Someone already mentioned what is going on in the OP.
In addition, PieFed has categories of communities and user-customizeable and shareable Feeds, allowing you to both have your cake and eat it too by expanding upon the binary choices of merely “Subscribed” vs. “All”. e.g. you could unsubscribe from news communities to remove all that from your Subscribed Feed, yet still see all News & Politics communities at the touch of a button (or what I do is subscribe to far fewer, more highly selective communities, but then I still have access to a wider selection whenever I switch over to that specific Feed).
The only way to do that with Lemmy was to have one account per topic area that you wanted to highlight focus on. Which since Blaze already had one account per instance (for the aforementioned issue of reports not federating), he used that alt army to achieve. Think like: one account for politics, another for memes, one for the weekend, one for evenings, a different for mornings, etc. (A major downside is that I for one can never remember which one to tag him with, at any given time!🥴😉🤔)
Lemmy will eventually add multi-communities, although it may take a year for the updated code to trickle its way through all the various instances, particularly Lemmy.World. Meanwhile, PieFed has already had this feature for nearly that same length of time, and a year from now I expect it will be even better!
(There is a friendly rivalry between Lemmy and PieFed - they are roughly equivalent in terms of feature sets and polish now, with each having areas wherein they shine and other areas that we put up with while awaiting improvements. Here is a list of PieFed features in relation to Lemmy - such lists are difficult to keep updated since PieFed adds new features roughly weekly, e.g. now we have emoji reactions. Eventually PieFed will surpass Lemmy by far since its usage of the extremely common Python language rather than Rust that is the polar opposite enables many more contributors to help tinker with it.)
I want the ability for finer grained blocking to block just comms but not users from an instance. Unfortunately my request for it seems to have pissed Rimu off ideologically.
I am not sure why you would need that myself? The entire model of using PieFed can be different from how using Lemmy. Using the latter you mostly end up having to use All and then block just tons and tons of communities that you don’t want to see (and then keep doing that over and over again as new ones get created), but PieFed’s capability to use categories of communities and user-customizeable and shareable Feeds opens up while new vistas of control.
You can, for instance, simply unsubscribe from let’s just spitball here by saying all of those huge major communities from Lemmy.World (but better than that, you could keep some without having to deal with such broad brush strokes as “all” or “none”), yet you can still view content from those communities anytime you want to, in the category Feeds. This makes the Subscribed Feed on your main landing page actually fully usable to find content most of the time, unlike on Lemmy where attempting to do that gets so difficult.
Plus there’s tons of other filtering options as well, including by keywords (here too there are options to filter out not only “All” or “None” of the specified keyword, but there’s another option to allow just “Some” of that content through, at a low level), or hide controversial content based on number of downvotes (I have this disabled, but it’s there for anyone who needs it!), and so on.
So you can have what you want without needing to fully “block” them, as you would have had to have done on Lemmy, where the only available options are basically yes or no, yet on PieFed there are so many additional nuances possible, that it doesn’t really make sense to implement a new feature for something that we all routinely do anyway, but in a manner that is fully customized to our individual needs? But e.g. someone could make a shared Feed that accomplishes essentially this goal, so that everyone could benefit from that endeavor.
Does any of this make sense? Having used Lemmy for years now, I think I see why you are asking about it, but also knowing PieFed well, I see why he might say that you don’t “need” it, given everything else that would also accomplish that goal instead, and in a less “harsh” manner than a full block (but ofc feel free to block whatever communities you want to as well - a year ago the latter feature did not exist yet, an oversight, but it absolutely works just fine nowadays).
The obvious reason, which you’ve probably guessed, is that I want to block the tankie trio and not interact in their communities. I would however like to interact with .ml users since I don’t want to reinforce the echo chamber the admins are building.
it doesn’t really make sense to implement a new feature
Here’s the thing, the ability to block instances is already implemented. It currently gives you the option to fully block the instance (comms and users) or block just users. I want to block just comms, and given the existing feature set it can’t be much more complicated than adding an extra option to that list and a couple of extra conditions in the filter. Hardly a huge programming task.
Rimu was pretty clear in his response to my request that he did not agree with my intended usage model, and as such would not implement it, despite it being a simple change. I have no idea why he gets ideologically insistent on random stuff, but I’ve heard from others I trust that he’s done it on other topics on occasion.
Well I mentioned how you can accomplish that now already - just not subscribe to those communities, or use Feeds that incorporate them. I suppose it’s a hard job to make an entire Threadiverse platform so I can only guess what underlying reasons Rimu may have for not wanting to implement the model you described to streamline that process.
Someone already mentioned what is going on in the OP.
In addition, PieFed has categories of communities and user-customizeable and shareable Feeds, allowing you to both have your cake and eat it too by expanding upon the binary choices of merely “Subscribed” vs. “All”. e.g. you could unsubscribe from news communities to remove all that from your Subscribed Feed, yet still see all News & Politics communities at the touch of a button (or what I do is subscribe to far fewer, more highly selective communities, but then I still have access to a wider selection whenever I switch over to that specific Feed).
The only way to do that with Lemmy was to have one account per topic area that you wanted to highlight focus on. Which since Blaze already had one account per instance (for the aforementioned issue of reports not federating), he used that alt army to achieve. Think like: one account for politics, another for memes, one for the weekend, one for evenings, a different for mornings, etc. (A major downside is that I for one can never remember which one to tag him with, at any given time!🥴😉🤔)
Lemmy will eventually add multi-communities, although it may take a year for the updated code to trickle its way through all the various instances, particularly Lemmy.World. Meanwhile, PieFed has already had this feature for nearly that same length of time, and a year from now I expect it will be even better!
(There is a friendly rivalry between Lemmy and PieFed - they are roughly equivalent in terms of feature sets and polish now, with each having areas wherein they shine and other areas that we put up with while awaiting improvements. Here is a list of PieFed features in relation to Lemmy - such lists are difficult to keep updated since PieFed adds new features roughly weekly, e.g. now we have emoji reactions. Eventually PieFed will surpass Lemmy by far since its usage of the extremely common Python language rather than Rust that is the polar opposite enables many more contributors to help tinker with it.)
I want the ability for finer grained blocking to block just comms but not users from an instance. Unfortunately my request for it seems to have pissed Rimu off ideologically.
I am not sure why you would need that myself? The entire model of using PieFed can be different from how using Lemmy. Using the latter you mostly end up having to use All and then block just tons and tons of communities that you don’t want to see (and then keep doing that over and over again as new ones get created), but PieFed’s capability to use categories of communities and user-customizeable and shareable Feeds opens up while new vistas of control.
You can, for instance, simply unsubscribe from let’s just spitball here by saying all of those huge major communities from Lemmy.World (but better than that, you could keep some without having to deal with such broad brush strokes as “all” or “none”), yet you can still view content from those communities anytime you want to, in the category Feeds. This makes the Subscribed Feed on your main landing page actually fully usable to find content most of the time, unlike on Lemmy where attempting to do that gets so difficult.
Plus there’s tons of other filtering options as well, including by keywords (here too there are options to filter out not only “All” or “None” of the specified keyword, but there’s another option to allow just “Some” of that content through, at a low level), or hide controversial content based on number of downvotes (I have this disabled, but it’s there for anyone who needs it!), and so on.
So you can have what you want without needing to fully “block” them, as you would have had to have done on Lemmy, where the only available options are basically yes or no, yet on PieFed there are so many additional nuances possible, that it doesn’t really make sense to implement a new feature for something that we all routinely do anyway, but in a manner that is fully customized to our individual needs? But e.g. someone could make a shared Feed that accomplishes essentially this goal, so that everyone could benefit from that endeavor.
Does any of this make sense? Having used Lemmy for years now, I think I see why you are asking about it, but also knowing PieFed well, I see why he might say that you don’t “need” it, given everything else that would also accomplish that goal instead, and in a less “harsh” manner than a full block (but ofc feel free to block whatever communities you want to as well - a year ago the latter feature did not exist yet, an oversight, but it absolutely works just fine nowadays).
The obvious reason, which you’ve probably guessed, is that I want to block the tankie trio and not interact in their communities. I would however like to interact with .ml users since I don’t want to reinforce the echo chamber the admins are building.
Here’s the thing, the ability to block instances is already implemented. It currently gives you the option to fully block the instance (comms and users) or block just users. I want to block just comms, and given the existing feature set it can’t be much more complicated than adding an extra option to that list and a couple of extra conditions in the filter. Hardly a huge programming task.
Rimu was pretty clear in his response to my request that he did not agree with my intended usage model, and as such would not implement it, despite it being a simple change. I have no idea why he gets ideologically insistent on random stuff, but I’ve heard from others I trust that he’s done it on other topics on occasion.
Well I mentioned how you can accomplish that now already - just not subscribe to those communities, or use Feeds that incorporate them. I suppose it’s a hard job to make an entire Threadiverse platform so I can only guess what underlying reasons Rimu may have for not wanting to implement the model you described to streamline that process.