I don't really see support for following users in the lemmyverse either, now that you mention it...
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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You can go to a user's profile and click the bell icon and that will notify you of any new posts by that user. In piefed anyway. Don't know if it's an option in Lemmy.
I follow a few folks that way, and get notifications of their posts
Oh, you're right! I've only recently started following communities this way.
Looking on a Lemmy instance, no, I don't see an option to follow.
@jollyroberts @Bonus I follow a few Lemmy accounts from Mastodon this way too
Yeah, it's just a little weird following here from there but I do the same though.
Kbin had it. I don't know about Mbin.
Mbin also has this. But I never figured out how this works (started out in Kbin, moved to Mbin).
Good point, I use that feature from time to time on myself when I want to find back a comment I made that can be useful
It’s a lot safer to bookmark your own posts/replies than it is to allow easy searching of posts/users across all instances. “Convince” is what got us into the social media hellscape we’re in today.
Sometimes a comment only turns out to be useful weeks after it's made.
allow easy searching of posts/users across all instances
Lemmy allows that already : https://lemmy.zip/search?q=+&type=All&listingType=All&creatorId=24759872&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false
If you want to try Piefed, there's https://piefed.zip/
You would need to be able to search saved posts which would also be useful, but not nearly as much.
I’m not sure we’re understanding each other.
I’m saying you save the interesting content via bookmark before you lose it. If you lose track of it, it wasn’t that interesting. If you have that “wait that reminds me of this post” moment and don’t save it, don’t go treading on my privacy to find your “ah hah” retort.
And I'm saying you can encounter the same issue of not finding a post whether you save it or not. If you suggest saving content to reference later, there also needs to be a way to search within those saved posts. Otherwise, it’s essentially the same problem as not being able to find it without having saved it.
search is definitely a weakness overall.
Yes but there are also other things that I would consider much higher prioritization still before that.
One being easier usability of reading and responding to comments, especially those deeper in a chain - i.e. we need a "see parent comment" option. I created a codeberg issue for this (~~I can't connect to that server atm to link it here~~ there is some ongoing issue involving a JavaScript error on that site, but I did manage to find the link: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1362).
Another issue is that there still seems to be no way to preview a post before creating it (on Firefox, on Android, on PieFed.social) - yes for comments but no for actual posts. (Edit: interesting, this seems to only be true for mobile but not desktop?)
Some similar issues that are already completed are the ability to view the modlog for a community and a button adding spoiler text markdown - I will use those roughly the same frequency as I would a search function (probably a bit higher actually) and at a guess were far easier to implement.:-)
At some point it will be embarrassing to not have a fully fledged search function, but imho we are not all that close to that point yet, relative to other issues that are used hourly or daily rather than weekly or monthly.
yeah I can see that. Just the other day I was thinking how nice it would be to collapse a chain of comments.
Ah, found the link: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1362
Absolutely - and it is not entirely just a convenience factor, it really is possible to get "lost" since PieFed often seems to ignore where the URL link was pointing (especially if there are many comments and those now have to load differently, after the page load) and instead just defaults to navigating to the top of the OP, at which point if you attempt to search for the identical text of the message, it may not be found (despite the fact that it 100% does exist, deeper in the chain). Here is an example link: https://piefed.social/post/1305005#comment_8178603, which (1) you will note that clicking it does not navigate directly to it (note that there are only 59 comments total - so this failure to navigate directly to it is entirely separate from the issue of loading comments after the page), and (2) despite the fact that that comment includes the full text "And it makes sense that it was not a FULL rebuttal", if you search for that text it will not be found. The only way I can manage to find it after being thus "lost" is to go through the page and click on every single "Continue thread" that appears there one by one, underneath one of them (hopefully!?:-P) the desired content will eventually be found.
Replying to comments is something that I do several times a day - I am doing it right here and now in fact:-). This is something that should have a much higher prioritization to fix than searching, imho. Not that I want to "demand" anything - all of this work is done for free and we all appreciate that - but in case it helps to say my thoughts and where I am coming from there:-D. I would love to see replying to comments streamlined much more than it is now, even at the cost of pushing back implementation of a more robust set of search functions.
Edit: another streamlining that I would love to see happen is inline editing of comments. I hate how after you edit an existing comment, it next takes you to the full page and you lose where you were before.
ah yes I have encountered that. I can see what they say but not what I said they are replying to and then you go to the full post and yeah. continues.
There are multiple problems with your link here.
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Despite beginning with https://, PieFed does not render it as clickable.
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Upon pasting it into Firefox on Android, the results it offers are simply "No search results."
So I presume that people are aware of and discussing this issue? But PieFed still unfortunately lacks a great deal of such "polish" matters of very foundational concepts as URL rendering, navigation to specific comments, replying to comments, and previewing posts. Other than viewing posts, these concepts are mainly what I do on PieFed:-), so it would be great to fix those prior to a search function that would be useful less often.
Btw do you think I created the codeberg issue correctly? Nobody has commented on it so I wasn't sure. I couldn't add any labels for it - perhaps those are admin controlled.
I just tried this one, works on Firefox mobile :
Excellent! Although this really makes me wish now that I could easily retrieve the parent comment for it... haha! 😅
If you know the user's home instance, you can see all of their posts by writing the user's name in the URL, this way: https://piefed.ee/u/Tuuktuuk .
There you can see all posts and comments I've written. You could, of course, also check the same in https://piefed.zip/u/Tuuktuuk@piefed.ee , but as you can see, it's missing some of the content I have written. Better use the URL of my home instance if you for some reason want to see what I've been writing here.