To be clear, defederation has nothing whatsoever to do with PieFed.

Defederation happens on Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, nodeBB, and every other type of software across the entire Fediverse. It is even an absolutely crucial tool to prevent CSAM which depending on the locality of the affected instance could get it shut down and potentially the instance owner exposed to actual criminal charges. (There are other ways, but typically defederation is the easiest.)

Likewise, lemmy.ml famously censors what they consider cusswords on their instance - with a hard-coded list even, iirc, at least it was at one time, years ago - but then after much outcry this censorship was made optional in the code.

So defederation is a reason to not join an instance in favor of some other one, but has nothing to do with wanting to either avoid or preferentially pick an instance running PieFed. In fact the opposite is true, as the PieFed software allows additional options beyond simply federate vs. defederate, allowing instance admins choices between those two extremes. This finer granularity is so helpful! e.g. the PieFed.zip instance blocks Hexbear.net by default for new users, but explains how to remove that, thereby offering hexbear as opt-in content, rather than having to choose between treating it identically the same as all other instances or else cutting it out entirely.

PieFed also allows notes to be placed onto content, which is particularly helpful for places such as Beehaw where their stated ToS differs from the usual across the rest of the Threadiverse.

In fact I am not aware of any particular reason to avoid running PieFed, but anyway even presuming that such exists, defederation is definitely not among them.

I thought that wasn’t until step 2?

I hear that “newest MacBook” is pretty nice. (/s btw, although it probably actually is!:-P)

Just don’t get RAM for a bit? 😭

Mastodoting or Mastodotting sounds so much better to me. Or what is wrong with simply Mastodoning?

This comment wins the Threadiverse for today.

Is it possible to learn this power?

Sigh… yup.

Though Lemmy is still in beta (almost out though) and PieFed barely that as well. We of the “early adopter” mindset are helping polish the interfaces so that “one day” non-technical normie users can enjoy coming here.

At that time, availability of content will be crucial. But for now, I understand why they do not bother to do so. Anytime I want to know about some worldwide or local event that is happening, I end up having to go back to Reddit to have even a ghost of a chance at learning about it - and note that REAL normies don’t bother with Reddit even, as it is too niche and nerdy for them.

Only protest communities have a strong need to get out from under the authoritarian boot heels, but those should not be on the open clear web to begin with, leaving the Threadiverse as a tiny side project offshoot of Mastodon’s wider Fediverse. For now, but the tools are getting better all the time… PieFed practically weekly! 🥧🍰😋

No? Life is rarely binary.

For instance PieFed.zip both does not defederate with hexbear while at the same time not exposing new users to them unawares by placing a user-level block (which unlike Lemmy’s actually stops showing all content from those users) upon new account creation but then explains to the user how to remove that at any time. This makes interactions with them opt-in rather than have to discover it and be opt-out, so I consider it ideal. (Although I haven’t tested how that would show up to users browsing without an account - that might be a loophole.)

Or, a true opt-out solution could place a message underneath every post from that instance explaining how users are known to be combative, arguing in bad faith for “the dunk” and extremely likely to break your own instance’s rules and not conform to generally accepted standards of behavior. Something similar is done for Beehaw on PieFed.social, using that community’s own exact wording and linking to their ToS that differs greatly from the norm. However, I would wager that virtually all 3rd party apps would ignore this.

Defederation is not a first resort, it is rather the last one and for Lemmy, literally the only one provided when instance admins refuse to enforce both the rules of others and even their own stated ones (to keep trolling inside the community yet do not spread it to others WITHOUT CONSENT). Defederation from hexbear is not punitive - even members of hexbear have expressed a desire to defederate themselves from the outside world, to avoid all this drama - but rather protective of the wider Threadiverse overall, for new members to feel more comfortable joining us here.

Agreed.

It does not help that moderation reports do not federate among Lemmy instances. They do in PieFed, I don’t know about Mbin, but between Lemmy instances they do not, making the level of effort placed upon moderators really high by limiting the available pool to those on the same instance as the community.

It also does not help when instance admins protect those doing the bullying, such as hexbear admins that have even been caught lying to the admins of other instances, and refuse to police (i.e. ban) their own account holders as they constantly violate the rules on other instances. At that point, defederation becomes the only option left, except that many instances including yours are so high averse to defederations that instead the behaviors in question are essentially given carte blanche to continue without any means at all to stop it.

A fact that new visitors very much see - even if we old hands do not anymore, after having set up personal blocks aka blacklisting or otherwise view only Subscribed content aka exclude such via our whitelisting procedure. And new users that see what we have chosen to forget exists here go back and tell others about how unfriendly this place was to them.

So long as we leave the vast majority of the moderation burden on the individual user themselves, the Threadiverse is not going to grow and instead will continue to shrink. i.e. all the weeds are choking the garden.

Every single person that I’ve told about Lemmy has outright scolded me for having mentioned it to them. I may have lost a couple of acquaintance connections even as a result.

When people Google search for “Lemmy” or otherwise get taken to lemmy.ml (didn’t someone say that the so-called “random” instance picker chose either it or hexbear like 90% of the time?), see the content calling for murder of Westerners and the demise of Western civilization, is it any wonder that they choose not to come here, or if they create an account, to not remain?

Their preferences matter - to themselves at the very least, even if not to our instance admins that do not want to block it out so that potential new joiners won’t have to see it presented with zero warning or any distinction at all that it may differ from any of the other content in this place.

Regarding the Threadiverse in general, it seems that (1) many people find having to choose an instance first to be very confusing (not applicable to your situation I guess), (2) upon arrival these primarily Western people immediately see content proposing the murder of Westerners and demolition of the entire Western culture, whereupon they nope right back out (can you blame them?) and then complain bitterly about their toxic experiences here on other platforms, including Reddit and Bluesky and X.

Most of us forget how extensive our blocklists here have grown to be over time, and how much effort we put into Linux levels of tinkering to discover communities we like while blocking content we do not.

If I am wrong then please ignore me, but it’s a thought to consider.

Of course mostly it’s a network effect, so I am speaking about issues that we might actually be able to do something about.

Um, the POSIX kind?

Who would be so heartless as to reject babes? Just look at that cute whittle face…

It was implied? 🤔🤪

Worse, I find that Lemmy typically (vastly) under-delivers what was promised even. Like for many years people were promised the capability to do personal “instance blocking”, and for a long time after the Rexodus there were calls to avoid defederating places like lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml or even hexbear.net, because that feature was “coming soon^™”.

Then when that change did finally come, it only muted communities on that instance yet still left users to be able to reply in other communities, plus they could still vote on and thereby influence your content (hexbear is KNOWN for its brigading tactics). And then a subsequent bugfix opened it up still further to allow such “blocked” users the capability to send you a private DM, even pinging you with notifications - which on Lemmy (highly unlike PieFed) there is no way to stop that, even for WEEKs and WEEKs after you stop engaging… your consent to selectively stop such incoming pings does not matter, realistically (technically you could block every single person from an instance, one-by-one… but even there, you would have to bot that or do it the extremely tedious manual way, as the software provides no tools to aid with that). PieFed has offered the ability to block all users from an instance for over a year now.

The only counter-argument to the above is that software - especially FOSS (although Lemmy devs even get paid?!?) - takes time to develop. Which makes things like the bugs and inefficiencies that remain in Lemmy for years and years all the more disheartening. And then here comes PieFed, running around Lemmy in circles, it is almost no comparison at all.

And then I’m sure that I do not need to list out the rather LONG list of features that PieFed offers that aids community discovery - it’s quite amazing to see actually:-). PieFed is a game-changer for the Threadiverse, and might just keep it alive whereas it would otherwise have either died off or at least remained in obscurity forever known as a mere linux (& politics) forum. As things keep moving forward though, I think one day it could rival BlueSky, at least in terms of features offered, though whether a non-profit FOSS could ever overcome the strong network effect will remain to be seen… For that I think we would need a modmail, definitely notification upon content removal, perhaps better searching capability, maybe better modlog access, but not much else? (& 3rd party apps catching up to offer its features but that is not PieFed’s work anymore, now that so much has been exposed in the APIs)

we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to.

This right here. There’s a famous adage that goes “why would I want to be a member of a club that would accept me as a member?”, which encourages us to look within, but it’s undeniably true as well (however much we may want to deny it) that we are influenced by the actions of those who we choose to spend our time with. Echo chambers that act to funnel misinformation (or worse, active disinformation) are so incredibly dangerous. Yet it seems nearly impossible to escape from such - though we do get to choose our favorite flavoring of it.

I will note that making an account on PieFed does not represent any kind of “commitment” at all, and in fact has ancillary benefits such as reserving your username in advance in case you ever do decide to switch. Simply make an account on PieFed.social and you’ll get to see first-hand what all it offers! Do beware though bc most likely one glance at that sign-up wizard will make you fall in love 💕, and then more and more often you’ll find yourself using your PieFed rather than STW alt account. But is that a bad thing, to have options to choose from?! 😋

For a new member coming to Lemmy, my advice would be to:

1. Block instances
2. Block communities
3. Subscribe to communities (traditionally by scrolling through All)
4. Block users
5. Comment and Post

We need to move past these bare-bones basics. Which I don’t see much activity happening there on the Lemmy side to improve any of that, though I do see much happening in PieFed, hence I am placing my hopes for the future into it.

I presume that people already know about the older communities like !wholesome@reddthat.com and all the communities listed in its side-bar, but also check out the newer !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social.

(unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect)

Actually those are known to exist - see e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248 - though as evidenced by that same post, the admins tend to be pretty on top of shutting them down.

Below that though, at the level of communities, Lemmy has a moderation problem. Reports from one instance to anther do not federate (well, on PieFed they do, but on Lemmy they don’t) - although like everything else this is promised to be fixed “soon” (same as last year iirc, and to a lesser degree the year before that too, though probably more in the sense of just having put it onto the roadmap), which allows toxicity to thrive. Ironically it also encourages having toxic mods as well, seeing as they are the only ones willing to put up with the majority of the negative flood pushed at them.

And don’t even get me started on the lack of notification to someone that their content was removed by a mod - people tend to find out days/weeks/years later/if at all, meaning that they continue unabated, not even aware at all (or at least, at first) that they have been so censured.

Lemmy also is lacking is so many other ways, e.g. content discovery is often primarily achieved by browsing All, rather than lets say by browsing Topic areas (I am not discouraging the existence of the All Feed, just bemoaning the lack of many alternatives to it). So communities get “stumbled upon” much more readily by people not actively searching for something anywhere close to that content type, who might tend to emotionally vomit upon people rather than be genuinely interested in constructive dialog.

Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and even though the vast majority of the features rolled out over the last decade either ignored or actively went against what the userbase wanted, it nonetheless was a fully feature-complete product. e.g. it triggered notifications upon removal of your content, it had a modmail allowing you to communicate with the team to ask why, and posts removed from a community remained active to anyone possessing the URL, allowing people to continue discussions already begun, which personally as a mod of a small gaming community I used to explain to the OP why I felt their post had to be removed, and we could talk about it back and forth. None of that can be done here (although PieFed now retains deleted posts, rendering them inactive/locked but preserving their content to be read, so that e.g. a Q&A would preserve the A part even if the OP deleted their Q).

The Threadiverse is great for FOSS, not so much great as in overall terms. We make sacrifices to be here, and the benefits tend to be more abstract and harder to explain in few words (at least without needing all kinds of MAJOR caveats about what does not work). Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today, and until then it was primarily a CLI tool for all that time (gfx options often did not work as well or even properly at all, earlier in its development).

The amount of Karening aka entitlement that I’ve seen here (tbf it’s probably far worse in the likes of Reddit and Facebook by now) has shocked me. Mainly I mean: why would people downvote things simply for appearing in All… that’s literally what you asked to see, by choosing to browse “All”, and then you act like it has assaulted your delicate sensibilities? If you do not like it then block it and you’ll never have to see it again… or it’s even easier simply to scroll down.

Well, it’s always worked before…