OpenStars

The reason my first example wasn't a good one was that this meme community (!tech_memes@lemmy.world) wasn't part of the organized hierarchy of Home -> Topics -> Chilling -> Memes, but rather the generic Home -> Communities (as in, all of them in aggregate) -> Technology Memes@lemmy.world. So yeah, it's a very new community, although !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca is older but the same happens with it too. Therefore I assume that it requires an admin approval to bundle these "Topics" together, and it definitely doesn't strike me as something that an individual user could put together.

Then again, someone (perhaps you? or me?) could send requests to the admin to add communities to topic areas, or perhaps modify the codebase directly if it were placed into a file and people granted access (whereupon once again, the admin would have to approve - although in this case a mechanism would also be needed to assess the differences and apply them).

Anyway, there's a LOT of polish that PieFed lacks, and this doesn't even crack the top half imho, next to things like user mentions (@openstars@piefed.social) and Notifications properly taking you to the actual thing that you are being notified about (a goodly fraction of the time it does not, right now.

On the other hand, Lemmy has no such thing as "Categories" or "Topics" of any kind so... anything that PieFed has along these lines is surely better than the nothing that exists in that regard there, right?

I mean, most beings never get immortalized at all so... there's also that to consider as well:-).🦖

I haven't looked but that's great to know as well:-).

And honestly, it may really help Mastodon out if people join it specifically to get at the content here.

Also note that "blocking" it doesn't actually "block" much of anything at all - it stops you from seeing the communities located on that instance, but the users will still appear in posts all across the Fediverse, sending their harassing messages to you, pinging your Notifications every time they reply to you, downvoting your own comments, etc. The instance block function is horribly misnamed.

If you want to avoid this kind of thing, I second that recommendation to try Lemmy.cafe - it is the only Lemmy instance that defederates from the Big 3: hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml. The latter one is like 1000x easier to deal with than hexbear, yet still nearly all of the most batshit insane comments I've received on Lemmy after defederating from the other two have come from it - and for similar reasons that they get used to how things work inside their echo chamber, and then behave the same way when they venture outside of it - so I consider having defederated from it too worthwhile overall. Although you will miss out on some content such as !Firefox@lemmy.ml that way.

Same.

Though there's a feature request for that where db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com said that he would be excited to work on!:-)

And uses less data - helpful for using a mobile data plan. Those numbers shown in the article are all the more impressive even for sending 5x more posts on the home screen than Lemmy's default, even while still sending >4/5 less data - i.e. it's more like sending roughly only 1/25th the data per post, if I'm reading that right.

Yes really. Here's an example - see the communities at the top, and hashtags at the bottom.

On second thought, that's not a fantastic example of categories, so here and here are better ones.

There's a lot that is not yet implemented in PieFed, like no preview feature for writing messages or user tagging (e.g. @openstars@piefed.social does not send me a notification), yet it already has several features that Lemmy does not - it's so exciting to watch it develop!:-)

TLDR: just as eating too much processed foods leads to obesity of the body, consuming too much Big Tech processed social media leads to mental rot.

It would be better to focus on quality ingredients.

Interesting, I think they legitimately don't know what they'll do instead:

"Strictly speaking, there are no alternatives to what X offers today," Vincent Berthier, head of the technology department at RSF (Reporters Without Borders) told AFP.

"But we may need to invent them."

I imagine they'll end up on Bluesky, possibly also on Mastodon?

I really like the approach taken by PieFed to provide greater transparency in the decision-making process, and enable the users to make their own determinations rather than solely the binary yes-no to removing vs. retaining content.

As one example, allowing people to block users, communities, or even whole entire instances, in a true way rather than Lemmy's way that calls itself an "instance block" but then acts as a mere "community mute".

And then further to turn off notifications for individual items, which allows people to cool off rather than have to resort to jumping straight to the ban-hammer (I am trying to be funny there, but really an individual cannot "ban" anyone, so I mean block:-).

And a big one: auto-collapsing and even auto-hiding comments based on the content's number of downvotes. If someone wants to click to expand it, then they are free to do so - and I've completely disabled the auto-hide feature for myself, by putting in a number of 10000 for the threshold - or not as they please. I would hope that the UI tools will get better in that regard, e.g. right now if you reply to someone and then receive a notification, it won't auto-expand back out the auto-collapsed entries, so you really have to hunt around for what the notification was trying to direct you to (though not as bad as the more deeply embedded "Continue thread" where the notification tries to take you to something that isn't even on the same page!). But even moderate implementation issues aside (of a very recently-added feature ofc), the theory is wonderful!:-)

And potentially even bigger: placing a label next to a person based on their "reputation" score, or even for a whole entire instance (e.g. Beehaw), so that someone does not walk into a conversation with them unawares. They still have every right and ability to, just... hey, they were warned, you know?:-P

A democratization of moderation, yeah it sure sounds nice:-) - ofc it still needs some "hard" limits such as spam and NSFL content that needs to flat be REMOVED as quickly as possible, but providing automated tools that allow for an entire spectrum of ability to engage or not engage with content is... just wow. So exciting, and futuristic, especially compared to the likes of the hard-nosed Reddit mods (and I say this as someone who was one of them, for two small communities - there really were only the 2 choices, and it sure would have been nice to have had more options to be able to choose from, between "allow" vs. "remove"!:-).