Your comment seems if not outright wrong then at least imprecise.

The PieFed.social instance is very much against tankies, but the software can be tuned however the admin installing it wishes. Like how reddthat famously turned off downvoting, you can turn on or off any PieFed feature that you wish. So e.g. if someone disliked downvoting, there’s still a Lemmy server for them! The instances are very much different than the software.

One feature vaguely similar to what you describe is the user indicator icons. New user accounts (of <2 weeks iirc) have a label placed next to the usernames, so that people realize that they are talking with a newb. That does not block making posts or comments, just an icon next to the username (which any instance admin can disable if they want).

Likewise, people who receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes will have an icon placed next to their username. It won’t block submissions, just display that icon, so that someone is aware that they are about to reply to a known troll. It is not underhanded, not a secret, it is instead very open and thus overhanded. But indeed, if you don’t like it, then don’t use it. I’m sure there is a way to turn it off for someone’s user account (it might not be as simple as merely pressing a button in the settings).

Beyond that… I don’t know what you could mean. There is a feature, turned on by default, to automatically collapse or even automatically hide comments if their score falls below a certain threshold. I don’t personally use either of these options, so I disabled them by setting the threshold to a ridiculous value of -10000. However, they are there if someone wants them, and I don’t begrudge someone else doing whatever they feel is right.

Oh, maybe you mean the image filtering stuff? That has largely been debunked - yes there is some code that will do filtering, but what people failed to realize is that when wrapped inside an if() statement, it becomes optional - it only happens if the instance admin specifically selects that option to happen? And thus again, it’s a per-instance decision, not so much something mandated by the software.

But yeah, if you don’t enjoy PieFed, then by all means do not use it. I begrudge nobody their choice there. I just wanted to make sure that people have accurate information upon which to base their decision.

If those are great instances, then it’s good to be directing people there. On the other hand, there are just a ton of other instances (like Discuss.Online, leminalaspace, reddthat - although that one disables downvotes) that are likewise general purpose yet excluded for some reason(s) - that is “unfair” aka unequal treatment.

And more to the point, it’s not “a random Lemmy instance” at all, to only pick from just those 2. Instead it’s more “just come join my instance”… which I genuinely am actually totally fine with, I only am arguing against the usage of language that seems to misleadingly imply that it was instead a more equal distribution of picks among all (suitable by some criteria?) Lemmy instances.

PieFed already provides a HUGE aid to help here, and while Lemmy currently lacks this I believe that a future version is imminent that will help in this regard as well. I am talking about federating mod reports across instances, which will allow mods to remain on their home instance without having to continually check an alt account(s) on the same instance that houses the community. This will increase the pool of available mods for any specific community.

Edit: and this barely begins to scratch the surface of what PieFed offers in this regard. e.g. if someone does not want to see so much Trump or Musk spam, they can use a personal (automated) keyword filter, rather than have to rely upon kids to do all of that work for them. Likewise, users can set personal filters for unpopular content, with more than X downvotes, either to automatically hide it or at least to collapse it, needing an extra button press to see it - I personally have these turned off, but if someone wants them, it is available to them (note how this is different than a mod deciding to ban someone or remove their content: this is a USER decision). Another is the user account reputation indicator, placing an icon next to someone’s username who e.g. consistently receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes - it won’t hide their content, but it is a subtle indicator that helps you realize what you are getting into before you respond (e.g. a sea-lioning situation?)

All of the above literally reduces the amount of effort that a moderator is required to do, in order to make a community a pleasant place to visit.:-) Also, it democratizes the moderation work, placing more power into the hands of users rather than that of centralized authority figures.

Is that just some of the communities, or the instance itself, do you think? I thought their overarching tolerance policy was because they are anarchists, not actual tankies - like, would they be equally as tolerant of conservative viewpoints?

Anyway thank you for posting the link to learn more.

True. Fwiw, PieFed offers a number of neat automated moderation tools, like a setting providing a community moderator with the ability to limit voting to only Subscribers, which helps curtail drive-by downvoting from All. But if you mean CSAM type of filtering, that I do not know which software has better tools.

For a single-user instance, I would wholeheartedly recommend PieFed over Lemmy, no questions asked. For a small instance sharing accounts with friends… probably still PieFed there as well, but less confidently than it is always the better choice under all conditions. Also the UI of Lemmy is slightly better for the core features and Lemmy’s search functionality is superb, whereas PieFed’s is practically non-existent by comparison (by design), so especially if someone wants to do a lot of searching on their own instance, I could see using Lemmy for that use case. For everything else, PieFed tends to be more useful.

It’s not “random” though if it is always those two choices. And I also confirm that it is ALWAYS those 2 options - I’ve literally never seen a 3rd option offered that way. It’s highly biased towards those two very tiny instances (of <200 people each)… as in exclusively so. Which could be fine, the issue I have here is in calling that as “random”.

Also, if I were signing up that way, I would want to know the answer to questions such as: (1) are there multiple people on the instance admin team, (2) are they well-funded, since a negative answer to either of those might mean that the server disappears six months from now, which is a major inconvenience.

I can see why the instance picker might not choose to put that into front and center, but like… even with me having been on the Threadiverse since the Rexodus, I personally have no idea as to their answers. In contrast, something like PieFed.zip has an extremely established track record, with a very solid admin team. (To be clear, I am not saying that those other two instances do not, just that I do not know if they do or do not, and I didn’t see an explanation on the instance picker page).

Like this? https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser#

I mean… that sounds to me like an entirely valid question ⁉️ - how WOULD we handle such?

PieFed is 25-fold more efficient in its data transfer than Lemmy, fwiw (source: that’s 5-fold less data transferred, despite it being for 5-fold more posts, hence 25-fold more efficiency)

If you were at all serious about that, I highly recommend reading https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed - the differences between those software platforms in terms of installation and maintenance is reportedly quite high, on top of the differences in features offered.

Nope, I still see both of them, very high up in the list too - despite it being sorted by “random”, which would make a kind of sense if it would weight more highly active instances higher, so not true random but with a random component. However, every time I refresh the page both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net consistently appeared in the top 5 instances every single time. So most definitely biased towards them, whatever the underlying reasoning may be.

There was something that removed lemmy.ml long ago, but apparently it is not that one.

I don’t want to send leftists to a conservative cesspit, and conversely I don’t want to send USA centrists to a leftist version. Neither would feel terribly welcomed in those respective opposite spaces.

Instead, the list should be curated to show only “Newbie-friendly” instances by default, even while allowing those others to appear as opt-in alternatives. Which, surprise surprise, the PieFed instance picker does do exactly that - see one of those at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser.

There is. Someone told me that it recommends lemmy.ml roughly half the time. I tried it personally and it first recommended hexbear.net, so I tried it again and then it recommended lemmy.ml. If I was an American-based centrist Reddit user, being sent to either of those places who literally celebrate and call for my literal and actual irl murder (not joking), I would nope out and never visit the Threadiverse again.

So yes, it is a very bad idea if the goal is to entice people to join from any Western civilization.

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

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! :-)

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!

C-suite response:

Nothing will ever be truly perfect, it is rather an arms race where defenders construct barriers while attackers jump those hurdles - often easily but it does act as a barrier and some bad actors simply give up rather than do so.

In this case, PieFed has several relevant options, one being a per-community setting that only counts subscribed members of the community, which has the effect of reducing the impact of drive-by downvoters from All, but obviously won’t stop a coordinated attack vector. The former scenario is real though, so the feature has actual benefits despite not stopping everything bad that could possibly happen, as it does improve the state of things incrementally.

Another such feature is the option to only count votes from “trusted” instances. This allows for finer-grained control so that e.g. you could remain federated with an instance, but not allow them to constantly brigade your content. Obviously someone could make accounts on trusted instances to do so, but the subscriber numbers being so low overall for the entire Threadiverse and for Piefed specifically seems to suggest that if it is happening, it is not a huge deal (yet). And the usual measures still apply, e.g. if an account only ever downvotes without ever posting or commenting, then it is likely a brigade account in (a not very decent) disguise.

Sometimes they will get more sophisticated, like repositing comics that seems an easy way to quickly generate many upvotes for the new account. But these seem to be shut down quickly… somehow, and anyway at that point whatever their intentions ultimately were, at least they were positively contributing to the Threadiverse community in the meantime, haha!

The Left eats its own. The Right too… eventually, though seems to do a better job (especially lately but also historically as well) of putting aside their differences in the short-term in order to strategically attain their goals. e.g. they will accept a trans person of color voting for them… for a time, before they eventually put them to death.

This probably helps explain the global rise of fascism since WWII. Fascism is winning, and will do even more so given modern technology like surveillance tools.

Which makes the attitude of the so-called “leftists” on e.g. hexbear or lemmy.ml seem all the more odd to me. It appears as if the emotional “high” of incel-like whinging supercedes any actual irl progress attempts to be made. It is very juvenile. In their defense (if it can be called thus) they exist inside of echo chambers and so are kept in that juvenile state artificially. Right or so-called “Left”, it is really difficult to break out of such a cult-like existence.

And the Threadiverse does not seem eager to either help them break out or at least protect new users and thereby expand the Threadiverse to a much wider audience, by e.g. defederation. In large part since people prefer to use the Lemmy devs to continue to develop that software, regardless of the consequences that will have upon the state of the Threadiverse overall (tbf, Lemmy was genuinely first there, and yet many of us are only here because first Kbin, then Mbin and now PieFed offers an alternative?). Thus, the enhancement of PieFed is my first real hope there (well, ever since the demise of Ernst’s Kbin) that things can get better.

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!:-)

PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.

I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.

And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.

Finally I will add that I’ve never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their !announcements@piefed.zip or !home@piefed.zip local communities, and now I don’t see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I too questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don’t see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.

The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But… it’s getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.