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
Are they using a 3rd party app like Voyager? It makes a big difference.
most of them no, which is maybe another issue of not showing that’s an option, but really the default UIs need to be good
The reddit UI sucked in the past and sucks more now. The main reason that reddit grew was because of the incredible apps that 3rd parties made like RiF.
Lemmy now has a bunch of mature and efficient apps that are easy to use.
A couple of the apps were even made by reddit app devs that abandoned the platform. So some of the lemmy/piefed apps are literally those remade.
Well, the platform abandoned them.
RiF is the worst example possible of better UI and “incredible”, it was always the ugliest and least nice to use reddit app by far, IMO.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone could stand it, it was like trying to use some shitty win95 shovelware compared to most others. Easily one of the ugliest apps I’ve ever seen too.
Yes, but it WORKED!
In contrast, I tried out Summit that easily looks to be the most beautiful Lemmy app that I’ve seen, but there were so many times when I had to switch back to the browser web UI to get something done that I gave it up in favor of Voyager.
Which despite being one of the most fully-featured ones, still has a ton of limitations.
I suppose I understand, it’s a chicken and egg problem where app devs don’t want to spend unlimited time working on an app that only like 100 people are ever going to use, while at the same time people aren’t going to come to the Threadiverse if the UI/UX is poor.
Blue alien was the one reddit bought it, made it their official app and ruined it
I use Voyager and I feel like it’s easy enough to use and has a great UI.
Sometimes I just use Lemmy with Firefox and that’s when I feel a tad lost. It’s still useable if you put the effort, but it’s clearly not as intuitive as Voyager.
So maybe the Lemmy browser UI should be improved. Also it would be good to have an official Lemmy app for mobile phones as people can get lost with choices.
The problem with the Fediverse is always the onboarding and understanding the basics. Peertube or Lemmy are great but really intimidating for non geeky people.
Also the lack of some content can be problematic. On Lemmy I can find almost everything I want even if some comminities are almost dead, but on Peertube I can only satisfy 1 out of my 4 point of interest (Basketball, Cars and game reviews being the missing one and Linux being the fullfiled one).
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?
well to be honest, I haven’t done any thorough research on the topic, but I know I haven’t personnaly blocked anyone on PieFed since it was my first day and my first post on it.
For now, especially because I can’t find a mobile app with an UI similar to Voyager, I think I’ll stay on Lemmy unless PieFed makes major progress.
Edit: although I’m now noticing that the Progressive Web App has an UI I appreciate more than Interstellar’s, so I’ll give it a shot😇
Edit2: it turns out that PieFed was already blocking 4 instances without me doing anything, so that’s why some comments were missing.
Voyager support Piefed
Oh wow, which ones are blocked automatically?
It seems like PieFed.social is quite opinionated, which is a fact that has not been made transparent to the community - e.g. I have a PieFed.social account myself, and I had no idea that these blocks were there (also, they aren’t present for me).
But that’s the instance itself - the software PieFed or its fork PyLova are outstanding, and definitely superior to Lemmy, even though your choice of instance admin matters far more than choice of software platform.
If you did leave PieFed.social - not that I am recommending that you do, especially now that you see how to remove the blocks, which solves your immediate issue - then I recommend checking out PieFed.zip or PieFed.ca as both having outstanding instance admin teams that take good care of their users. e.g. PieFed.zip also has a couple of instance blocks placed onto your account when you join, but you are sent a message explaining what these are, and importantly how to remove them, not leaving you guessing what is going on.
Again I am really curious which instances were blocked automatically for you, on PieFed.social?
One more note: Lemmy.ml is notorious for being an echo chamber as well, instance banning MANY people over the years, so the fact that PieFed.social has lately become similar is not a strike against the PieFed software platform itself anymore than lemmy.ml’s choices would be a strike against you having an account on some other instance like sh.itjust.works.
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.
maybe but this is accurate
lol
Made me chuckle
Thank you for the “feedback” ☺️
(The title of the OP…)
Even if they aren’t. The interface isn’t that bad. More just different. It takes some adjustment. Although there 100% is an old threaded like interface for lemmy at least. But that’s an issue for Discovery and presentation.
The PieFed UI is strange but more or workable, aside from some things like trying to view a downvote count being incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible. Try writing a long comment in a Lemmy browser interface - it jumps and skips wildly every time you make another key press, it’s horrible. Though it looks beautiful when you use it read-only.
Voyager offers a much nicer UX. Though then 90% of PieFed extra features aren’t workable, with 100% of them being inaccessible from within the app.
This place is hella confusing to non-technical normies.
Honestly I comment mostly from voyager and post mostly from piefed. I hadn’t really noticed that. But I guess that can be chalked up to posting much less. I will have to pay attention more next time I do.
PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice of admin team is far more important than platform software, I believe.
That said, PieFed.World in particular always struck me as an unfinished test project - probably bc the Topic Feeds at https://piefed.world/topics are so bare-bones. That is one of the most-requested features that PieFed offers but PW seems to basically ignore them?
Anyway from Voyager you’ll never see them in any case:-).
I think there may only be tens of us using the piefed.world interface. It very much is an afterthought. Even the official Mastodon account linked to it hasn’t posted in a couple years lol. I have a piefed.social account as well. Though honestly I’m considering trying to spin up my own small personal instance.
PW has nearly 900 users total of which 200 are active as of this past month - it’s small but solid.
There’s a ton of communities, which have like no or next to no posts - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/wednesday, https://piefed.world/c/snl.
A lot of the content there seems populated exclusively by bots - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/tech, https://piefed.world/c/shit, https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles, etc.
TenForward is an excellent example: compare the PW version at https://piefed.world/c/tenforward to the LW version and there simply is no comparison at all.
It just overall looks like a test that was never finished. Perhaps Rimu scared the LW admin team away. If so, maybe the PyLova development could be an option?
PieFed/PyLova definitely looks ready to be used to make a new instance - if you take the plunge, then I wish you good fortune in that endeavor! :-)
The post bots are a new thing of the last few months. Look at the mod on almost all those communities. Came in and set up shop a while back. To take advantage of the low activity.
I don’t have anything against post bots explicitly or modding multiple communities. I have two. However there should be limits
So long as they are labeled as such, I have no issues with it. The intent seems more than clearly to aid rather than deceive.