Try PieFed. The reason you keep seeing furry content on Lemmy is that you are forced into browsing “All” in order to see some new content, but then you don’t like some of the new content that you see.

On PieFed with categories of communities (instance-defined Topic areas and user Feeds that are user-customizeable and shareable) you can have your cake (have a tight Subscribed feed, e.g. without being subscribed to any politics communities if you wanted) but then also eat it too (news & politics content is but a click away, or movies & TV).

Combining together comments across all cross-posts also helps a lot with community discovery. I haven’t searched by All in a long time, unless I just felt nostalgic and wanted to, but there is no longer any need with this new model.

Moderation reports are currently not federated (well they are in PieFed, but not in Lemmy) - at some point that will be added, but for all this time after the Rexodus this has been true. This lack of federation has hindered the growth of the Threadiverse.

The issue does get murky - especially when people use the same account both for their bot posting and also for their human interactions, rather than separating the two.

We scare normal, non-techie people away. The Threadiverse in general and Lemmy in particular is very lacking in moderation capabilities, especially by not federating mod reports across instances (PieFed does that, but Lemmy does not).

There are barely any places that defederate from lemmy.ml, including PieFed.ca that you are on. Thankfully PieFed allows us to block all users from an instance, but new users will have to discover on their own that they even should do this, and until then will be exposed to all of their comments and posts.

Same. I almost left Lemmy, until PieFed allowed another option.

If you Google for “beans no pooping challenge” https://lemmy.eco.br/post/113558?scrollToComments=true at least appears on the first page of results - that’s progress, baby!

PieFed labels bots and bot-like accounts, allowing you to choose options like blur or show the content semi-transparently.

But they are accessible without needing a login account.

The peak for Lemmy at 55k is really really super tiny, in comparison to Reddit’s literal millions. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for debate, e.g. this very OP stating it as a bad thing, and people responding to it pushing back saying it is a good one, to have avoided being noticed more by bot brigades and large-scale disinformation and influence campaigns (which might be here as well, but there’s definitely less incentive for them to be).

The potential to attract large masses here I think does not exist. It could though, in theory, if we really did want it to and work towards it. The major thrust forward there that I know of is the PieFed software, which gets out from underneath many of the heavy aspersions that Lemmy is not even trying to distance itself from regarding authoritarianism. But PieFed is only used by a couple thousand people, and high ironically people are resistant to switch to it, just like others are resistant to switching from Reddit. It seems like it is human nature to remain in a place long after there become increasingly fewer reasons to do so.

Not all of them…some wear white hats? 😜

There are so many interconnected issues there:

1. I thought “vibe-coding” inherently implies checking the output, but just as “patriots” or “believers” often do not actually believe in the principles that they espouse, perhaps “ai slop” would more rightly apply to much of the output, aka theory vs. actual practice
2. similarly for videos, “ai slop” by its technical definition implies only minimal checking of the output, however any output - whether checked or not - from an unethically trained LLM, and perhaps using a datacenter that privatizes profits at the expense of public funding (water), can be considered theft
3. so then is responsibly-trained output of AI, like using DeepSeek on a personal machine where someone pays for their own electricity, okay? What if an artist trained an LLM on their own OC, so then technically if such a person were to not modify their output (or do so only minimally e.g. slapping on a label for attribution) before sharing, would that be considered okay? That does meet the technical definition of “ai slop” though?
4. conversely, what about stealing memes on the internet and sharing those without attribution as to the source - why is that so very often considered okay and even somehow “good”? (let’s say for the sake of argument that we exclude those images that have been cropped specifically to remove the author attribution) Should we start calling those “human slop”, or “meme slop”?
5. piracy likewise steals content and shares - a huge difference there is attribution, but there are certain similarities to how common a"i" models also did not consider concerns about violations of copyright and IP. One is lifted up on the Threadiverse as being ethically good while the other is condemned as being bad. I know it is more complex than this… or at least surely it must be, but I definitely struggle with categorizing all of this in my own mind (perhaps the difference lies in the intent? one makes the common man happier. or perhaps the difference lies rather and/or with the output, where one of those two harms us all? but doesn’t the other as well, if less content is made from those sources that will not see their hoped-for ROI as a result?). Wow I really did not expect to open up this rabbit-hole… I guess just ignore this one for now. :-P
6. and then there’s the issue of whether content is properly labeled or not - I have far less problems (not none but less) with something labelled “made with ChatGPT5[, trained on <source>]” than with something that has no label on it whatsoever.
7. and finally there’s programming vs. video, yeah

I suppose I mostly have heard the phrase “vibe-coding” from its pro-ai proponents, while the anti-slop contingent has not really used a coherent phrase (so far that I have typically seen). I suspect because for coding, people have the expectation that you are supposed to be checking it, so the concern there is mostly on the low quality due to lack of degree of rigorous post-production checking, rather than the theft of input source - although I also suspect that most people have not really though the issue through very in-depth. I know I have not.

Calling poor-quality vibe-coding as “ai slop” could be a great way to shame it! :-P

That seems a solid listing. I would add one more: companies that did actually fire their workforces and attempt to replace them with a"i" now having regretted it, and likely to the tune of that decision having destroyed their entire company.

Although my earlier comment was purely about the slop present on YouTube - where slop or no slop, already the monetization aspects have been so destructive to the utility of those videos.

This now makes me curious: does the term “slop” apply beyond text, images, and videos? I thought “ai” coding was called “vibe-coding” rather than slop?

Thanks for the validation - indeed being able to block out what does not match our values is quite helpful for our sanity.

Fwiw, I’ve been on a crusade against hexbear for years, as many others here do as well.:-P

Only for them. Now get back to work you lazy slob!

Maybe if “ai” would make better than mere slop, we might actually like it? (e.g. if instead of just stealing it might do something responsibly, and also well)

Somehow all this reminds me of spez… we are just landed gentry, don’t you know 😜

Agreed except that given its history, I strongly doubt that most of it ever will be. The developers of the Lemmy codebase made the software for their own desires, and it functions perfectly well as far as they are concerned, fitting in very well with the authoritarian nature of lemmy.ml where even mods seem cowed to barely do anything and instead the admin is the strongest initiator.

I have simultaneously both great respect to them for having made Lemmy as FOSS while also I realistically acknowledge that they do not have the same goals in mind that I and most Westerners do about the rights of individual people vs. that of the State. In their own words:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it

(In fairness here, they did later recant on that position, after great public outcry, to remove the hard-coded filters for swear words like “fuck” that were baked into the code at the time. Though Nutomic is absolutely correct in the general sense at least: if people want something that the devs do not want, it is not necessarily the devs responsibility to provide it? Similarly for changing the prioritization of which features to work on first.)

Therefore even without knowing the future plans of either platform, I can practically guarantee that you will see such features added to PieFed, probably multiple years before they show up on Lemmy. In fact it’s already started a year ago now where Lemmy’s “instance block” that still allows users from those supposedly “blocked” instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, even triggering notifications, whereas PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance. PieFed’s version works, while Lemmy’s was promised for years and then never did, and at this point I assume never will.

And in a second example, PieFed just changed how deleted posts are handled: the user controls their own content, but not the content of others, so e.g. if they ask a question they can delete that question, but they can no longer delete the answers delivered to that question by other people.

Sorry if I am salty but I have lost hope in Lemmy. And I am putting all my hope instead into PieFed:-).

Excellent points. Perhaps Lady Butterfly might want to help redirect traffic from the old to the new. Like the note in the sidebar helps greatly for discovery, though some content did not look to me like it was cross-posted and instead submitted exclusively to the old communities, so at first glance it does look like it’s remaining alive. But fair point that it doesn’t need to be “promoted”:-).

Piefed allows to block instances at the user level, making defederation less of an issue. You have to keep in mind that there’s another part of the Reddit population that prefers to have control over their own experience, and for which having a short defederation list is appealing.

Agreed, my issue is that Newbies specifically will not be aware and thus not know. So if e.g. hexbear was added to that blocklist by default and all the user had to do was remove the block, that would solve the problem of making PieFed.zip more “Newbie-friendly”.

Or ideally a sign-up wizard question asking if people preferred a cleaner experience without more controversial content (read: trolls) vs. to be exposed to them and be able to make their own decisions.

Though without either of those, I disagree that PieFed.zip is fully “Newbie-friendly”. Which to be clear is a perfectly fine choice to make, I am just saying that it would help to refine that label. This is like arguing whether a picture showing someone in a thong bikini should have the NSFW label applied to it: if it does then it makes for maximum friendliness, and anyway what’s the harm in having done so?

I have zero desire to police someone else’s NSFW experience anywhere, just offering these suggestions in case it may help more people feel encouraged to visit the Threadiverse and feel welcomed rather than get trolled and, being new, unable to at first figure out what to do about it. Just because we here were all hazed upon entry to the Threadiverse does not mean that the conditions must continue unabated.

Or perhaps they should - if that serves as a filter for new people to select only those most matching the current crowd? I would disagree, but it seems a lot of people hold to that view, and also it is the default to continue unless changes are made. Change will require effort.

Reddit is worse both overall and on average, agreed. I will say that Lemmy.ml is extremely well-known for mass banning people even from communities that they’ve never heard of, so it’s more than a little bit like Reddit, though as you say with the federated model someone can always go elsewhere, and still see the same content.

There are some slight ways in which the Lemmy implementation of federation is very authoritarian, like how it does not send you any kind of notification that your content has been removed, or even that you have been banned - people simply have to discover that on their own (and oftentimes never!), months to years later. And there’s no modmail to be able to ask questions why, plus the modlog most often obscures the name of the mod anyway, so you can’t even DM them, nor, as you could on Reddit, can you ask them in the same post that has been removed from the community yet still exists for those who have the URL, since Lemmy not only deletes the post in that case but offers a confusing generic error message as if the post never existed in the first place.

So believe it or not, Reddit actually offers some (very few but somewhat foundational) more rights to people there than Lemmy does here!!! Lemmy offers supreme rights to someone wanting to spin up their own instance and be an admin (though CSAM brigading is a constant threat), and also offers special privileges to mods as well, but normal everyday users have far less protections. It is up to each person to decide which “rights” they value most - there is no right here to not have your content deleted by a bot btw, though it is far less common on the Threadiverse than on Reddit, I hear.

Overall I think it’s better here than there, though as the OP graph shows that seems to not be an opinion shared universally by all people looking for a threaded conversational platform, since we are losing slightly more people than we gain, slowly getting smaller over time (now at ~35k active users, down from the peak of ~55k at the time of the first major Rexodus).