OpenStars

In addition to keyword filters that Blaze mentioned, PieFed is basically the only way I know of, other than an app (Sync or Connect) that offers a true instance filter that blocks all users from the specified instance, without requiring admin support. I’ve blocked all those batshit insane comments from lemmy.ml and now if I go to the same identical posts, those comments from those users from those instances that you specify are flat gone. Regardless of the community. More in this post but that’s basically it that I’ve said already.

Likewise, Categories of Communities allows you to have your cake and (when you want it) eat it too. e.g. check out https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft and note absence of it, in that category. Likewise https://piefed.social/topic/fediverse, and https://piefed.social/topic/food, and https://piefed.social/topic/gaming, and so on. But, in the very rare event that you ARE wanting it (hey, it happens!) it’s still accessible at https://piefed.social/topic/news (& politics).

I would be remiss if I did not tell you that PieFed isn’t fully completed yet - it both has features that Lemmy (and even Reddit!) lacks, while also missing some, like its search feature is pretty abysmally bad (on purpose, it just hasn’t been the top priority yet, to receive some love and attention:-). Though I still love it even so. You can keep your old account (to do things that PieFed cannot yet), and eventually you should find yourself using the new perhaps 90% of the time, as you adjust and come to love what it can do for you - though note that I find that the approach to finding content is quite different from when I used Lemmy, which only offers Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has so many more options to choose from (it may be overwhelming at first - but it’s so fantastic to have choices!:-).

Sadly there are some aspects that don’t work well - like searching and notifications sometimes sends you to things that don’t exist. This is MORE than made up for (imho at least, though I respect that it won’t be everyone’s) in having so many features that Lemmy still lacks.

The onboarding process is one fantastic one, and you’ve barely begun to learn all that you can now do that you could not before. Categories of Communities, hashtags, notifications for every. single. thing. (whole entire communities? best used only for your favorites or low frequency ones - though a new custom Topics feature will make that process obsolete, whenever it comes out, I don’t know the prioritization. Comment in !piefed_2025@piefed.social or !piefed_meta@piefed.social if you want to add new feature requests:-)

I would keep your old account around though, for the handful of things that PieFed isn’t fully ready to deliver yet.

Absolutely. Case in point: I got a notification now when you tagged me, while a month or possibly even a week ago I would not have. There’s new features weekly here!:-D

Isn’t the “tiling” view on PieFed like that? Link

Not really though - that only mutes communities, while the users are still free to troll you by replying and generating notifications in posts sent to other communities.

Worse, that protection has even weakened rather than strengthened over time - the notifications used to be blocked. I almost decided to leave Lemmy myself when I continued to receive notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after accidentally responding to a post that I encountered in All - I hadn’t read the sidebar, I didn’t know about that instance, and so how was I supposed to know!?

I did that in Lemmygrad, and then again in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net - and after that, I very much understand why people say that we are miserable tankie trolls over here.

It’s the Nazi bar effect: “We” might be fine, but there are places here that anyone can just wander into without any advanced notice of what will happen…and then they leave. And complain over in r/RedditAlternatives, warning others against attempting the same.

And since it’s TRUE, we DESERVE this reputation. 100% of the people I’ve ever mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having mentioned it. I can see why, with such bOtH sIdEs SaMe content as this:

Just go to https://discuss.online/, easy. :-)

True but they’ve improved dramatically - especially what Blaze is telling people now in r/RedditAlternatives. (it’s sth like 5 sentences now, only what they need to know - see it live here)

There reportedly are some slowness issues for people in the USA, where most Redditors would be coming from? Perhaps the updates currently in progress and still planned will help.

PvP v. PvE seems like it would make s difference, probably? :-P

But yeah I get you: the list of varied options is too large, and worse yet opaque.

Fwiw Blaze most often just recommends 2-3 options to current Redditors, to KISS (Keep It SimpleS:-).

If it helps, the issue is much less prominent for PieFed. Pick https://piefed.social/ bc it is the flagship and new features will just magically appear every week or so (not joking! the pace of development really is that fast!) Also it’s easier to not have to start the community joining process for every community - that one being (by far) the largest for PieFed means that more often than any other instance, that work will have been done for you.

Also, when you join, you will become energized about the Fediverse again - the startup wizard helping you pick communities to subscribe to based off of your interests will make you happy:-). Whether it’s worth the pain of learning a whole new system after that or not… is up to you, but seriously if you need that jolt of positivity, sign up TODAY! (you can always abandon it tomorrow, though I hope you won’t, and am betting that actively seeing it in front of you may help… although tbf there is a bit of a learning curve as you adjust, and yet only bc there’s so much MORE you can do with PieFed, like Lemmy has just Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has a whole slew of new options to add to that, in the Topics, in choosing to receive Notifications for content rather than have to navigate to it, and new stuff is coming like personalized multi-communitied as well - it kinda really is awesome and exciting!? 😊)

Those went on and on and on and on for years though - it was only 3 months ago that Discuss.Online finally defederated from Lemmy.ml, making it the first top ranked instance that would be suitable to recommend to Redditors. And even then lemmy.ml still remains to bully and abuse the potential users with tankie BS (bOtH sIdEs SaMe don’t ya’know).

Also before those two started there was Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, and others I cannot recall off the top of my head but they really do go back a ways - defederation fights is kinda Lemmy’s whole main entire deal. Sadly, I am not kidding: it’s a Nazi bar effect where you can’t convince people to join a bar that welcomes Alt-Right Nazis (although in this case it’s Alt-Left tankies), bc they are turned off by such.

It’s fine if we ignore what those users want btw, it’s just less so if we don’t acknowledge who we really are, and then wonder why nobody likes us - that kind of incel culture is not okay, at least not with me, and I will stand by that.

Personally I find the UX better on PieFed (unless it’s for a part where most of the development hasn’t happened yet, so yeah it’s hit or miss). See e.g. the tiling view.

So much possibility…

If only we could find a way to have such quality content here! If only…

Oh okay, so not that they say “dot world” when referring to lemmy.world (bc almost nobody talks about Lemmy irl from what I can see:-), but in the general sense they say whatever comes after the dot out loud, I get you now (I think):-).

Democracy means allowing the people to decide, as opposed to authoritianism where a central group (mods, admins, facilitators or whatever) makes all the decisions for people. PieFed still allows for authoritian control, mind you, e.g. on PieFed.social (the flagship instance) both hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml are defederated. But in addition to that, this opens up a new possibility where someone who is perhaps controversial yet not over a hard line can be allowed to remain, yet merely labelled.

And then people can decide for themselves, rather than solely an authority figure, what they wish to do about it. You are free ofc to debate whether this is “good” or “bad”, but either way it does seem more “democratic” to me, bc it places the power and therefore responsibility into the hands of the user to decide.

Which is sorta how our brains work anyway all the time, so these icons act as a shortcut to help jog people’s memories or realize something about the target that they would eventually figure out anyway.

The point is that the icon means… whatever you want it to mean. A “new account”, a “potential unregistered bot”, a “noted controversial person” - the authorities no longer control these meanings, only the recipient. Hence “democracy”.

No not always. Just as “.world” I usually see called rather LW, so too ML works. And yours would be SJW:-). Maybe that’s mostly my conversations with Blaze but I’ve definitely seen LW used elsewhere, though I can’t recall ever seeing someone saying .world. Perhaps I simply wasn’t paying proper attention:-).

After kbin.social went defunct the smaller instances I kept moving to (StarTrek.website and discuss.online) had not defederated from those two instances yet at that time. They do now, but a year ago it wasn’t as prevalent a choice to protect people from such things happening to their users. The Lemmy community has matured a bit, the word has gotten out, a case built to do so, and admins became receptive to what they had once spurned - e.g. I petitioned discuss.online to defederate hexbear.net after it was revealed that the admins there were caught lying to admins of other instances. But it took a lot of effort and time to get to this point, and still today most instances remain federated with lemmy.ml, which is where a bunch of Hexbear alts (e.g. Cowbee) decided to continue their trolling efforts after so many other places defederated from Hexbear itself.

I hear what you are saying about PieFed, especially from just what is mentioned on that page regarding tools that community mods would have access to, but in practice what I’m seeing so far really is tons better. For one thing, mods on Lemmy right now have to choose between the binary options of removing content vs. allowing it to remain (similarly at the instance level it can either defederate from another instance vs. not do so), whereas PieFed offers additional options that will allow the content to remain and then place the choice of what to do into the hands of the end users. Some users may e.g. want to avoid controversial content, and so like a spam filter automatically collapse content with a certain ratio of downvotes to upvotes - which preserves the ability to see it, but putting it one step away exactly like a spoiler feature for the post. Or maybe the user will instead choose to have the content removed altogether, with the auto-hide feature? Some of my own content would have gotten removed this way, and I definitely see how things can get misunderstood by downvoters, but at the end of the day, it still gives choices to the user that otherwise would have rested solely in the hands of a moderator. Personally I have both the auto-collapse and especially auto-hide options turned off, but it’s worth noting that they are there if people want them.

There are also other niceties such as keyword filtering - so e.g. if the user wants to remove all posts with the keyword “Musk”, then they could. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but they can, if they wanted.

I find that user labelling really is different though, than any of the filtering options above. Examples include new users with accounts newer than let’s say a couple of weeks, a user who almost exclusively posts but never comments (likely an unregistered bot?), someone who downvotes 20x more often than upvotes, or receives 50x more downvotes than upvotes - again, their comments aren’t removed (currently I am not aware of a method to even make that happen), just labelled with an icon next to their name. These icons can help someone decide whether or not to respond, or how much detail to put into it if so. Essentially these are just measures of a user’s “reputation”, so this is the numeric version of the type of info that people use anyway? But at each moment the choice lies with the user to either pay attention to or ignore those icons. And yeah the precise formulas to determine these icons are constantly tweaked to improve them, so that’s a thing, surely.

Ultimately though, whether the end-user makes proper usage of the tools given to them or not, either way, I think it’s awesome that these tools are given to the regular users, rather than constraining them to work solely when in the hands of a mod. That’s “democracy”! I guess whether democracy itself is a good thing or not is a whole other discussion altogether…🤣

Edit: also the tools are definitely in their infancy - e.g. to avoid karma farming, communities should be able to use community-specific metrics so that actions taken outside of a community do not necessarily affect filtering options inside of one. Which iirc is coming or at least people are aware of this issue. PieFed itself is still mostly in the works:-).

Thanks, it seems there was a lot here I was missing.

Edit: e.g. I missed that this is Jeena himself, who I generally enjoy reading his comments, and if made a month ago rather than now definitely makes this all make a ton more sense than it would have otherwise.