Federated Social Media with Topic-Based Following and Blocking?
OpenStars @ OpenStars @piefed.social Posts 5Comments 1,385Joined 9 mo. ago
OpenStars @ OpenStars @piefed.social
Posts
5
Comments
1,385
Joined
9 mo. ago
It is soooo very hard to overcome our natural biases. An interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5Peima-Uw7w .
The excuse used to be that it was new and would eventually get around to it.
I gave up waiting and moved to PieFed, personally.
It also says that it is "studid"...
Arguably, this way conveys the point moar effectively than it would have otherwise? :-P
Lemmy offers a great deal of freedom - to an instance admin, and to a lesser but still high degree a moderator (e.g. their decisions are immediate, final, and unquestioned unless overturned by a higher authority) - though a lot less to an end-user. Reddit offers things like the modmail, notifications of events, and I can only guess that people are not aware of the level of censorship that has become more common lately. Meh, but if that's how they want things, then perhaps we here would prefer that they remain over there as well:-P.
As in, perhaps they simply prefer the gilded cage to the level of effort required here to be truly free.
INTERESTING! Indeed I was relating a story from the past, although occasionally I kept confirming that it remained true, and today is the first day that I see that it is no longer. Like on page 1 I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network), then several pages later (on mobile) I see lemmy.world, but no lemmy.ml up top, anymore.
Thank you for telling me - I'll stop telling this story or else make sure that I say that it describes the past rather than present.
I lolled so hard at the OP... then did again at your reply!
Why does it say both "his" butt and "my" own butt at the same time!?
Omg he must have invented inter-dimensional butt-smelling, the absolute divine dream!? :-P
Everything you own in the box to the left...
I would hope so, and yeah when I tried Interstellar with PieFed (admittedly quite awhile ago, and since then I've forgotten how to make it connect again) the button placements and such were... far less than ideal, having been designed for Mbin. Also I recall something along the lines of when you switch between looking at a Lemmy vs. a PieFed instance you had to entirely delete all of your app data in order to get it to connect (I submitted a bug report to the dev; well, at least I told them here in the Threadiverse so they know and probably fixed that one by now).
But... I am sure that developing an app is not easy. Which makes me wonder: even when the likes of Thunder and Voyager gain full support for using PieFed the same as Lemmy, will they continue forward and add things such as user & post (community) flairs? And Topics / Feeds? And as you said here the conjoined comments.
And even if the answer was yes, what about the next feature to come along, and the next?
But yeah, with all the major shift to PieFed now, and the most-used apps adding support, it seems only a matter of time before not only the forward development but the pace of that too quickens:-).
I hope at least here's they don't just ban for no reason lol.
Ah... well... actually... see the thing is...
Nvm, you'll find out. But overall discussions are higher quality here, while I just gave up on that on Reddit entirely.
I would argue that their authoritarian preferences get baked right into the codebase: e.g. there is a modlog but no notification of a moderation event, no modmail to contest or at least discuss such an event, no ability to DM or even be aware of which moderator performed the action (it used to say the mod name, but now it merely says "mod"), and deleted or removed posts disappear as if they never existed, ironically with the message to check back in later, as if it might come back but of course it never will.
The "rights" of someone being moderated are either to spin up their own instance or to not and just suck it up and take it, or else leave Lemmy entirely. Unsurprisingly, we see people leaving Lemmy in droves (and some, such as those who went back to Reddit, we don't see so clearly, only being able to read their complaints about Lemmy if we go to Reddit to do so).
And yes the codebase is open, but it's also complex and written in Rust. It is just easier to write an entirely new application of the ActivityPub protocol in a more comfortable language than to work with the Lemmy codebase, people such as the developers of Kbin, now Mbin, Sublinks, and PieFed seem to feel. And now these have a chance to do differently.:-)
For one thing if you Google search (we are talking mainstream normies here) for Lemmy, it pulls up Lemmy.ml as the first hit to an instance. And then that in turn, to an anonymous guest without an account, it shows posts solely from Local, rather than All. So a visitor does not see the part of the Threadiverse that is ignoring the tankies, they see the tankie home environment in full glory. There they talk about such things as beheading people who have bank accounts. Mainstream normies nope out fairly quickly... and then get mad at me for even having mentioned "Lemmy" to them in the first place.
It is easy for us who know how to ignore the propaganda, but we do quickly forget - I did for sure - just what kind of place this is, as in how it appears to others who have not put in the time we have to so heavily curate our experiences.
I am saying that we are a Nazi bar: we allow it, even while we ignore it, but it makes others uncomfortable so they leave.
There is a Thunder fork (not main code last I checked), and experimental support from Voyager and Interstellar, but yeah feature development is so fast that the webpage may be best until more people take the time to add each new feature to each of those apps.
Sadly true, he seemed to see Star Wars as his meal ticket 🤑 . I much prefer the books that were written by great authors, each with their own world-building talents set inside the Star Wars universe.
This is definitely true. Also some instances like to push the boundaries, while others such as Lemmy.world prefer to "toe the line". e.g. lemm.ee was notorious for not wanting to defederate with anything unless it was absolutely necessary (like for CSAM, but not for like trolling), a decision which kept burning out all the mods over and over and over and over again, thereby leaving it up to the admins to control that chaos, who likewise got burnt out again and again until... the instance itself finally gave up and closed its doors. But not before putting out numerous calls to have someone, ANYONE step in and actually lift a finger to help? No? Okay then... well good bye and good luck I suppose. Hexbear likewise has somewhat imploded multiple times over the course of its existence, due to "drama" among its internal controlling team. Each instance does as it chooses and Lemmy.World chooses to toe the line and steer clear of illegal content, leaving people free to steer clear of it in return, if that is what they want.
One incident I am aware of wrt to Lemmy.World was when the infamous Luigi incident happened late in 2024 in the USA, the mods decided to pause discussion as to whether outright, literal and irl murder should be allowed, and things related to that such as "jury nullification". Keep in mind that the entire instance could theoretically have been shut down if the admins - who unlike the rest of us have their irl names and addresses exposed to the legal authorities - had been found legally liable under whatever laws in whatever countries around the world. Faced with this ENORMOUS amount of pressure, not merely theoretical but again threatening the very existence of the instance itself, the admins decided to pause discussions of this matter... for less than a week iirc while they looked into their legal standing. And then they lifted the ban and allowed those discussions (again iirc, though it's been a minute). But many people about lost their minds that they had to wait a few days to do as they wished.
Tbf that probably had to do more with preexisting chaffing under the dominance of Lemmy.World that while today makes up only ~40% of the Threadiverse, at one point dominated it at ~80%, plus also a pattern of similar events than the singular one I described there (e.g. its decision to defederate from hexbear.net). But it does illustrate how Lemmy.World has to walk that line between allowing freedom to have discussions while maintaining a space to even be able to continue to have those discussions on the open clear internet.
I note the high level of irony that many people left Lemmy.World to the more "open" lemm.ee, which then closed its doors because people refused to volunteer to help clean up the toxic filth that they then generated. Lemmy - as a part of the real world - really can be quite an unwelcoming place. Like if you want to speak, then make your own instance and get to it, but if you want to go into someone else's house and speak... well then you have to play by their rules, how is that not understandable?
That particular jury nullification decision btw is described in many places but one that I know of is https://sh.itjust.works/post/29086287 , and in general that community !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com is just a fantastic one run by a great mod who somehow manages to avoid the temptation to become a power-tripping bastard himself as he runs that instance and community that helps keep the Threadiverse in check by allowing people to air out their dirty laundry in full view for all to see:-).
I wonder what Qui-Gon would think of that ending? Probably "it is the will of the force..." and so at least nominally approve.
And then that leads me to wonder if knowing that, would he still have had the courage to do it - and die as a result, even though obviously becoming a force ghost?
Now that is probably crossing the line into over-thinking it! 😄 (/s btw, bc there is obviously no such thing!)
PieFed is a 100% for this.
Topic-focused puts you into the Threadiverse, where there are mainly 3 options: Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed. I haven't looked at nodeBB but that's a fourth up-and-comer. (Also people expect flarum to gain ActivityPub support but it currently lacks it.)
Mbin's major claim to fame is combining the topic-focused Threadiverse with the user-centric Mastodon like sharing, which sounds like not what you want... although it does have hashtags, and yet iirc only on the Microblogging side?
A very few - and unfortunately no longer maintained - Lemmy apps have some of what you want, but it is not worth what you would lose out on by doing so.
PieFed has perfectly what you have asked for. Hashtags sit on top of regular communities, so it is not either-or but rather both capabilities at the same time. And while I don't know if you can block a particular hashtag (that feature should be added, if not, it's a great idea!), the concept of keyword filtering (regardless of hashtags) can not only block out all of such content, but there's even an option to only block out some, if you would rather, so that additional level of choice is nice. The only catch is that app support is experimental at best, so make sure to use the web browser view, at the very least to set up your account with the blocking that you want to see associated with your account, even if you then use an app for just daily browsing.
As Rimu (inventor of PieFed) already said, PieFed has numerous other features that you will fall in love with as well - e.g. categories of communities, which are both customizable and user shareable (so you can create a curated one if you like, and then share with literally everyone housed on the same instance, but there are pre-defined ones so that you do not have to) and many other features lacking on Lemmy such as user and post flairs, ability to hold polls, and just an absolute ton more behind all of that. It even goes further in terms of features than Reddit does, e.g. combining all the comments across all reposts of a particular OP into one view, to help deal with the fragmentation inherent in an implementation of the ActivityPub protocol i.e. the nature of the Fediverse trends towards fragmentation so this helps counter-balance that.
Happy explorations!