You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you?

I think that initial sign-up even if it mentioned that it was for topic areas, was actually joining you to communities? (Bc the actual “Topic” areas seems to be invariable) I mean, based on those Topic areas that you selected, it Joined you to Communities that will fill up your All feed.

You can now “leave” a community at any time, and while this doesn’t seem to block it from showing up in the Topic areas list - more’s the pity, bc it really should - it at least stops it from showing up in the All feed. And ofc you can (re-)join other Communities as well.

So as we are seeing, things tend to work slightly differently than Lemmy.:-) What I find helpful is how my entire “workflow” is different on it: since Lemmy doesn’t even offer Notifications for posts from communities, for those where there are only like 0-3 posts per day, I prefer receiving those Notifications rather than have to “find” the communities as I would have done in Lemmy. Like, this works much better than hoping that they show up in a Feed somewhere, especially when a community is small like !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world. Then again, this would work better for someone who checks things daily, although… there is a “Mark all as read” button as well.

On Lemmy I used to browse All rather than Subscribed, but on PieFed I usually use a combination of Notifications and rarely browsing All or like when I want a concentration of news stories (ahem, even from communities that I’ve “Left” even:-), then that is available as well. This whole aspect of PieFed really works much better for me overall, though indeed it took quite some getting used to it at first to discover what was possible and have to re-think my workflow. I hope this description helps you think through what may work best for you, or perhaps you’ll just copy this.:-)

Well I know a way but you won’t like it. Actually two ways.

The first is to start your own PieFed server instance. The second is to message an existing person who admins one to add it. Whenever I add new communities, like !AskUSA@discuss.online, it just goes under the generic Home -> Communities, while in comparison !AskLemmy@Lemmy.World goes underneath Home -> Topics -> Chilling and so that’s where AskUSA should have gone as well.

Perhaps in the future, whoever brings in a community could make a suggestion as to which Topic areas it should lie underneath, but PieFed is fairly early in its development and thus kind of “polish” is still being added. But for now, it’s something that is predefined by whoever admins the instance.

The good news is that the devs & admins are EXTREMELY responsive, both in speed and concern for what they are making. Like, if you ask for it, there’s a very good chance its prioritization would be increased over other things to get it working faster. Here’s an example post of mine showing such conversation: https://piefed.social/post/301249.

Oh and perhaps I misunderstood you - something like a text listing of them should be available within the code itself, if that’s what you meant? Or there’s https://piefed.social/topics - is that what you mean? I just noticed that the way to access this list changed just today or yesterday I think - this page used to exist but it was also a drop down list as well (that never worked right in my desktop browser, though did on a mobile), so if it is being difficult lately that is likely why:-).

Though beware if you are considering making PieFed your daily driver: it helps if you know your way around Lemmy and have a backup account for when you can’t get things done using PieFed. Searching for instance is not great, so trying to find a post I usually do with Lemmy rather than PieFed. Another is that Notifications are more than a little bit broken: e.g. your very comment reply to me here I had an extremely difficult time trying to find - I read through every comment on this thread before finding yours in fact. The reasons this can happen are many and varied: posts that later get removed still remain in your Notifications area, as do users from instances that you have blocked, and if a comment is buried too deeply in the chain in a post then you’ll need to click the Continue thread button, except you won’t know which one of those to click in the first place, also a comment can be auto-collapsed or even hidden, frustratingly even if it was not at the time you replied but then that happened later then you similarly to these other situations won’t be taken right to it when you click the notification. Honestly sometimes I’ll go to Lemmy, visit the post, and search for my name and see all the people who replied to me, then walk up the chain to see some text to search for, then switch back to PieFed to actually do the reply… So anyway: TLDR: PieFed is quite interesting, and I do use it for my daily driver, but it can also be quite frustrating until some of these more foundational issues are fixed.

That said, PieFed already can do more than Lemmy, in so many ways. For one, I can have it send me a notification upon every single new post in a community or my choosing, like !tenforward@lemmy.world and !
AskUSA@discuss.online, and for another, if I wanted I could have it cease sending me notifications for a comment that I made if people decide to relentlessly troll me for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards (this is no mere hypothetical situation: both hexbear and Lemmygrad have done this exact thing to me). I can also view a post without having to read any comments at all from users posting from an instance of my own choosing - instance blocking is horrible misnamed on Lemmy and does next to nothing along those lines, while defederation is dependent upon an admin, except that PieFed puts that ability to choose into the hands of its users. That alone made me want to choose it, but everything else is does is great too! Caveat: so long as I can fall back onto Lemmy when I need to.

Also PieFed has next to no moderation tools, so there’s a lot that is still coming.:-) I am definitely here for it!:-)

There are dozens of us - not quite a dozen dozen, but at least multiple dozens! (on PieFed) :-P

Omg I thought that was like it’s whole deal even!? 😞😲

I got my start on Kbin.social as well - he was ambitious, that’s for sure, but despite all the people clamoring that they could do things faster and better, that dream doesn’t look to me like it has materialized? Although Mbin is also good as it is, if you like the interface and also want the interconnection with Mastodon.

I do see features being added to PieFed over time, and hold out high hopes for it.

Sublinks also looks promising, though it was paused for basically a year due to its founder having a baby.

Well actually we use Arch btw…

No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @openstars@piefed.social is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)

Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.

Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).

That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.

Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.

The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012

We all know what that list would look like: https://feddit.org/post/3602869

TLDR version:

Beautiful! 😍

Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.

Read some more about it here (don’t click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:

Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.

TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn’t, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).

The Fediverse is a bunch of pirate and free trade ships that pass messages around with one another.

Pick a ship and let’s get going!

Then show a list of the top instances. e.g. lemm.ee has the maximum amount of content, but at the cost of including all known trolling instances - Alt-Right, Alt-Left, and otherwise. lemmynsfw.com for, you know, porn, but many people block it as a result. Themed instances for Star Trek, Star Wars, anarchy, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, computer programming, gaming, anime, climate change, general science, etc. Or location based like aussie.zone for Australia, lemmy.ca for Canada, feddit.org for Germany, feddit.uk for UK, jlai.lu for France, Discuss.Online for USA, etc.

Sorting the list at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list can help. Unfortunately it requires 2 clicks after following that link to see what I mean, as the URL won’t provide a sort ordering.

For the examples given, you could make links that show the feed sorted by Local and Active, to show what kind of content is most readily accessible there - e.g. this link, and therefore would have the least amount of federation (message passing) issues especially delays.

For the most part I would avoid instances having only a single admin as there can be problems with that, like them not responding quickly to a request to make a new account, or in the worst case what happened with Ernst at Kbin.social or dmv.social or so on where when the single person called it quits then the entire instance disappeared.

Which boat you choose can have a MASSIVE difference in how you experience the Fediverse - e.g. check out how different lemmy.ml looks from Lemmy.ca - bc of how many people will straight up block your entire instance (e.g. I have blocked all users from Lemmy.ml, bc I don’t enjoy those type of tankie/Alt-Left messages in my feed).

In this case, “customers” may be more precise, bc if like a whole family has one account that’s only one customer, but perhaps representing 5+ people affected?

And a business could be even worse, affecting >10 people.

A few ways to contribute to move these ideas forward:

If you know one of either Python or HTML+CSS then you can start contributing to PieFed (explanation, which is much easier than learning Rust (+ also JavaScript) for Lemmy.

There is just so much low-hanging fruit there - like in Lemmy why can I only see upvotes separately from downvotes when viewing the web UI from a mobile device but not a desktop one, and even then for posts those values are below the post, alongside the actual voting voting, whereas for comments that identical information is way up above the content in a whole separate area, sometimes on the right of the screen but other times to the left. Ofc there are apps but those fall behind too, as new changes come out.

Similarly, Sublinks uses Java, and Mastodon uses mostly Ruby on Rails and JavaScript (description).

Or Mbin already combines Lemmy + Mastodon, written in PHP (requirements).

Or make a community on an existing platform, and invite people to post and join as you do the work of moderation.

Or help with funding bc server hardware and networking isn’t free. Or start one of your own and invite people to join.

Lots of work is happening. Lots more remains to be done.

The first half of the sentence you quoted is:

Explore the possibility of a single account system that allows users to seamlessly log into multiple Fediverse platforms

So one account for a Lemmy instance, another for a Mastodon instance, another for a Friendica instance, another for Loops, another for PeerTube, etc.

These may help:-)

Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed

PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster

It was actually My Best Friend’s House (SNL).

(/s)