Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week agoEven so, if celebrities started using something, their users would follow them - as happened with Bluesky, and to a much smaller extent the Rexodus from Reddit to Lemmy over the 3rd party app debacle.
But there seem to be just too many problems to make it worth most people's efforts. Like lack of content. And speaking of Lemmy, r/RedditAlternatives is full of people that came over here, but then went back - citing lack of content and presence of toxicity as their top reasons.
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I almost left due to the toxicity of the tankie triad but luckily I learned the block features work well.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week ago
Me too. I found a post via browsing by All, and responded with something innocuous (I thought) to the effect that "Biden may not be perfect, but he did at least lower gasoline prices and that's not entirely nothing"... and the responses kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS. And then I did it again - once was on Lemmygrad.ml and the other on hexbear.net.
Even taking it as a given that I'm a dumb stupid idiot (am I though?), it was obvious to me how "consent" matters not at all to them. I was being "dunked on", which tbf is literally written in the side-bar text of ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net!... EXCEPT that I found it by browsing All, so had never seen that!?
So to clarify, it's not that I think such places shouldn't exist entirely, just that they are not a match to everyone else across the Fediverse, particularly the more mainstream normie, mostly centrists in the USA that were coming over from Reddit (including myself).
Mind you, PieFed provides full solutions to all of these issues: the side-bar text is shown down below EVERY post from a community (okay so someone could still find something via All and respond via comment without ever seeing it but... it's something?), and more importantly it provides the ability to place messages attached to like URLs or more relevant here, Lemmy instances. Hexbear is fully defederated from PieFed.social but if it were not, then for one I wouldn't be here, but moreover I would push heavily for such a message to be added that warns people who do not know the lore already. Also you can do personal defederations without needing admin support, by truly blocking all users from a given instance (I do it for lemmy.ml), unlike Lemmy's horribly misnamed feature that would be better termed a community muting (that still allows those users to spam your inbox with notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS). Also, PieFed allows you to trigger notifications for anything at all - a user, a particular post, a singular comment (whether yours or by someone else), and thus CRUCIALLY allows you to STOP receiving notifications for something when you don't want that anymore.
And those aren't even the top features of PieFed:-). However, back then PieFed didn't exist, so I can well understand all the people complaining in places such as r/RedditAlternatives (as I mentioned but I'll bring it up again:-) why they tried out Lemmy and decided to abandon it. You and I almost did the same - and we are by no means alone in that, as, still yet again, many did do so.
Unfortunately Lemmy's feature set in this regard have actively gone backwards lately - e.g. instance blocking used to not allow notifications, but now it does. And Lemmy.ml seems integrated heavily into the Lemmy processes, so much so that most instances don't dare to defederate from it. This seems relevant since the OP was talking about "centralization", and while in theory the Lemmy sourcecode doesn't absolutely 100% mandate that a new instance be federated with lemmy.ml, in practice it is true that every single major instance has done so. i.e. we talk a lot about decentralization, even while we have this major centralization feature present in the Lemmyverse.
Thus forcing new users to be exposed to the anti-Western propaganda (e.g. "bOtH sIdEs SaMe"), before they learn how to block those communities and users (but are prevented from doing so for the entire instance) one by one...
peregrin5@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I might have to try PieFed. I think this might inspire me to.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 week ago
Omg it's amazing! Treat yourself enough to make an account. Once you see the sign-up wizard, asking you what your interests are and pre-signing you up to communities based on your responses, and it asking you how much content you would like to see containing the keywords "Musk" or "Trump" (importantly, not just All vs. None, but an intermediate Some as well), you'll see what the Threadiverse has been missing!
After that, it does take quite some getting used to, coming from Lemmy and Reddit, but that's a good thing bc it has so many more CHOICES that you can make, like not just All vs. Subscribed (vs. Local), but categories of communities. Like e.g. you could choose not to subscribe to any political communities so that you won't be deluged with such every single time you log on, and yet all the News and Politics are available in the appropriately named News and Politics - which (it just keeps getting better and better) are also user customizable and shareable as well!
It's not perfected yet - notifications are sometimes buggy and the search function sucks compared to Lemmy - but it serves my needs 99.9% of the time and for the rest there's my Lemmy alt to fall back to anyway:-).
So yes indeed, try it and you'll fall in love instantly, finding yourself using it more often until it's your main. You'll see.:-)
Oh and the developer team adds features practically weekly, plus is super friendly and responsive, so there's that too.:-)