You are very welcome! 🤗

To add to this: tankies are leftist MAGA. It’s not what they (claim to) believe so much as they are toxic trolls who deny facts and reality itself. Discussions with them tend to be very unpleasant, since they use “alternative facts” and incel-style reasoning - e.g. when you block them they are quite proud of how they simply make a new account and keep right on going. No does not mean no to them but rather to simply push harder.

Hell yeah.

The issue with PieFed is that it is “opinionated”. First, most of that is disinformation that the original people refused to correct (last I checked) even after being demonstrably proven wrong, like the main dev Rimu literally showed screenshots of the code to prove that it wasn’t “hard-coded” as they had claimed, but nobody cared. In-group (Lemmy, as in those on the main disinformation spreading platform Lemmy.ml)=good, while out-group (choosing to see PieFed as their “opponent”, despite VEHEMENT claims previously that we all should just try to get along in the Threadiverse and that Lemmy should not be singled out to be criticized in any way, a classic case of one rule for me while a different rule for thee)=bad.

Beyond the disinformation though, the software truly is opinionated. Every such feature is at worst opt-out, and most are even opt-in, but the lack of transparency about the disclosure (vaguely similar to the Tesseract dev scenario as you mentioned, although that one was to an extreme degree) definitely turns people off. Admins of multiple instances were suddenly surprised by the vote quota, not realizing what was happening on their own machines, as this MAJOR structurally breaking and exceedingly poorly and incompletely implemented “feature” was dropped like a bomb onto them, yet with barely any mention, buried like literally 20 items deep into a very long listing along with minutiae - almost like the software didn’t just implement a shadow-censoring change that rejects contributions from both people on the same instance that the community is located on plus EVEN LEMMY (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) but WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. All because the main dev had an itch to scratch, and then rammed it through despite everyone pushing back majorly in the chats, and despite some VERY well-known and most highly-active contributors on the entire Threadiverse quitting the platform in protest. And then most telling of all is how he responded to people asking about it - note the title of that post is “Upvotes turn green but number doesn’t change”, i.e. this “anti-feature” is causing bugs left and right, breaks the entire model of the ActivityPub Protocol and existing modes of how the Threadiverse has worked until now, and Rimu’s response is that he felt (no evidence btw, see his linked post that fails to demonstrate the premise, as everyone in its comment section agrees) that people were voting too much, so he took that right away, citing how the end-users need to simply “Get creative” and live with the suddenly and only partially implemented and barely announced anti-feature, seemingly created on a whim with no advanced or even current notice as it was being rolled out, and against the advice of pretty much everyone, with the best case scenario being that people are mainly neutral (except like one prominent supporter, but notably I only counted one, vs. like a veritable MOUNTAIN of push-back!!).

So understandably, this kills people’s enthusiasm and worse yet, their hopes that PieFed could be the future of the Threadiverse. One reason for that is that the Lemmy devs are quite opinionated themselves, and have been known to do similarly in the past - e.g. when they implemented an English word slur word filter, which they ACTUALLY did hard-code right in (most of the detractors of PieFed seem to keep claiming that PieFed did this, which it did not, but in contrast Lemmy actually did do that at one point in time), and then moreover adamantly refused to change it, telling people to simply fork the code if they did not like it. Tbf, they did later relent on this and made the feature able to be disabled with an option.

And that is one thing notable about the kind-hearted Rimu: this extremely unpopular and not transparently disclosed at all anti-feature of having implementing a vote quota was made to be opt-out. It would have been better to have made it opt-in, better still to have told people about it properly, even better still to have listened to all the advice and simply not done it at all, especially until it could be done properly, but at least he took the effort to make it able to be easily disabled, by an environmental variable controllable outside of the docker container. That is not nothing. (Edit: I mean to say that it is rather the opposite of nothing: it demonstrates a consideration for the needs of others who may have different viewpoints than the dev - i.e. even while being opinionated, it is not to the same degree as how Lemmy’s slur word filter was handled. Both were imperfect, but managed differently.)

Back to the Lemmy devs now: the software seems equally opinionated to me, although more in the sense of features that it refuses to implement, than in features that it does. e.g. Reddit has no modlog but it does have a modmail, and notifications to the user that their content was moderated, and the ability for anyone with the link to continue to see and even converse in a deleted post. PieFed has roughly half of these features, but Lemmy has zero of them. Lemmy is quite authoritarian in its design philosophy - it offers supreme power to an instance admin (even the ability to hide events from the modlog), somewhat less so to community moderators, but very little to none at all to individual end-users. Like why did the devs decide not to even so much as notify users that they have been banned from an entire instance or community, instead leaving them to find out the hard way? May glorious leader live forever!! The power differential there is extreme - even people using Reddit are granted more rights (e.g. to be notified of removed content) than users of Lemmy?

I am tired of making excuses for Lemmy, as if it will ever get any better. It’s been over three years since the Rexodus and I’ve seen some features actively get worse - e.g. after you banned an entire instance, the people thus “banned” used to not be able to send you DMs and trigger notifications, but then the devs claimed that was confusing and added the ability for these BANNED users to send you DMs and thereby harass you as much as they please from newly-created troll accounts. Lemmy software truly sucks in so many ways.

And recently I am also now tired of defending PieFed as well, after the shadow-censorship of implementing a vote quota without telling anyone or listening to feedback.

But at least both are FOSS, both are free, both provide an alternative to corporate enshittification, while each adding their own forms of enshittification, and each helps people get away from the corporate Algorithm, while substituting that for our own versions of undisclosed Algorithmic control.

And yes, people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. See e.g. my very own reply right now, daring to criticize the devs providing us all with free software, emo-venting my fee-fees all over the place, mixing it together with facts and hopefully not but potentially some anti-facts as well (please do correct me if you see that I am wrong!). Whatever software platform someone is on, I would hope that we would always try to remember the human.

Discuss.Online is one of the BEST instances! It has super-high uptime, meaning the admin team is very highly technically proficient. I left other instances due to very long delays causing problems, but I rarely to never experience such things with Discuss.Online.

In case it helps, Lemmy is the name of the software that is being run, which implements the ActivityPub Protocol that makes the Threadiverse (the threaded conversion style subset of the Fediverse, different from the microblog style of Mastodon) happen. Then Discuss.Online (DO) is the name of the “instance” (a server machine, running Linux as the OS). Our primary admin is I believe m_f, since jgrim the owner stepped back a bit to take care of his newborn child.

DO will share content with everyone else on the Threadiverse - not only other instances running Lemmy software but also PieFed, mBin, nodeBB, soon flarum may be added, and more. That’s the beauty of federation: you aren’t limited to just your instance, or even just Lemmy, you will access all of it, at once. I am not sure how your apps/clients handle things but I know that some of them hide the instance names - you can turn them on if you prefer to see them? It helped me get a better feel for the place - e.g. Lemmy.World holds about half of all users on the Threadiverse, and perhaps 90% of the most active communities (but people are trying to change that, to mix things up so that it’s not all in one place like that!!).

I guess you already know that a “community” is like a “subreddit”, which we denote like c/pottery rather than r/pottery, and then add the instance name. That said, the absolute best way to refer to it is with the exclamation point !, then community name, the at symbol @, then the instance name. This will make a link that anyone from any app can follow to navigate directly to the community. Like this: !pottery@lemmy.world.

DO would be happy to host a potty community here! See in the sidebar text:

A general purpose instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It’s a welcoming place for all.

Welcome to discuss.online!

Home for interesting conversation, discovery, and fun. Everyone is welcome!

Guidelines

discuss.online aims to enrich the lives of everyone it touches. Please be kind as you use it.

That said, the other community mentioned, the one on Lemmy.world (LW) seems to be struggling mightily, with only a single person posting to it and zero active moderators (the single mod there hasn’t posted or commented anything in the past 3 years). So you might talk to the single person that is posting, Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online (if I had put an at @ symbol in front of their name, it would have tagged them, sending them a notification and making it into a link), and see if they want to collaborate with you, either here on DO or over there on LW. Either way you might make a friend of mutual interest!:-D And/or just start posting in that community and see what happens:-). Others occasionally do that I see, it’s just far more rare. If you did make a community here, expect to have to do similarly: people won’t know right away and you’d be the only one posting for a LONG time, perhaps a year or more. The Threadiverse just does not have a large userbase to support communities, especially outside of tech or politics.

Thank you for the thanks! I saw your addition to your OP and am sorry it became so controversial for you. This seems to always be what happens. You have been here as long as I have and perhaps longer if you had an alt (I got my start in kbin.social that went down and have jumped around ever since), so you know that Lemmy used to be quite a bit kinder. I think a lot of those people have since given up and left, bc it just isn’t worthwhile to continue beating your head against the same wall over and over again, hoping for a better result the next time.

Oh this is an extremely well-known and documented effect, although as you can see you will receive a significant number of downvotes whenever you state it publicly. See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/29072279 and the community that it is posted in for FAR more details than you ever wanted to know about that instance. TLDR: as you saw with your own eyes, they are actively rooting for the downfall of all Western civilizations, and if that comes at the cost of millions of the lives of people currently living in them, so much the better - they “deserve it”, bc they did not stop capitalism single-handedly, or something. Crucially, Russia, China, and North Korea does not ever do anything wrong though, certainly not genocide or like “invading” other countries or anything like that (hey, in fact, don’t you know that UkRaInE iNvAdEd RuSsIa, not the other way around?!?).

This btw is why many people are refusing to donate to fund Lemmy.ml, and by extension further development of the Lemmy codebase, since the main developer Dessalines refuses to separate donated funds to only go to the latter without also being used to moderate and maintain the highly problematic Lemmy.ml instance.

And the pace of development of Lemmy is already glacially slow… PieFed’s is significantly faster, but like the Lemmy devs, its main dev is likewise quite opinionated and bakes that into the codebase in a number of ways. So they both have their advantages and disadvantages, but either way Lemmy.ml itself looks to me like pure disadvantage.

Only one but… yeah, yeesh, that’s even being mentioned in other social media platforms, like Mastodon and Bluesky, although ironically my DuckDuckGo search couldn’t find anything in Reddit.:-P

I will take some ownership of my experience and try out some other apps, but I do see where someone currently used to Reddit is going to feel like Lemmy is a very significant downgrade in terms of UX. PieFed is trying to help - adding support for things like user & post flairs, polls, emoji reactions, along with significantly stronger filters - but it has its own overly-opinionated “daddy must control everything” issues (though tbf, literally all of those are opt-out iirc, and better yet most are even opt-in).

Still, it’s too complicated for most non-technical normies to want to bother with, if the experience right out of the box is not good, and all the more so when there are these stories about how toxic we are floating around our there, making them wonder why they should even bother.

I mean… some do, yeah. But I did not enjoy such content (as e.g. AITA) when I was on Reddit, so it is definitely by no means all that do. (Then again, I am also here rather than there so… perhaps not the best argument for me to be pointing to right now:-P)

But what is wrong with wanting software to be easy to use, access, and understand?

When I receive a reply in PieFed, the web browser UI will auto-scroll down to it. Unless there are lots of comments, and then sometimes I have such an extremely difficult time finding a comment buried amidst all the others that I literally have to give up and go back to Lemmy to see it. This has gotten simultaneously both better and worse over the last year, in different ways. Rimu is unfortunately not much interested in the UX/UI side of things.

In Lemmy, my Voyager app (on multiple devices even!?!?!?) keeps forgetting my login password over and over again, making it difficult for me to use (I have no idea if that’s common or not, or like different when installed via FDroid vs. the Play/App stores?), so I gave up on it at least temporarily (who wants to have to remember their password?:-P).

So am now seeing your comment reply here in my web browser (Firefox on Android). Here I have to scroll WAAAAAAAAY the fuck down past this exceedingly long post to get to it (no quick button as Voyager offers, no auto-scroll to a comment reply and I believe Voyager does and definitely PieFed does as well), plus then toggle showing the parent so I know what we were both replying to, then start over again to scroll WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY the fuck down again, to finally be able to read and comprehend what you were saying.

If you ask me, we could stand to make things a little easier to use here. Maybe I can find a better app or make better use of one or something, but in any case I sympathize with new people who face all these same hurdles, yet do not know the structure of how things work here, nor even whether it will be worth their time to invest in order to learn.

And that mismatch between the claim and reality is what will - if anything does - doom the entire Threadiverse to irrelevance. It’s understandable that inside the echo chamber they refuse to see what is plain, but what is far less fine is when everyone else simply goes along with it, with zero pushback.

Lemmy is a Nazi tankie bar (for anyone who does not know, see Paradox of Intolerance). The lack of moderation is why whenever Lemmy gets brought to in outside mentions, it is as the butt of a joke and laughed at (I’ve seen it treated such in Reddit, X, Bluesky, Tildes, etc.).

Here is a perfect example: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. An entire community was deciding whether to move here or no, and the majority of the top comments are basically just “lolz no fucking way”. A few examples:

My answer is no. I have tried repeatedly to use the Lemmy/Piefed and have bounced off each time because the platform is fundamentally at odds with good content. Bluesky’s upcoming Reddit alternative shows far more promise and I’d personally wait for that.

I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic

There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier

Lack of proper moderation… I once saw CP and have never used fediverse ever since. I’d rather not use social media at all than to take part in half measures

To be fair, some of these issues are older now - like PieFed has basically solved the onboarding issue, and db0 solved the CP spam one from years back, though such events tend to stick around in people’s memories… and I cannot honestly state that the lack of moderation has gotten any better. MAYBE will the upcoming release of Lemmy v1.0??? Though I exceedingly doubt that, especially after seeing what happened to Lemm.ee.

Also tbf, people did recommend Beehaw and mander.xyz as sensible choices. The former was more or less soundly rejected by bringing up its defederation status from lemmy.world, cutting it off from the majority of the Threadiverse communities (although the ones locally on it i think are quite nice - I’ve never had a negative interaction with any of them), and the point that a single cadre of super-mods controls the entirety of what is allowed to be said on it, which is what they would be wanting to get away from by leaving Reddit. Browsing locally on mander.xyz though… that just might work!? But only if you are exclusively interested in STEM and basically nothing else.

Being a tankie bar is our choice, but others refuse to enter into that journey alongside us. So long as we entertain the most toxic among us, refusing to distinguish them in any way from anyone else, mainstream normies are going to refuse to put in the enormous amount of effort required to do that work for themselves, and so will simply stay on Reddit or move to corporate solutions (like Bluesky) that do not shirk from doing so, rather than enjoy the Fediverse where they would be free but that also requires the high amount of effort that comes with that.

It would be great to have opt-in choices to either enter or not be forced into entering such spaces. Like I do not wish that e.g. ChapoTrapHouse did not exist, I only wish that proper labels would be more readily visible so that people would not stumble into them unawares. Likewise, Lemmy.ml’s disallowance of criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea is not exactly easily read from the instance sidebar, nor is that sidebar readily visible from most 3rd-party apps that I have seen - especially when browsing by All, which how else would someone even browse, especially when new and haven’t subscribed to much yet?

So agreed that labeling would solve most of the issues. But if e.g. Lemmy.ml refuses to allow any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, then at least someone would be aware that it has chosen to be an echo chamber in that manner (while others choose to be echo chambers in different ways - e.g. PieFed chooses to restrict votes to a daily quota rather than topic-based, which is just a different style of filtering).

Ironically, PieFed has allowed such things for something like a year already - e.g. with keyword filters someone who does not want to view content involving “Trump” or “Musk” can avoid it on a personal level, without requiring a mod to make that decision for everyone.

Likewise, for all the flak it has received, the “reputation” visual indicators put additional power into the hands of end-users to decide how they best would like to interact with others on the platform.

Another one, back to actual filters again, is an automated collapsing or even filtering of comments below a certain score threshold. I always turned those off, but for those who want them they are neat to have - not every moment of every day does every person need to be ready to read such content, sometimes people just want a break from anything controversial and to enjoy a pleasant read?

Lemmy is glacially slow to add new features so I wouldn’t hold my breath for these anytime soon, but FYI, they do already exist elsewhere.

It’s not a quip - we’ve had quite in-depth discussions about this topic before and people have outright stated that they do not want normal folks to come here (example). Something about barriers to entry keeping this place a safer haven against undesirable segments of the population. I disagree with that viewpoint, but that is my background context.

It would indeed be nice if this place was more welcoming to people, imho. And being a technical person myself, who is here, I was only going by what people said about this place when they left it or refused to join. Early on, during the Rexodus (when Huffman spurned 3rd-party app developers and thereby many of us left in protest, foreseeing what Reddit was about to become - “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”), the most common refrain was that it was too empty and too complicated to figure out. Later, the most common mantra (in e.g. r/Redditalternatives) it shifted to still being too empty but also far too toxic (example), even people sticking around on Lemmy for several years but eventually leaving as a result (example that is not Reddit - I’ve also seen similar on Bluesky as well but it’s much harder to search for those).

Like here is a great example of a recent discussion of people on Reddit deciding whether to come here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. The poll said yes to move but with major pushback. Some selected comments:

I have tried repeatedly to use the Lemmy/Piefed and have bounced off each time because the platform is fundamentally at odds with good content. Bluesky’s upcoming Reddit alternative shows far more promise and I’d personally wait for that.

I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

I went to lemmy website and i felt it’s bit complicated, surely I can surpass that with any yt video or guide but I didn’t had enough will to do that

This one is misspelled but reflective of many longer comment replies saying similar - honestly I think a lot of people got confused by not understanding the difference between the “Local” vs. “All” sorting. Obviously a lot of that will depend on people’s method of access, e.g. a 3rd-party app vs. web browser UI, and also PieFed has basically solved the onboarding issues, though PieFed has its own… problems to contend with (leading to an exodus of some of the highest contributors to it, I mean to say PugJesus but also I’ve seen others say the same things since they no longer feel welcomed, which in turn is only going to exasperate the lack of content issue still further).

Sorry if I somehow implied that gender discrimination was not an issue, I just wanted to add that it is not the only one - it is merely one among many that turn people away. Including you, until you found your groove, but many won’t stick around long enough to do so.

I meant the Threadiverse as a whole.

Often I see that phrase spoken by e.g. a trans person who does not want to deal with anti-trans language, and so would rather that their instance not federate so broadly than to encounter such in the wild. It makes sense to me - that’s literally the purpose for which blahaj was constructed, hence allowance of right-wing viewpoints goes counter to that purpose.

Or from pro-Palestinians who do not want to see anything other than rabid acceptance of that viewpoint either. Anyone who is wrong there is not acceptable to exist here, even in more entry-level spaces designed for such, and even if allowance of the latter might help to change people’s minds.

The Threadiverse is not a place for “open discussions”, it is a giant echo chamber reflective of the values of the majority. Tbf it could in theory be whatever people want, like if a right-wing instance were to be created (I think one does exist even!?) and then go to all the trouble of getting people to join it, but in practice it’s all just took much effort. The network effect is real. So if the majority of people here want to be a certain way then… that is that, and unlikely to ever change.

Yes and having a /local feed might be even more critical for someone in a similar situation as you also! I am glad you have found a solution that works well for you:-).

Thank you for clarifying, no I actually meant non-technical folks who don’t spend as much time in introspection, as opposed to e.g. creating things. An example could be a comics artist, or a craftsperson, let’s say working with wood, who gets confused by all the technical hurdles needing to be overcome in order to join the Threadiverse. We (who use Linux btw) thought virtually nothing of any of that, even finding it fascinating how and why the entire Fediverse is able to function as it does, but they tend to feel daunted at such and turn away rather than engage.

You seem to be speaking sincerely, yet while entirely missing my points. I was not speaking against communism, I was speaking against “communism” in name only, while actually being fascism in disguise. For example, if you think about it, doesn’t almost everything you say work well as a description about Putin and modern Russia, both of which many call “communist” (despite being ostensibly a “democracy”, while in reality a totalitarian regime, and definitely capitalist rather than “socialist”)?

This idea that the likes of Russia, China, and North Korea are simply going through a fascism phase after which they will eventually emerge into being ideologically pure seems the height of naïveté to me. Never once in the entire history of the world has that ever worked out in practice, and there is no proof that it ever will. However, this idea that in the meantime all other forms of government must be converted into your theoretical ideal, despite going against all logic and history, THAT style of thinking is going to LITERALLY get me ACTUALLY killed irl.

Some modes of thinking are actually genocidal in their outcomes - and yes I know the counterargument is that “it’ll be worth it later, just trust me bro”, but as I said I do not believe that.

Anyway, this is not a politics community and thinking ahead to how my death can better serve someone else’s theoretical ideological agenda is somewhat triggering to me for some reason, so let’s not go any further into this tangent. I’ve had this identical discussion over and over before and it never seems to solve anything at all ever.

I want to disengage here, but I hope you will continue to think about the points I raised. Fwiw, I promise you I’ve put literally decades of thought into your points already.

There are no ads here, and no corporate Algorithm to contend with, plus everything is entirely freely offered. If we were more welcoming to mainstream normal folks, people would be outright flocking here.

In fact, people have checked us out and even made accounts, but at least half the people that came here have since left, often self-reportedly after remaining here for at least one or multiple years. We are driving them away in droves. Possibly we do not (collectively) want them here.

What we “need” (in order to survive) vs. what will actually be done are entirely separate matters.

Hey I resemble that remark!! 🤓

I think it is too early for such specialized niches tbh. The vast majority of those continue to die off due to lack of content. Even if you rigorously posted something literally every single day for three years straight - as so many of our communities have done before, just look back into our history - the community can still die off due to lack of engagement when nobody else is posting alongside you.

I don’t mean to focus entirely on the negatives here, just saying that merely posting is by itself insufficient. Additional posters and other engagers are not going to magically spring up from nowhere.

A lot of the issues can be solved by technological improvement - e.g. whenever you click on a link to a post and it goes to some other Threadiverse instance rather than automatically opening up in your home instance, where you can reply and vote and that applies your chosen filters (hehe, dark mode?:-P) - that leads to frustration rather than drawing people further in.

In the meantime, I think we need to accept that the audience here simply is not a large enough size to support whole entire communities that nobody even knows about and therefore will not participate in. Also, a LOT of people currently on Reddit are American, Christian, and centrist or even right-wing, who ABSOLUTELY do not feel welcomed here (what with all the constant calls for the deaths of everyone in any Western culture, especially the USA right now, what with all the invading other nations and such). So since the Threadiverse has chosen to remain tiny rather than welcome others to come join here, the audience for the vast majority of niche content simply is not and will not in the foreseeable future every be here.

This instead of a community dedicated to “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, we just have the likes of c/tenforward and c/risa that more generally hold all content in a larger category. Perhaps accepting that and posting to those larger categories will help make them more lively? PieFed offers post and user flairs to help sort content so that we can have our cake and eat it too - both aggregate into the larger communities (for discoverability) yet still help people find the niche material that they want as well. I think Lemmy was talking about eventually adding something along those lines as well.

I would love to see spaces for centrists and even right-wingers to discuss matters - how can anyone be expected to learn in a vacuum without that? However, I can see the argument that such a space need not be here.

I find it the height of irony that many right-wingers are much more able to discuss topics with one another than left-wingers - e.g. Jordan Klepper videos, especially his behind-the-scenes discussions about making those videos. Or perhaps a better formulation is that extremists/zealots are incapable of truly rational discussion regardless of political affiliation (though on top of that there truly seems something about the Right that facilitates ability to discuss matters more readily than the Left, with less judgement in advance than the incessant purity beatings, which seem to presume knowing the other person’s mind completely even before they’ve barely begun saying anything yet).