OpenStars @ OpenStars @discuss.online Posts 44Comments 3,853Joined 1 yr. ago
As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don't exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.
Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it's primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.
Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it's so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it's coming!
There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.
SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).
Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.
Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website's technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World's lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).
Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don't know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?
A simple score isn't going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.
Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.
Hehe go for it then:-).
Yeah, and while it may not solve everything, it could still help!:-)
And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how "instances" relate to "communities" and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure... Hey, where are you going? 😯
The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.
So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an "average" user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.
There's a reason the current Lemmy sourcecode is named 0.19.8 - this is beta version software, awaiting very many changes to reach completion. Heck, reports don't even reach moderators on remote instances yet, as the whole drama with 196 is showing (they left the mod reports there for days, then got mad when the instance admin did what she said she would and cleaned up in the absence of the mods being willing to do anything about the situation).
But people either don't know Rust (it's reputedly difficult), don't want to deal with those developers, or simply don't want to help with the writing of code. Hence the creation of K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks to deal with the former pair of issues, though not catching up to feature parity with Lemmy yet (except PieFed is already quite ahead, in some ways even though not ready for the masses in some fewer but more foundational and crucial ways).
Yeah... I'm actually okay with censorship so long as it is clearly explained in advance and fairly applied - then again, I don't necessarily want to join it either, just saying that I'm okay that it exists... over there somewhere (away from me:-).
If LW helped you migrate from Reddit to the Threadiverse until you knew more what you were looking for and could find a true home in lemm.ee that meets your needs better, then both of them sound awesome at their respective roles to me.:-)
Mods are generally not going to surrender their power, especially as differences in moderation techniques is what most often leads to new community formation in the first place:-).
Other than PieFed's Categories of Communities, the only other ways I know of to make Topic aggregations like that is to either find and switch to using an app that provides such (I have heard of at least one, but I don't recall which:-), or else have many Lemmy accounts and constantly switch between them - like one for News, another for Memes, etc. Or you can browse by All, and see mostly only memes and news from the USA all the time:-P.
But PieFed provides numerous methods handle this: not only Categories but also Topics to aid community discovery, and you can trigger Notifications for anything - a person, a comment, post, or even an entire community.
One day very soon I strongly believe that PieFed will surpass Lemmy in terms of usability. It already has in so many ways, though not quite all.
I'm surprised to hear about the slowness issue - I think this is the first time that I have, though I am definitely spoiled at Discuss.Online that has such a great technical admin (he also is the one who was developing Sublinks, before life and a baby intervened:-). Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?
Tbf there is legit fear in the USA that Trump will start to place bans or at least watchlists on social media outlets that Musk does not make money off of. Then again, I thought that LW wasn't really associated with the USA in any way besides having a bunch of users from it, and anyway you have found a perfect solution to the problem - if they don't want it, go somewhere else that does allow what you need.:-)
At a guess, bc it doesn't have that many communities on it?
Efforts are underway to change that but yeah it definitely lacks the same punch as others - like sh.itjust.works has 5 communities that are each larger, some by almost 3 times, than the absolute largest one on lemm.ee.
That instance seems not so much a "source" of content across the Fediverse as a "destination" for posts made to communities elsewhere.
Then again, very little else compares to Lemmy.World in that regard - it has another 10 communities each larger, some twice as large, as sh.itjust.works does. It would be healthier for the network effects to split that up a bit more... but fortunately their upgrade process over the next few months should help a little.
Well, now you are on a firm basis to chant being #4!? 😜
People used to say how Lemmy.World had ~80% of all users on the Fediverse. I'm not sure if that was older defunct accounts or what. But it does illustrate one thing: does it even matter where user accounts are located, when the federation model means that someone can access the entire thing, minus only whatever someone's instance has chosen to defederate from?
On Mastodon that matters greatly, due to the discoverability aspect, but here on the Threadiverse (or whatever we want to call ourselves to distinguish the forum vs. microblogging nature of our spaces, accessible via Lemmy, some app, Mbin, Friendica, PieFed, Tesseract, perhaps Sublinks one day, etc.)? On that note, my instances (Kbin.social, then StarTrek.Website, Discuss.Online, and now a mix between that and PieFed.social) have mostly been extremely tiny, but I never felt like I was excluded, being able to browse by All.
In fact quite the opposite! Having wandered into Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and thereby exposing myself to their echo chambers, right inside the very ones hosted on their own instances but due to federation, hosted likewise on my instance as well, I strongly wished that the Fediverse would have been a little less connected - or at least if it has offered me some warning! (The sidebar text is only shown on a "community" page, not an individual post when arrived at via browsing All.)
And then there's communities to consider - so many are on Lemmy.World, but how much should that matter, vs. the users? Moderation though is primarily something related to communities. So like sh.itjust.works doesn't have all that many, there's e.g. !whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ca also, like there's !pcgaming@lemmy.ca and !canada@lemmy.ca, yet these general-purpose instances have so very many users, even if the communities themselves are mostly on lemmy.world.
If lemmy.world were to go down though, we'd lose a LOT, at least in the short term. Archived copies of older posts would remain cached on remote instances, but a new community would have to be created somewhere in order to allow continued posting.
So I don't think that the Threadiverse is all that distributed - but I also don't think that it matters for us?
Wouldn't total posts bias towards older instances though, counting posts over time rather than activity today? So then good point that sh.itjust.works is so high up by both metrics:-).
While lemmy.ml continues to fall - by active users I think I recall it was #3 at some point, then #4, while now it's #5, where based on the gap below it, it seems likely to remain since users are now more distributed than previously (which is a good thing!:-).
Personally I would go with Monthly Active Users, e.g. since Hexbear has managed to run off a good fraction of its users over time (which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well).
This puts sh.itjust.works as #4, which it's been for a good long while, above Lemmy.ml and Hexbear and nearly all other instances.
Link, but the URL does not preserve the options shown, so you have to resort by Monthly Active Users.
You... don't want to know.
Okay so I had a little accident where I was walking in the dark and bumped into, you know what, just forget I said anything, m'kay?:-P
Yeah tbh it's not quite ready for anyone who doesn't have the early adopter mindset, and is still a project showing off what features will come to the Fediverse rather than something to use now. e.g. a good fraction of the time it will show me Notifications to comments that I cannot even see in the web UI, that's quite frustrating:-(, and its search function is really quite horrible. Also notifications based on name mentioning (like @openstars@piefed.social) aren't implemented yet. And it was only literally yesterday that inline commenting was added to the flagship instance.
Then again, its Categories of Communities is superb, it has hashtags, YouTube embedding, shows you the "sidebar" area for every single post, and other functionality that Lemmy lacks. One I particularly like is the ability to trigger Notifications on or off for anything - following a user account, posts from a community, etc., or like turning them off if you no longer want to receive them for a particular comment. But most important of all: it is written in Python so development should go forward much more quickly.:-)
I use it as my daily driver, then switch to Lemmy also daily, especially if I ever need the search tool for anything, or for moderation that PieFed lacks a lot of ability for (though tbf Lemmy's cross-instance moderation abilities aren't the best either, unless 0.19.20 fixes that). I usually spend the largest majority of my time on PieFed, and have such great hopes for it in the future!:-) Also, there is reportedly a fork of Thunder that can connect with it, so at some point such apps may not care whether someone is using PieFed or Lemmy.
Here is an example post showing off what it can do.:-)
I wonder what will happen if a bunch of people lose their jobs all of a sudden. That worries me.