I believe I understand it. To clarify:

The normal Thunder app works perfectly with Lemmy instances. I’ve got it and while I haven’t registered my account with it yet, it works very well even as a guest to read content - it’s a great app!:-)

There is also a fork for the app, designed specifically for testing purposes, which only works atm (iirc) for a single PieFed instance. This fork no longer works with any Lemmy instances, nor any instances of PieFed either that aren’t running the API code. So it’s testing the backend and frontend connections, requiring specializations on both ends to work at all.

When all of that is done, the fork can be requested to be merged into the main branch, and become a standard feature of Thunder, to work either with Lemmy or with PieFed instances.

But notably, getting to what I thought you meant: PieFed itself still connects perfectly to Lemmy, due to its implementation of the ActivityPub protocol (and Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, and whatever else may also use that same ActivityPub protocol to share content).

I hope this explanation helps at least a little!:-)

PieFed has not merely several but MANY concepts along these lines.

Lemmy, for ah… “reasons”, seems to have none. In fact, having a modlog but no modmail, nor any type of active notification of a moderation event occuring (e.g. content removal, locking, or banning), nor any method of asking whoever removed the content why (worse: the modlog used to say the account name that did so, but now merely says “mod”), there is a very compelling argument to say that Lemmy is more authoritian than even Reddit is, at least at the end-user level (though not for instance admins or mods).

Edit: At which point PieFed’s efforts to provide democratization of moderation are like a breath of fresh air!:-) No longer must a mod+admin team be the sole arbitraters of content - users can themselves do things like filter out all, or just a little, or none of content matching certain keywords such as “Musk” or “Trump”. And icons next to usernames help alleviate the need to always block trolls - seeing that someone has an account less than two weeks old, or posts far more than they comment (unregistered bot?), or receives many more downvotes than upvotes (contentious user!) helps inform whether or how you may want to respond, while still allowing you to read their content if you should so desire. Such tools as these (and several others) put the choice of whether to see many varieties of content or not into the hands of individual users, unlike the Lemmy + Reddit model where only a mod+admin gets to decide for everyone in the community all at once. Okay so here’s another one: if you wish, you can have PieFed automatically collapse, or even hide outright (two different settings, with different filter thresholds) content that receives many downvotes. Personally I don’t like these so I turn them both off - but they still offer me that choice, which I greatly appreciate.:-)

What do you mean?

First, there’s a version of Thunder available on the App Store.

And second, PieFed offers better service in its web browser interface than any Lemmy instance I’ve seen, and most apps too. Like, Voyager is pretty awesome and a strong contender for best Lemmy app (especially among FOSS options), but it doesn’t have categories of communities, hashtag support, user customizable and shareable Feeds (like multi-Reddits), cross posting that shows all comments merged into one view, etc. and a lot of features that it does have can be quite buried within the interface. e.g. to read the rules of a community you have to navigate to it, then click the hamburger menu and choose the side-bar option, whereas on PieFed the rules are displayed directly underneath every single post, so all you have to do is scroll.

Now, mind you, the standard Thunder app won’t work yet for PieFed - it’s still being tested in a forked version of the code, not committed yet to the main branch of the code. So if that’s a deal-breaker for you, then yeah you should stick with Lemmy - FOR NOW!:-D - but there is movement towards supporting that, which i think is fucking awesome 😎. Lemmy is so slow to add new features, while we get them here on PieFed basically weekly at this point.

Yes, please do!

Come to think of it, I am aware of one issue where PieFed won’t automatically pull in content when it receives a vote for it - but I discount that as being a problem bc that’s a major issue even among Lemmy instances, just in different ways. I could show you some examples where my votes on a post vary from like 200 to 0 or anywhere in-between (that particular issue was from the post being locked, which ofc I received no notification of that happening, it just screwed up the federation of it across the entire Fediverse).

Also, the issue I’m thinking of would only affect a brand-new PieFed instance, not an established one that receives the post content as it federated out. And too, the way that Lemmy would handle this would lead to improper vote counts: imagine hypothetically that a post got +1000 upvotes and only 10 downvotes, but then the moment your brand-new Lemmy instance goes online you start to receive exclusively new votes for this post, and let’s say that it receives +2 more upvotes and another 10 downvotes. In this (hypothetical) scenario, the vote counts are MAGNITUDES off from what they should be - instead of showing +983 it would show as -7, thus misrepresenting a “highly popular” post as a “fairly unpopular” one. Lemmy’s approach is to have the post but allow the vote counts to be incorrect, whereas PieFed’s approach is to not pull in the post in the first place (unless someone manually makes that determination to override - which anyone can do, though I’ve argued that this should be a feature that is slightly more hidden or at least not as readily shown to users who, like myself at the time, could unknowingly cause spread of misinformation by not knowing all of these technical details).

So it’s not that Lemmy’s way is “right” and PieFed’s is “wrong”, but rather both are kinda wrong, iirc, and yet only affecting old posts that brand-new instances are trying to work with, so very much an edge scenario.

But if there’s something I missed, yes please send me the link - I would like to be informed!:-)

It sounds like the current issue depends on what you think of having “subscribed” to content. So, I’m digressing here to talk about it first.

On Lemmy, there’s only the Local, Subscribed, and All feeds - that’s it, no more options available. And Local is virtually useless for someone who isn’t on a highly active generalized instance (like Lemmy.world) or else a very active special purpose one (like slrpnk.net or startrek.website, although even the latter would not offer the extremely active !tenforward@lemmy.world community). So for many of us, e.g. my alt account on discuss.online, and probably still most of the time for you on srlpnk.net, Local just doesn’t cut it.

While All has… issues. People report anime spam (unless you are on an instance that doesn’t federate?) and porn (this is unfair imho bc it depends on one’s NSFW setting, so gigo - Lemmy I feel like is extremely respectful of this setting), and ofc so many political and news and USA focused content. So the model is to block things that you don’t want, bc otherwise it makes All virtually unbearable to try to use. Like for me, I blocked all sports, any specific location (cities, states/provinces, nations, etc.), and other stuff that I knew for certain that I didn’t want (edit: which btw I felt was unfortunate, bc I actually would have liked to keep tabs on things happening around the world, even in places that I have never and will never visit, yet I HAD to find SOME way to reduce the flood of content on All, by focusing it a bit). And the majority of the time I browsed All actually. (Edit: one reason why is that less popular communities, such as poetry, have little chance of showing up in your Subscribed feed, so browsing All by New shows so much that Subscribed just won’t really offer, especially by Hot or Active)

But from the downvotes I often got whenever I said so, I see that the majority of people browse Subscribed (and dislike any other way that may work for others?🤪). This requires knowing about a community in order to add it, so e.g. if a community were to move, you might never know unless the mod allowed a post to state that fact (tenforward is a great example of that), and possibly not even then if you missed that post (even if it was pinned, you’d have to go there, and even then many sorting options won’t show it, like Top Six Hours).

So for Lemmy, “subscribing” means an ENORMOUS deal, basically to the point that you either see such content or else you are unlikely to ever see it - short of visiting an individual community explicitly to check it out (which I also often did:-).

But in PieFed it does not mean that at all. The model here has so many different options to expand one’s capabilities. Here, “subscribing” merely means for content to show up in the “Subscribed” main feed, but since there are multiple other avenues to be directed to content, it doesn’t have the enormous implications that subscriptions do on Lemmy. For example, if I was mod of a community or wanted to be alerted to every single post made in a community (usually those with low-volume content 😁), I can click one button to receive automated Notification alerts for that. And there’s also the default Topics as well as the user-customizable and also shareable Feeds. As well as, ofc the Subscription default main feed. But bc there’s so many more options, someone could, for instance, not subscribe to political communities or others like !askusa@discuss.online, if you wanted a reduced amount of USA-related content. And yet, that content is still accessible, bc you haven’t quite blocked it, merely not subscribed to it.

I think more choices = better. Ngl it took me over a week (maybe more) to get used to this new model, during which time I often reverted back to checking stuff on a Lemmy instance. But when I finally had it arranged how I wanted, now I REALLY appreciate these additional options!

And I don’t have any comments from anyone on Lemmy.ml showing up for me - bc I’ve blocked all users from that instance. Lemmy’s instance blocking is misnamed and nonfunctional as it does not actually “block” the “instance” as it says, but PieFed’s “block all users from <this instance>” works exactly as advertised!

Sorry this is long, but I hope offers that insider’s perspective of how PieFed works differently, bc it offers MANY different choices and options that are not available to people using Lemmy, which affects the implications of certain words like “blocking” (becoming true blocking) and “subscribe”/join (meaning merely to show up in the default Subscribed feed, but no other implications beyond that).

(+ @rimu@piefed.social) If you could easily skip past a section to the next block, that seems like it would help alleviate that concern? It’s still an extra click, but would make navigation easier?

Oh yes, I really miss how ubiquitous that rainbow Fediverse icon is readily accessible. There’s ways and means to find an original for some things on PieFed - notably a community or user account or an actual post - but it does make things more difficult, e.g. to look at a comment that is on a different instance than the OP or the community that it was submitted to. That would indeed be a useful addition to make it so accessible as it is on Lemmy!:-)

Fwiw, Lemmy.ml self-reports only 2,407 MAUs (Monthly Active Users, which includes posts, comments, or even merely votes).

lemm.ee has >7.4k MAUs and thus >3x the amount on lemmy.ml, while Lemmy.World has 18,603 which makes it >7.7-fold larger.

Lemmy.ml is the #5 instance in terms of MAUs, behind also sh.itjust.works and lemmynsfw.com.

It’s a testament to how popular the Lemmy software is that our little Threadiverse or whatever we want to call it (I’ve also heard just “Verse”, “Forumverse”, etc.) has spread to include so many other instances, world-wide, beyond lemmy.ml.

I would love to see this expanded, with at minimum a link to the community so that someone could read its rules, and ideally perhaps a hidden-by-default (collapsed?) type of pop-out that displays the community rules right there on the page, as exists (without being hidden) for the main community that a post is in.

But even as it is now, this is such a fantastic feature to see live already!:-) Not only does it save time but it increases the feeling of connections between communities and overall sense of welcomingness to people browsing the (Threadi-)Verse:-).

And the filtering isn’t just yay vs. nay, you can also select a little bit of filtering as a third option for that.

At this point it probably would be easier to list the things that PieFed does not do:-P

That’s not really how PieFed works - it takes awhile to adjust, but having a separate Subscribed feed from the Topics areas can be quite useful, allowing you to have your cake and eat it too. e.g. you could not subscribe to any Politics communities, but then if you rarely wanted to catch up, everything would be visible in a News & Politics feed.

So I’d rather see an option to control that, rather than work according to the “Lemmy” style.

Fwiw, I do note that comments do not show up from instances that you have actively blocked, and therefore presumably from communities that you have blocked as well.

The link that says the time does than. So e.g. your comment that I’m replying to says “10 minutes ago” (for me, right now:-) and resolves to https://piefed.social/post/571276#comment_5293979.

Not “fully”, but testing is underway for Thunder (a FOSS Lemmy app) - https://piefed.social/post/484755.

Why do you say that it doesn’t work well with Lemmy instances yet? I’ve been using piefed.social for ~5 months now, and while I do often see connection issues (maybe once a month?), I likewise experienced first-hand many, Many, MANY other connection issues on several Lemmy instances (StarTrek.website got so bad that I left it for Discuss.Online, which I would say has such issues only exceedingly rarely) plus constantly hear about many issues on other instances (Lemmy.world delays with many other instances especially aussie.zone, programming.dev database corruption, images not showing on Lemmy.cafe, etc.).

The connection issues on PieFed.social in particular I believe may have little to do with PieFed as software in general and rather much to do with PieFed.social in particular being a bleeding edge testing ground for new features. Which I knew and consented to as I made my account (and advise people to keep a Lemmy backup alt, although that’s just good advice for any Lemmy instance too), but there are other instances running PieFed that someone can choose if they want greater stability - notably feddit.online as the largest one.

So that’s my take, but perhaps you have more details you can add? If you were referring to this old post, that was only referring to someone starting up their own instance using PieFed, and they said themselves that the issue resolved itself in half an hour after posting.

TLDR: you’re not exactly wrong per se, but it comes across as cherry picking to imply that Lemmy has no such issues working even with software on both sides being Lemmy. But perhaps I am missing something and I’d love to read more if you have any details you’d like to share:-).

You will be surprised how easy and seamless it all is. Just browse the content if you like.

PieFed has tools that help a ton by bringing together communities from different instances under one roof - like !technology@lemmy.world and !technology@beehaw.org and !technology@lemmy.zip (and no this is nowhere close to being a comprehensive listing - there’s also !technology@lemmy.today, !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@midwest.social, although I would advise avoiding the latter two for reasons perhaps best not discussed here, and still several more besides), but with some effort you can piece together your own choices as to which communities you want to subscribe to and from then on see in your Subscribed feed. Perhaps even if you don’t want to specifically make an account on PieFed (e.g. if you prefer a particular Lemmy app that doesn’t support it yet), you can still see the collection of communities underneath the single header of simply “Technology” (which also includes others by different names, e.g. !assholedesign@lemmy.world) and then using the “communities” link on lemmy.ca, subscribe to them with your account there.

Another thought is that you may find it helpful to browse by Local or All to help you discover where new content can come from. Also, people here will share links to communities and webpages dedicated specifically to that purpose.

Welcome to the Fediverse btw!:-)

I use Fediverse Explorer - click Active Users a couple times to sort decreasing. So the largest is Lemmy.World, bigger than the next five combined, and after that one they really drop off fast, with the rest being more alike in having merely hundreds or few thousands of active participants, rather than >18 thousand.

These “instances” (servers) make up the Fediverse, along with other federated platforms such as Mastodon (X/Twitter replacement), Friendica (Facebook replacement), Pixelfed (Instagram replacement iirc?), etc. Lemmy is software meant to replace Reddit, and then there’s a few unique ones that are related but have much fewer users: Mbin, which offers connection to both Mastodon and Lemmy software at once, and PieFed that is an entirely new thing, somewhat like Lemmy but not aiming to replace Reddit as the latter does and instead offer entirely new features (like democratization of moderation where users can control their own experiences, rather than have to depend upon a moderation team to tell them what they can or cannot have - I think it’s highly worthwhile going through it’s sign-up wizard just to see what it’s all about, even if you for sure plan to stay on your current instance, so that you’ll see it first-hand what is coming! other great features include categories of communities, basically multi-reddits, and hashtag support, neither of which Lemmy has). Both Mbin and PieFed though have fewer than 1k users total across all of their instances (shown in those links above), which is expected to change as they begin to be supported by apps - e.g someone is testing PieFed in a fork of Thunder right now.

But fwiw, Lemmy.ca looks to me like a fantastic instance, especially if you are located in Canada (for lower ping and increased relevance/interest to you), and it is the #6 top-ranked instance. So unless you prefered PieFed or Mbin software rather than Lemmy, it would make a great home. My only beef with it is that it federates with Lemmy.ml (for reasons not worth going into here:-), but this is exceedingly common among all of the top 20 instances (and most others as well), and you could spend a lot of time searching for “better” than Lemmy.ca without finding it.

One mantra for using Lemmy: block early, and block often - the people who were too toxic even for Reddit came here, and we have lost many people who expected the platform to curate their experience for them, yet we simply are not given the tools to do so: you need to do such things on your own. As you do, pay attention to which users submit content, what communities you are reading it in, and as you get more experienced, what instances are involved. They are NOT the same at all - they have entirely different sets of rules about what is allowed where.

But there are great discussions to be had here:-). Especially as Reddit gets more enshittified every day. You will probably like it here:-).

Innuendo Studios, maker of The Alt Right Playbook, has an earlier series specifically on this topic in Why are you so angry.

…yes😁