Well I know a way but you won’t like it. Actually two ways.
The first is to start your own PieFed server instance. The second is to message an existing person who admins one to add it. Whenever I add new communities, like !AskUSA@discuss.online, it just goes under the generic Home -> Communities, while in comparison !AskLemmy@Lemmy.World goes underneath Home -> Topics -> Chilling and so that’s where AskUSA should have gone as well.
Perhaps in the future, whoever brings in a community could make a suggestion as to which Topic areas it should lie underneath, but PieFed is fairly early in its development and thus kind of “polish” is still being added. But for now, it’s something that is predefined by whoever admins the instance.
The good news is that the devs & admins are EXTREMELY responsive, both in speed and concern for what they are making. Like, if you ask for it, there’s a very good chance its prioritization would be increased over other things to get it working faster. Here’s an example post of mine showing such conversation: https://piefed.social/post/301249.
Oh and perhaps I misunderstood you - something like a text listing of them should be available within the code itself, if that’s what you meant? Or there’s https://piefed.social/topics - is that what you mean? I just noticed that the way to access this list changed just today or yesterday I think - this page used to exist but it was also a drop down list as well (that never worked right in my desktop browser, though did on a mobile), so if it is being difficult lately that is likely why:-).
Though beware if you are considering making PieFed your daily driver: it helps if you know your way around Lemmy and have a backup account for when you can’t get things done using PieFed. Searching for instance is not great, so trying to find a post I usually do with Lemmy rather than PieFed. Another is that Notifications are more than a little bit broken: e.g. your very comment reply to me here I had an extremely difficult time trying to find - I read through every comment on this thread before finding yours in fact. The reasons this can happen are many and varied: posts that later get removed still remain in your Notifications area, as do users from instances that you have blocked, and if a comment is buried too deeply in the chain in a post then you’ll need to click the Continue thread button, except you won’t know which one of those to click in the first place, also a comment can be auto-collapsed or even hidden, frustratingly even if it was not at the time you replied but then that happened later then you similarly to these other situations won’t be taken right to it when you click the notification. Honestly sometimes I’ll go to Lemmy, visit the post, and search for my name and see all the people who replied to me, then walk up the chain to see some text to search for, then switch back to PieFed to actually do the reply… So anyway: TLDR: PieFed is quite interesting, and I do use it for my daily driver, but it can also be quite frustrating until some of these more foundational issues are fixed.
That said, PieFed already can do more than Lemmy, in so many ways. For one, I can have it send me a notification upon every single new post in a community or my choosing, like !tenforward@lemmy.world and !
AskUSA@discuss.online, and for another, if I wanted I could have it cease sending me notifications for a comment that I made if people decide to relentlessly troll me for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards (this is no mere hypothetical situation: both hexbear and Lemmygrad have done this exact thing to me). I can also view a post without having to read any comments at all from users posting from an instance of my own choosing - instance blocking is horrible misnamed on Lemmy and does next to nothing along those lines, while defederation is dependent upon an admin, except that PieFed puts that ability to choose into the hands of its users. That alone made me want to choose it, but everything else is does is great too! Caveat: so long as I can fall back onto Lemmy when I need to.
Also PieFed has next to no moderation tools, so there’s a lot that is still coming.:-) I am definitely here for it!:-)
Yeah I don’t think you quite got me. When you first start you choose topics you like and I would like to be able to go back and select more or deselect ones I previously selected. I really like what they seem to be trying to do but it is limited. You can join communities but not block them or block topics. This would be huge for me because I have no interest in sports so I block all sports communities but if I could block sports as a topic that would be really useful. I do like that they have the keyword thing. Especially short term. Sometimes something happens in the news and its like you don’t want the clutter from the barrage of articles.
I think that initial sign-up even if it mentioned that it was for topic areas, was actually joining you to communities? (Bc the actual “Topic” areas seems to be invariable) I mean, based on those Topic areas that you selected, it Joined you to Communities that will fill up your All feed.
You can now “leave” a community at any time, and while this doesn’t seem to block it from showing up in the Topic areas list - more’s the pity, bc it really should - it at least stops it from showing up in the All feed. And ofc you can (re-)join other Communities as well.
So as we are seeing, things tend to work slightly differently than Lemmy.:-) What I find helpful is how my entire “workflow” is different on it: since Lemmy doesn’t even offer Notifications for posts from communities, for those where there are only like 0-3 posts per day, I prefer receiving those Notifications rather than have to “find” the communities as I would have done in Lemmy. Like, this works much better than hoping that they show up in a Feed somewhere, especially when a community is small like !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world. Then again, this would work better for someone who checks things daily, although… there is a “Mark all as read” button as well.
On Lemmy I used to browse All rather than Subscribed, but on PieFed I usually use a combination of Notifications and rarely browsing All or like when I want a concentration of news stories (ahem, even from communities that I’ve “Left” even:-), then that is available as well. This whole aspect of PieFed really works much better for me overall, though indeed it took quite some getting used to it at first to discover what was possible and have to re-think my workflow. I hope this description helps you think through what may work best for you, or perhaps you’ll just copy this.:-)
Well I know a way but you won’t like it. Actually two ways.
The first is to start your own PieFed server instance. The second is to message an existing person who admins one to add it. Whenever I add new communities, like !AskUSA@discuss.online, it just goes under the generic Home -> Communities, while in comparison !AskLemmy@Lemmy.World goes underneath Home -> Topics -> Chilling and so that’s where AskUSA should have gone as well.
Perhaps in the future, whoever brings in a community could make a suggestion as to which Topic areas it should lie underneath, but PieFed is fairly early in its development and thus kind of “polish” is still being added. But for now, it’s something that is predefined by whoever admins the instance.
The good news is that the devs & admins are EXTREMELY responsive, both in speed and concern for what they are making. Like, if you ask for it, there’s a very good chance its prioritization would be increased over other things to get it working faster. Here’s an example post of mine showing such conversation: https://piefed.social/post/301249.
Oh and perhaps I misunderstood you - something like a text listing of them should be available within the code itself, if that’s what you meant? Or there’s https://piefed.social/topics - is that what you mean? I just noticed that the way to access this list changed just today or yesterday I think - this page used to exist but it was also a drop down list as well (that never worked right in my desktop browser, though did on a mobile), so if it is being difficult lately that is likely why:-).
Though beware if you are considering making PieFed your daily driver: it helps if you know your way around Lemmy and have a backup account for when you can’t get things done using PieFed. Searching for instance is not great, so trying to find a post I usually do with Lemmy rather than PieFed. Another is that Notifications are more than a little bit broken: e.g. your very comment reply to me here I had an extremely difficult time trying to find - I read through every comment on this thread before finding yours in fact. The reasons this can happen are many and varied: posts that later get removed still remain in your Notifications area, as do users from instances that you have blocked, and if a comment is buried too deeply in the chain in a post then you’ll need to click the Continue thread button, except you won’t know which one of those to click in the first place, also a comment can be auto-collapsed or even hidden, frustratingly even if it was not at the time you replied but then that happened later then you similarly to these other situations won’t be taken right to it when you click the notification. Honestly sometimes I’ll go to Lemmy, visit the post, and search for my name and see all the people who replied to me, then walk up the chain to see some text to search for, then switch back to PieFed to actually do the reply… So anyway: TLDR: PieFed is quite interesting, and I do use it for my daily driver, but it can also be quite frustrating until some of these more foundational issues are fixed.
That said, PieFed already can do more than Lemmy, in so many ways. For one, I can have it send me a notification upon every single new post in a community or my choosing, like !tenforward@lemmy.world and !
AskUSA@discuss.online, and for another, if I wanted I could have it cease sending me notifications for a comment that I made if people decide to relentlessly troll me for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards (this is no mere hypothetical situation: both hexbear and Lemmygrad have done this exact thing to me). I can also view a post without having to read any comments at all from users posting from an instance of my own choosing - instance blocking is horrible misnamed on Lemmy and does next to nothing along those lines, while defederation is dependent upon an admin, except that PieFed puts that ability to choose into the hands of its users. That alone made me want to choose it, but everything else is does is great too! Caveat: so long as I can fall back onto Lemmy when I need to.
Also PieFed has next to no moderation tools, so there’s a lot that is still coming.:-) I am definitely here for it!:-)
Yeah I don’t think you quite got me. When you first start you choose topics you like and I would like to be able to go back and select more or deselect ones I previously selected. I really like what they seem to be trying to do but it is limited. You can join communities but not block them or block topics. This would be huge for me because I have no interest in sports so I block all sports communities but if I could block sports as a topic that would be really useful. I do like that they have the keyword thing. Especially short term. Sometimes something happens in the news and its like you don’t want the clutter from the barrage of articles.
I think that initial sign-up even if it mentioned that it was for topic areas, was actually joining you to communities? (Bc the actual “Topic” areas seems to be invariable) I mean, based on those Topic areas that you selected, it Joined you to Communities that will fill up your All feed.
You can now “leave” a community at any time, and while this doesn’t seem to block it from showing up in the Topic areas list - more’s the pity, bc it really should - it at least stops it from showing up in the All feed. And ofc you can (re-)join other Communities as well.
So as we are seeing, things tend to work slightly differently than Lemmy.:-) What I find helpful is how my entire “workflow” is different on it: since Lemmy doesn’t even offer Notifications for posts from communities, for those where there are only like 0-3 posts per day, I prefer receiving those Notifications rather than have to “find” the communities as I would have done in Lemmy. Like, this works much better than hoping that they show up in a Feed somewhere, especially when a community is small like !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world. Then again, this would work better for someone who checks things daily, although… there is a “Mark all as read” button as well.
On Lemmy I used to browse All rather than Subscribed, but on PieFed I usually use a combination of Notifications and rarely browsing All or like when I want a concentration of news stories (ahem, even from communities that I’ve “Left” even:-), then that is available as well. This whole aspect of PieFed really works much better for me overall, though indeed it took quite some getting used to it at first to discover what was possible and have to re-think my workflow. I hope this description helps you think through what may work best for you, or perhaps you’ll just copy this.:-)