over quantity”. I feel like we need to remind ourselves that bigger doesn’t always mean better, particularly online. Particularly when the question is about attracting Redditors. Reddit is a cesspool, and cesspools often attract and breed noxious organisms.
The point is, it might be best to keep focus on raising awareness and promoting what the Fediverse is to those who might be receptive rather than trying to contort ourselves to suit the wants of those to whom the Fediverse’s appeal is lost. Do our best to be more accessible from a technical standpoint. Then just put out the welcome, open the door, let those masses yearning to break free come, let the rest be.
An exception to this argument is the objective of furthering the cause of federation itself more broadly, but this is a different concern and a completely different discussion.
The upvote/downvote system destroys communities over time. It’s only a matter of time, not if it will happen.
I don’t really see how to ‘fix’ the first part because its fundamental to what the threadiverse is
Yeah honestly I’m pretty okay with things as they are. Lemmy.world is a bit too brain rotted/Redditor energy as is. Everyone in this thread is all ‘lets make things easier for the lowest common denominator’ but if someone can’t take 15 minutes to try to understand what they’re actually signing up for then why do we even want them here?
Ew no thanks. Leave the hufflepuff shit on tiktok please.
True now, but doesn’t have to be. Could have a site that aggregates and simplifies these steps to one place, allows you to pick and choose your instance with explanations right there to help you make informed decision on your account, and let’s you know upfront on which instances have other restrictions. Filters for those lists, and other quality of life features that people have come to expect in a modern user experience.
I know some have tried sites like this before, and I’m sure there are some kind people out there that may even have the handy excel sheet to share as well, but few to no solutions out there do it all, and certainly not all of it well.
All this is to say, there’s things the fediverse could have better, but it’s really reliant on volunteers to make it what it is and those are in short supply.
I chose the second most popular instance at the time I joined and haven’t thought about it since then except when I have to log into it
Just explain it like you would explain email to a boomer in 1998. It is just another protocol.
👌👍
which ones are the problem ? the ones not hating capitalism, or the ones doing the s screeching ?
The people and their behavior are the problem
Well, yes. “No people” is a “problem”, as is “people”
Personally, I’m not looking for people who agree with me all the time, so luckily for me, everywhere I go, i can find people who disagree with me :)
To be honest though, when I hear this kind of question, I always end up thinking “quality over quantity”.
It’s funny you say that. When I first read the post I interpreted more as “We’re about to get a bunch of unruly Redditors. How are we going to deal with the increased workload on moderators.”
For most things that “block” vpns, I’ve found you can just try different countries until one goes through. Works for reddit and lemmy.world, at least.
FANTASTIC! 3rd party app support itself seems to be a huge priority for the majority of people, so you are doing a great service helping catch up to these recently-added and very nice new features added to PieFed. Thank you for supporting the Threadiverse! :-)
Exactly. Getting my account her took a week. I had to sign up then go through an application process. Like I get it, it helps reduce bots and stuff but golly it’s a pain and the average user isn’t going to do it
The several apps thing I don’t see as much of a barrier to Redditors; most are already used to the platform’s official app being garbagepuke and going with something else so they’ll figure that out relatively quickly.
I haven’t yet seen the “Pick an instance to sign up with. It doesn’t matter, well actually it does, for reasons we’re not explaining right now” problem really addressed in a meaningful way. Those lists of instances to join when you go to Lemmy or pixelfed or whoever’s website? Most of them don’t get filled out correctly by instance admins; so they’re either the default boiler plate, or they’re the first two-thirds of the first sentence of a paragraph about what Lemmy is.
Lemmy is an open source, federated link aggregator platform powered by ActivityPub, the fastest growing…
You are not crazy: we’ve seen reports where whole entire posts along with every single comment underneath them were copied nearly word for word, though separated years apart (I’m talking like a decade here). The usernames were changed, but it was extremely recognizeable what happened there.
The motive to maximize profits, to the exclusion of all other criteria (such as morality) very obviously rules Reddit right now. And Google (extremely unfortunately now touching Android), and Meta, and Apple, and every other large mega-corporation. This is no conspiracy theory when the very CEOs themselves state this clearly and unambiguously - the masks worn in prior decades are now off.
In any capitalist society, the mantra applies that the buyer must beware. Keeping corporate power in check is somehow communist, and therefore seen in an enormously negative light by conservatives.
Sorry, you said you wanted to step away from politics. Okay then I’ll just say that Reddit got bad for “reasons”, which will never change in the future; however while they are free to do whatever they please, so too are you. Welcome here where we’ve made our own forum boards like the days of old, minus ads, minus spez, no Algorithm controlling your feed (I mean obviously any sequence of steps is an “algorithm” but sorting All or Subscribed posts by New hardly qualifies compared to Reddit’s “pushing” controversial enragebait content while actively hiding… ah… “other” content - cough socialist cough - and pushing other stuff in its place, Praise Be To Our Totalitarian Leader May He Live Forever…), add in blackjack and hookers, and we are ready to go! :-P
On the surface, that works. Problem is, to use the Fediverse you have to get a bit deeper into it than with email.
Email is designed to evoke the UX of the physical post office. To use the post office, or email, you need to know your address, and your recipients address. You need to know where to put outgoing letters, and where to get incoming letters. Even if you’re vaguely aware of Grumman LLVs and letter sorting machines and trucks and trains and whatnot, you can still get away with conceptualizing it as, you put a letter in a box, it is then “In the mail” until it is delivered to the recipient. Email presents itself to the end user as exactly that.
ActivityPub might be “just another protocol” like smtp or pop3 or whatever but the user experience is vastly different in ways people really haven’t had to deal with before. Lemmy isn’t lke the post office, it’s like Reddit, except there’s 90 little Reddits each with their own slightly different rules and a complex web of which will communicate with what. The format of the electronic communique is of no consequence to the end user.
On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.
I wish there was more of an active gaming community.
I find on a system with minimal RAM that shit gets super expensive really fast.
Yeah, me too. For some hobbies there just isn’t a lot of activity.
We have some regular pc gaming communities:
And some about tabletop games:
how can we be ready this time?
I’m here to chew bubblegum and sass noobs; and I’m all outta noobs.
I thought about spinning up a lemmy server but honestly the moderation and being responsible for content is a huge concern
I might actually have to instance block lemmy.world if it’s too bad since it attracts the worst kinds of new users due to open registration.
On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.
It’s stored on all of them. Piefed.social can see them because piefed.social is federated with sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world and programming.dev.
Are they already doing that?
lemmy.world is really slow at accepting applications, we should not be suggesting it for new users
but you’re fine to stay there since you’re already in
for big communities, we can sort by New Comments instead
there are a lot of video game communities already
honestly too many lol, luckily PieFed has feeds to help this issue https://piefed.social/f/games
there’s even more if you include the more specialized communities https://piefed.social/f/allgames
there are a lot of video game communities already
honestly too many lol, luckily PieFed has feeds to help this issue https://piefed.social/f/games
there’s even more if you include the more specialized communities https://piefed.social/f/allgames
that’s kinda already how it works
https://join.piefed.social/ suggests you just join the default instance
https://join-lemmy.org/ gives a random default
PieFed does a pretty good job with filtering, it asks when you signup if you want a filter for US politics
Decision fatigue? Almost everyone picks lemmy.world, and the UX is the same everywhere, specially if you use mobile apps.
Well what do you expect when the entire community thinks everyone should sign up for Lemmy.world and make this place even more centralized?
Its really stupid, but thats what it is….
they love CCP and russia for example in its current state.
IDK I think it works brilliantly.
It prevents the iron grip on users/content like Reddit/Twitter have achieved. Enshitification can be defeated by moving instances, which is way easier when it can be done piecemeal instead of all at once, users can move at will and not even lose their friends and communities. Lemmy.world is less than a third of the Threadiverse, and only like 1% of the Fediverse. Enshitification relies on slowly boiling the frog, but here with federation that would cause a slow bleed of users moving until there’s no one left in your enshitified instance. Finding alternatives is really easy and you’ll already be used to the software since there are other instances with the same software.
If the software tries to enshitify then the code can be forked, instance admins can band together to support the new fork. Or switch to a different platform entirely like PieFed instead of Lemmy. Or even just changing the frontend to Photon or something like that.
its the ones distilled from other platforms like reddit, or another where they get banned.
i just block politics.worlds, its usually the most problematic one for me, especially with thier subtle pro-zionist rhetoric. im fine with the other communities though.
yea, thats why alot of other instance shut down, too much to handle.
reddits arnt coming here, unless SPEZ/reddit decides to a massive purge wave again, which they wont now. because they realize they lost too much irl users to thier AI slop, and now bots/spammers are taking over reddit. they went with more subtle background shadowbans.
we had a larger instance now shutdown and too many people are scattered to the other ones, and i noticed less content on my feed because of that.
Only way there is a mass rexit is if the bot accounts get fed up and leave.
Can’t say I’m looking forward to swarms of bot accounts descening on Lemmy
Lemmy.world has about 40% of the pop these days.
They are already arriving to some degree.
The difference being is that Lemmy and other similar services have zero controls or ability to handle bots or bop traffic if those bots were bots from 2014.
Not bots from today.
It’s a bit of a problem and honestly with increasing bot traffic across the internet and fedaverse being extremely vulnerable to it It’s absolutely bat shit insane, but I don’t see any other option than somehow having some form of human verification.
It’s a problem
Biggest problem for Lemmy and similar applications is scalability and controls and detection for bots.
The compute costs to operate instances are astronomical compared to the actual user load they receive.
That’s a bit of a side problem compared to bots though. Bots are a real problem that services like this are not equipped to handle.
Lemmy is not capable of dealing with bots at all I believe
It’s a design feature of the fediverse that larger instances are better. Bluesky goes a long way towards solving these issues. So there’s no point in complaining about people not making sacrifices.
I know a few marxist-leninists IRL who, as you say, are quite normal.
Really? How does that work? Like, in what way are the ml?
Just surprised and curious.
Oh glad to see there’s quite some representation around.
Now, we have to add to it.
(I should really adopt a non-photogenic cat sometime)
Lemmy seems in a great spot. I hope people give it a chance
Okay cool!
Yeah there are like a handful of instances with 90% of the users.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, fedinsfw.app, piefed social have the bulk combined. Lemmy.ca and feddit.org not too far behind.
Why is it not possible to have a sort of algorithm that ‘recommends’ an instance to each new user depending on which instances have less numbers?
Is that a bad idea?
That is how https://join-lemmy.org/ works now. I just got recommended thelemmy.club and in another browser it recommended lemmus.org
That’s cool
When I switched during the API blackout, the first issue I ran into was just a lack of content. That’s definitely been resolved since. I think at this point it just comes down to how well they can pick up on the concept of the fediverse, and picking an instance.
There is. Someone told me that it recommends lemmy.ml roughly half the time. I tried it personally and it first recommended hexbear.net, so I tried it again and then it recommended lemmy.ml. If I was an American-based centrist Reddit user, being sent to either of those places who literally celebrate and call for my literal and actual irl murder (not joking), I would nope out and never visit the Threadiverse again.
So yes, it is a very bad idea if the goal is to entice people to join from any Western civilization.
you mean https://join-lemmy.org/ ? they’ve removed those recommendations actually
Human verification? As in “give us your photo” or something?
Let’s hope this time there won’t be a “boycott is over” moment.
Nope, I still see both of them, very high up in the list too - despite it being sorted by “random”, which would make a kind of sense if it would weight more highly active instances higher, so not true random but with a random component. However, every time I refresh the page both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net consistently appeared in the top 5 instances every single time. So most definitely biased towards them, whatever the underlying reasoning may be.
There was something that removed lemmy.ml long ago, but apparently it is not that one.
I don’t want to send leftists to a conservative cesspit, and conversely I don’t want to send USA centrists to a leftist version. Neither would feel terribly welcomed in those respective opposite spaces.
Instead, the list should be curated to show only “Newbie-friendly” instances by default, even while allowing those others to appear as opt-in alternatives. Which, surprise surprise, the PieFed instance picker does do exactly that - see one of those at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser.
If you were at all serious about that, I highly recommend reading https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed - the differences between those software platforms in terms of installation and maintenance is reportedly quite high, on top of the differences in features offered.
mine just says to join thelemmy.club or lemmus.org as the default, it doesn’t show a list by default
screenshot of default recommendation when you open the page:
https://retrolemmy.com/pictrs/image/e0290f79-c76d-450b-b8c5-8fe850e0d93f.png
PieFed is 25-fold more efficient in its data transfer than Lemmy, fwiw (source: that’s 5-fold less data transferred, despite it being for 5-fold more posts, hence 25-fold more efficiency)
I mean… that sounds to me like an entirely valid question ⁉️ - how WOULD we handle such?
There was a boycott is over moment? Isn’t reddit still blocking third party apps?
It isn’t an issue if platform but rather being responsible for content moderation. The time investment after spinning a server up is what worries me.
Like this? https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser#
Basically a lot of people got their anger out, then moved on with their life.
Kindof a tangent there, buckaroo.
Aside from trying to recruit more mods, I have no idea. I think a big influx of Redditors is going to reduce discussion quality here no matter what we can do, and we have very limited resources to spend on damage control.
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me can come up with something.
One of my favorite tricks that a friend of mine showed me years ago was this:
Put a check box or radio button somewhere on the page that will never end up visible to the end user marked with a label like “check here to verify you’re not a not” or “choose your ethnicity from this list or select prefer not to say”, then reject accounts that ever check those boxes, because a human never would. If you occasionally snare a blind person by mistake,they can email to bypass that with a human admin.
I don’t know if it would trick modern bots, but he said it worked awesome back then.
The only way lack of content still pervades is in niches. If I specifically like Game X, chances are worse than not that there’s no activity in the community built for that one game.
Basically, I guess I need to write 8 alt-account posts/memes complaining about how the Ghoul is overpowered in Dead by Daylight.
I get the sentiment, but I feel that the majority, if not all of those benefits can be achieved by a floss threaded forum server application and companion client applications. So long as the software’s design objectives includes content ownership and portability, you could bail to another instance with all your stuff and re-share it or not as you see fit.
As much as I understand the goals of federation, it introduces many, many, intractable problems with efficiency, privacy, security, moderation, and ease administration in exchange for openness benefits that can likely or definitely be attained in other ways.
I believe that the idea of federation is not fundamentally bad, per se, but seems to have had a hype wave at a really opportune time, that made it the forerunner among the solutions to lock-in being discussed at the time. Plenty of other solutions seemed just as valid, but they lacked newness and novelty that made them less hyped at the time.
I don’t see much of the former, but the later seems pretty ubiquitous already: vegans hunting vegetarians for sport, communists splitting socialists into equal chunks among them, clones clawing over one another to be standing more to the west than each other.
“The Left: Where the Perfect is the Arch-nemesis of the Good”
Quick, get into a war about your favorite character in Iconoclasts!
yeah but you’ve been away for like two days
the meta has shifted
But those countries just have a sign out front that says “communism”, with little to no actual ideological communism taking place inside. Surely those alabaster pure ideologues seek out the Platonic form of perfect ideology, rather than this DPRK-like fun-house mask covering up an entirely different ideology.
I just signed up, and it’s confusing. I used lemmy.world because it seemed like it was the only means to get my registration approved. It wasn’t clear whether or not this account can still view and interact with other “instances”, so I went with the website that had the largest userbase.
This is a small one. I’d like to see a full screen edit window like Reddit has.
Reddit isn’t terrible when a user adjusts what they are suggested, but the system they use to ban people pretty much sucks.
If I respond to a user that is suggesting the unnecessary euthanasia of a relatively healthy cat with, “Great. Now it is okay to k*** relatively healthy cats. This is a positive development,” I will get a warning for promoting the abuse of animals. Four of these strikes over any period of time will lead to a permanent ban.
…it’s not sustainable. Since there isn’t any human oversight, I have to heavily censor what I say to avoid being banned from the platform. I’m using an actual example. My appeal was denied.
Yes, it can. I’m from Piefed.social.
I feel like the split between people leftists and liberals really isn’t that big at all, assuming the people being talked about aren’t people that are diehard behind people like Schumer or are scorched-earthers. There’s a vein of liberalism that builds towards the same exact goals that are leftist in nature.
I see progressive liberalism for instance being focused on working within what currently is built out to get to those goals of helping people reach self-actualization and living stable lives without having to be concerned about if you’ll be able to retire, have healthcare, have childcare, housing, food, disease, or other common concerns.
are we ready?
idk how to get more people aware of fediverse without joining stuff like reddit again and getting banned repeatedly mentioning fediverse.
I agree. This place feels dead? I’m sure I’m just doing it wrong. But, I downloaded Blorp, went to ‘Explore’, and the amount of ‘subreddits ’ is so minimal. What am I doing wrong here? Lol
Yep that was a change a while back. Choice makes some people think there’s too much effort involved so the first recommendation is a random “general” server. You can still see the list if you want.
As a sys admin with a lot of experience, I am still unsure how to maintain and update my lemmy instance. So I am revisiting again, but it seems like we need work on the lemmy docker containers and possibly docker-compose.
Eh, I’m probably leaving here after lemy.lol shuts down. Have fun!
I agree with you, but if the tankies were listening they’d be very upset! (I say let them rupture a vessel but hey)
I never boycotted Reddit, I just refused to use their app and new reddit. I ended up just using desktop mode old reddit without an app. If reddit moved to an age verification I would just drop it completely lol.
I’m the developer behind Blorp. The trouble with the threadiverse (a term that refers to Lemmy and PieFed) is it’s not tuned by big cooperations to get you addicted. That also means you gotta dig a little more to find the content you’re looking for. I’m happy to help direct you if you have questions!
Thanks for using my app!
Get off my lawn!
I think user friction without federation will always result in too much lock-in. Federation is our only chance to actually defeat the network effect and allow new platforms/instances to actually have a fighting chance at competing when they are better.
Mobile users can be pointed towards alternative clients. Makes the whole thing much more manageable and familiar. I use sync (which no longer seems to be being updated) but there are others. Don’t know if there’s a desktop equivalent but that might help with UX problems.
Also, re onboarding - many Lemmites might be astonished to realise how many non technical ppl don’t know what a server is and are intimidated by the term. Maybe just say something like ‘Click on the place nearest to you’. Re instances, I dunno, a metaphor. Like, your computer is a toilet, the fediverse is the ocean. When you take a crap and flush, your turd goes to the local sewage facility where it parties with all the other turds before being dumped into the sea.
There’s probably a better metaphor, but, y’know.
pretty sure PieFed is easier to host
When I first signed up - when reddit did the API thing - I was also shocked how empty it felt here. And it is, but when I adjusted I came to prefer that. There’s fewer commenters but also less bullshit. I spend less of my linked screen time doomscrolling and more on other stuff, like reading and gaming.
That could be true. People do seem to tend to tolerate slow declines in platform quality surprisingly long before jumping to available alternatives. I think that’s at least in part due to that ‘critical mass’ effect described elsewhere in this conversation that makes people prefer to stay where they believe everyone else is.
If federation does end up being the only solution that pans out, I hope to see additional approaches beyond ActivityPub. As capable as it is, its design seems to confound any implementations of private communications or revocation of access at many levels where it would be very useful and empowering to admins, moderators, and regular users alike.
I would love to see a federation model where each user has an encrypted profile and content in their own archive that they manage and/or have stored somewhere for them, which they can then use to join servers and choose what data from their profile they share with who else on that server, as well as participate in server local and federated public channels, as well as private data exchanges facilitated but not readable by the server or federated network of servers you have a user account signed up.
I’m not sure it could promise revocation for all data on servers of unknown configuration, but could accommodate info that is facilitated by but not readable by any of the participating servers. Posts in public areas would have and require much lower revocation/deletion assurances, but could still have them in a manner at least as robust as ActivityPub.
I’ve been watching the space as time permits and am interested in a lot of the amazing things people make for free for the ‘love of the game’!
Lemmy.ml was created by the lemmy developers following the quarantine of ChapoTrapHouse on reddit. ChapoTrapHouse was the largest tankie subreddit and extremely toxic.
Following the development of Lemmy, lemmy.ml split into Lemmygrad, where Lemmygrad is where they hold their more extreme opinions and lemmy.ml is supposed to be the more presentable side. However, the users are largely the same. One’s mask-off, one’s mask-on.
I would love to see a federation model where each user has an encrypted profile and content in their own archive that they manage and/or have stored somewhere for them, which they can then use to join servers and choose what data from their profile they share with who else on that server, as well as participate in server local and federated public channels, as well as private data exchanges facilitated but not readable by the server or federated network of servers you have a user account signed up.
This sounds like more work/requirements/issues placed on the casual users, it won’t work, people are too lazy. You have to lean into the 90%/9%/1% rule and let the instance admins and community moderators handle everything for the casual users.
You’re right though, it doesn’t need to be ActivityPub. However no one says a platform can’t support multiple federation protocols at the same time, at least while a transition is ongoing.
I wouldn’t recommend dbzer0. Since the AI purge, where many users who were critical that you can’t be pro-AI and anarchist at the same time were banned, the instance has been largely taken over by tankies. Even their own admins are self-proclaimed tankies, and all their popular users are tankies who have accounts on Hexbear. They’re, at the very least, openly a tankie bar.
It’s largely considered ineffective these days. Detecting elements that don’t affect layout is trivial, or elements that are occluded, transparent….etc
Capchas are one of the best options. But even then, LLM users bypass those relatively easily, and LLM users are one of the biggest risk areas for astroturfing.
I mean, fundamentally, yeah.
But we live in a corporate controlled, corrupt, world and now of these larger companies can be trusted with this process.
Some smaller communities and platforms DO this right sometimes, as they build in house processu that respect privacy. But governments world wide are making this impossible through increasingly strict compliance requirements that actually increase data privacy risks and funnel these needs to 3rd party services who just lie about what they do with the data.
OP’s post is hilarious because .ml, grad, and hexbear are like the only reasons to use lemmy lmao
Hi there! Thanks for developing the app, that’s quite impressive. Not sure if there’s a good answer to this, but what I was referring to was when I ‘Explore’ and search for something specific, it doesn’t seem to be there. So I thought maybe I was doing something wrong? Also if there is something specific that I end up fonding, it sometimes only has ~1-10 members. If there are any tips surrounding these things, that’d be awesome!
I’m guessing you’re subscribing to more niche communities. For example, I really enjoyed r/homekit, r/WLED, and r/TvTooHigh on Reddit. I think some of those exist on Lemmy, but they are very very inactive compared to Reddit. But if you look at more broad topics like !news@lemmy.world or !technology@lemmy.world, those are way more active.
There are a few exceptions. Lemmy seems to attract lots of Linux and Star Trek fans. I consider those topics more niche, but here they are very active topics.
I know this is easier said than done, but I really want the niche communities here to be more active. If you see a community missing, create it. If you see the one you’re looking for but it’s inactive, post to it.
We need more content especially main stream topic and pop culture.
In the fediverse we have too much politics, lgbt, Linux and environmental topics. Don’t get me wrong those topics are great and should continue existing but your average Joe like other topics more.
Says it shares personal info with third parties?
Yes, but with many more sorting options. (What does “newbie-friendly” even mean?)
IDK what personal info could it be sharing. You don’t need to login, it doesn’t ask for permissions and it’s a GPLv3 app. Where did you get that idea?
The app repo lists that kind of information about every app.
It’s on a device, it can access IPs, network info, maybe phone number, other accounts. It’s a blackbox, I don’t know what it has access to, but I guarantee it’s more than I explicitly share with it…
There are apps without public repos at all. Here’s a report of trackers and permissions the app may ask, but again, you don’t need to grant it more than just network access because is for Reddit.
I can’t give any value to your guarantees. There’s the code, there’s an analysis of trackers and the history of the app. These things make me feel rather secure about using it behind a VPN as I said, but that’s me.
No I meant the app repository like play store, f-droid, app store, etc.
You can check whether the app collects or shares any data, and this one says it shares personal info with third parties. It doesn’t elaborate any further than that.
I’m not going to read the entire source code to identify it. Someone else suggested redlib, so I’ll probably go with that instead.
Answer, in my opinion, is local communities.
Perhaps it’s a bit of nationalist of me, but I think we are flooded daily with unnecessary information about what happens in other countries. In my personal opinion a random person from, say, Berlin or Paris shouldn’t be bombarded daily with news about another school shooting in backwater american town. Nor should they know what happens in politics of each other nations.
A community of my town would be useless for bots, especially if it banned all politics and ads from beyond my town. Elections of president? No dice, the only elections we care about is our mayor.
I do not live in USA. I shouldn’t know about Trump as much as I do, I shouldn’t be talking daily to americans. What relationships could I form with them? We will never go together to restaurant, bar, bowling alley etc. But place where my countrymen, and americans, and french, and germans etc. are herded together is the best place for bots.
It’s not “random” though if it is always those two choices. And I also confirm that it is ALWAYS those 2 options - I’ve literally never seen a 3rd option offered that way. It’s highly biased towards those two very tiny instances (of <200 people each)… as in exclusively so. Which could be fine, the issue I have here is in calling that as “random”.
Also, if I were signing up that way, I would want to know the answer to questions such as: (1) are there multiple people on the instance admin team, (2) are they well-funded, since a negative answer to either of those might mean that the server disappears six months from now, which is a major inconvenience.
I can see why the instance picker might not choose to put that into front and center, but like… even with me having been on the Threadiverse since the Rexodus, I personally have no idea as to their answers. In contrast, something like PieFed.zip has an extremely established track record, with a very solid admin team. (To be clear, I am not saying that those other two instances do not, just that I do not know if they do or do not, and I didn’t see an explanation on the instance picker page).
I believe it’s three instances that were picked for the moment, including mine which has been going for nearly 3 years. I think their logic is to spread people out from the big instances.
I would want to know the answer to questions such as: (1) are there multiple people on the instance admin team, (2) are they well-funded, since a negative answer to either of those might mean that the server disappears six months from now, which is a major inconvenience.
I mean I think most people ending up on that page probably don’t even know to ask. They may have no familiarity with fediverse software or what the hell an instance is. They just want to sign up to this reddit alternative they heard about.
It’s a hard balance for sure.
True. Fwiw, PieFed offers a number of neat automated moderation tools, like a setting providing a community moderator with the ability to limit voting to only Subscribers, which helps curtail drive-by downvoting from All. But if you mean CSAM type of filtering, that I do not know which software has better tools.
For a single-user instance, I would wholeheartedly recommend PieFed over Lemmy, no questions asked. For a small instance sharing accounts with friends… probably still PieFed there as well, but less confidently than it is always the better choice under all conditions. Also the UI of Lemmy is slightly better for the core features and Lemmy’s search functionality is superb, whereas PieFed’s is practically non-existent by comparison (by design), so especially if someone wants to do a lot of searching on their own instance, I could see using Lemmy for that use case. For everything else, PieFed tends to be more useful.
You do you. Good luck.
Is that just some of the communities, or the instance itself, do you think? I thought their overarching tolerance policy was because they are anarchists, not actual tankies - like, would they be equally as tolerant of conservative viewpoints?
Anyway thank you for posting the link to learn more.
PieFed already provides a HUGE aid to help here, and while Lemmy currently lacks this I believe that a future version is imminent that will help in this regard as well. I am talking about federating mod reports across instances, which will allow mods to remain on their home instance without having to continually check an alt account(s) on the same instance that houses the community. This will increase the pool of available mods for any specific community.
There are SO MANY features that PieFed offers to help new users learn more about the Threadiverse - e.g. the entire set of community rules placed below each and every post that you read from it.
In this case, one thing that helps newbies is to either defederate or otherwise block new users from being exposed to the likes of !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net, without being informed first about what that place is like. MANY people came here from Reddit, got chewed up by trolls, then quickly noped out and complained bitterly about Lemmy on Reddit, X, Bluesky, etc. Someone who is forewarned can handle that, hence the name “Choose your own adventure”, but if you want an instance to hold your hand for you and protect you from anything bad that might happen, then “Newbie-friendly” ones are more like that than the alternative.
chances are worse than not that there’s no activity in the community built for that one game.
Bold of you to assume there even is a community instead of just a random mention in !games@insta.nce !
A local community also makes it much easier to check humanity vs botness. Just summon the members to an open meeting at the local cat café and exchange GPG keys or something, like in the good ol’ days.
A fair warning when joining Piefed: they incorporate a number of CCP-style “Social Credit” underhanded measures, so any criticism of eg.: “tankies” from that side is if anything at least negligently myopic.
If those are great instances, then it’s good to be directing people there. On the other hand, there are just a ton of other instances (like Discuss.Online, leminalaspace, reddthat - although that one disables downvotes) that are likewise general purpose yet excluded for some reason(s) - that is “unfair” aka unequal treatment.
And more to the point, it’s not “a random Lemmy instance” at all, to only pick from just those 2. Instead it’s more “just come join my instance”… which I genuinely am actually totally fine with, I only am arguing against the usage of language that seems to misleadingly imply that it was instead a more equal distribution of picks among all (suitable by some criteria?) Lemmy instances.
Your comment seems if not outright wrong then at least imprecise.
The PieFed.social instance is very much against tankies, but the software can be tuned however the admin installing it wishes. Like how reddthat famously turned off downvoting, you can turn on or off any PieFed feature that you wish. So e.g. if someone disliked downvoting, there’s still a Lemmy server for them! The instances are very much different than the software.
One feature vaguely similar to what you describe is the user indicator icons. New user accounts (of <2 weeks iirc) have a label placed next to the usernames, so that people realize that they are talking with a newb. That does not block making posts or comments, just an icon next to the username (which any instance admin can disable if they want).
Likewise, people who receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes will have an icon placed next to their username. It won’t block submissions, just display that icon, so that someone is aware that they are about to reply to a known troll. It is not underhanded, not a secret, it is instead very open and thus overhanded. But indeed, if you don’t like it, then don’t use it. I’m sure there is a way to turn it off for someone’s user account (it might not be as simple as merely pressing a button in the settings).
Beyond that… I don’t know what you could mean. There is a feature, turned on by default, to automatically collapse or even automatically hide comments if their score falls below a certain threshold. I don’t personally use either of these options, so I disabled them by setting the threshold to a ridiculous value of -10000. However, they are there if someone wants them, and I don’t begrudge someone else doing whatever they feel is right.
Oh, maybe you mean the image filtering stuff? That has largely been debunked - yes there is some code that will do filtering, but what people failed to realize is that when wrapped inside an if() statement, it becomes optional - it only happens if the instance admin specifically selects that option to happen? And thus again, it’s a per-instance decision, not so much something mandated by the software.
But yeah, if you don’t enjoy PieFed, then by all means do not use it. I begrudge nobody their choice there. I just wanted to make sure that people have accurate information upon which to base their decision.
The instance itself. The admins, half of whom are openly tankies and actively participate in Hexbear troll campaigns, are all tech bros who love their AI and will actively silence users who are critical of it.
