I’m new here, and have been looking into different communities to subscribe to, it’s pretty difficult to decide which ones to subscribe to when theres often the same community on more than one server. (Example: internetisbeautiful on @feddit.de, @lemmy.ee, @lemmy.ml)
I’m not super savvy but couldn’t they merge them and have the community hosted as mirrors of each other on both for redundancy? If I’m wrong, do correct me, again, not super savvy and also new here.
what quirks??
Iirc it was mostly around notifications and federation delays
Tbf, federation delays occur for every instance - and in particular Lemmy.World is well known for how they cause them.
OTOH, the flagship instance PieFed.social does have quite a bit more of those than I’ve typically seen on any Lemmy instances. Here is a list of other PieFed instances readily available to join. They won’t have features be added as quickly, but might be more stable.
Mostly relating to small matters of polish. Like there’s a post preview feature, but that isn’t provided (yet) for comments.
One super annoying feature is when you receive a notification for something that you cannot actually see. Sometimes it relates to all the variety of auto-collapsing or auto-hiding of comments (therefore I turned all of that off), but e.g. you can receive a notification from someone that you have added to your block list if they reply to you, yet you will then be directed to a page displaying an error (when instead, that notification itself should have been removed by the PieFed backend).
Oh, and searching is crap (tbf, Reddit’s is too? However, Lemmy’s is fairly great, and about to get even better by separating out post titles I hear), plus while cross-posts are properly joined together, you cannot actually initiate a cross-post from PieFed.
PieFed is great for a new person to join the Fediverse, or for an old hand (who knows how to go to Lemmy in order to get around these limitations) to use as a daily driver, but it hasn’t reached feature parity yet with Lemmy.
OTOH, it has already surpassed Lemmy in so many ways, and Lemmy is not without its quirks as well. Chief among those might be how authoritarian it is - there is a modlog, but no modmail, and the account name of the mod who performed an action is actively hidden, replaced with just “mod”. Also the “instance blocking” feature is horribly misnamed, as it only acts as a community mute, whereas in contrast, PieFed has a true instance blocking feature that I use to block all users from lemmy.ml, regardless of what community or instance they are posting to. No need for an instance admin or defederation or anything - and you can reverse it anytime to boot! That one feature alone is what enticed me to join it, when it was much less developed - that feature is so helpful!
As are the hashtags, categories of communities, keyword filtering, and the list just goes on and on. Ahem, but yes nothing is perfect, and it does have quirks, some of which can be quite annoying. Fortunately the pace of development is extremely quick, and the dev very friendly and responsive.
Sounds like it’s coming along
Heh I’m finding out so much about how inadequate the blocking system on Lemmy is the past couple days. I’m not a conspiracy theorist type of person, but it’s so bad it almost feels… intentional lol
It shocked me to realize how authoritarian Lemmy was, after moving over to it from Kbin.social as it died. And it has only gotten worse over time - e.g. it used to say which mod removed something, while now it just says “mod”, which is particularly disadvantageous when there is no modmail so you would have to DM them in some other space like Discord or Matrix or some such.
Tbf, Lemmy was mainly marketed to instance admins, and only after the fall of Reddit did people try to pin their hopes to make it a viable alternative for common, non-techie users who don’t use
ArchLinux btw. Then, several alternatives did not pan out - Mbin seems stuck in its development after breaking away from Ernst, as too does Sublinks (the main dev had a baby), though PieFed is indeed coming along nicely, and giving me hope by providing democratization of moderation (by creating tools, such as keyword filtering, that allow for the end user to curate their own experience rather than have to rely upon a mod to do everything).And Rust is a really difficult language, even for people who already know C++. And there wasn’t really much competition until PieFed, so whether intentional or not it may not matter, but basically if we want something then we need to first build it. As we are doing!:-)