Just a quick note that PieFed allows you to easily block all users from a given instance, like a personal defederation with no need for admin powers. Your way also works, but you’d have to block thousands of users individually, plus new ones that sign up later.

While in contrast the option that looks like it would work easily, the “instance block”, in fact is strongly misleading - still allowing those users to vote on your content, reply to you, submit posts in other communities, DM you, triggering notifications, etc. Essentially it does not “block” the “instance” at all, only muting communities hosted on them.

Only if Lemmy was the only Reddit alternative. As so many people are saying though, it’s not.

e.g. PieFed not only exists but it has surpassed Lemmy in most ways in terms of feature development. And it continues to add new features at an astonishing pace.

There is no hope for “Lemmy” reaching the mainstream in my mind, but with PieFed leading the way, and Mbin also exists (that sounds mean so I’ll clarify: it has <1k users worldwide iirc), and yes a fork of Lemmy could be created if necessary, there is hope for the Threadiverse (federated threaded-based conversational platforms) overall.

Try out PieFed, even just the sign up wizard will leave you amazed. Donate to both its development and the operation costs of the instance that you choose (PieFed.social, PieFed.zip, several others to choose from).

Admiral Patrick definitely approves (look at his profile pic:-P

Fwiw, some of us got the (not even all that) deep cut, and liked it:-).

community, massively upvoted the post.

Not by nearly enough yet, keep upvoting!!!

I never said it was unworthy, just that for whatever reason, people are not doing it. And… it is incomplete? And perhaps “extremely” niche is the wrong phrase but definitely “common” is something that it is not.

Again, I have not asked you to take my word for it: compare the feature sets yourself to see the empircal evidence with your own eyes.

written in Python (which many developers are already familiar with, rather than the extremely niche Rust that even experienced C++ coders are loathe to have to learn)

There are pros and cons to every language. Is what I said inaccurate? “Many developers are already familiar with” Python, whereas many people are not wanting to learn Rust. I’m not saying it’s not a good language (or that it won’t be one when it gets finished), but from the standpoint of how many people are willing to join a project to write code for the Threadiverse, it does hold back feature development.

It is your choice: you could look at the set of features that PieFed has and how quickly they were developed, and you could compare that to the requests sent to Lemmy for features that have not and seem at this pace like they will never be done, and you may conclude whatever you like.

Maybe it’s not the language, maybe the PieFed devs are just simply that good while the Lemmy ones are not, is that what you are implying?

Or maybe you don’t know the feature comparison between those two software platforms - fwiw I included a link above.

Supporting Lemmy won’t do much to help the Threadiverse thrive imho. Instead I suggest supporting PieFed, for many uh… reasons. One being that it is written in Python (which many developers are already familiar with, rather than the extremely niche Rust that even experienced C++ coders are loathe to have to learn) and thus has a ton of features already that Lemmy lacks (see https://join.piefed.social/features/), plus it’s only continuing to add still yet more, on a monthly basis even.

By comparison, Lemmy requests sit for literally years and years, while a lot of the donations, rather than going to support further code development, instead goes to support the, let’s just say “highly controversial” instance lemmy.ml.

Lemmy won’t “die”, but it’s never going to hit mainstream. Visit r/RedditAlternatives in any given post to find out why (hint: tankies, which Westerners do not like, probably bc tankie instances are full of content calling for the literal murder of Westerners as well as the actual fall of those civilizations - for some reason though these anti-Western sentiments seems to drive people who live there away? Go figure!🤪🙃).

PieFed on the other hand might just have a chance, and the dev team is super friendly and highly responsive. At least check it out.

Also, post content! More than most other things you could do, that would help a lot.

This ignores how money donated supposedly to support development of the Lemmy codebase goes instead towards moderation of their personal instance. Unless you want to donate to Nutomic specifically (which has other issues), there is no way to donate specifically to develop Lemmy code.

So ironically the answer to your question lies in the lines that are lacking, but that would have been there otherwise.

Bottom line is that it’s their code and they can do as they please. Meanwhile, I switched to PieFed. I wish you good luck with that extremely slow-paced development of Lemmy, but I am not putting any hope into it myself anymore.

We are past the Information Age now. You used to be able to use Google search or read Wikipedia or watch videos to learn about any subject, as verified by news stories and “print media” sources (older, established sources of journalism, regardless of whether actually printed anymore).

Now, even before AI has thoroughly corrupted all of that, the post-information era has begun. Alternative facts, misinformation and disinformation are arguably more important and definitely more prevalent than real.

Same as it ever was.

I think there’s a way to make that happen. Sorry I don’t use apps, I just played around with it in the past, but I recall not liking it until someone told me how to make the images larger - buried VERY deep in the customizations somewhere - and then afterwards it became my favorite app (except I don’t actually use apps, but IF I did, it would be Voyager. Or Thunder. And with full sized images that don’t cut parts out.)

I also left Reddit not for the tankies but for kbin.social, so PieFed is a spiritual successor for that:-).

In terms of number of users, rate of growth (in number of users, communities, instances, etc.), level of app support, appreciation from the Threadiverse community, and by all other metrics, yeah? Especially the sheer pace of development of PieFed, which is just a pleasure to observe such a labor of love.

Threaded conversations in Mbin appear more like an afterthought to the Twitter/X microblogging style - see e.g. its own level of app support. Also, the peak of Mbin (according to this site was 874 monthly active users in April 2024, but just one month later that had dropped to 563 and today is 719.

Though Mbin is still remembered - now as the Threadiverse = Lemmy + PieFed + Mbin (+ nodeBB + flarum, with Sublinks seemingly abandoned). There is room for us all here! :-) I will add that if Mbin ever wanted to actually get serious, it would be nice to see.

So… another year then?

I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried with Lemmy. The best I found that I could hope for was sorting by New, but mostly I just gave up hope for it.

Until I moved to PieFed, and now the issue has multiple solutions. For one, using the Topic/Feeds (which are user-customizeable and shareable) you really can have your cake and eat it too, e.g. you can unsubscribe from all politics communities so that those do not show up on your main homepage, but an entire new feed completely dedicated to News & Politics is just a click away. Or Memes. Or Hobbies. Or Movies & TV, or any of a thousand other things - again, you can build your own, or subscribe to one that someone else has made.

And for another, for sufficiently low-traffic communities you can click the bell icon (which you can do to pretty much anything - users, posts, comments, communities, etc. - plus you can even UNCLICK that to silence notifications from your own content!!), so that you get a notification for each and every single new post to it. But, if it ever does get to be too much, you can mark all as read and/or separate the different categories of notifications from one another - community posts by others vs. replies to your own content.

PieFed really is leaving Lemmy behind in the dust, as far as features are concerned.

Yeah “obscure” was definitely the wrong word there - maybe “niche”?

Thank you so much for your contributions btw! In this era of disinformation, making the Threadiverse more usable can be an enormous boon:-).

He did, as well as mental health. So perhaps it is good that he pulled back a bit rather than overwhelm himself further. He did come back from his hospital trip, but then left the instance completely unmonitored which caused the entire Threadiverse to become flooded with spam messages like advertisements, to the point where some instances chose to defederate from it. You can’t just leave something like open on the internet these days!

Anyway PieFed is fantastic, you will probably fall in love with it instantly, like so many others of us:-).

Kbin the software has died - technically there is still one small instance in Poland that uses it, but all others have ceased, and the software is no longer being maintained under that name - yet the project lives on in its fork Mbin.

Instances that include the kbin word - e.g. kbin.earth - only retain that now as a legacy.

Sadly I don’t think anyone has heard from Ernst, the original developer and admin of kbin.social.

App support finally came to Mbin though, see “Interstellar”.

A spiritual successor to Kbin’s design philosophy that is very much worth checking out is “PieFed”, which I am writing to you now using it :-). Most apps that work with Lemmy also now work with it (except Thunder support still coming “soon_™” but available only in the beta version for now, not the Play Store one). PieFed is written in Python rather than the obscure Rust language so its pace of development has been extremely rapid in comparison to Lemmy and it now has a feature set well beyond that of either Lemmy or Mbin. If you want to access both the Threadiverse/Lemmy/Mbin communities/magazines as well as Fediverse/Mastodon-style content, Mbin is still your best bet as it was designed for exactly that, but for Threadiverse stuff it offers numerous advantages. Anyway it is so nice to have choices to pick from!:-)

Both sides fall for it, just not equally.