OpenStars

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.

But - and this is crucial - someone isn't going to be able to block things unless they first have an account. It's like saying that a particular general location (like a city or a nation) has no crime... if only you avoid the "bad" parts (but where are those even, and how are you supposed to know especially before you get into them - also, are there even any parts that aren't bad? it's a valid question, to someone who does not yet know?)

So you are correct in the sense that Lemmy != "Alt-Left Nazi". What I said though is that we are an Alt-Left Nazi "bar". We are not totally that thing - some of us are simply here, hanging out, having a drink, doing our own thing(s). But there are Nazis here (or rather in our case, the Alt-Left instead of the Alt-Right).

And that political content is everywhere. Well, not literally, but like if you browse by All or enjoy any kind of "news" or especially "memes", then it's really super difficult to block out. Someone used to Reddit simply won't bother learning how to navigate around the Alt-Left spaces. We who use ~~Arch~~ Linux btw are different - perhaps less sane?:-P

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.:-)

Fwiw the only thing you were ever banned from is !Comics@lemmy.ml, and I don't even understand the reason: "No third party vote shaming". And that expired 2 months ago so you are all good.

Here is your entire modlog btw: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=8837267 . I don't know what communities those posts were even attempted to be sent to but mostly it says "Not political" for the reason given for the removal, so whether that's too much political and they don't want it or not political enough and they need it I don't even know but there it is!:-P

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.