Oh, yeah they are. I just presumed that they would be merged back into PieFed like previous improvements.

You should really enjoy it!:-)

Feature parity with old reddit?

It having used LLM aid is going to be extremely unpopular here on the Threadiverse, but Reddit users won’t care in the slightest I would guess, so a non-issue as far as they are concerned.

I never liked old reddit myself, but a ton of people do so that’s a great way to welcome them!

And so much the better if it can also add in the RES features!? (I think that’s Reddit Enhancement Suite? another thing that I never personally used but heard about often)

The main blockers of course are a near total lack of content (from their perspective, as going from a flood about every subject imaginable to a trickle except politics, especially American, and Linux, is “near total” to them - anyway it is what it is, and nobody is saying that they have to switch to here entirely in one go, just start visiting here occasionally, if they feel like it?), and of course them not feeling welcome. Mainly bc they are not welcomed - e.g. right-wingers, even if they voted blue in the recent election in the USA, aren’t going to feel terribly welcomed here.

The shareable user blocklists should help a ton with that though, if people start building and promoting them - perhaps one chosen as a representative and applied by default?

I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).

I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy. Which made a lot of sense to me, since that happens a great deal actually. e.g. PieFed offers polls and user and post flairs, all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.

But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard? Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).

The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking. It doesn’t so much involve logic as emotional manipulation. Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen. With perhaps just one or two… “minor” adjustments, which now place them on the outside rather than in, as the enemy rather than beneficiary of all the absolute violence and horror. Like the target rather than the perpetrator of a genocide.

It really helps to realize that sometimes people lie on the internet.

PieFed is growing, agreed, though mainly due to lemmynsfw.com having fallen and chosen PieFed as its replacement. Which is valid but an outlier, skewing the stats heavily by just that singular data point. PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly, if all the decisions about planned migrations that were cancelled as a result of the daily vote quota issue do not get reversed or replaced by others.

I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others. PyLova has already done it though, as you noted, along with so many other things that Rimu was never going to get around to. Gold lining, even Platinum!?:-)

The ones usually defederated from by most instances across the Threadiverse are hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and hilariouschaos.com. However, it would be weird to instance block them from PieFed.social because they look like they are still already defederated from, so there should be no need to add a block on top of that?

I am kinda glad that PieFed.social helps provide a less toxic environment for new joiners. The problem is, as you are discovering first-hand, the confusion that it creates when people have a really hard time finding this stuff out.

Now that your immediate problem is solved, do you think you’ll remain on PieFed.social, or switch to something like PieFed.zip or quokk.au?

How are you liking PieFed itself? For me it took weeks to figure out a whole new workflow, but once I adjusted I was definitely sold on it being better.

Oh wow, which ones are blocked automatically?

It seems like PieFed.social is quite opinionated, which is a fact that has not been made transparent to the community - e.g. I have a PieFed.social account myself, and I had no idea that these blocks were there (also, they aren’t present for me).

But that’s the instance itself - the software PieFed or its fork PyLova are outstanding, and definitely superior to Lemmy, even though your choice of instance admin matters far more than choice of software platform.

If you did leave PieFed.social - not that I am recommending that you do, especially now that you see how to remove the blocks, which solves your immediate issue - then I recommend checking out PieFed.zip or PieFed.ca as both having outstanding instance admin teams that take good care of their users. e.g. PieFed.zip also has a couple of instance blocks placed onto your account when you join, but you are sent a message explaining what these are, and importantly how to remove them, not leaving you guessing what is going on.

Again I am really curious which instances were blocked automatically for you, on PieFed.social?

One more note: Lemmy.ml is notorious for being an echo chamber as well, instance banning MANY people over the years, so the fact that PieFed.social has lately become similar is not a strike against the PieFed software platform itself anymore than lemmy.ml’s choices would be a strike against you having an account on some other instance like sh.itjust.works.

In Lemmy, no way.

In Tesseract (yes, that Tesseract!) there was a partial way, but only if the posts happened to come in as part of the same batch when accessing the instance. db0 helpfully made a fork of that, but the community outcry was so enormous that several instances simply dropped support of it entirely rather than switch to using that fork.

In PieFed, partially, but only for those sharing the same URL (like these examples probably do?) - so text-only posts do not qualify.

And then 3rd-party apps add a whole new dimension to this, by replacing the Lemmy/PieFed/PyLova/Mbin front-end with their own stuff. Note that Voyager provides only rudimentary support for PieFed. Overall, app support for the improvements that PieFed makes over Lemmy is still fairly shitty, sorry to say - note that you can tweak some settings in a web browser (like user blocks & such that are entirely impossible in Lemmy) and then that affects your using the 3rd-party app on a more daily basis, but many of the more advanced features of PieFed/PyLova are still inaccessible from most 3rd-party apps. See this wiki page for more details - like “Crosspost comment merge” is only supported in Interstellar, and some features (like a mod locking a post) is not available from any app, iOS or Android.

Lemmy is the same way - reducing such crossposts an extremely often-requested feature, for both software platforms, but so far I think only PieFed accessed via a web browser can do it even partially. Or certain 3rd-party apps (not sure which ones, though I’ve looked at several FLOSS offerings and did not see that - maybe only paid ones do?)

Missing posts happen all the time on Lemmy as well - those phenomena are related to the per-instance dynamics (e.g. PieFed.social vs. PieFed.ca vs. PieFed.World, etc.), not the per-software differences (Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin).

Reasons this can happen include:

• major network delays - this is much more rare these days, but a bot attack could cause a temporary issue, or if you know about mander.xyz (a Lemmy instance dedicated to scientific content) that one is pretty much just gone for now (the backup is super old so admin is waiting, hoping it will come back rather than the most recent few months merely being permanently gone)
• if the poster is blocked on your instance, for being a known troll (or the instance admin felt that way, whether overzealous in that opinion or no)
• for Lemmy, at least pre-v1.0 that hasn’t been released yet, at least one person needs to to sign up to a community first, before content will start being pulled in from it for everyone else; although I thought PieFed did away with the requirement so this should not be an issue for you

Taking a quick look, [email protected] looks pretty dead - sorted by time there’s one post from 2 days ago, before that only 2 posts in the last month, the next post 3 months ago, then others 7-8 months ago. And looking from a guest/anonymous account, that’s identically what I see on PieFed.social as well (barring some slight time reporting differences e.g. 2 vs. 3 months but the poster name matches) at https://piefed.social/c/[email protected], and I also confirmed the same at https://piefed.ca/c/[email protected].

So I wonder if PieFed.social is now user-blocking lemmy.ml automatically. To confirm: did you add any kind of blocking for lemmy.ml communities or users? On a desktop machine, go into your Account, Blocks & Filters, scroll down to the Blocks section and look especially at the Instances section - does it have lemmy.ml in it, or is it empty?

Of course if you are using a 3rd-party app, that could be a factor as well. In that case, first I suggest to confirm that you can see the posts that you are wanting to see from a desktop with your logged-in PieFed.social account, and then deal with whatever may be going on with the app.

Is there a certain post in particular that you were hoping to see? (or at least using it as a way to understand what it is that you are seeing) That would help me to diagnose, like especially if it is super-old, like years, that could help explain what is going on?

I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired. #2 already exists though - for PieFed/ PyLova though not for Lemmy afaik - but also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial - I’ve seen many people either outright leave PieFed or stating that they had plans to imminently switch to it that they cancelled as a direct result; that was an extremely poor communication rolling out those anti-features, which along with other similar matters previously essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created).

My recollection is that they are now opt-in

Ah… interesting. I don’t know the full history and it likely depends in part on what features under discussion. There was one set of features that someone on a Lemmy.ml community lied about, stating that a bunch of “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase, and Rimu responded that they were the opposite of hard-coded since they were wrapped inside of an if-statement that was turned OFF by default, so that one was opt-in (fwiw, the original OP there never did acknowledge afaik that they had been in error - the post remained up for at least several months when last I checked and people continued to point to it as evidence of PieFed betraying the principles of the Threadiverse, despite how the entire thing had been debunked). I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in. Rimu in the past has usually been quite friendly and responsive to such, except when he digs his heels in and insists that his way is better even in the face of all opposition (maybe it is even, but it is too much at once and people don’t like having their choices taken away from them, so not the right way to go about making such changes, imho).

Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.

Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology.

Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜. By the same token, MAGA is “against” the government telling people what to do.

Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.

Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw. Other than porn, which Rimu almost but not quite does the opposite of support, PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right? (I’d have to take another look myself to update myself but that was my thought at some point?) Hence this singular change is essentially an outlier that may - or may not - be representative of the situation as a whole. Or you could take the opposite position that the number of these events is simply too hard to be able to say much of anything about, but in that case what is there to learn at all? Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.

And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation. And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.

becoming ‘the only game in town’

That sounds logical. I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well. Barely any third-party apps support it, and its web browser UI assumes that post titles will be very long, so for short ones it wastes a very large amount of space, plus other layout concerns as well. PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).

I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it.

Very exciting indeed!! :-)

Yeah the entire onboarding experience is a mess for the whole Threadiverse - both Lemmy and PieFed.

Most people that talk poorly about us on Reddit or Bluesky or X claim to have had accounts here for several years, so it does not seem to get better even after making an account.

We here still perpetually need to have the early adopter mindset, which seems like it will never go away.

The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL

Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0, now that I think about it. Anyway it’s only for convenience of pulling in community names, to help onboard a new instance, while existing instances won’t need it. Also the central authority could be let’s say Lemmy.zip, or sh.itjust.works, or whatever the admin sets it to. If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen. Otherwise, yeah it’s Lemmy.ml that gets the first even if not final say in what communities are suggested to new instances.

It is things like this that prove the lie to people complaining that Rimu is too controlling of PieFed instances, when features like the above exist showing Lemmy.ml the same or even more. The vast majority of Rimu’s features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in, with a graphical wizard even helping guide the set-up process, whereas this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out. The difference is night and day. Go figure, the same people that claim that Ukraine is responsible for Russia invading it somehow claim that PieFed is more authoritarian than Lemmy?

I am not wanting to ascribe motivations behind Rimu’s actions either, though what I mentioned earlier is based on the set of features released recently, planned to come out soon, and his speaking about the situation for the past year and also looking ahead. e.g. he is not interested in the slightest in fiddling with the UI, preferring to leave that to others - ideally third-party apps, although as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.

We seem to be in a downward spiral where we would need to attract more people, in order to improve the experience here, which in turn would attract more people. Previously we had the hopes of a brave new world free of corporate enshittification to bolster at least those of us who came here. But now we see the reality that the grass is only somewhat greener on this other side, and that in particular there are other forms of enshittification that have nothing to do with corporations.

Oh well, we can only do so much, and the outcome will take care of itself.

Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn’t look to see how active they all are especially recently, and it also mentions that it is based on PHP (https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#requirements). I know very little about that language beyond that it is a scripting one, but recent news stories does make me concerned that it is a difficult one especially regarding security.

And of course you know better than most people that there are <1K total Mbin users (without bothering to check I thought it was like 500-600), so even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K. I also suspect that Rimu’s vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand, except the Threadiverse alone barely functions especially if the goal is to attract more people, who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.

Though Rimu proving extremely difficult to work together with is a major distraction from the advancement of the PieFed agenda - as he said himself in his blog post where he decided to step back from administration of his personal instance (although then couldn’t actually manage to stay away, e.g. leaving the admins surprised that the instance was now implementing a daily vote quota and shadow-censoring contributions from other PieFed and even Lemmy or Mbin instances, without disclosure of this fact).

The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it’s a win-win there!:-)

Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It’s not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it’s easy then…? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what’s easy or not:-).

Or they’ve already invested effort into figuring out ways around it - like old reddit+RES. Whereas for Lemmy there is less content overall and it’s a change that they haven’t yet seen the value in making the switch.

And also Stockholm syndrome to the max:-)

Thank you for the “feedback” ☺️

(The title of the OP…)

I suppose those instance admins are the ones who should have the most say about what they do or do not allow on their instance. But then yeah, we each also have our own choices to make in response, like whether to block or not. I don’t, but then again I’m effectively doing it by another means where I browse by Subscribed and simply never subscribe to those coms:-).

So long as they are labeled as such, I have no issues with it. The intent seems more than clearly to aid rather than deceive.

PW has nearly 900 users total of which 200 are active as of this past month - it’s small but solid.

There’s a ton of communities, which have like no or next to no posts - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/wednesday, https://piefed.world/c/snl.

A lot of the content there seems populated exclusively by bots - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/tech, https://piefed.world/c/shit, https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles, etc.

TenForward is an excellent example: compare the PW version at https://piefed.world/c/tenforward to the LW version and there simply is no comparison at all.

It just overall looks like a test that was never finished. Perhaps Rimu scared the LW admin team away. If so, maybe the PyLova development could be an option?

PieFed/PyLova definitely looks ready to be used to make a new instance - if you take the plunge, then I wish you good fortune in that endeavor! :-)

I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.

However, PieFed made an improvement to not need to do this anymore, and then Lemmy followed suit as well, and now the whole process is much easier. Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done. Technically admins - or again, I think anyone - can always add it the old way, but only if you know that it exists and how to make that happen (which isn’t hard but requires crafting a URL rather than mere clicking on links). Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.

Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!! Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists. It’s okay for him to work on whatever he wants, but it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.

I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.

The PieFed thing was once again another of Rimu’s rants against “unserious” meme content. He is obviously entitled to not feel forced into providing unlimited hosting for images, but I am saying that the limitation built into the PieFed software and enacted on e.g. PieFed.social may not be universally applied. I could well see e.g. lemmynsfw.app choosing differently to retain every image forever. Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.

This is a limitation of all Fediverse software that I’ve seen, including Lemmy and Mbin, so not just PieFed. Though PyLova does have the most transparency of all of them… and yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.

I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists. But… at least the software will support that now, so yes indeed this is the very important, crucial first step!!

PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice of admin team is far more important than platform software, I believe.

That said, PieFed.World in particular always struck me as an unfinished test project - probably bc the Topic Feeds at https://piefed.world/topics are so bare-bones. That is one of the most-requested features that PieFed offers but PW seems to basically ignore them?

Anyway from Voyager you’ll never see them in any case:-).

PieFed interoperates pretty much seamlessly with Lemmy - some post types Lemmy does not support (like user polls) so occasionally you’ll see something in PieFed but not Lemmy, though never the other way around.

Settings Export & Import should work perfectly as well, definitely from Lemmy to PieFed though I never tried that in reverse.

You should really enjoy it!! Anyway, you always have your Lemmy to fall back onto… like during maintenance or whatever.

It is what that event revealed about the site owners. When someone tells you who they are, it’s best to believe them the first time.