I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy irl actively chiding me for having mentioned it to them. It doesn’t help that (1) Lemmy.ml is the #1 Lemmy instance in a Google search, and (2) that instance uses Local rather than All when you don’t have an account. If someone told me to consider joining Lemmy.ml, and that first couple of pages of content were all that I saw - especially just before any election in a Western nation - well then now I understand their reaction perfectly, as it is the correct one!?!?

Conversely, PieFed has a number of features that Lemmy lacks, one being the ability to actually block all users from an instance (rather than merely mute communities but not actual users on it - leaving them free to troll you in other communities, reply to your comments, trigger notifications, downvote your content, etc.). Since blocking lemmy.ml, I have had zero regrets, and enjoy interacting with Lemmy communities much better:-).

The real biggest problem that Lemmy has is lack of users and overall dearth of niche content - which ofc wraps back around to why would someone willing come here to be bullied just for being a mainstream centrist or even “leftist” by USA standards (Reddit is based in and its largest userbase is from the USA)?

Bullying is why Lemmy will never grow. That, and how the tools are somehow even more authoritian than Reddit - i.e. there is a modlog but no modmail, nor notification of a moderation event, instead the modlog simply says that a “mod” did something, if you go to the trouble to find out why nobody bothered to respond. And worse, on Lemmy.ml you’ll find yourself banned from communities that you’ve never so much as heard of, citing having broken a rule that seems not written down anywhere. The lack of transparency is very reminiscent of the spez.

Fortunately, PieFed and Mbin offer non-Lemmy options to the Threadiverse.:-)

That’s great!

I was just talking with an admin of Lemmy.zip who automatically puts up a community muting of HB for new users joining that instance, but not going so far as to defederate from it. So… that surely helps a little bit? Except when Hexbears brigade a community located on a different instance.

But the example I gave of a mod throwing out death threats to users involves lemmy.ml rather than Hexbear. Both instances are problematic in that regard, ML mostly for the admins and the mods that they choose to protect, while HB the subset of users that go outside of the instance to engage in trolling. In both, it is also entirely possible to have completely sane and normal conversations on the instance itself, which muddies the waters a bit, though the presence of sanity on occasion does not negate the presence of insanity on others.

And I was thinking of editing my comment but instead I’ll put it here, your own posts such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/ most definitely covers both the strong benefits as well as strong criticisms of using Lemmy, as well as solid solutions to the latter problems.

Lemmy has a well-known reputation as being a “Nazi bar”. e.g. as mentioned in this example post in r/RedditAlternatives complaining about toxicity on Lemmy, here is one of the comments therein (not from OP but as part of the overall conversation):

If their experience is anything like mine, it’s populated by mostly far left wing Americans who were banned from Reddit for being too extreme. I disagreed with someone about a topical left wing American position and received death threats. In fact I’ve never received that many death threats on Reddit. Lemmy is extreme.

Even if the threats came from Hexbear or one of the lemmy.ml mods who are allowed to make death threats against users without any repercussions, “we” still expose “our” users to such content when we federate with those communities. i.e., for exactly the same reason that we defederate from instances that share CSAM, if we really, truly, genuinely don’t like it when mods make death threats against users, then we need to put a stop to it - by defederating those instances that are known to do exactly that.

Otherwise we give our tacit approval, and moreover whenever we encourage people to join Lemmy instances, we willingly expose those people to this kind of content. Would you expose someone to CSAM, knowingly and without warning them first? Then why is it different when we can see the death threats, delivered by mods, who are not censured in any way, yet still encourage people to come here to Lemmy communities? Are we truly that desperate for content that we are so inconsiderate to them as to expose them to that without warning?

If you somehow have not heard of this yet and really don’t know what I’m talking about, a lot of details are offered in Discuss.Online’s (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, although that particular mod in question is from Lemmy.ml.

🐵🐾?

You can read in my (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net some stories not only about that instance but also some for Lemmy.ml, including an incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP), then double and tripled down on that thought, all entirely protected by the admins (discussed further here).

When I first considered leaving Reddit, this kind of thing gave me strong pause, and it was only the fact that Kbin.social also existed that got me even a toe-hold into the Lemmyverse. This despite me not caring about Mastodon and thus any of its Microblogs, which lead to me mostly interacting with Lemmy magazines remotely, though with different sorting metrics which did help a little for me to see content that was not merely highly upvoted by people using Lemmy (including hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, etc.) and instead prioritized more by like-minded people using Kbin, and then later Mbin.

PieFed goes MUCH further, providing not merely different voting metrics on mostly the same content but actual tools that even pro-authoritarian Lemmy users want (categories of communities, combined comments across cross-posts, hashtags, etc.), as well as people who want the opposite, it’s really extremely flexible.

And I think PieFed is the only hope for the Threadiverse to go mainstream. I’m not saying that I think that we necessarily will, or even that we all want to or should, just that if it were to happen, it won’t happen with Lemmy. I’m currently at 100% of people I’ve told about it irl actively chiding me for having so much as recommended it, which makes a great deal of sense only once you realize that (i) a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance, (ii) that instance shows Local rather than All by default, and thus (iii) what someone will be exposed to is content making fun of Western society. Mainstream normal people don’t want that! I don’t want it either! We learn how to block it, but mainstream normal people don’t want to expend hours upon hours to make Lemmy usable - and by hours I mean like tens of, continually, as they keep swatting off the bullies, but there are always more.

The alternative would be to make better mod tools. Which on Lemmy are barely happening, extremely slowly. PieFed is still catching up to Lemmy in terms of base features though, e.g. there is a Preview option but only for posts but not for comments, and many Notifications point to things to read but then won’t actually show you the thing when you click on it (due to many reasons, possibly having been removed in the meantime, or being hidden by an auto-collapse or auto-hide feature, or you’ve blocked all the users from an instance but nonetheless notifications are still sent, etc.) - i.e. it still needs some polish. Hence in the meantime I am not recommending Threadiverse tools to anyone irl atm, unless they are already reading something here and then I recommend to check out PieFed:-).

A highly relevant post, particularly the part “Address the Elephants in the Room”. Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get… Lemmy.

Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren’t really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That’s the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there’s a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.

People most definitely don’t come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn’t going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.

That’s never going to happen. The admins of Lemmy.ml are the actual developers who make the Lemmy software, so there is huge resistance to doing things that will offend them.

There was a software project aiming at making a non-Lemmy Reddit replacement. The main dev got sick and basically the project (Kbin) died, though spawned a fork called Mbin, which afaik has barely been improved since.

Though you may want to check out PieFed, even entirely aside from all of this. The set of features that it has been developing and the speed that they are added is nothing short of astonishing! Btw I am writing to you on Lemmy from PieFed right now.:-)

The Alt-Left is my own phrase for people who act identically to the Alt-Right (as described in e.g. Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook - gish gallop, didoing, pyramid thinking, controlling the conversation, etc.), just on the “left” side. The more traditional term is the (much more?) pejorative “tankies”. There are several communities that discuss these events - one entirely dedicated to tankies in particular is [email protected], but as the abuses are rampant you will also see it in [email protected], [email protected], etc.

This graphic depiction may also help:

This will explain SO MUCH why so many people are site-wide banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, citing a rule that makes no mention of anything that their supposed offense is. Once you realize that the reason that Lemmy was created was bc Reddit banned the code developers, you will see why they created their own Reddit 2.0, which in many ways is somehow even more authoritarian than Reddit itself is. e.g. here we have a modlog, but there is no modmail, nor a notification of a moderation event, and the modlog simply says it was done by a “mod”, so you have no idea who to ask for clarification, or to appeal the decision - all you are left with is the “choice” to go somewhere else (or…?).

Mind you, instance owners are very free, and mods likewise have a great deal of power subject only to instance admins, but individual users not so much - not even the right to be notified that your content was removed (sounds similar to shadowbanning doesn’t it?).

OTOH, software is software, and so we are here as well, trying to find some way to talk that isn’t owned by a corporate entity.

Here’s a highly relevant post: https://lemmy.world/post/21055894, see also it + the comments in the OG cross-post it was from (its first link).

If it helps to add: ditch the analogy about the Fediverse being like email, for the level of understanding that you are seeking. Instead, consider it like a bunch of ships (hehe, free traders and… otherwise), each passing messages around.

When A posts to C, A knows about it, but more importantly everything connected to C also knows about it too. A copy of the message has been shared with all the partners. So yeah, thus B knows about it too, despite the lack of direct connection to A.

Although then when B sends C the downvote action, A is not told, bc of the defederation. So everything connected to C and B knows about the downvotes, with the exception of instances that have disabled downvotes entirely, and those who ignore all messages coming from B, plus those who likewise ignore all messages coming from A.

Where it starts to get tricky is that defederation does not have to be symmetrical, although ideally it always would be. In theory, and it has most definitely happened, messages sent from one instance to another can definitely be influenced by an asymmetrical pattern of defederations.

I wouldn’t worry as much about Alt-Right conservatives here - they tried but couldn’t get a foothold, and after being defederated from all instances eventually collapsed internally, and went to Truth Social.

Here, we ironically have much more to worry about from the Alt-Left that uses identical patterns of behaviors, just ostensibly on the “left”.

Just use the search function and sort by Top All Time and you’ll find everything you need. But if it helps, here’s my own (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net on Discuss.Online, making that USA instance safer to recommend to aid people fleeing Reddit. You can click the links and read with your own eyes examples of those admins being caught lying to other admins, and one case of a mod tripling down in saying how they wanted to kill someone for a simple misunderstanding of a scenario in a game (although do such details matter in the slightest?) - that one was on lemmy.ml though. And btw in case it helps, How do I block users from an instance of my choice? (TLDR: it’s super difficult, not really entirely possible without jumping through some rather hefty hoops, but with enough effort or sacrifice of freedom of other choices it is possible).

Worse yet, what’s happening in the USA is happening all around the globe, to varying degrees. Elections being “influenced” by alternative information campaigns, the rise of authoritarianism, etc.

And worst of all is what’s behind all of it, arguably the chief component being that ultimately climate change is going to radically reshape the world, along with the forces of automation and globalization but that one in undeniably bad ways with an even rougher transition process. Neo-liberalism in most nations did not care, not truly in the sense of actually doing anything rather than merely paying lip service to caring.

TLDR: we FA, now we get to FO what that means.

At least we don’t have to do it alone, here on the (Threadi-)Verse 😁.

I checked: definitely the first one. Also another check: blocking does work to not show the comments, I checked both blocking all users on a particular instance and blocking a specific community, and in both situations those comments did not appear, though all the other comments did.

I can see how for some people it could be a good idea to switch to the second though, e.g. in the form of allowing a toggle, and yet allowing all also does facilitate community discovery, at the expense of exposure to less well moderated areas of the Threadiverse. Although I’m personally really enjoying seeing comments from communities that I choose to not appear in my Subscribed feed on the main page, so I would hate for your second way to become the default with no option to change it.

Overall I feel like the addition of this feature, while not perfect (your point about it being opt-out) is more of a “10 steps forward, half a step back” kind of thing, i.e. the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages, even though the true ideal would be to put the choice into the hands of the end-user, as PieFed does so exceedingly much of in so many ways, yet this feature is so very brand-new so not this one currently.

Edit: ultimately, the way it is now, the choice of which ones to show is primarily in the hands of the OP, who chose what communities to post the link to. Plus also if anyone else cross-posted it. A PieFed user can override that decision, but only by either blocking or ignoring (scrolling past) the comments that they do not want to see. This makes sense to me.

I guess what I didn’t get is: doesn’t this new feature purely add, not detract, from someone’s capabilities?

So like, if you strictly wanted to read just the comments from the original community, then you could just stop at the gap where those comments end and the comments from another community begin - unless you are worried about FOMO due to seeing them and then feeling compelled to have to read them (all)?

Or if you wanted to read only let’s say half of the communities (but then all of the comments from each of those), then you can still do that? And now there are even two ways: to use the old method of accessing the cross-post menu and going to each community individually to read those, or the new way to hop and skip and jump all on just one page (this one admittedly isn’t so ideal just yet, without the ability to simply skip down to the next).

So, except for perhaps FOMO, what is being lost here? And isn’t this pretty niche, since someone can always just block the “bad” communities and never have to see them again, so that the difficulty here lies in both preserving them to show some but neither all nor none of them? That seems a more nuanced thing that isn’t likely to just spring up out of nowhere, as this initial feature did.

Well, it’s not like I’m even disagreeing with you there. Your suggestion does sound nice, and would be helpful to have.

Although I will say that I disagree that it will necessarily cause centralization of comments, or at least not entirely. For one thing you can respond to any comment, so this only affects top-level comments, and for another, subscriptions have those different implications on PieFed than on Lemmy, so e.g. I often do NOT subscribe to Lemmy.world communities such as politics or news, since that way they do not show up in my Subscribed feed - hence, all my top-level replies will be definition not be located there - and yet I can still see posts from these communities in the Topic/Feeds if I desire, and now I can also see comments from them.

Perhaps I’m just being a pendant - or I felt more like we were “exploring this space” verbally:-) - where what you are saying isn’t “necessarily” a given, and yet indeed this may encourage certain pre-existing trends, especially for those who aren’t forewarned or forearmed to resist them. And yet we still haven’t arrived so much at a (potential) “solution”, except to simply turn off the feature at the instance level, which will still allow those pre-existing trends to continue as they were, while also not helping with all the new things this offers such as helping people discover new communities, e.g. outside of Lemmy.world, that they probably had no idea even existed:-). i.e. yes there is a cost to this new feature, but there are also costs to not having it as well. And the costs to me seem small - bc again, someone can simply ignore all of these extra comments (except for FOMO?) and stop reading after the primary set, while if this feature did not exist then it would take a lot more time having to hunt through and read all of the comments from each community individually - which I used to do, which is why I’m saying that I LOVE this new feature!:-) But… maybe an option to disable it offered per user account would be sufficient to help improve it for you? If you can pin down something that doesn’t take a lot of effort, you could submit a feature request for that?

If you will, allow me to attempt a friendly rebuttal?

You aren’t on PieFed right now anyway? So maybe you mean that this is a reason to not join it? “Soon” the Thunder app will officially support PieFed and that will offer additional options for an interface.

A new feature just dropped where you click on the words and it takes you to the original community. Yes, I mean that the new feature was added to the new feature, just in the time that we’ve been having this conversation, started 13 hours ago on this post from 21 hours ago. THIS is the pace of development of PieFed, compared to Lemmy. I’m not suggesting that you not offer feedback - conversely, I’m saying that there is a VERY high chance that it will be heard, considered, and possibly implemented all within the space of mere days.

For instance I’d love to see an option to skip past one comment section to the next one, for situations like this. That way you could read “some but not all” of such comments, from such communities as you do not enjoy as much as other communities, but not have a hard time moving on to the next.

Everything is optional here: when you click on a post it shows up as the “main”/OP, and then other cross-posts are indicated, and their comments appended to the END of that conversation thread. Therefore you can read all the OC’s comments and then simply stop before reading the next ones from other communities. But yeah, this could definitely be improved & streamlined as mentioned above.

To your first point, Lemmy offers very few to no options to implement that ideology - you either are subscribed to something or you are not (unless you are willing to brave looking at All, which I did but those who do definitely seem to be in the tiny minority, to the point of being made fun of to admit it, sadly). PieFed offers many, Many, MANY choices in-between, for posts, and so it would very much be in the same spirit to add some additional options as you alluded to regarding comments. Perhaps “only show top comments (rather than all)”, maybe even an exact (edit: I meant to add “user customizable” here) limiting threshold specified like first 20 comments, using whatever sorting method (Hot/New/etc.). Of course, someone would have to do that work to make it happen! PieFed being written in Python rather than the super difficult and unfinished language Rust makes that much easier, i.e. far more people are capable of such, if only they are willing! Perhaps you’ll add it even:-). If not, then it’s still great that you are offering suggestions:-).

But this is a very new feature, and yeah it’ll take time to perfect. Your second topic seems a tiny little bit to go against the spirit of your first, where you didn’t want content to be opt-out, yet you also wanted to be exposed to new things that are in-between never see it vs. always see it. It will take time to discover the UX needs and then implement it in a UI. I hope my suggestions above help the devs a little to explore that - like top 20 comments rather than “all the comments” vs. “none of the comments”.

If that is the case, then wouldn’t you want to block that community? In which circumstance its comments would not pollute other posts. I confirm that at least for the situation where you “block all users from instance” (I did this for lemmy.ml), those don’t show up in these additional comments, and surely the same is true for blocked communities as well.

I believe I understand it. To clarify:

The normal Thunder app works perfectly with Lemmy instances. I’ve got it and while I haven’t registered my account with it yet, it works very well even as a guest to read content - it’s a great app!:-)

There is also a fork for the app, designed specifically for testing purposes, which only works atm (iirc) for a single PieFed instance. This fork no longer works with any Lemmy instances, nor any instances of PieFed either that aren’t running the API code. So it’s testing the backend and frontend connections, requiring specializations on both ends to work at all.

When all of that is done, the fork can be requested to be merged into the main branch, and become a standard feature of Thunder, to work either with Lemmy or with PieFed instances.

But notably, getting to what I thought you meant: PieFed itself still connects perfectly to Lemmy, due to its implementation of the ActivityPub protocol (and Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, and whatever else may also use that same ActivityPub protocol to share content).

I hope this explanation helps at least a little!:-)

What do you mean?

First, there’s a version of Thunder available on the App Store.

And second, PieFed offers better service in its web browser interface than any Lemmy instance I’ve seen, and most apps too. Like, Voyager is pretty awesome and a strong contender for best Lemmy app (especially among FOSS options), but it doesn’t have categories of communities, hashtag support, user customizable and shareable Feeds (like multi-Reddits), cross posting that shows all comments merged into one view, etc. and a lot of features that it does have can be quite buried within the interface. e.g. to read the rules of a community you have to navigate to it, then click the hamburger menu and choose the side-bar option, whereas on PieFed the rules are displayed directly underneath every single post, so all you have to do is scroll.

Now, mind you, the standard Thunder app won’t work yet for PieFed - it’s still being tested in a forked version of the code, not committed yet to the main branch of the code. So if that’s a deal-breaker for you, then yeah you should stick with Lemmy - FOR NOW!:-D - but there is movement towards supporting that, which i think is fucking awesome 😎. Lemmy is so slow to add new features, while we get them here on PieFed basically weekly at this point.

Yes, please do!

Come to think of it, I am aware of one issue where PieFed won’t automatically pull in content when it receives a vote for it - but I discount that as being a problem bc that’s a major issue even among Lemmy instances, just in different ways. I could show you some examples where my votes on a post vary from like 200 to 0 or anywhere in-between (that particular issue was from the post being locked, which ofc I received no notification of that happening, it just screwed up the federation of it across the entire Fediverse).

Also, the issue I’m thinking of would only affect a brand-new PieFed instance, not an established one that receives the post content as it federated out. And too, the way that Lemmy would handle this would lead to improper vote counts: imagine hypothetically that a post got +1000 upvotes and only 10 downvotes, but then the moment your brand-new Lemmy instance goes online you start to receive exclusively new votes for this post, and let’s say that it receives +2 more upvotes and another 10 downvotes. In this (hypothetical) scenario, the vote counts are MAGNITUDES off from what they should be - instead of showing +983 it would show as -7, thus misrepresenting a “highly popular” post as a “fairly unpopular” one. Lemmy’s approach is to have the post but allow the vote counts to be incorrect, whereas PieFed’s approach is to not pull in the post in the first place (unless someone manually makes that determination to override - which anyone can do, though I’ve argued that this should be a feature that is slightly more hidden or at least not as readily shown to users who, like myself at the time, could unknowingly cause spread of misinformation by not knowing all of these technical details).

So it’s not that Lemmy’s way is “right” and PieFed’s is “wrong”, but rather both are kinda wrong, iirc, and yet only affecting old posts that brand-new instances are trying to work with, so very much an edge scenario.

But if there’s something I missed, yes please send me the link - I would like to be informed!:-)

It sounds like the current issue depends on what you think of having “subscribed” to content. So, I’m digressing here to talk about it first.

On Lemmy, there’s only the Local, Subscribed, and All feeds - that’s it, no more options available. And Local is virtually useless for someone who isn’t on a highly active generalized instance (like Lemmy.world) or else a very active special purpose one (like slrpnk.net or startrek.website, although even the latter would not offer the extremely active [email protected] community). So for many of us, e.g. my alt account on discuss.online, and probably still most of the time for you on srlpnk.net, Local just doesn’t cut it.

While All has… issues. People report anime spam (unless you are on an instance that doesn’t federate?) and porn (this is unfair imho bc it depends on one’s NSFW setting, so gigo - Lemmy I feel like is extremely respectful of this setting), and ofc so many political and news and USA focused content. So the model is to block things that you don’t want, bc otherwise it makes All virtually unbearable to try to use. Like for me, I blocked all sports, any specific location (cities, states/provinces, nations, etc.), and other stuff that I knew for certain that I didn’t want (edit: which btw I felt was unfortunate, bc I actually would have liked to keep tabs on things happening around the world, even in places that I have never and will never visit, yet I HAD to find SOME way to reduce the flood of content on All, by focusing it a bit). And the majority of the time I browsed All actually. (Edit: one reason why is that less popular communities, such as poetry, have little chance of showing up in your Subscribed feed, so browsing All by New shows so much that Subscribed just won’t really offer, especially by Hot or Active)

But from the downvotes I often got whenever I said so, I see that the majority of people browse Subscribed (and dislike any other way that may work for others?🤪). This requires knowing about a community in order to add it, so e.g. if a community were to move, you might never know unless the mod allowed a post to state that fact (tenforward is a great example of that), and possibly not even then if you missed that post (even if it was pinned, you’d have to go there, and even then many sorting options won’t show it, like Top Six Hours).

So for Lemmy, “subscribing” means an ENORMOUS deal, basically to the point that you either see such content or else you are unlikely to ever see it - short of visiting an individual community explicitly to check it out (which I also often did:-).

But in PieFed it does not mean that at all. The model here has so many different options to expand one’s capabilities. Here, “subscribing” merely means for content to show up in the “Subscribed” main feed, but since there are multiple other avenues to be directed to content, it doesn’t have the enormous implications that subscriptions do on Lemmy. For example, if I was mod of a community or wanted to be alerted to every single post made in a community (usually those with low-volume content 😁), I can click one button to receive automated Notification alerts for that. And there’s also the default Topics as well as the user-customizable and also shareable Feeds. As well as, ofc the Subscription default main feed. But bc there’s so many more options, someone could, for instance, not subscribe to political communities or others like [email protected], if you wanted a reduced amount of USA-related content. And yet, that content is still accessible, bc you haven’t quite blocked it, merely not subscribed to it.

I think more choices = better. Ngl it took me over a week (maybe more) to get used to this new model, during which time I often reverted back to checking stuff on a Lemmy instance. But when I finally had it arranged how I wanted, now I REALLY appreciate these additional options!

And I don’t have any comments from anyone on Lemmy.ml showing up for me - bc I’ve blocked all users from that instance. Lemmy’s instance blocking is misnamed and nonfunctional as it does not actually “block” the “instance” as it says, but PieFed’s “block all users from <this instance>” works exactly as advertised!

Sorry this is long, but I hope offers that insider’s perspective of how PieFed works differently, bc it offers MANY different choices and options that are not available to people using Lemmy, which affects the implications of certain words like “blocking” (becoming true blocking) and “subscribe”/join (meaning merely to show up in the default Subscribed feed, but no other implications beyond that).

(+ @[email protected]) If you could easily skip past a section to the next block, that seems like it would help alleviate that concern? It’s still an extra click, but would make navigation easier?