Lots of great STEM communities exist on mander.xyz, but it’s an older and sometimes very slow Lemmy instance, so I would recommend accessing them via a more modern and far easier to use PieFed instance such as PieFed.social or PieFed.zip, e.g. no login needed to view https://piefed.zip/c/astronomy@mander.xyz.

In truth I have no idea. But we don’t have to guess, as we’ll see in about two weeks if there are any downstream effects to have to worry about!

Either way, people are already making decisions and, whether true or not, citing these high gas prices as their reasoning behind their different behaviors.

I did hear that it will impact Japan much more than people inside the USA. Then again, Iran was talking about making a special exemption to allow ships for Japanese oil to go through the strait, while blocking others such as those for the USA. So maybe not?

Truckers paying more for gas will mean higher prices for things like groceries.

You are very welcome 🤗

There are different parts to Reddit. The largest subs that appear on r/all (or rather pop) are one thing, the small niche subs are another, the interactions with Reddit admins one aspect, the less controversial subjects another, and so on.

The Threadiverse is the same - like if you post the “wrong” thing in a tankie space then you will be brigaded with users following and downvoting you across many communities - they even brag about creating accounts specifically for this purpose, to get around bans (bc “no” means you need to keep pushing, consent be damned!!)

But even if the maximum experience here can be much worse than on Reddit, the average interaction is far kinder and nicer, imho.

Fwiw, PieFed has put all those features into its API, so at this point the burden is on each individual app designer to catch up to using them, if they decide they want to.

I edited my comment before you replied here adding a bit more.

Yeah, I agree, Reddit is much easier to use than Lemmy, but PieFed has most definitely solved that problem, in most if not entirely all of them. You don’t even need to create an account - just visit one of them, like the flagship PieFed.social, and the difference is immediately recognizeable!

For instance, I could in theory unsubscribe from all politics and news communities (or just the largest most controversial of them), but then still have access to all of that content just a click away in the category of communities News & Politics. I can (figuratively) both have my cake and eat it too!

And if you do create an account, the sign-up wizard alone is likely to make you absolutely fall in love. Content discovery is a solved issue in PieFed.

I like how I can control notifications for everything - e.g. for a low-volume community I sign up to be told for every single new post. You could get notified of content from a particular user, or a specific comment - even one that is not yours! - and crucially (even for your own), you can STOP being notified of replies, e.g. when you say something in Chapotraphouse or Lemmygrad.ml and strongly wish that you had not done so…

The UI for Piefed is a bit less polished - it suffers from trying to look different from both Reddit and Lemmy, despite how those layouts simply make a great deal of sense. But its UX is superb! Yeah, check it out - you can always keep using your Lemmy as an alt, though if you are anything like me then you will find yourself doing so increasingly less often until you just use PieFed all the time, because why would you want to use the product with fewer features?

How is Reddit easier to use?

PieFed is extremely easy to use. Its searching sucks, but so too does Reddit’s (Lemmy sets an extraordinarily high bar there: Lemmy’s searching is supremely excellent).

Reddit is definitely larger and has more niche communities - I’m not pushing back on that, just questioning why Reddit is easier to use than PieFed.

Or did you mean that Reddit is much easier to use than Lemmy? That I would agree with - Lemmy is extremely lacking, e.g. user polls, user & post flairs, multi-communities, notifications for things, e.g. if you get banned then Lemmy will never tell you but PieFed will, and the list just goes on and on and on and on… but that’s just Lemmy, not all of the Threadiverse.

Edit: oh, maybe you mean apps? I don’t generally use Threadiverse apps but whenever I have done so then they seem fairly great - like Voyager? (The default settings should be changed imho, but if you fiddle just a bit then it gets substantially better.) Or maybe you meant old-Reddit? That would be a good point, but you definitely know that Reddit will dump it the very moment that they can get away with doing so. It would help if you expand a bit: what precisely is easier to do on Reddit than on here? And then whatever you say, probably should become the next thing to heavily push forward to make better! :-D

Pangea

Nonce can mean niche yes, though it does add a flavor of derogatory implication to the subject, similar to if not precisely like how pedophiles have uh… ah… “specialized” interests.

Whether pedophiles themselves have preferred terminology, h-h-how would I know!?! 🤪 It’s funny that we are now discussing our second non-preferred terminology:-).

I think “Usaian” has caught on, but only among internet incel culture, which is the problem I was warning about. Most people use US-American. Using Usaian then comes across as being meant as an insult.

You have not demonstrated that this theory is the exclusive possibility though? It is a somewhat strong indicator of yet another reason that was certainly one of the (several, potentially even many?) deciding factors in pushing forward.

Btw, Usaian is considered a nonce term - it is not preferred by the recipients so is a name interjected into the situation despite terminology already pre-existing. Chiefly, even people in South or Central America for whatever reason call US-Americans as simply “American”, perhaps due to the fact that the word is in English which bespeaks primarily the USA (while only half of Canada), whereas they prefer to call themselves Latinoamericanos or better than that even, by their country of origin e.g. paisas or ticos.

I agree that “American” is problematic, but YSK that many people will ignore everything that you say if you use the term Usaian anywhere in your text, especially when US-American exists. It comes across as you preferring to speak your preferences as to how you would like things to be rather than listen to how reality already is. I hope this is helpful for me to say - obviously feel free to ignore if not.

W-w-what?

PieFed, at the discretion of community mods, offers restriction of voting to only subscribed community members. This limits drive-by downvoting from All, where people would not have read the community rules (which in PieFed are repeated in their entirety at the bottom of every post from that community).

It also offers restriction of voting to only “trusted” instances, thereby introducing a third category between the binary federation vs. defederation.

I have also seen communities on PieFed that disable downvoting entirely, even to subscribed members, even on the same instance.

Community mods can enable or disable these settings at will iirc.

“B-b-but my side virtuous (in all ways, and can do no wrong), while their side ignoramus (everything they do is because they are poopy-heads)!”

I wish I could add /s here but a good half the population on earth seems to hold to this as an invariant position, solidarity in the face of all obstacles, i.e. the Nazi bar effect.

Case in point: who doesn’t love it when a religious institution offers food and shelter and medical care to the needy, or counsels people to forgive, laying down their burdens and seek therapy to thereby travel lighter through the world? It is the diddling kids part that for some strange reason (/s on this one) people tend to get upset?

Since we were talking about Zionism here, I will mention that Deuteronomy 13:5 (in the Torah, part of the Old Testament for Christian and Muslim and offshoot religious branches such as Mormonism) provides an EXTREMELY stern warning about those who would misuse their authority to lead people astray.

TLDR: intolerance paradox - if you tolerate the intolerant, it corrupts the entire system, giving it a bad reputation when people see the worst excesses and extrapolate that to infer the properties of the whole. e.g. Reddit is fascist, hence we did not stay and put up with it but rather moved here.

(Alt-)“Left” != Left, and in fact shares far more in common with Right (aka: fascism).

One of PieFed’s earliest features was the separate distinction between NSFW and NSFL / gore. Although with Lemmy lacking that, I would guess that any poster would be afraid to rely on it without also toggling the NSFW label as well.

Most Lemmy issues lay in wait for literally many years before being worked on at all. At best, the devs struggle to work with their command of the difficult Rust language, while at worst they pick and choose primarily issues that they want to see implemented on their home instances lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, while the needs of the wider Threadiverse are less important to them. (Or both?:-P)

Which btw is somewhat fine - this is FOSS we are talking about here - except that many people would like to donate to them in hopes that an increased level of code development would occur, only to be extremely disappointed to find out just how much of those funds goes instead to maintain lemmy.ml (seemingly including time spent moderating extremely controversial topics such as criticisms of Russia, China, or North Korea).

Also, there are very long-standing bugs that have been well-known for many years that go unresolved. This is why I say that it is likely unintentional. Authoritarians tend to not have much sympathy for people who want to individually curate their experiences on the platform, vs. simply taking what is given and STFU about it, at least as far as admins are concerned - i.e. curation for them is done at the instance or community moderator level, rather than the individual human. So not much time is expended upon those features - see e.g. the horribly named (so much so as to almost be disinformation) “instance block” that still allows “blocked” users to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, and then a later code change further added the ability for those DMs to trigger notification pings - again, this is what rights the “BLOCKED” users have, to someone wanting to block them, whereas conversely the rights of people wanting to institute such a block include: shutting the fuck up, and move to a non-Lemmy platform (including the OP’s dubvee.org since he personally instituted real blocking capabilities there, at least specifically for Lemmy.ml, whereas PieFed allows a user to custom block any instance they choose, independently of instance admin approval).

See also https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed and https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524 for some discussions about those long-standing bugs that remain unfixed for years and years and years. i.e. I have no problem believing that the devs gave so little attention to this particular issue as for it to have caused unintentional side-effects - at this point it would be more shocking to me to have read that it had been implemented correctly. 🤷‍♀️

It would have been helpful yeah.

Tbf, this behavior is very much unintentional, as OP explicitly lays out, and would like to make others aware and stop it from happening.

Also, an individual user can “speak about” an instance just fine without getting thus censured - it’s only community sidebar descriptions being caught up in this sweep unintentionally.

So yeah, OP himself shares your distaste that this is a bad thing? But it is not a thousandth as bad as you are making it out to be - which given recent flamewars about Tankies vs. PieFed I wanted to make things crystal clear even if you meant every word there in jest, so that others do not get mislead.

Maybe this can be your first code change PR? 😉