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
It’s not even about deception. Although deception starts off as aid generally before they are deceived. Hence deception. Realistically an individual cannot properly moderate that many communities. Not even people I know who are on disability and spend all day online can do that and still remain mentally healthy. It’s just not a good thing.
Un moderated or poorly moderated communities can also be problematic in their own right. Not to mention creating all these unused communities. Posting all these bot posts to those communities. It grows the local database, for no real purpose. Just the hope that maybe they could catch someone to come in and contribute to the community? Does the good outweigh the bad? And then it leads to assessments somewhat like yours. Of large bot presence. Which if you were looking to grow communities. That sort of thing is generally seen as a detriment. Maybe they think or are looking to try to help. But again I just question it. The efficacy of it. I would rather see fewer but more active maintains communities than a bunch of ghostcoms. Magically getting posts but no engagement. But that’s just me LOL. And if I put up my own instance I will probably keep it quite tight.
I suppose those instance admins are the ones who should have the most say about what they do or do not allow on their instance. But then yeah, we each also have our own choices to make in response, like whether to block or not. I don’t, but then again I’m effectively doing it by another means where I browse by Subscribed and simply never subscribe to those coms:-).