OpenStars

joined 4 months ago
[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Yeah the learning curve is real... but fortunately it's bc there is so much more that can be done, not bc like it's "difficult" or anything, just that you get to choose how you want things to be.:-)

Like anything, you get better with practice, so yeah, just start strolling through the posts and enjoy!

PieFed really is the best (most often only) answer that I've seen to SO VERY MANY questions for how to accomplish something on Lemmy (usually you cannot, unless some app provides that feature). Like how to see posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics: the topics (often if not always tend to) do that, like Arts & Crafts - and another cool trick is that if you ever do want it, News & Politics is always right there just waiting for you, so there's no longer any need to "subscribe" to those (or maybe subscribe to some of the lower traffic, less contentious communities?), hence you can both have a Subscription feed free of politics (as an example, for someone who wanted that) and still have full access to politics whenever you wanted. It's a whole new way of browsing the Threadiverse, i.e. even if accessing the same Lemmy communities, you approach it all differently - or, you can, if you want.

It's so nice to have choices!:-)

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago (8 children)

It is very much worth checking out, yes!

I use it as my daily driver. Some functions, like searching for posts, are abysmally bad - but thankfully that's the only one in that category. For me who can hop over to a Lemmy alt when I need to, PieFed is a great main. Another downside is that often I receive a notification for something that I cannot see, for a variety of reasons including that I've blocked all users from an instance (but hey, on PieFed that's actually possible in the first place!).

PieFed is definitely still in alpha, though ironically a better experience than Lemmy in many ways for all of that, even though a more frustrating one in other ways. An API is currently being tested using the Thunder app, which should help smooth the usability issues.

My advice: most definitely make a PieFed account - you have nothing to lose there - and also hold onto your older one. You'll use it less and less often, you'll see:-). There is a bit of a learning curve though, since PieFed offers so many new features and you'll want to try out this and that to see what works best for you. e.g. for some lower-volume communities, I have notifications set up to receive every single new post, rather than have to wait to find that while scrolling Subscribed or All. It really helps! (But can be quite overwhelming for higher-volume communities - the better way now could be to create a custom topic Feed, which I haven't tried yet but that's awesome that I now can:-).

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

A port of Thunder has been made, ready for testing.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago (12 children)

PieFed is more advanced than Lemmy in several ways, while less so in others.

Like for one it offers fantastic onboarding to the Fediverse via a wizard asking users what topics they are interested in and then signs them up to communities.

And for another, at any time users can view Categories of Communities, such as all things Fediverse, News & Politics, or Gaming, and now users can even create our own customized Feeds - all of this is in addition to rather than instead of the traditional Subscribed and All feeds.

Users can also follow anything - a user, community, post, single comment, etc. - plus stop following comments that you've written but no longer wish to receive notifications for.

It's REALLY cool! The major downsides revolve around it being newer and so a bit less polished, like there's now a post preview feature but that is not yet available for comment replies.

The codebase is written in Python, so is possible for more people to help out with making changes than Lemmy, written in Rust. Some people wonder if it might not scale as well to larger number of users, but so far that is not a problem and the speed of updates seems well worth that trade-off.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

said in a statement, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “If you leave now, you may have the opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream.”

So I guess this is the advantage, if someone wanted to return later.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Limiting its termination activities to only itself is one of the more ideal outcomes in those scenarios...

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago

Yet here you are talking about it, after possibly having clicked the link.

So... it worked for the purpose that they hoped? Hence having received that positive feedback, they will now do it again.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?

Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).

To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it's right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).

At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a "moderator", so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the "mod" to ask that it be removed?

Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a "private" setting. Lemmy already has a "local-only" setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ironically, if Lemmy supported decentralization of communities in this way as PieFed now does, and as I guess Reddit did iirc, then you could post to a smaller community and people who were subscribed to such a multi-community feed would be able to see it.

However, there are many features of Lemmy that are even (far) more authoritian in nature than Reddit. Lacking both a modmail and hiding the account name of the mod who removed something of yours, plus not sending you any notification about the event, are three such examples, and there are many more where that came from.

On Lemmy, as on Reddit, a mod "owns" their community, and that's all there is to it - there is no decentralization inherent in the system, at least at the community level. Where the decentralization comes from is the ability to pack up and move elsewhere if needed. Or course, you would be able to take none of it with you, nor be able to leave a message at the old place that you had migrated. As you see, decentralization, while nowhere close to a "myth", is quite constrained - mainly I mean, that functionality is available to admins, more than mods. So nobody can tell you what to do with the communities on your personal machine, running the Lemmy software, which is open source.

Although PieFed allows for greater levels of decentralization in numerous ways, chiefly with the Topics and now the ability for users to create their own custom ones.

Although a caveat is that "cross-posts" - even those sharing identical URLs - between multiple communities are not collapsed in the listing of posts in a feed (yet, although as Rimu said it's a high priority to add that).

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I missed this at first as well, but the "Create a Feed" button (colored almost the same as the background for some odd reason, using the PieFed theme) is accessible to you as a user, not simply an admin. So if you wanted let's say technology@lemmy.world and technology@beehaw.org but not technology@lemmy.ml, then you could do that. You probably should name it something appropriate like technology2, but mainly I mean that you are not limited to Feeds created by other people: the whole point of this is that now you can create your own (if you want to that is, or perhaps someone will have already done so).

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago (5 children)

PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect iirc) can already do this, by blocking all users from the instance. It works much better than the Lemmy equivalent that would be better named as a community muting, since it still allows users to troll you in communities located on other instances.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.

Too late - we are already here!:-P

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