PieFed and Lemmy.

I appreciate so much PieFed’s ability to offer a true instance block:-)

Subscribed! I had no idea that existed…

Which only bolster my point further: these communities need to be pointed to from instance sidebars to be truly effective.

There is also some overlap with [email protected] if we are talking about PieFed specifically.

You are a treasure… - and places such as the [email protected] community are helpful as well - but a post or community that you need to find somewhere first is not the same as an official explanation offered to everyone (to clarify my earlier statement, I meant that nobody “officially” explains this to all newcomers).

Here for instance is the entirety of the sidebar text of OP’s instance, which again has a full-page advertisement to donate to the further developement of the Lemmy sourcecode (+ the hidden activity of time spent administering that heavily political instance), plus multiple additional links to donate, yet seems to me to lack an explanation of e.g. “hexbear”.

A Lemmy instance operated by ex-Reddit moderators from the StarTrek, Risa, and Daystrom Institute communities Support us on Patreon! Our Communities c/StarTrek: General Star Trek news and discussion c/DaystromInstitute: Serious, in-depth Star Trek discussion c/Risa: Star Trek memes and shitposts c/StarTrekOnline: Star Trek Online discussion, tips, and tricks c/GreatestGen: For fans of the Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts c/DoctorWho: Doctor Who news and discussion c/Quarks: Instance Meta and off-topic chat Alternative UIs https://old.startrek.website/ - A nostalgic UI https://vger.startrek.website/ - A mobile web UI Thinking of creating an account on our instance? Click here to read what to expect from us. All communities on this instance follow the principle of IDIC. Read our mission-statement and terms of service here. Follow our Mastodon account for updates, scheduled maintenance, etc.

Nor did I see it mentioned anywhere on https://wiki.startrek.website/books/startrekwebsite/page/what-to-expect-with-an-account-on-startrekwebsite. To be fair, hexbear.net is now defederated from it, as too is lemmygrad.ml, but this was not always so in the past, and this was one of the reasons I left that instance long ago. Though conversely, instances that still federate with hexbear.net, such as lemmy.zip, do not seem to offer any warnings either?

Lemmy can be a highly toxic place. The maximum here seems much worse than Reddit, even though the average (discounting certain instances) is much much lower. Lemmy can be cleaned up by blocking toxic people, whereas on Reddit that endeavor is just a lost cause.

Which is why I am placing my hopes for the Threadiverse not in Lemmy but in PieFed, one of its many features that Lemmy lacks being the automatic labeling of toxic users - they can still say whatever they want, but their reputation now precedes them.

It’s in the sidebar!!! /s

Noice - subscribed! :-)

And it does. Then they seem shocked - Shocked I say, SHOOKETH! - when the same behavior that gets them many upvotes in their home instance is met with… “resistance” outside of their echo chambers.

Blocking hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, or lemmy.ml will improve people’s experiences on the Threadiverse by 90% - while blocking all 3 raises that to >99.99%, although self-admitted alt accounts on more standard instances (such as [email protected]) remain to have to be blocked one by one.

Nobody explains any of this to newcomers of course, which helps (it seems to me) explain the high rate of people leaving. Your instance https://startrek.website/ even has a huge, full-page advertisement from the Lemmy developers Nutomic and Dessalines, the latter at least seems to spend a great deal of his time moderating the users of a highly contentious political instance rather than editing the Lemmy sourcecode. i.e. a donation to that team goes a long way towards contributing to the formation of those very same echo chambers that drive Redditors away from the platform, rather than donations to the codebase being separate from donations to the lemmy.ml instance itself. I am not making this political - they are the ones who already made it political, I am just reporting that fact.

Feel free to be a part of the change that you would like to see. There are tons of uplifting communities. Examples of news ones include: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], (though [email protected] seems dead now) and specifically for positive memes there is [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc.

And this is just specifically for positivity - there is also even more tons of niche content that is fairly positive or at least a lot more rarely negative like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and on and on.

It also helps to block the entire instances of hexbear and lemmy.ml - to see why, just visit them and show Local content without being logged in. Their ideas of “positivity” include beheadings of anyone who has a bank account i.e. who remotely participates in society. Okay then, that’s their choice I guess… but you don’t have to participate in the 4chan-like experience.

Yeah, people can be fairly negative, but you can choose what you see. Tbf, it helps to use PieFed’s far more robust set of tools than Lemmy e.g. a keyword blocker and a true instance block (rather than mere community mute) if you so choose.

Welp, back to the bots!

It helps to block whole entire instances. Some innocents may get caught up in that, but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make.

I would have naively thought that Europeans would be the plurality? But if you mean from any one particular nation then that makes sense.

Part of what the Threadiverse provides is the ability to make for ourselves whatever we want - and if someone wants to make a community that showcases solely news from within the USA while excluding all external news, or vice versa, then they can do that? The creator + mod can do whatever they want, subject only to admin rules of the instance that they choose, and if they spin up their own then they can even adjust those.

So even if they “should not” want that, nevertheless if people did want something different, then the power of the Threadiverse provides that ability? Of course it is a bit different to demand that someone else go through all the effort - and likely be doxxed and receive literal death threats for their trouble - but that’s a separate issue.

So my point above was that exactly what OP asked - “There should a seperate place for US news” - already exists. I agree with you though that OP was not terribly precise in asking for whatever it is that they actually wanted: for [email protected] to feature news from outside the US? (the current posts that show up on it right now using the default sorting method of Active are things like: “Thieves steal crown jewels in 4 minutes from Louvre Museum”, “Trump suggests US will buy Argentinian beef to bring down prices for American consumers”, “Greenland chooses French satellites over Elon Musk’s Starlink”, etc. - I am not saying that USA-internal news does not exist there obviously just that it is only one part of the news that that specific community chooses to host, which is their decision but nobody needs to be bound by that as they can always just seek out different communities that meet their needs better?) Maybe they want communities to exist for other places - like [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected], or [email protected], or more amalgamation-type ones such as [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected].

Heck, there is even a community literally called [email protected] that says specifically: “This is the place for anything but US politics.” People can do whatever they want - note that it may require some amount of effor though.

And I need to add that I am just laughing here over on PieFed. We have had user & post flairs for half a year now already, merging of comments across all cross-posts for slightly longer, and we’ve even had features such as the “Topic/Feeds” that combine different sources of news across multiple communities, and keyword filtering, for well over a year now. So very much of the difficulty in using Lemmy stems from the technology behind very behind that of Reddit, as if that kind of fully-featured thing could be developed from scratch, plus add ActivityPub integration allowing federation, and an API, all for free, in a short amount of time, plus having to do so using a highly niche language such as Rust. But Rimu did it, and post flairs and/or keyword filtering seems like exactly the kind of thing that would give OP exactly what they wanted: the ability to block out all posts of a certain type that they do not enjoy seeing, while still not having to do any work at all to either moderate a community (especially about a heavily contentious subject matter such as this!) or to create one or even to move to a different one. Which is why this post reads to me more like schadenfreude than anything else. So… okay then, ignore all the efforts being done to improve the Threadiverse, and rather simply complain, if that’s what OP wants, I guess?

Such places do exist though? e.g. [email protected] says:

Any politics anywhere in the world. Inevitably it’ll be 99% US stuff, but that’s not a rule.

And there’s [email protected]:

Welcome to [email protected], where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.

And [email protected]:

News about and pertaining to the United States and its people.

There also used to be [email protected] and [email protected], although both were on instances that no longer exist.

Also, “World” communities outside of Lemmy.World do a MUCH better job of allowing USA news but not letting it dominate the feeds - e.g. [email protected].

You may want to broaden your horizons beyond only those large communities on Lemmy.World - especially since those subscriber stats are fake (the Users / month are likely better but the Subscriber counts in particular include accounts of people who tried Lemmy for a brief time before noping back to Reddit, never to return). An analogy: leave the toxic sheeple to argue over how to fix their Windows machines, while you embrace the beauty of learning to use Linux - it takes some slightest of effort on your part, but you will be glad that you did.

The same. e.g. the first community I tried - [email protected] - has as its first post a video from a non-YouTube source, https://lostpod.space/w/qqcZQw6bN1EC8DFp55ciSF, and its preview is the same width. That community seems not federated with your feddit.org, but you can see on PieFed.Social in both List and Tile views the preview is quite wide. This is on a desktop though - I don’t know how it would look in any particular app, and it might look different in a mobile browser but in Firefox on Android it likewise is presented in a very wide view

So… another year then?

I meant that the … whatever to call them - “previews” does not seem quite right? - on PieFed are enormous, very wide. Although I suppose the example I gave was not the best to show that… since it went straight the post itself where Lemmy also shows the larger preview image.

The community view on Lemmy has just the tiny little “thumbnails”, whereas on PieFed the same view has much wider previews - even in the Tile rather than List view, which is a setting that the community mods can choose the default for.

I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried with Lemmy. The best I found that I could hope for was sorting by New, but mostly I just gave up hope for it.

Until I moved to PieFed, and now the issue has multiple solutions. For one, using the Topic/Feeds (which are user-customizeable and shareable) you really can have your cake and eat it too, e.g. you can unsubscribe from all politics communities so that those do not show up on your main homepage, but an entire new feed completely dedicated to News & Politics is just a click away. Or Memes. Or Hobbies. Or Movies & TV, or any of a thousand other things - again, you can build your own, or subscribe to one that someone else has made.

And for another, for sufficiently low-traffic communities you can click the bell icon (which you can do to pretty much anything - users, posts, comments, communities, etc. - plus you can even UNCLICK that to silence notifications from your own content!!), so that you get a notification for each and every single new post to it. But, if it ever does get to be too much, you can mark all as read and/or separate the different categories of notifications from one another - community posts by others vs. replies to your own content.

PieFed really is leaving Lemmy behind in the dust, as far as features are concerned.

DYK that Lemmy now auto-plays videos WITH SOUND?!? (those links no longer work, since they were to lemm.ee that no longer exists)

Edit: PieFed has huge video thumbnails - example. I thought for sure that Tesseract did as well, but that seems broken right now.

I though that there were Lemmy spaces that do it too, but likely they use a bot to accomplish that. For it to be baked right into the PieFed code, and displayed in a consistent manner, I think is wonderfully transparent. :-)

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/43326274 https://lemmy.world/post/2498330 https://discuss.online/post/13916278 https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2017079

There are just tons of these - here is a few more.

TLDR: there is abundant evidence that Hexbear is a troll instance and it scares new people off to have to deal with them, who then ofc go to Reddit and complain how bad the Threadiverse is, thereby lessening the migration over here overall. In short, dealing with such a 4chan-like space should be opt-in rather than making people learn the hard way.

Yeah “obscure” was definitely the wrong word there - maybe “niche”?

Thank you so much for your contributions btw! In this era of disinformation, making the Threadiverse more usable can be an enormous boon:-).