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
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.
It’s not even about deception. Although deception starts off as aid generally before they are deceived. Hence deception. Realistically an individual cannot properly moderate that many communities. Not even people I know who are on disability and spend all day online can do that and still remain mentally healthy. It’s just not a good thing.
Un moderated or poorly moderated communities can also be problematic in their own right. Not to mention creating all these unused communities. Posting all these bot posts to those communities. It grows the local database, for no real purpose. Just the hope that maybe they could catch someone to come in and contribute to the community? Does the good outweigh the bad? And then it leads to assessments somewhat like yours. Of large bot presence. Which if you were looking to grow communities. That sort of thing is generally seen as a detriment. Maybe they think or are looking to try to help. But again I just question it. The efficacy of it. I would rather see fewer but more active maintains communities than a bunch of ghostcoms. Magically getting posts but no engagement. But that’s just me LOL. And if I put up my own instance I will probably keep it quite tight.