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?

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 9 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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!:-)

[–] Specter@feddit.org 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

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

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

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

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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!

[–] Specter@feddit.org 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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 🍻!

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 1 hour ago

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! :-)