You can read in my (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net some stories not only about that instance but also some for Lemmy.ml, including an incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP), then double and tripled down on that thought, all entirely protected by the admins (discussed further here).

When I first considered leaving Reddit, this kind of thing gave me strong pause, and it was only the fact that Kbin.social also existed that got me even a toe-hold into the Lemmyverse. This despite me not caring about Mastodon and thus any of its Microblogs, which lead to me mostly interacting with Lemmy magazines remotely, though with different sorting metrics which did help a little for me to see content that was not merely highly upvoted by people using Lemmy (including hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, etc.) and instead prioritized more by like-minded people using Kbin, and then later Mbin.

PieFed goes MUCH further, providing not merely different voting metrics on mostly the same content but actual tools that even pro-authoritarian Lemmy users want (categories of communities, combined comments across cross-posts, hashtags, etc.), as well as people who want the opposite, it’s really extremely flexible.

And I think PieFed is the only hope for the Threadiverse to go mainstream. I’m not saying that I think that we necessarily will, or even that we all want to or should, just that if it were to happen, it won’t happen with Lemmy. I’m currently at 100% of people I’ve told about it irl actively chiding me for having so much as recommended it, which makes a great deal of sense only once you realize that (i) a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance, (ii) that instance shows Local rather than All by default, and thus (iii) what someone will be exposed to is content making fun of Western society. Mainstream normal people don’t want that! I don’t want it either! We learn how to block it, but mainstream normal people don’t want to expend hours upon hours to make Lemmy usable - and by hours I mean like tens of, continually, as they keep swatting off the bullies, but there are always more.

The alternative would be to make better mod tools. Which on Lemmy are barely happening, extremely slowly. PieFed is still catching up to Lemmy in terms of base features though, e.g. there is a Preview option but only for posts but not for comments, and many Notifications point to things to read but then won’t actually show you the thing when you click on it (due to many reasons, possibly having been removed in the meantime, or being hidden by an auto-collapse or auto-hide feature, or you’ve blocked all the users from an instance but nonetheless notifications are still sent, etc.) - i.e. it still needs some polish. Hence in the meantime I am not recommending Threadiverse tools to anyone irl atm, unless they are already reading something here and then I recommend to check out PieFed:-).

A highly relevant post, particularly the part “Address the Elephants in the Room”. Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get… Lemmy.

Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren’t really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That’s the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there’s a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.

People most definitely don’t come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn’t going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.

Well, there truly is a trickle down effect there: there is only one Reddit, but there are many instances running Reddit 2.0 Lemmy, and several running Mbin or PieFed instead. So as a user, if you do not like Reddit, there aren’t really any good alternatives (read a book, Twitter/X or like Bluesky or Mastodon or GameFAQs or such, maybe touch grass, etc.:-), but if you do not enjoy a Lemmy, you can shuffle over to another one, or even start your own.

What I said above is just the beauty of any generic Free and Open Source Software to run or be a user on a forum, but beyond that, the Federation model of sharing content via the ActivityPub protocol allows you to work with the identically same data from the new place as you would have from the old - more or less. e.g. if you get booted from Lemmy.ml and make a lemmy.world account then you could access the same communities on lemmy.ml, with the new account (although being careful this time not to cross the unwritten rules, including for ban evasion). Moving from Reddit to X doesn’t allow that, but moving from a Lemmy instance to another Lemmy, or Mbin or PieFed, does.

So there is that tiny amount of freedom, which nonetheless still sets it apart from corporate non-FOSS Reddit, by virtue of the Federation model:-). The Fediverse software is quite resource intensive, depending on amount of network utilization, but widely considered to be better than isolated forum software for this reason of its interconnectedness:-).

You cannot. You never could. The difference that the Fediverse makes is that you can make your own instance.

In fact, in many ways Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit, this is basically a Reddit 2.0. Here there is a modlog, but no modmail, no notification of a moderation action, no ability to ask questions as to why (if only so that you can avoid doing so again?), especially when the modlog merely says that the action was done by a “mod” (so even if there were a moderator chat somewhere, usually on Discord or Matrix since they don’t bother discussing on Lemmy itself, or you wanted to send a DM, who would you send it to, unless you send it to literally all, thereby risking getting yourself getting banned from the entire instance for legitimately spamming DMs, bc no other means are provided to you!?).

Edit; I’ve been waiting since the Rexodus nearly two years ago for any of this to be fixed. Do you want to know what all has happened during that time? I’ll warn you: it’s actually worse than nothing, and instead it has actively taken steps backwards. Previously the mod account name was reported in the modlog, so you could DM the one who took the action against your content, whereas now that information has been hidden from you. This is the opposite of “transparency”, a hallmark of democratic features of governance.

On lemmy.ml, people routinely get instance-wide banned from communities that they’ve literally never even so much as heard of!? More importantly, for a rule that is never written down anywhere or explained to new users - don’t ever criticize the authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, or North Korea (perhaps soon the USA will be added to that list). On midwest.social numerous people have been banned merely for downvoting posts or comments offered by the instance admin, or for submitting reports (not spamming, just one) literally calling out cries for (not against) murder - ideological purity testing is real there. Meanwhile back on lemmy.ml, I can point you (if interested) to an actual conversation where a moderator tells a user that he wants to kill him - but ofc he is protected by the instance admins so nothing will ever be done about such occurrences, which for that mod I believe are somewhat well-known.

Now you understand, the “freedom” that the Fediverse offers is not extended to the users, but rather to the instance owners - i.e. the landlords rather than renters. If you want that freedom, you have to start your own server.

Or join one that offers it downwards to its users. PieFed offers MANY features facilitating democratization of moderation. Discuss.Online, a Lemmy instance, is quite well-known for allowing freedom to its userbase (though being located in the USA… for how much longer?). There are others - these are just ones that I definitely know about and recommend.

TLDR: you cannot and never could, that’s a misunderstanding of the concept of the Fediverse, though there is potential to make freedom happen here, unlike Reddit where it’s a lost cause from the start.

Yeah I was excited about Kbin.social as well, both for not being developed by political extremists and for having more capabilities. However, like you I never ended up using that whole microblogging style bc I simply prefer the Threadiverse format so much more.

PieFed is indeed developing FAST! But there are minor to moderate annoyances while trying to use it so yeah, I understand people not being ready for that yet. Fwiw, if you were just wanting to avoid being on the server that uses the bleeding edge codebase (PieFed.social), there are a few others, namely https://feddit.online/ (for the list of others see here: https://join.piefed.social/try/, with additional information at https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list).

It’s fantastic to have choices, whether we decide on PieFed, Mbin, or Lemmy to meet our needs on the (Threadi-)Verse!:-)

It’s better than Reddit, badumtis!

(Yeah, a very low bar indeed) When was the last time you tried it? It gets better literally weekly.

Genuinely there are elements that I prefer using in Lemmy, and other elements I prefer PieFed, with the balance overall being 90:10 PieFed to Lemmy. And PieFed is growing by leaps and bounds. Lemmy is growing too but more slowly (it also might end up being more stable at larger scales - I dunno, though PieFed also sends like 25x less data per post iirc so the reverse could rather be true).

Still, use whichever you prefer - the Fediverse is fantastic in offering us so many choices, all for free! Much respect to the dev teams of both, and Mbin too, as well as instance admins and most mods who donate their time to keep it all going!

Lemmy, Mbin, and now PieFed!

That’s never going to happen. The admins of Lemmy.ml are the actual developers who make the Lemmy software, so there is huge resistance to doing things that will offend them.

There was a software project aiming at making a non-Lemmy Reddit replacement. The main dev got sick and basically the project (Kbin) died, though spawned a fork called Mbin, which afaik has barely been improved since.

Though you may want to check out PieFed, even entirely aside from all of this. The set of features that it has been developing and the speed that they are added is nothing short of astonishing! Btw I am writing to you on Lemmy from PieFed right now.:-)

The Alt-Left is my own phrase for people who act identically to the Alt-Right (as described in e.g. Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook - gish gallop, didoing, pyramid thinking, controlling the conversation, etc.), just on the “left” side. The more traditional term is the (much more?) pejorative “tankies”. There are several communities that discuss these events - one entirely dedicated to tankies in particular is !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, but as the abuses are rampant you will also see it in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !fediverselore@lemmy.ca, etc.

This graphic depiction may also help:

This will explain SO MUCH why so many people are site-wide banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, citing a rule that makes no mention of anything that their supposed offense is. Once you realize that the reason that Lemmy was created was bc Reddit banned the code developers, you will see why they created their own Reddit 2.0, which in many ways is somehow even more authoritarian than Reddit itself is. e.g. here we have a modlog, but there is no modmail, nor a notification of a moderation event, and the modlog simply says it was done by a “mod”, so you have no idea who to ask for clarification, or to appeal the decision - all you are left with is the “choice” to go somewhere else (or…?).

Mind you, instance owners are very free, and mods likewise have a great deal of power subject only to instance admins, but individual users not so much - not even the right to be notified that your content was removed (sounds similar to shadowbanning doesn’t it?).

OTOH, software is software, and so we are here as well, trying to find some way to talk that isn’t owned by a corporate entity.

Here’s a highly relevant post: https://lemmy.world/post/21055894, see also it + the comments in the OG cross-post it was from (its first link).

If it helps to add: ditch the analogy about the Fediverse being like email, for the level of understanding that you are seeking. Instead, consider it like a bunch of ships (hehe, free traders and… otherwise), each passing messages around.

When A posts to C, A knows about it, but more importantly everything connected to C also knows about it too. A copy of the message has been shared with all the partners. So yeah, thus B knows about it too, despite the lack of direct connection to A.

Although then when B sends C the downvote action, A is not told, bc of the defederation. So everything connected to C and B knows about the downvotes, with the exception of instances that have disabled downvotes entirely, and those who ignore all messages coming from B, plus those who likewise ignore all messages coming from A.

Where it starts to get tricky is that defederation does not have to be symmetrical, although ideally it always would be. In theory, and it has most definitely happened, messages sent from one instance to another can definitely be influenced by an asymmetrical pattern of defederations.

I wouldn’t worry as much about Alt-Right conservatives here - they tried but couldn’t get a foothold, and after being defederated from all instances eventually collapsed internally, and went to Truth Social.

Here, we ironically have much more to worry about from the Alt-Left that uses identical patterns of behaviors, just ostensibly on the “left”.

Just use the search function and sort by Top All Time and you’ll find everything you need. But if it helps, here’s my own (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net on Discuss.Online, making that USA instance safer to recommend to aid people fleeing Reddit. You can click the links and read with your own eyes examples of those admins being caught lying to other admins, and one case of a mod tripling down in saying how they wanted to kill someone for a simple misunderstanding of a scenario in a game (although do such details matter in the slightest?) - that one was on lemmy.ml though. And btw in case it helps, How do I block users from an instance of my choice? (TLDR: it’s super difficult, not really entirely possible without jumping through some rather hefty hoops, but with enough effort or sacrifice of freedom of other choices it is possible).

I checked: definitely the first one. Also another check: blocking does work to not show the comments, I checked both blocking all users on a particular instance and blocking a specific community, and in both situations those comments did not appear, though all the other comments did.

I can see how for some people it could be a good idea to switch to the second though, e.g. in the form of allowing a toggle, and yet allowing all also does facilitate community discovery, at the expense of exposure to less well moderated areas of the Threadiverse. Although I’m personally really enjoying seeing comments from communities that I choose to not appear in my Subscribed feed on the main page, so I would hate for your second way to become the default with no option to change it.

Overall I feel like the addition of this feature, while not perfect (your point about it being opt-out) is more of a “10 steps forward, half a step back” kind of thing, i.e. the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages, even though the true ideal would be to put the choice into the hands of the end-user, as PieFed does so exceedingly much of in so many ways, yet this feature is so very brand-new so not this one currently.

Edit: ultimately, the way it is now, the choice of which ones to show is primarily in the hands of the OP, who chose what communities to post the link to. Plus also if anyone else cross-posted it. A PieFed user can override that decision, but only by either blocking or ignoring (scrolling past) the comments that they do not want to see. This makes sense to me.

It’s very eye opening. It troubles me that now that I know what those tricks are, I can see it used in the Alt Left as well as the Alt Right, but whichever direction it is applied in, the real trick is how to spot the difference between Truth vs. Lies.

Imagine if people dedicated their lives instead to the pursuit and application of knowledge, like curing diseases and stuff…

I guess what I didn’t get is: doesn’t this new feature purely add, not detract, from someone’s capabilities?

So like, if you strictly wanted to read just the comments from the original community, then you could just stop at the gap where those comments end and the comments from another community begin - unless you are worried about FOMO due to seeing them and then feeling compelled to have to read them (all)?

Or if you wanted to read only let’s say half of the communities (but then all of the comments from each of those), then you can still do that? And now there are even two ways: to use the old method of accessing the cross-post menu and going to each community individually to read those, or the new way to hop and skip and jump all on just one page (this one admittedly isn’t so ideal just yet, without the ability to simply skip down to the next).

So, except for perhaps FOMO, what is being lost here? And isn’t this pretty niche, since someone can always just block the “bad” communities and never have to see them again, so that the difficulty here lies in both preserving them to show some but neither all nor none of them? That seems a more nuanced thing that isn’t likely to just spring up out of nowhere, as this initial feature did.

Well, it’s not like I’m even disagreeing with you there. Your suggestion does sound nice, and would be helpful to have.

Although I will say that I disagree that it will necessarily cause centralization of comments, or at least not entirely. For one thing you can respond to any comment, so this only affects top-level comments, and for another, subscriptions have those different implications on PieFed than on Lemmy, so e.g. I often do NOT subscribe to Lemmy.world communities such as politics or news, since that way they do not show up in my Subscribed feed - hence, all my top-level replies will be definition not be located there - and yet I can still see posts from these communities in the Topic/Feeds if I desire, and now I can also see comments from them.

Perhaps I’m just being a pendant - or I felt more like we were “exploring this space” verbally:-) - where what you are saying isn’t “necessarily” a given, and yet indeed this may encourage certain pre-existing trends, especially for those who aren’t forewarned or forearmed to resist them. And yet we still haven’t arrived so much at a (potential) “solution”, except to simply turn off the feature at the instance level, which will still allow those pre-existing trends to continue as they were, while also not helping with all the new things this offers such as helping people discover new communities, e.g. outside of Lemmy.world, that they probably had no idea even existed:-). i.e. yes there is a cost to this new feature, but there are also costs to not having it as well. And the costs to me seem small - bc again, someone can simply ignore all of these extra comments (except for FOMO?) and stop reading after the primary set, while if this feature did not exist then it would take a lot more time having to hunt through and read all of the comments from each community individually - which I used to do, which is why I’m saying that I LOVE this new feature!:-) But… maybe an option to disable it offered per user account would be sufficient to help improve it for you? If you can pin down something that doesn’t take a lot of effort, you could submit a feature request for that?

If you will, allow me to attempt a friendly rebuttal?

You aren’t on PieFed right now anyway? So maybe you mean that this is a reason to not join it? “Soon” the Thunder app will officially support PieFed and that will offer additional options for an interface.

A new feature just dropped where you click on the words and it takes you to the original community. Yes, I mean that the new feature was added to the new feature, just in the time that we’ve been having this conversation, started 13 hours ago on this post from 21 hours ago. THIS is the pace of development of PieFed, compared to Lemmy. I’m not suggesting that you not offer feedback - conversely, I’m saying that there is a VERY high chance that it will be heard, considered, and possibly implemented all within the space of mere days.

For instance I’d love to see an option to skip past one comment section to the next one, for situations like this. That way you could read “some but not all” of such comments, from such communities as you do not enjoy as much as other communities, but not have a hard time moving on to the next.

Everything is optional here: when you click on a post it shows up as the “main”/OP, and then other cross-posts are indicated, and their comments appended to the END of that conversation thread. Therefore you can read all the OC’s comments and then simply stop before reading the next ones from other communities. But yeah, this could definitely be improved & streamlined as mentioned above.

To your first point, Lemmy offers very few to no options to implement that ideology - you either are subscribed to something or you are not (unless you are willing to brave looking at All, which I did but those who do definitely seem to be in the tiny minority, to the point of being made fun of to admit it, sadly). PieFed offers many, Many, MANY choices in-between, for posts, and so it would very much be in the same spirit to add some additional options as you alluded to regarding comments. Perhaps “only show top comments (rather than all)”, maybe even an exact (edit: I meant to add “user customizable” here) limiting threshold specified like first 20 comments, using whatever sorting method (Hot/New/etc.). Of course, someone would have to do that work to make it happen! PieFed being written in Python rather than the super difficult and unfinished language Rust makes that much easier, i.e. far more people are capable of such, if only they are willing! Perhaps you’ll add it even:-). If not, then it’s still great that you are offering suggestions:-).

But this is a very new feature, and yeah it’ll take time to perfect. Your second topic seems a tiny little bit to go against the spirit of your first, where you didn’t want content to be opt-out, yet you also wanted to be exposed to new things that are in-between never see it vs. always see it. It will take time to discover the UX needs and then implement it in a UI. I hope my suggestions above help the devs a little to explore that - like top 20 comments rather than “all the comments” vs. “none of the comments”.

If that is the case, then wouldn’t you want to block that community? In which circumstance its comments would not pollute other posts. I confirm that at least for the situation where you “block all users from instance” (I did this for lemmy.ml), those don’t show up in these additional comments, and surely the same is true for blocked communities as well.

I believe I understand it. To clarify:

The normal Thunder app works perfectly with Lemmy instances. I’ve got it and while I haven’t registered my account with it yet, it works very well even as a guest to read content - it’s a great app!:-)

There is also a fork for the app, designed specifically for testing purposes, which only works atm (iirc) for a single PieFed instance. This fork no longer works with any Lemmy instances, nor any instances of PieFed either that aren’t running the API code. So it’s testing the backend and frontend connections, requiring specializations on both ends to work at all.

When all of that is done, the fork can be requested to be merged into the main branch, and become a standard feature of Thunder, to work either with Lemmy or with PieFed instances.

But notably, getting to what I thought you meant: PieFed itself still connects perfectly to Lemmy, due to its implementation of the ActivityPub protocol (and Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, and whatever else may also use that same ActivityPub protocol to share content).

I hope this explanation helps at least a little!:-)

PieFed has not merely several but MANY concepts along these lines.

Lemmy, for ah… “reasons”, seems to have none. In fact, having a modlog but no modmail, nor any type of active notification of a moderation event occuring (e.g. content removal, locking, or banning), nor any method of asking whoever removed the content why (worse: the modlog used to say the account name that did so, but now merely says “mod”), there is a very compelling argument to say that Lemmy is more authoritian than even Reddit is, at least at the end-user level (though not for instance admins or mods).

Edit: At which point PieFed’s efforts to provide democratization of moderation are like a breath of fresh air!:-) No longer must a mod+admin team be the sole arbitraters of content - users can themselves do things like filter out all, or just a little, or none of content matching certain keywords such as “Musk” or “Trump”. And icons next to usernames help alleviate the need to always block trolls - seeing that someone has an account less than two weeks old, or posts far more than they comment (unregistered bot?), or receives many more downvotes than upvotes (contentious user!) helps inform whether or how you may want to respond, while still allowing you to read their content if you should so desire. Such tools as these (and several others) put the choice of whether to see many varieties of content or not into the hands of individual users, unlike the Lemmy + Reddit model where only a mod+admin gets to decide for everyone in the community all at once. Okay so here’s another one: if you wish, you can have PieFed automatically collapse, or even hide outright (two different settings, with different filter thresholds) content that receives many downvotes. Personally I don’t like these so I turn them both off - but they still offer me that choice, which I greatly appreciate.:-)

What do you mean?

First, there’s a version of Thunder available on the App Store.

And second, PieFed offers better service in its web browser interface than any Lemmy instance I’ve seen, and most apps too. Like, Voyager is pretty awesome and a strong contender for best Lemmy app (especially among FOSS options), but it doesn’t have categories of communities, hashtag support, user customizable and shareable Feeds (like multi-Reddits), cross posting that shows all comments merged into one view, etc. and a lot of features that it does have can be quite buried within the interface. e.g. to read the rules of a community you have to navigate to it, then click the hamburger menu and choose the side-bar option, whereas on PieFed the rules are displayed directly underneath every single post, so all you have to do is scroll.

Now, mind you, the standard Thunder app won’t work yet for PieFed - it’s still being tested in a forked version of the code, not committed yet to the main branch of the code. So if that’s a deal-breaker for you, then yeah you should stick with Lemmy - FOR NOW!:-D - but there is movement towards supporting that, which i think is fucking awesome 😎. Lemmy is so slow to add new features, while we get them here on PieFed basically weekly at this point.

Yes, please do!

Come to think of it, I am aware of one issue where PieFed won’t automatically pull in content when it receives a vote for it - but I discount that as being a problem bc that’s a major issue even among Lemmy instances, just in different ways. I could show you some examples where my votes on a post vary from like 200 to 0 or anywhere in-between (that particular issue was from the post being locked, which ofc I received no notification of that happening, it just screwed up the federation of it across the entire Fediverse).

Also, the issue I’m thinking of would only affect a brand-new PieFed instance, not an established one that receives the post content as it federated out. And too, the way that Lemmy would handle this would lead to improper vote counts: imagine hypothetically that a post got +1000 upvotes and only 10 downvotes, but then the moment your brand-new Lemmy instance goes online you start to receive exclusively new votes for this post, and let’s say that it receives +2 more upvotes and another 10 downvotes. In this (hypothetical) scenario, the vote counts are MAGNITUDES off from what they should be - instead of showing +983 it would show as -7, thus misrepresenting a “highly popular” post as a “fairly unpopular” one. Lemmy’s approach is to have the post but allow the vote counts to be incorrect, whereas PieFed’s approach is to not pull in the post in the first place (unless someone manually makes that determination to override - which anyone can do, though I’ve argued that this should be a feature that is slightly more hidden or at least not as readily shown to users who, like myself at the time, could unknowingly cause spread of misinformation by not knowing all of these technical details).

So it’s not that Lemmy’s way is “right” and PieFed’s is “wrong”, but rather both are kinda wrong, iirc, and yet only affecting old posts that brand-new instances are trying to work with, so very much an edge scenario.

But if there’s something I missed, yes please send me the link - I would like to be informed!:-)