Honestly just the webpages themselves offers the absolute best experience, especially with the API still being made and refined. But Voyager is also an extremely popular choice. There is also a Thunder beta version but it has not made its way into the official one (at least as of yesterday in the Play Store, I don’t know about the App Store on iOS).

And when used correctly, them being a great boon - e.g. users can set up automated keyword filters (allowing None, All, or even just Some of the content through), which is a decision made by oneself not someone else.

Community mods likewise choose whatever they are comfortable with - e.g. if you dislike people who downvote literally every post in the community, then it helps to have tools to detect and put a stop to that. The main thing there is (it seems to me) to remain on top of understanding and making appropriate use of the tool so that it isn’t doing something that you do not approve of - e.g. in the aforementioned example perhaps downvoting two posts in the community should not trigger a ban (however short in duration) whereas downvoting twenty should (so then what about 10? 5?).

I find the exact opposite, though to some extent that may be a difference based on which communities we each spend time in.

My prioritization is on honesty and integrity - if you say that you are dictatorial, and then you are dictatorial… I have zero qualms about that. Be what you say and power to you! However, lemmy.ml’s claim to be merely a place for FOSS enthusiasts to discuss matters… that does not sit well with me at all. Nowhere in their rules do they say that you are not allowed to criticize Russia, China, or North Korea, while on the other hand they constantly call down death threats to the Western World. Their biases are pretty clear, which I take far less issue with than the fact that their biases are nowhere ever explained. PieFed.social is pretty biased to, and that fact is very clearly and prominently displayed, imho, seeing as how it is displayed on virtually every single page across the entire site (when viewed from a web browser).

Likewise with the super-authoritarian mods on LW, though I do draw a sharp distinction between the admins on LW that seem like they at least attempt to really consider the needs of their constituents, and also LW users that, as a large instance that at one point had no less than 80% of the entire Threadiverse on it, seems understandable to me that the largest instance (BY FAR) was going to have both great and not so great people on it.

Similarly, I have really enjoyed discussions with some people on lemmy.ml. But on the other hand the extremely vitriolic nature of most commenters there, and distasteful interactions with people such as Cowbee (an admitted hexbear alt - well tbf I think the ML account was first, but when HB was defederated by LW he simply hopped over back to using the ML one, i.e. “no means no” is not in their vocabulary, and rather “no means that I simply switch accounts and continue on unabated”, i.e. consent means nothing to them, nor facts in their replies). If it were just one or two, or even ten or twenty, then I simply blocked them and moved on, except it isn’t just a few, it is the VAST majority, again, at least in the communities that I visited, such as [email protected].

I am happy though that PieFed provides tools to pick and choose what you want to be exposed to - e.g. I can block LW, and/or ML, and/or both, and/or neither. With Lemmy that is much harder to accomplish - as you said you only blocked the communities, as you cannot block all of the users - but it can still be done, with a bit of effort, to curate our respective worlds to a manner that is enjoyable to each/all of us, while still preserving the ability to interact in communities such as this one, i.e. we still have much common ground despite the minor differences in preferences:-).

Me too! Rather than leave the Threadiverse entirely, I simply left those hot-spots of toxicity. I am glad that it keeps them occupied though… otherwise they might flood out to the rest of this place! (otoh, such echo chambers seem to embolden them whenever they do so… it’s a mixed bag)

If you use a mobile app, then note that many of those - e.g. the most popular ones being Voyager and Thunder - work for both Lemmy and/or PieFed (Thunder I thought still hasn’t rolled out its official support, but it supposedly is available in the beta, so coming to the stable branch “soon”). The apps are not bad at all, but personally I just use Firefox:-).

If it helps, most people do not entirely block all LW communities, though there is a bit of a preference to help spread the Threadiverse around more than it currently is, where as Blaze keeps saying lately, 95% of the top most-active communities are located on LW. Also, historically it has had some notoriously over-active mods (note that when people started leaving Reddit >2 years ago, especially those even before that who were banned for being too toxic even for Reddit, they came here, as the main alternative), and yet conversely, politics is going to attract “attention” no matter where it is located, and all the more so if those LW communities were to go down, the flood of toxicity would simply spread out over the Threadiverse.

Also note that on PieFed, unlike Lemmy, you really can have your cake and eat it too in this regard: rather than having to “block” a community such as [email protected], you can simply not subscribe to it, and by doing so it will not appear in your main Subscribed feed on your homepage that shows when you log in, yet if you ever choose the “News & Politics” Topic/Feed area (under the “Explore” menu), it will show up there. So you could in theory do something like avoid news & politics for 6 days of the week yet still check it from your same account one day out of every week (or once a month?). Those kinds of workflows are not possible on Lemmy, and having such access to great features like that are one of the mains reasons that people are switching from Lemmy to PieFed!:-)

But getting back to blocking: the main reason that blocking LW works for some people (such as the entire instance of beehaw.org) is that it blocks a lot of the more toxic individuals present on the Threadiverse - particularly those that are lazy. Such people prefer that particular balance of quality over quantity. I do not do this, but I understand why some people do.

Whether or not you are considering that, I recommend considering first whether to block lemmy.ml. The decision as to whether you want to block hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml has already been made when you chose piefed.social, but lemmy.ml is still on you to decide - read this post for more details if you like. TLDR: aside from the super authoritarian and deceptive practices of the admins there, every one of the most batshit insane comments that I receive from anywhere on Lemmy (those that did not come from hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml I mean, back when I was on instances that had not defederated from them yet) is from lemmy.ml. Something about the echo chamber that they live in, and then they decide to loudly proclaim their alternative facts out to the rest of the world whenever they leave it. Plus that is where hexbear users tend to make their alts, it being the most ideologically in line with it.

In short, just pay attention to the instance that users are commenting and replying to you from, and you will learn a ton about what to expect from users on that same instance. PieFed.social for instance tend to be thoughtful and compassionate, imho, LW tends to be more mixed and while containing some juvenile others are very worthwhile, whereas lemmy.ml 99 times out of 100 were at best a waste of my time and at worst offensive to me, sometimes highly so.

Wonderful! Subscribed!! :-)

It does not begin to compare to lemmy.ml in that regard… well okay so yeah it begins to :-P, but lemmy.ml still vastly blows it out of the water in terms of authoritarian control while using opaque standards - LW at least goes to great lengths to explain things that happen, if not in the timescale of hours then at least days to weeks. Yes LW is slow to begin look into things - on the timescale of months or even years - but lemmy.ml never does, ever.

I cannot fathom why people complain about LW but then entirely leave ML out of the discussion. I don’t want to presume bootlicking but if it looks like it and acts like it then…

I… would have advised against recommending anything on that instance, remember all the drama there regarding seahorse and how they banned people for downvoting their content? Or did that somehow change? (I still see their name in the admin list at least)

Edit: now adding @[email protected] for the rest of this:

Oooh this is interesting, as of 4 hours ago there is [email protected]!

There is also specifically [email protected], even though it is on Lemmy.World (also its mod team list is entirely empty - was JordonLund the sole mod there and then removed perhaps? in any case, he is not there now… - although it seems to have had posts to it as recently as 2 days ago)

True, but don’t miss the rest of my comment just due to that one tiny little thing. I can’t fix the entire Fediverse, nor every document on it. That one is only worth pursuing (to me) if it is used by many other instances - such as piefed.social - across the Threadiverse. Which I argued that it should not be, due to its hyper-focus on being for Canadians.

Fedecan already knows. I said that their PieFed page was “empty” but what it actually contains is:

This section is a work in progress. You can ask your question in the c/newtopiefed community. If you’d like to contribute, please get in touch.

If they want to fix it they will, however I am neither Canadian nor have an account on lemmy.ca, plus also as I mentioned even if it were perfect it would not solve the issue that someone new to the Threadiverse often has very little they can turn to in order to explain things like why are Hexbears the way that they are (or how are they even in the first place). Ironically the About page even on piefed.social seems to be getting thinner and lighter over time, as it used to have a direct link to https://join.piefed.social/ but now I do not see that anywhere - you have to go to a specific post, which also does not have it but then if you poke around that same community (nowhere in the post itself mind you, nor in the comments) in the sidebar then there is a link to a wiki… which still does not have it, but then from that page there is a link to it. I am not complaining about that, except to say that even what information used to be readily available seems increasingly difficult to find (as hurdles are added such as burying this kind of information behind many clicks and hunting around through hundreds of links on each page - granted most being to individual user accounts and a plethora of various hierarchies of community links but still - each of which is another chance to lose someone who is searching for such). Perhaps I am being unfair - maybe Zulip truly is a superior platform to PieFed and so it is worth telling people to go use it rather than offer information about how to navigate the Threadiverse? (kidding… mostly, though wouldn’t it really send people “away” rather than keep them “here”?)

BTW I see on it that you are promoting better onboarding tools: you are so helpful - we are so fortunate to have you!:-) If we decide that Fedecan should be the singular repository for all onboarding then yes I will offer my help… though I highly doubt that it will be the one, especially as the name itself seems to imply it was only ever meant primarily for Canadians, not those of us in the rest of the world.

Sigh… enshittification is ruining every single thing that it touches. TV, movies, Google searches, and Reddit/Xhitter are all just a few examples. The good news is that since this is all FOSS (Free Open-Source Software), the profit motive has been removed so it is far less likely to be touched in that manner. Then again, Android is also FOSS so… we’ll see:-P. Also, wikipedia is likewise not-for-profit, yet is still under attack by people playing political games with the truth, so profit-seeking is not the only destructive force at play even just on the internet.

People on PieFed and some people on Lemmy as well tend to be older, more educated, and more tech-savvy than e.g. your average Redditor (I mean the human ones ofc, whereas so very many are outright literal bots these days -> btw we have those here too, but they have to be labelled as such and a bot that helpful tells you that it is one is a whole other story than one masquerading as a human to increase profit-seeking “engagement stats” for the sake of advertising firms and ultimately the Reddit corporate shareholders, even at the expense of the actual user-base, who are mainly there nowadays not even to be sold for the ad revenue but also to be sold to those training LLMs). So there is some hope that this place will last much longer than Reddit did - but even if piefed.social were to go belly-up for whatever reason, the FOSS software will still be around and a new instance could spring up in its place, which so very many already have.

If you want to see the polar opposite vibe, check out https://hexbear.net/c/chapotraphouse - or better yet, don’t. This instance is defederate from by piefed.social btw (but not piefed.zip). The moral of that story is that indeed, different instances have different vibes, and we are all free to choose what works best for our own personal selves, by picking an instance that we feel suits us best.

We all were new once too:-).

And yes I think this community is a perfect place to ask such questions, it is chock-full of extremely helpful people. Who usually say things with much better levels of brevity than I did here:-).

We who have been here for a minute tend to forget what it is like for new joiners: for some people, the authoritarian banning of cusswords and pirate communities is considered a bad thing all on its own, and thus highly worth reading about. You likely agree and thus got tired of reading it, but the person I responded to may (seems to even) be learning that for the very first time?

It’s not like there is a guide to any of this stuff - I even searched LW’s Quick start guide and the more detailed ToS but while I saw the piracy section of the latter never could find any mention of the filtering of “cuss” or “curse” words. Also, some instances have some cool guides like the lemmy.ca Getting Started Guide, they of course will not tell you that you should move to some other instance - see e.g. their piefed section (I will save you a click: it is empty). Also I note the outright misinformation in their How to Block an Instance guide:

When you block an instance, you will no longer see their posts or comments. You will also not be able to see the communities or users from that instance. You will also not be able to see the posts or comments from users on that

I did not chop that off btw - the sentence literally just entirely halted there without any ending period. I know that you know that the “instance block” in no way actually prevents people from seeing users from that instance - communities yes, but users no.

Anyway, even if that guide were somehow perfect, that would primarily help Canadians on that one instance, whereas people on other instances are left to fend for themselves to try to find guides, leaving e.g. OP having no idea which instances are the helpful kind of true anarchists, vs. the ones that merely claim to be thus while denying factual reality and also trolling everyone else across the entire Threadiverse. And like, where are the conservatives (do not exist, but what says that?) and where are the centrists (here they are called as “conservatives”, and likewise even Bernie Sanders-supporting liberals become labelled as “conservatives” in the face of the extreme purity testing of the left here).

Anyway, TLDR yes my answers are long here, but at least they are answers, as opposed to leaving OP having to find every single thing out on their own, e.g. by first figuring out which questions to ask and then having to ask people them one-by-one?

Well then if you like it, here are some additional thoughts:-).

The model that the Fediverse “is like email” is only an initial, EXTREMELY rough initial impression - more wrong than correct imho. But now that you are here, it is time for a better analogy instead. Imagine a bunch of ships (both free-trade and ah… otherwise *cough* pirate *cough* - I am just kidding, this is not Reddit, nor LW, we can fucking say “pirate” here:-P as you learn more about the history of the Threadiverse though, that sentence will take on multiple who new meanings:-D oh heck I will just say them now: one is that cusswords iirc are filtered on LW so you can’t say “fuck”, and another is that they famously kicked out their piracy community out of fear of losing their license in whatever nation they are hosted in), who each pass messages around between ALL of the other ships. Well, except those that they have a grudge with. Your chosen ship is your vessel, but you have access not only to content that is already hosted on it, but to the entire Fediverse, at your beck and call! Except that word “entire” there has huge caveats, due to defederations. One example is that beehaw.org, which has excellent discussions, has chosen to defederate from LW, so if you had an account on LW then you would not be able to access the [email protected] community, or vice versa. PieFed.social is fairly well-regarded though, and has only defederated from the places that the large majority of people likely do not want to visit in the first place - although if you feel that this does not describe you, then you might consider joining piefed.zip that has a much shorter list of defederated instances that it has chosen to block.

Btw “Fediverse” is the wider set of things that share via the ActivityPub Protocol, but whenever I feel the need to I switch to “Threadiverse” that is the subset of that which specifically means the threaded, forum-based software that structures things around “communities” i.e. Reddit replacements, as opposed to the X/Twitter (we often call this Xhitter, since it sounds like “shitter”) replacement known as Mastodon, which is more user-centric i.e. instead of subscribing to communities and having the All/Local feeds, or PieFed the numerous Topic/Feeds, on Mastodon you have to “follow” someone first, or you can use the extremely less precise hashtags (piefed also has hashtags too btw) to discover new content, except not really b/c the software isn’t very well-implemented especially across instances, unlike the Threadiverse software tools of PieFed, Lemmy, and Mbin (there are also some other less well-known things too including nodeBB, flarum, etc.).

Each instance indeed has its own personality. LW is one of the more “authoritarian” instances across the Threadiverse, although nowhere close to the tankie Lemmy.ml. You are getting to experience this first-hand, as its communities are VERY well-known for such policies as caused your video post to get removed. Virtually every other instance is waaay more chill. PieFed.social is fairly chill, except biased against those who intentionally spread “alternative facts”, a policy which I very much agree with hence I love it here, although again if you want to intentionally expose yourself to a more diverse set of inputs then piefed.zip may be more your style. (Btw I hope I do not come across as suggesting that I want you to leave? First I have no horse in that race, and second, you would not be “leaving” since as mentioned above you would just be switching your instance, but your posts and comments would still flood the entire Threadiverse, even entire Fediverse.) The really hard part here is that the worst instances go to some trouble to actually lie about what they are for, stating that they are for one purpose when in reality if you look at them for even a few moments you begin to see that they are really something entirely different. Therefore you are doing a good thing: dipping your toes into the Threadiverse, and slowly taking things in, hopping around to different instances until you find one that perfectly suits your needs. Again, not that it matters much, since whichever one you are on, you can access pretty much the entire Threadiverse from it (except for the MAJOR caveat of defederations).

And no guide is going to be able to explain all of this, most especially because it changes like every six months. PieFed for instance is extremely new, or at least it is new for it to be as popular as it has now become. This is why you see such things as that difference between “yepower” vs. “ye power” where one works but the other does not: the kinks have not been ironed out yet. Then again, Lemmy is 5+ years old and the kinds also have not been worked out of it, yet PieFed has zoomed ahead of it, while Lemmy in many ways has decided to go backwards - or at least that is how many of us choose to see it, if we think of “democratic principles” as “forwards”, and “authoritarian control” as “backwards”, though obviously that is subjective and many people think the polar opposite there. Also, PieFed is implemented in the extremely popular Python programming language, rather than the extremely difficult Rust (even for people who already know C++), so even now that PieFed has surpassed Lemmy it will continue to gain ground over it as time passes and new features are added to the former practically weekly while people wait for YEARS and YEARS for features to eventually come around in the latter, and as I mentioned often the features end up reversing course, taking away freedoms that people previously had but then after an “upgrade” no longer have it (another example is the ability to block an entire instance: it used to be that if you chose what they call an “instance block” then you would block the instance so that users from it could not ping you in DMs or trigger Notifications by replying to you, but then they reversed course in one of their “upgrades” and now the instance block is horribly misnamed and only mutes communities on that instance, leaving the users free to harass you as much as they wish to in other communities unless you take the time to block them individually one-by-excruciating-fucking-one).

But you will get it. Just keep your eyes and ears open and you will understand it all - e.g. you already know now much more about LW and PieFed than you did yesterday:-P.

He has been removed “from the community team”, which I think refers to a special thing they have on LW (short-hand for Lemmy.World) where some community mods have special access to do things that typically only admins on traditional instances can enact.

His removal from each individual community is now being reviewed on a case-by-case basis. If he is still a mod there after a week, that would be a time to complain, but things are moving forward now so it is understandable (to me at least) that they want to properly review each individual decision point before enacting it.

It looks like the search function works differently up in the “Communities” menu. If I search for “ye power” it finds it, but if I search for “yepower” it does not. Conversely, if you go to All communities and then search, then both search terms work, see e.g. at https://piefed.social/communities?search=yepower. I hope this post prompts people to fix that, because indeed it can get confusing!:-)

This link should also work to get you there: [email protected]

BTW jordanlund has been removed from a bunch of Lemmy.World communities (edit: read more about that here), but apparently not this one just yet. Whatever you think of him specifically as a mod, I will note that technically the rule “Post only links to articles” means that they have the right to remove a video if they choose to. Some of us may choose to think of videos as sources of information as well, even regarding political topics, but you said it, it is the largest political community so they tend to not want to spend all that much time moderating it, and just get used to doing things like “see YouTube video -> remove”.

On a related note I unsubscribed to that specific community long ago because discussions underneath it got quite toxic and I do not need or want that in my life. Some ideas for replacements: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] - and this barely begins to even scratch the surface.

Regarding your question about the modlogs: they all are quite primitive, across the entire Threadiverse, and worse yet they seem to be going backwards in functionality rather than forwards, granting increasingly greater power to mods over time while offering decreasing options to the end-users as new features are added to Lemmy that e.g. now hide the name of a mod that performs each action, only citing it as a “mod” who did it. First, you can see the modlog for PieFed.social here: https://piefed.social/modlog, but it only says “Deleted post When Saddam Hussein Held A Public Purge in [email protected] Reason: Video link.” - note that it does not even indicate your account as the OP, nor the name of the mod who did it. However, you can go to the original location for that community on Lemmy.World and get a more detailed view - it is extremely buried imho, but if you scroll waaaaaay down in the right-hand sidebar, there is a link that says “View community on original server”, and then if you scroll waaaaaaaay down in that right-hand sidebar, clicking that modlog will show you mod actions that happened just in that community. In this case it says “mod
Removed Post When Saddam Hussein Held A Public Purge reason: Video link.” See how much more informative that is? Well, I do not either, but it used to say a lot more, once upon a time, back when the modlog was a reason to try to entice people to leave Reddit, although now that we are here… its capabilities have been steadily been taken away from us, piece by piece.

You probably won’t need to make your own politics community - there are others that are good, you just need to hunt around to find them - but I sincerely applaud your enthusiasm there nonetheless to want to help people get what they need out of this place that was supposed to be a forum to enable discussions, although as yet one more social media platform somehow became a place for landed gentry instead. That said, it does show off the power of the Fediverse: when one place goes bad, we simply move on to the next - yes that takes effort to make it happen, but it was entirely impossible on Reddit or X/Twitter, so this is still a step in the right direction! :-)

Hopefully all of this wall of text helps you understand PieFed and the Threadiverse a bit better now.

Counterpoint: there are very limited resources, and a whole bunch of very basic and foundational things that do not work even within the Threadiverse (e.g. links that don’t go to where they were aimed at, bc of the new way that comments load and then the direct link to a specific comment does not continue forward anymore past that; also searching, extra stuff in the API for 3rd party apps, etc.), as PieFed is so new. And those take on increasing importance now that lemm.ee has shut down and so many communities migrated over. People are waiting patiently for those fixes.

Therefore, while expanding to go beyond the Threadiverse into increasingly more niche use cases is desirable, the opportunity cost of slowing down the aforementioned fixes may outweigh them.

We can have it all, but not all at once, and not for free, with the current low level of funding support.

Sounds great! 👍

That’s great but if someone were to click your download link, I don’t see a version that supports PieFed, so I was trying to help avoid confusion by mentioning that so it could hopefully be clarified.

Thunder I believe won’t support PieFed until the next update. The current version that I see in the Play Store was last updated in June 26, 2025 and does not mention PieFed.

You can download a version with that functionality (I’ve heard, though I do not recall where), but that is not the version 0.73 that is currently in the Play Store.

So you may want to annotate it as coming soon rather than fully here already.