I’ve tried both [Lemmy and PieFed], and the UX is incredibly unintuitive and unpleasant. The main problem is that it’s quite hard to discover content you want while avoiding content you don’t, Bluesky at least has really good custom feeds that are easy to add (the default feed sucks). Another big issue is the general site layout, it’s hard to figure out how to do things as simple as saving a post for later or how to go back to the feed without being redirected back to the post I’m trying to exit.
Maybe they didn’t see the “Feeds” feature in PieFed? The top navigation menus in PieFed are a bit messy. Although shareable blocklists could be cool too, or maybe toxic?
That’s excluding the horrible lack of contrast most frontends use, which makes reading and parsing the site elements unnecessarily difficult (no Lemmy, grey text on a grey background is not good for readability).
I like the Lemmy colors, but maybe it should be easier to change, because they might like the darkly-pureblack theme.
Fediverse feels slower, but not in a good way. More of a ‘if I don’t use this for a week, I’ll see new things’. If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.
Maybe this is a UX issue of not finding the right feed they would like.
I’ve tried using lemmy and have exactly the same issue. After blocking all the politics stuff, left wing meme stuff and tankie stuff there’s bugger all remaining. Even with all the blocks I’ve made it just seems to be a bunch of toxic left wing people calling each other fascist because of some minor difference in opinion.
I also want nsfw stuff now and then. I hate how censored the internet has become, at least with reddit if I want to see a bit of porn, I can.
Again maybe a UX issue of not presenting what communities they could subscribe to.
I tried twice to join those forums within the Fediverse and I can’t get past the captcha test. The fact that you need approval to validate your access doesn’t seem designed to encourage you to recommend it.
The captchas on Lemmy are AWFUL, I can’t do them either.
(that’s the “Medium” difficulty)
Lemmy v1.0 is adding the ability to do invites, so maybe there will be an invite-only instance that gets some momentum, that could be cool. Invite sites seems like a cool old-internet type of culture.
The fediverse stuff is way too complicated for me, Reddit is very easily accessible and actually has active communities for the topics I’m interested in.
Of course these are naturally going to be all negative because they’re users that bounced off the Threadiverse, but there’s probably hints to what can be improved
Btw PieFed has more or less solved the onboarding problem. Seriously, pick one and make an account even if solely to go through the onboarding wizard and you will be amazed.
Those categories of communities, which are user-customizable and shareable Topic Feeds, are also hella useful, even if only to help you discover communities that you want to subscribe to in your existing account.
Realistically, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy in terms of features. And now PyLova is moving even faster than it (but they mostly tend to share).
A lot of these Reddit comments are from people that seemed to put zero effort into understanding anything. Or perhaps they simply aren’t expressing their thoughts well: like those organized Topic Feeds are not difficult to use at all, making one wonder if they didn’t bother poking around to click on menus enough to know that they are there, or realize that by subscribing to communities that they like, their main Subscribed Feed would be affected. Such people not coming here may be no great loss?
Well you convinced me to give it a try! I hope I’ll be able to interoperate with Lemmy and also export some of my settings.
PieFed interoperates pretty much seamlessly with Lemmy - some post types Lemmy does not support (like user polls) so occasionally you’ll see something in PieFed but not Lemmy, though never the other way around.
Settings Export & Import should work perfectly as well, definitely from Lemmy to PieFed though I never tried that in reverse.
You should really enjoy it!! Anyway, you always have your Lemmy to fall back onto… like during maintenance or whatever.
That’s my first comment since you convinced me to try PieFed.
You said I’d occasionally see something on PieFed and not on Lemmy, but for now it’s quite the other way around. I noticed a crosspost between [email protected] and [email protected] isn’t showing at all.
I’m gonna keep comparing Lemmy and PieFed and then choose one at one point.
Missing posts happen all the time on Lemmy as well - those phenomena are related to the per-instance dynamics (e.g. PieFed.social vs. PieFed.ca vs. PieFed.World, etc.), not the per-software differences (Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin).
Reasons this can happen include:
Taking a quick look, [email protected] looks pretty dead - sorted by time there’s one post from 2 days ago, before that only 2 posts in the last month, the next post 3 months ago, then others 7-8 months ago. And looking from a guest/anonymous account, that’s identically what I see on PieFed.social as well (barring some slight time reporting differences e.g. 2 vs. 3 months but the poster name matches) at https://piefed.social/c/[email protected], and I also confirmed the same at https://piefed.ca/c/[email protected].
So I wonder if PieFed.social is now user-blocking lemmy.ml automatically. To confirm: did you add any kind of blocking for lemmy.ml communities or users? On a desktop machine, go into your Account, Blocks & Filters, scroll down to the Blocks section and look especially at the Instances section - does it have lemmy.ml in it, or is it empty?
Of course if you are using a 3rd-party app, that could be a factor as well. In that case, first I suggest to confirm that you can see the posts that you are wanting to see from a desktop with your logged-in PieFed.social account, and then deal with whatever may be going on with the app.
Is there a certain post in particular that you were hoping to see? (or at least using it as a way to understand what it is that you are seeing) That would help me to diagnose, like especially if it is super-old, like years, that could help explain what is going on?
It hasn’t started well for now.
First instance I tried said they were taking more people when the main Piefed page said they were.
And now, I’ve been waiting for 2 days for an answer from another instance…
If the answer is negative again or if I get none, I’ll go for the biggest instance available, but I’ll give up after this…
This would be way too much for someone who would just give a try to the Fediverse…
Yeah the entire onboarding experience is a mess for the whole Threadiverse - both Lemmy and PieFed.
Most people that talk poorly about us on Reddit or Bluesky or X claim to have had accounts here for several years, so it does not seem to get better even after making an account.
We here still perpetually need to have the early adopter mindset, which seems like it will never go away.