The PieFed admins are super responsive. I've enjoyed every conversation with them I've had so far.
Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.
But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to [email protected], as opposed to e.g. "What is Lemmy.ml" that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World's Getting started guide that doesn't mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn't like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason... I get you there.
So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it's merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn't block users, only communities). And I'm not clear about Mbin - I think not.
Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can't just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it's the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work... e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn't see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.
So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I've mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can't get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.
Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon's heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone's initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming "soon(TM)".) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is "not" doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA "is" (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole "one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me" thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don't doubt that people are asking for instances that aren't defederated from anything, I do question whether that's truly what they want, especially "they" meaning the majority of normies. It's complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It's one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it's another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.
There is so much to enjoy about the Fediverse, so many flavors of variety to experience and get to choose from!:-)
Star Trek always had the best hats. Unless you were Michael Dorn and then the costume staff seemed to have a grudge against him or sumthin'.
Edit: bonus
B-b-but sometimes you just get the munchies and gotta have that all the omletes, ya'know!!?!!
Just look what the tribbles have done to this poor, poor man!? Well, I guess he's rich in tribbles:-).
I have to be real wit u: this... this OP graphic MIGHT NOT BE CANNON!🤯
Flavortown?! Somebody try to stop this madman, he's turned evil I tell you!!?
Look, I have proof: Guy has a beard - you KNOW what that means right!?!?
Meanwhile in the Delta quadrant...
Oh ahem Star Trek right...
My take-away here: sometimes diversity demands that we go beyond Star Trek for the sake of the joke? 🤣
That's wonderful! Now it should properly fill up my Chilling feed once more:-).
And too with each such issue fixed PieFed will become ever more stable, which is far more wonderful. 😊
I mean... true but...
There's only so much Russian outright propaganda I can stomach at one time, so even if it's "less" it's still "too much" at the same time?
https://lemmy.ml/post/21927716 - edit: to be clear I'm not talking about the post, but rather the comments within it.
Sigh... I used to be that way. But it does get exhausting, and I now prefer to spend my time in other ways.
Great! I don't really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do... and like that interface, then that's wonderful. It's definitely quite polished. I don't think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I'm not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it's a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other "control the conversation" tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler... or a Trump supporter.
Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it's not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?
It might though - don't underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and... well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.
suggestion: disable the option to "Retrieve a post from the original server"
I gather that it had a use unrelated to Lemmy but for Lemmy posts I make a case here that it is more misleading than helpful. For a moment, please ignore the underlying reasons why things are the way they are and focus on how the issue presents to the end-users.
(1) By pulling in solely the post, but not any of the comments, it at best provides only partial information - which if all you wanted to read was the post, then why bother pulling it here at all? (as opposed to retrieving from its original location - I mean, to do it you already need the full URL...) While if instead you wanted all of the comments... - e.g. to be able to reply to - then too bad, b/c it won't do that?
(2) It also does not pull in any of the old vote counts. So if hypothetically a post had 1000 upvotes, and then after pulling it here it received adjustments +2 from upvotes and -4 from downvotes, then its total would then be 998, right? Except PieFed would instead display "-2", a qualitatively different score for a highly popular post that is a terrible misrepresentation of the actual facts about it.
(3) It conveys a distorted view of things to the end-users. e.g. see [email protected] where there are 6 posts from the last 2 months, right? Right?! No, there is actually only a single post there in its entirety, then a few more that I and what I assume was Blaze pulled in - note how those other 5 have zero comments, and total scores near zero, due to the aforementioned issues. Really the "earliest" post that PieFed.social reliably has from that community is from 4 days ago, and then beyond that is a scattered, partial mess. There are actually MANY more posts from the last two months, which are not represented here. Ergo, the initial impression that a quick glance at this community offers turns out to be false, due to these federation issues.
(4) showing only partial information is often called a "false positive" or type I style of error, whereas showing nothing at all for those posts that are not fully here avoids that pitfall. If certain content is not here then... well it is not here, and that's that, but for only some of it to be here leads to much confusion, imho.
Almost entirely distinct from this issue, the ability to find an existing post given its URL should be added to the search menu, b/c that is where people will go to find it. But ofc all the more so if the retrieval button is removed or made less prominent, so that that find ability is not lost along with that.
I understand that there are hard limitations of the federated model itself. So if e.g. older comments and votes cannot retroactively be pulled in - or possibly even if so - then maybe this function should just be abolished? Or perhaps a couple more layers of "are you sure you want to do this?" added, or better yet moving it from its prominent place showing up to everyone on almost every page to a more subdued location where only those who know what it is and what will happen if it is used are likely to access it? I now feel that I actively made the situation in [email protected] worse by pulling in those posts, and wished now that I hadn't done so, as it could lead people astray into thinking "this is all the posts that the community has to offer from this time-period" (NO, it actually has MANY MANY more than that, on the original server!?!!). Now that I know this I can refrain from using it, but it would be nice to help others who climb this ladder after me as well:-). So I am sharing my thoughts with you in case that helps.
PieFed is freaking awesome and you all who work on it are magnificently extraordinary to share your knowledge with the world:-).
there is something wrong with federation of posts
See e.g. https://piefed.social/communities?search=forward - there are 2 communities listed there, both go to the same place if you click them, and that place has no posts from the last 3 days.
It almost looks like the existence of the second version of that community - changed mere seconds ago at the time of my writing this, except again, when you click the link it doesn't show anything new for several days - is soaking up all the new posts, but since it is inaccessible by the normal means those new entities cannot be accessed.
This is my favorite spot in the Fediverse, so I hope it is addressed soon! That community in particular is doing great work to make the Fediverse fun & welcoming to come to by all us nerds:-).