I get that it sounds whiney, and you are certainly entitled to whatever opinion you want. However, upsetting the balance of power will reverberate around the entire world, literally. Everyone will feel the influence of the new USA + Russia + North Korea axis… eventually. It has nothing to do with gratitude. imho at least.

(But yeah, things will never quite go back to the way they were, nor would we want them to exactly.)

In one sense this does nothing that other avenues don’t already.

But I do start to see what you mean. Making communities available not just individually but en mass like this will encourage people to not read the side-bar text of each specific community, to see how e.g. its goals may not be aligned with all the other echo chambers and/or debate clubs present in the Fediverse, and instead start treating all communities within a feed as being equally the same.

A fact which PieFed worsens by not describing well the community name. e.g. you may read “c/Fediverse” - but what is that really? Several clicks away, possibly having to go all the way to the home instance in some cases where the short nickname doesn’t match the longer one (and all the more so if there are spaces within the latter), you may find that it means something like [email protected] - but just reading “c/Fediverse” isn’t enough to be able to tell that apart from some other c/Fediverse somewhere else.

Except you can, by simply clicking the post. Not on the feed page, but in the individual post, at the top you can see the full community name - e.g. this example shows Home -> Topics -> Fediverse -> [email protected].

And then as you scroll down, you can read the exact side-bar text, with all the explanation, rules, list of moderators, engagement stats, etc., like the one above begins with:

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s (sic) related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

And then further below that, a list of Related communities, which I’m not sure but perhaps those are the ones that define that Topic?

So all the information that I think you were wanting people to have access to is there, not on the Topic/Feed page themselves but rather on the individual posts.

Though you are probably right that it could increase more naive engagement, by people who don’t read things. Still, this is a new feature that was not available before, and when even newer features continue to be added it will get better still, like if a setting could be added by a moderator of a community to indicate a desire for it not to be included in such multi-communities. Although even the latter may want to be not a hard cutoff and rather a double-check label - perhaps an example could be a community welcoming to trans people first and about technology second, so it should not be conjoined into a multi-community for technology feeds, yet it may be fine to combine it along with other trans communities? Also, if a particular user wants to make like 5 feeds for their own personal usage, and they have put in the effort to read about each one individually, then this feature is very useful for such a person. (Edit: this one not for the sake of discoverability, but for utility. Although if the person making these feeds does their job well, and does not inappropriately add communities that don’t want to be added, then it would help others for discoverability too.)

Even while people may also use it naively as well, yes. On the other hand, there are fewer than 300 people that use PieFed (see stats), so the immediate effect likely will not be overwhelming, and there is time to add new features before PieFed becomes more mainstream.

One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?

Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).

To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it’s right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).

At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a “moderator”, so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the “mod” to ask that it be removed?

Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a “private” setting. Lemmy already has a “local-only” setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)

If I understand correctly that existing feeds can be altered later by the creator, then this is still quite an improvement over the old way that required potentially more limiting admin support. By allowing for such “mods” of not a community but rather of these feeds (again, rather than concentrating the authority solely in the hands of a full admin), it democratizes the process overall. Tbf not very well, but a little bit, and that’s not nothing.

And if only a tiny change was made to more easily list out the full set of communities present in a feed (the copy button didn’t seem to do that for me, but maybe it could become like a meta-sidebar feature), then it would democratize it still further to allow any user to see what communities are in those feeds - even those lacking a PieFed account, who simply wants to subscribe to those same ones while remaining on their existing Lemmy account?

Anyway, it’s a step forward, however small or large, and that’s worth acknowledging, woo-hoo! 🥳🎉

Ironically, if Lemmy supported decentralization of communities in this way as PieFed now does, and as I guess Reddit did iirc, then you could post to a smaller community and people who were subscribed to such a multi-community feed would be able to see it.

However, there are many features of Lemmy that are even (far) more authoritian in nature than Reddit. Lacking both a modmail and hiding the account name of the mod who removed something of yours, plus not sending you any notification about the event, are three such examples, and there are many more where that came from.

On Lemmy, as on Reddit, a mod “owns” their community, and that’s all there is to it - there is no decentralization inherent in the system, at least at the community level. Where the decentralization comes from is the ability to pack up and move elsewhere if needed. Or course, you would be able to take none of it with you, nor be able to leave a message at the old place that you had migrated. As you see, decentralization, while nowhere close to a “myth”, is quite constrained - mainly I mean, that functionality is available to admins, more than mods. So nobody can tell you what to do with the communities on your personal machine, running the Lemmy software, which is open source.

Although PieFed allows for greater levels of decentralization in numerous ways, chiefly with the Topics and now the ability for users to create their own custom ones.

Although a caveat is that “cross-posts” - even those sharing identical URLs - between multiple communities are not collapsed in the listing of posts in a feed (yet, although as Rimu said it’s a high priority to add that).

I missed this at first as well, but the “Create a Feed” button (colored almost the same as the background for some odd reason, using the PieFed theme) is accessible to you as a user, not simply an admin. So if you wanted let’s say [email protected] and [email protected] but not [email protected], then you could do that. You probably should name it something appropriate like technology2, but mainly I mean that you are not limited to Feeds created by other people: the whole point of this is that now you can create your own (if you want to that is, or perhaps someone will have already done so).

So do I understand correctly that these are identical to Topics, except customizable without requiring backend changes?

Sweet!

PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect iirc) can already do this, by blocking all users from the instance. It works much better than the Lemmy equivalent that would be better named as a community muting, since it still allows users to troll you in communities located on other instances.

And even then there are often still trolls… and also attention vampires who refuse to read anything unless directed specifically at them.

Bolf of you to presame that we d0… :-P

Hrmmm… at a (strong) guess, PieFed does. You can follow anything, like a community, post, comment (even ones you do not own), or a user account. You would get Notifications triggered every time they post something, I believe. Including comments as well as posts, but again just a guess.

It’s a great way to follow a low-volume something or other! At higher volumes… it can get a bit much, but at least the tools are available, and you can always wipe all Notifications at once if need be.

John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.

Too late - we are already here!:-P

It’s been 3 hours and your comment is still here…

“Moderate” no, “Influence” yes. I see what you seemed to be trying to say: the Lemmy codebase is fairly authoritian e.g. lacks any way to contact a mod to find out why something was removed, even going so far as to obscure the name of the account that did it, simply saying “mod”.

So them being the ones who provide the codebase definitely “influences” us here, but on the other hand they provide the code for free, and anyone at all could make a fork off from it, and administer their own instance however they see fit. Or, as K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks have all done, make their own Reddit replacement Threadiverse software entirely from scratch.

See e.g. [email protected] (here’s a start to a post) that proves that people on the Fediverse are allowed to criticize the main Lemmy developers, while still using Lemmy software.

On a personal note I will add: we can respect certain aspects of those people, even as we criticize other aspects, just as we do the same internally inside of our very selves.

The underlying problem is that Lemmy only offers Subscribed vs. All, and the former starts off entirely empty while the latter is… EVERYTHING.

PieFed solves this by a wizard that guides a new user to pick what their interests are and thereby subscribes them to many communities based on those. On top of that, Categories of Communities allow seeing any content that you choose - e.g. if 9/10ths of the time you want to avoid politics so you subscribe to none, but then that 1/10th you actually do want it… it’s there for you. Instantly. And then goes away again just as quickly.

Some Lemmy apps do this as well - I don’t know which ones - but base Lemmy does not.

So anyway, it’s a UI/UX issue, but fundamentally a bot that at least is properly labeled as such is friendly enough, especially in comparison to all other media platforms where they masquerade as real people to pretend like there’s more engagement than there actually is, and thereby boost advertising income.

I at least have little trouble believing it. People did not vote for Trump the first time so much as against Hillary Clinton, and the debates and such this time likewise made Kamala Harris out to be a poor candidate next to him who, if not personally, then at least via delegation would really “clean up” all the stuff that is wrong in the USA.

I mean to say: we all (here + most of the media seems complicit in this as well) fell asleep far too readily. We IGNORED the desires and plight of the rural people, even being aware of the electoral college, yet we did next to zero about communicating to them whatever it was that was even being done on their behalf. Example: encouraging people with testosterone (isn’t that considered a performance enhancing hormone?) to compete against people without, citing that being the most “fair” treatment possible (I don’t care here what actual gender they are - I’m talking strictly performance hormones here). Another example: across the Fediverse we kept saying how bOtH sIdEs SaMe, meaning NOT that, and surely the other side would see that? Except meanwhile they didn’t seem to care about the issue all that much, in comparison to e.g. grocery prices and “moral corruption” in the government.

Like a failed friendship, we ignored what the other side wanted. And now, we should not be so shocked that it is over. We could have listened but… oh well. We preferred our echo chambers and enragement-baiting clickbait media (the “correct” sources of news) to engaging in that basic human activity.

BE the change that you would like to see in the world… 🫠

All the better!! 😁😉

Isn’t that true of any fiction?

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!:-).