OpenStars

To fill that niche, there’s always Hexbear, or diluted 1000-fold, the still Alt-Left lemmy.ml instance.

I don’t begrudge someone being “stupid” or ignorant, I begrudge them being obstinate and willfully remaining that way, especially when it crosses over into taking away my own freedoms.

It is helpful to have posts from multiple communities delivered to you though, in a conjoined “Feed” - e.g. here is an example of a PieFed one called “Fediverse”. Personally I disagree with not showing the full name of the community in the feed like that, but when you click on an actual post you see at the top the entire thing including what instance it is located on (and for some, the little icons can differ as well, which I particularly see for communities located on Beehaw, which really helps to distinguish e.g. technology on Beehaw from technology on Lemmy.World, etc.).

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.

The feeds are also (now), in addition to being user customizable, shareable as well. So yes you can create your own, but also you may not have to, and instead just find one already made and maintained by someone else with similar preferences:-).

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.

Go to the community, e.g. !mealtimevideos@lemmy.cafe, and just to the right of the name, you’ll see a bell icon. If that has a slash through it, which it should by default, then you will NOT receive notifications for that content. Toggle it to ON if you want them though.

I have greatly reduced my number of notifications from communities, since they can really pile up, especially for high-volume communities, and all the more so if you don’t check them multiple times a day. But for very rarely posted to communities, they can be a great way to ensure that you won’t miss something by other ways of reading, like your Subscribed or one of the Topic Feeds, which just recently were made to become user customizable and also shareable.

You can also sign up to receive notifications for Feeds too. Or a user. Or a post - most anything really. You can also toggle OFF notifications for a post or comment that people keep bothering you with, without having to delete it (this happened to me a couple times, once on Hexbear.net and again in lemmygrad.ml).

There are some quirks that PieFed still needs to fix, but overall I’m so happy with it! I’m glad you are enjoying it as well. Keep us all updated, in communities like this one, if you have other questions or feedback or anything - the Fediverse is getting active again all of a sudden, with all the enshittification happening on Reddit recently!:-)

That would be great! Avoidance of not just leftists but extremists of any persuasion is the chief reason cited by so very many people for refusing to come over to Lemmy. Which by turning away content creators, leaves Lemmy stagnanting.

Nobody wants this place to turn into a safe haven for the Alt-Right, yet for some reason so many people do not bat an eye at what I’ve started calling the Alt-Left here.

It really would be great though to be able to check in on politics as needed, but then for one brief period even if only for ten damn minutes be able to turn all of that OFF!:-) Which I can on PieFed, but I see so many people on Lemmy begging for that, not knowing how to accomplish that (bc on Lemmy, you can’t, and even on PieFed - well… look at this very post here, no separator is ever going to be perfect:-).

Tbf, from the perspective of someone who is THAT far left, I’m sure it does sorta all blend in to look the same:-). Even so, that is no excuse to remain in willfull ignorance. I don’t have to agree with any particular position to understand it, nor to respect either it or the people who believe in it (especially if their set of facts differ from mine - not everyone has the luxury of sorting all of that out, at any age and social status and time period in their personal life).

I’ve flat given up posting content such as Fareed Zakaria, and barely bother to post highly leftist but somehow still not leftist enough content such as Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook.

+ also @caveman_voice@lemmy.world

Beware of that one, it’s got… “issues”, and is not a great recommendation for someone trying to get away from the exact same type of stuff happening on Reddit.

Example 1

Example 2

must I get involved in senseless flame-wars?

Yes, you must. Now get busy! (/s)

Activity includes voting.

Isn’t it fantastic!?

(I bet nobody would say that on Reddit 😁)

(check again:-)

I think the Threadiverse offers a much higher rate of commentors to lurkers than that. Posting itself might be the same though.

It looks like a lot of the new accounts are on Lemmy.World (PieFed shows an icon next to usernames when the account is <2 weeks old:-), so I expect sometime in the next six months to see them move to another instance. Like Discuss.Online if in the USA or feddit.org if in the EU, etc.

Lemmy unfortunately requires enormous efforts to curate your feed - sometimes you can block a single user (or 2-3) and thereby salvage an entire community. Other times the community itself just isn’t worth it, ofc the trick then is to try to find other communities that can take their place, despite them having 1/1000th the number of subscribers.:-( Lastly, blocking some instances can immediately improve your experiences on the Fediverse by like 99%, or rather it would if the “instance blocking” were to do as advertised and actually block an instance, instead of just muting communities on it (but leaving users free to comment in other communities from other instances).

None of which is explained anywhere that you are provided ready access to, and then whenever someone tries there is inevitably the huge pushback as people cry out that you don’t agree 100% with them and therefore should not be free to say anything at all, apparently.

PieFed solves roughly 90% of this, for me, e.g. check out the categories of communities feature, which just recently became user customizable and also shareable Feeds. Like Arts & Crafts will have the expected type of posts, with News & Politics equally easy to reach if you did want to check it out. Which means that you can have your cake and eat it too, by not actually subscribing to communities with political content in them, yet still see that when you want.

Also, the instance block here actually blocks users from an instance, without requiring admin approval to do a full defederation as Lemmy does. I cannot emphasize enough how blissfully wonderful it was to block lemmy.ml and see not one single BoTh SiDeS sAmE post after that, just prior to the USA election when those Alt-Left messages were being put out in full force.

On the bright side, Reddit is virtually impossible to get working in a halfway decent manner these days, whereas with some efforts (tiny with PieFed, A LOT with Lemmy) this place can be outright cool 😎.

Only in communities though. Oh and also instances:-P. BUT, a LOT less, as you said, and more ways around it.

Uh… in the terminology of the show, Reddit would be The Good Place. (Obligatory fuck spez) 😁

If it helps, you can check out PieFed.social - the topic areas are at the top, no need for an account until you have decided to become active with voting, comments, or posts, and in that case there’s a sign-up wizard offering to subscribe you to topic areas of your choice, and put up keyword filtering for “Trump” or “Musk” or some such, to either see that content never, only a little, or not filter it at all.

Maybe you don’t need all that anymore, perhaps you’ve already found an app that you like that does similarly (Sync or Connect?), but I thought I’d mention just in case:-).

Unfortunately (?) on Reddit a lot of the comments are from bots - not even just the “everyone I do not agree with must be a bot” mantra but demonstrably as in it is word for word repeated from a duplicate post made often years in the past, presumably resurrected to increase “engagement” and therefore profits.

^THIS. And my ax. I also choose this guy’s wife! => all counts as “engagement” from the perspective of an advertiser.

And the humans are toxic AF. I resolved to leave Reddit regardless of whether I came here or not, bc I didn’t like what all that argumentation was turning me into. Conversations are just flat better here.

Tbf that happens here too, whereupon you hop over to another instance and use a different community, and it’s mostly the same (except that one community, which is why we have so many copies of each one).

I don’t think it’s possible in Lemmy, unless you use an app (might not be FOSS though?) that adds that functionality. I’m not sure which ones though - maybe check out Sync or Connect?

PieFed can do it innately, in multiple ways. First, in the new user wizard (or in your account anytime later) you can specify that you want to see posts mentioning “Trump” or “Musk” either never, a little, or have no filtering.

Second, in addition to the standard Subscribed and All feeds, PieFed offers categories of communities, like Reddit’s multi-reddit feature, so e.g. Arts & Crafts has no politics within it, though ofc News & Politics has nothing but:-D. The beauty of that is that with those, you could e.g. decide to not subscribe to any News or Politics communities, so that your Subscribed feed is empty of it, and yet still read the news as often as you like at the touch of a button. Those Feeds just became user customizable and shareable too.

The only other way to do that on Lemmy is to make a new account for every type of collection that you want, and then subscribe to the communities that you want each one to have. Which would get super annoying, super quickly:-).