PieFed looks so amazing! And it is fantastic how it continues to be developed more all the time.

Though it still lacks numerous features found on Lemmy - e.g. being able to search for users (I tried searching for one of my favorite people to talk to, lvxferre, and many variations such as @lvxferre@mander.xyz, but piefed.social came up with nothing - it seems to search only within the text fields, and I saw nothing in any of the dropdowns to look for a “user”, or a “community”, etc.). Likewise I tried to find existing posts in that search bar - e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/21055894 “Lemmy’s gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.” but again could not. Another one is that the frontend UI needs some polish, e.g. on this post I literally cannot see the name of the community (no matter how far I zoom out), only that it begins with “[META] Piefe…” (oh wait no, now I see, at https://ponder.cat/post/326806 - that’s the name of the post? but then why is it repeated like that, in tiny font, right next to / above the huge font, and also cut off - wouldn’t it make more sense to just stop the list at “Communities@ponder.cat”? or if it is important enough to add, then not to cut it off?)

Minor issues of polish aside, the USA election season is coming up so… this makes me wonder: can you block users from a given list of instances using PieFed? e.g. if I wanted to block users, and I mean all of communities, posts, comments, even voting if possible - basically I want a defederation action, but will take a user-level block if that is all I can get. People might be able to engender this behavior with keywords, but the key would be to allow things like a discussion of the firefox@lemmy.ml community name, while blocking the users from that instance name - and yet given the above issue of not being able to search for users at all, my guess is that keyword-based blocking would do the exact opposite of that? (cutting out posts that just happen to contain the instance name, while allowing the users free reign so long as their posts do not contain the instance name)

Either way, I do so look forward to the development of this fantastic Lemmy alternative, which nonetheless federates with it plus so much else besides!:-)

  • OpenStarsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Thank you so much for this detailed and highly informative answer. Yes it should be made easier to be found, but honestly just knowing that it’s possible is the main thing - e.g. to help convince users to try out PieFed as opposed to e.g. Tesseract or Sublinks or Mbin.

    I can’t go any further without an account myself, so can I ask: do you know if this only blocks all the communities from that instance - in an analogous manner as Lemmy’s user-blocking of communities works (e.g. I cannot even type out firefox@lemmy.ml and have that expand to a link anymore, after user-blocking lemmy.ml) - or if it also blocks especially the comments from those users in other posts?

    The latter is the key part of all of this, especially on PieFed where community discovery is already so much easier that people don’t really need to browse All (or whatever equivalent) anymore. Nothing will ever be perfect ofc, but if such comments could be blocked then it would help act as a toxicity blocker to reduce someone’s friction on the Fediverse.