Today the first of Feb is Global Switch day, Spread awareness of the Fediverse in your communities.
For things that you’re using by yourself, sure, it’s doable. However, for content creation, it’s pretty hard. Some of those alternatives just don’t have the critical mass yet. Maybe it would be an option to do both in parallel for some time before switching completely, but might not work for everybody.
Practical example: I’m a hobbyist photographer. Small timer, less than 1000 followers. My livelihood doesn’t depend on this, but I’m still serious about it. I mainly do concerts and sport events (so a lot of things involving other people) and my main outlets are Facebook and Instagram. Switching to something else would mean either 1) that no one will see my work or 2) that people will see my photos on the alternative place, they’ll copy them over and they’ll still end up on Facebook and Instagram, but this time without my creative control (thus badly cropped and recompressed several times - so even if I pay special attention to those things when publishing by myself, the effort goes down the drain when someone else does it).
Isn’t lemmy the reddit of the fediverse?
Really wish Loops had an Android app.
Lol, posting Piefed as an alternative to reddit to Lemmy…
Also, PeerTube is super obtuse to get an account and has almost no reach. You almost have to personally know someone who has a server or host your own. There’s a reason why video hosting has gotten so corporatized: it’s expensive. That said, almost “no one” used Mastodon for nearly a decade and it’s finally starting to take off, so maybe it just needs another decade or two.
Lets make February a switch month. It is impossible to switch in one day
What’s a good peertube instance that federates with a lot? I tried tldvids but its got like 2 regular uploaders and i cant find most channels I search for.
Please add chess.com → lichess
It’s honestly bonkers to have a community hosted on Lemmy this hostile to Lemmy as software and the developers.
Because so many keep getting told it’s by tankies and stop thinking immediately after that
Is this bait? There is hardly any hostility here towards the software and the Lemmy devs want to push the world towards being an authoritarian hellscape. If anything they dont get enough shit.
Are you referring to !fediverse@lemmy.world? This wasn’t posted by the mods.
This comm is often full of comments pushing lemmy alternatives, with PieFed being the new frontrunner.
You’d think the post here would include Lemmy, which I believe is still the most active platform
People on Lemmy don’t need to be told about Lemmy though?
But it’s the same platform! They all interoperate!
Yeah I agree, its all the same TBH.
Piefed sometimes makes it hard to interoperate: https://communick.news/comment/8015757
I understand, but most of us are here from the efforts of all those who built Lemmy and it was deliberately left off here as an alternative
Isn’t that because people are canceling it for some reason? I haven’t kept up with it enough to form an opinion, but I understand a lot of people want to ditch the project over something they don’t like about the dev(s).
The devs are Marxist-Leninists. They administrate the .ml instance with that in mind, and they will often ban or strictly moderate low effort anti-China content like depicting Xi as Winnie the Pooh (they see this as racist because yellow bear) and spam posts about Tienanmen Square. I’ve seen people claim they are pro-Russia, but most of what I’ve seen would fall under anti-NATO opinions than pro-Russia. I have never gotten the impression that Putin is popular in .ml, hexbear, or lemmygrad.
But they really just stick to their instance and don’t push their politics on the software’s development.
Deb’s a tankie with the most bullshit oppinions ever seen on earth.
Not true.
Demonstrably true. Try saying anything contrary to a tankie talking point on .ml and see how long before you get banned. May I suggest “Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine” for starters, or “China committed unjustifiable atrocities against peaceful protestors”.
Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine.
In fact, Russia is an expansionist state with rampant nationalism and homophobia and led by an obvious fascist. I support the political autonomy of Ukrainians.
Catch me in the modlogs.
Now, I believe all of that, but I can also believe that there are geopolitical forces making the situation more nuanced and complex
You’re replying to one of the Lemmy devs. Hearing them say it’s not true when they literally run .ml as a tankie community is hilarious.
Who is deb?
Developer
:3
I am unreasonably angry about the stretched icons.
Some icons are stretched and some aren’t. Double infuriating
Hey, hey you.
Get some.
Much better!
It makes it look like a shitpost at a glance lol
I’ll join you. 😡
Maybe add Matrix as a Discord alternative?
Last time I checked theirs still no channels ? Discoverability is not really their ethier only active one I really found was the monero one
It now has workspaces (it’s called servers in Discord) and there you can have chats, which are basically channels like in Discord.
The Element application is solid now. Still I think it’d be a rough transition for most discord users. But more users probably means more potential for developer interest
The Element application is solid now.
Eh, kind of. I have almost 300 unread message notifications I cannot get rid of. I have scrolled up as far as I can then slowly back down. I have gone into threads and done the same.
Revolt (now known as Stoat) isn’t federated though.
Is there a federated version, either in the works or planned? Because otherwise, Stoat is the only option.
Yes
Matrix
Matrix just isn’t up to it. It doesn’t feel like Discord at all. It hasn’t taken off in any meaningful way.
None of those really “feel like” the things they’re replacing. I don’t really even think that should be the goal. They occupy the same space, though, and the infographic would look stupid if it showed all the options in some category, so they just picked a popular proprietary/centralized one, and a popular federated alternative in the same category. In this case discord is a popular chat app, and the most popular federa chat app afaict is matrix.
True, Matrix is going to win currently by default of there being no other alternative, but it just isn’t being used in the way Discord is even if you assume a smaller scale.
No.
Other alternatives are Root, not federated.
There’s also Roomy in development which is federated, and will tie into Bluesky.
Links?
Thank you.
Roomy says they plan to integrate federation in the future, though it doesn’t have it now.
Well damn, I need to update the pic I guess. I didn’t make it, just saved it some months ago
Fair point,
I omitted Facebook in my image because fuck that kind of social media (my opinion)
I picked PieFed over Lemmy because UX is everything and currently PieFed has much better UX.
Fuck that kind of social media but tiktok and Instagram are better???
Should be Lemmy over piefed.
I’ve seen the Reddit users be more receptive of PieFed over Lemmy. In a post suggesting Lemmy, the Reddit users will just comment that it looks ugly, it’s confusing, devs are tankies, etc. Posts suggesting PieFed get less complaints and more signups.
Also I think the instance choice is easier for PieFed compared to Lemmy. If you tell people to use Lemmy, they’ll probably end up on lemmy.world which is overpopulated, or lemmy.ml…
Instead of recommending Lemmy in general, you should recommend a specific instance which matches the audience. For example someone posted about piefed.ca in /r/BuyCanadian. Or you can link to a different frontend like vger.app.
I did make a redesign to join-lemmy.org recently so that new users can reach the registration page with a single click. I am also curious about any suggestions you have to improve the onboarding.
join-lemmy.org looks much improved now! And yes linking directly to an instance is the way to go, I would’ve put URLs in this promotional image instead of just names
I’m not sure if I have any specific ideas at the moment. It’s possible Lemmy has just reached a saturation point with Reddit where the people still on Reddit are the ones who bounced off Lemmy before, so they won’t give it another chance anytime soon, but they haven’t tried PieFed yet. Maybe the optimal strategy is to cycle between the recommendations to catch everyone with whatever suits them best. I think we should also try changing out the Mastodon recommendation and see if something else catches people who haven’t already switched to Fediverse microblogging.
I think PieFed’s idea of asking new users what they want/don’t want to see is a good idea.
I made a couple of “Help Design Lemmy” posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml recently to get feedback and ideas, which was very helpful. I will continue to make such posts to improve join-lemmy.org, and also Lemmy itself.
Had a look at the Piefed signup now, choosing categories like that is a good idea. But the question is how these categories get curated. We have something similar with the instance topics on join-lemmy.org but no one is really helping to maintain them. So for community categories it would probably similar. In 1.0 we will have some improvements for discovery, like multi-communities and a “suggested communities” collection which can be set by local admins.
For the Mastodon recommendation there isnt any good alternative software that I can see. So its probably best to recommend a single Mastodon instance, depending on the target audience.
That person was me.
I’ve promoted Lemmy in the past only to be met with comments complaining about the ‘dogshit UX’ and tankeis.
So I switched to promoting PieFed instead, and have had no such complaints.
And so you decided to spread that misinformation further, instead of simply replying that it is wrong? I’m also very curious in what ways you consider Piefed’s UI better than Lemmy.
Good UX is all about removing friction and making users have to click less and think less.
Users these days are expect their hands to be held and things to just work, that sadly is just the reality.
Let me start off with saying, I started on Lemmy and even donated to Lemmy, PieFed can only grow because it’s standing on the shoulders of giants (lemmy)
My alt is AnonomousWolf, you can look it up, since I joined I complained about bat UX, but people told me to GTFO. PieFed fixes many of those issues I complained about.
Let me do a quick test and walk you through my thought possesses and UX. I’ll make 2 comments in this post, one for lemmy.ml one for piefed.social
Review of the two experiences:
With PieFed I can just keep scrolling without needing to click. Things just work and are where I expect them to be (based on pas UX experiences (reddit)) I can see way more content without ever getting confused or needing to click or make decisions, making me stay curious and engaged. Where as with Lemmy I very quickly got frustrated and confused, making me want to abandon ship and do something else, and I’m way way way more resilient than the vast majority of users
Not everyone likes infinite scroll, but some apps such as vger.app offer it.
– open https://piefed.social/ – met with some interesting image from c/selfhosted
–keep scrolling – some news articles, not really my vibe– keep scrolling – cut cat picture from c/cat – keep scrolling
– some meme about cars and fuck Trump, cool – keep scrolling – more memes and cats, keep scrolling – this keeps happening, doezens of more memes and cats – repeat
– bunch of posts I don’t have to click to open, I can see the image clearly and what’s happening
– interesting but I can just keep scrolling – bottom of the pace, have to click next– more semi interseting things
– keep scrolling, click next again– eventually find something interesting enough to interact with and leave a comment, of move on.
– open https://lemmy.ml/
– met with a list of posts, most images too small for me to see or read.
– click on first post so that I can see the image - https://lemmy.ml/post/42503928 – taken to a page where I still can’t see the image I clicked to see – Click on the image, now I can see it.– See some comments
– now I need to click back to continue– see another interesting post, image to small, can’t see so I have to click – https://lemmy.ml/post/42501566
– Still can’t see image so I click on the image – now I’m taken to https://mecha.so/comet#overview
– WTF, why am I on a different site? Why am I here,where are the comments – Realisze I can’t distinguish between Image posts and Links to a different site. – Why is this so confusing to browse?Sounds like you are specifically looking for a client focused on image browsing. In that case I would suggest linking to vger.app, phtn.app or blorp which I linked in another comment. Lemmy 1.0 will also have a card view which admins can set as default, where images are already expanded.
see another interesting post, image to small, can’t see so I have to click – https://lemmy.ml/post/42501566
This is only the link preview (indicated by the arrow icon), not an image post. Is the icon too small?
This is why I stopped promoting Lemmy and switched to PieFed.
UX is everything, and Lemmy UX sucked. The default UX (for your average user) is dog shit.
People want ‘it just works’ and PieFed offers that more than Lemmy does.
Thanks! I personally think as long as people land in the fediverse, its going to be ok. But its cool to give some highlights to piefed.
Also congrats on making a “controversial” post! Thats how you know its good :D
Yeah but this is like when Disney makes star wars tv shows. Ignore what the current audience likes and use the show as a vehicle to try and tell them what they should like.
I didnt think they could do worse than Discovery but the Academy is incredibly bad. On the plus side, Im rewatching Deep Space Nine again.
And BlueSky over Mastodon
I’ve been using lemmy.world with the boost app. Should I look into piefed? Am I missing anything? I mean I’m happy with what I got, but is the grass any greener?
There’s been some controversy recently about censorship hardcoded into Piefed’s backend. Basically it gives people a “social credit score” based on how they post.
Yuck. Do you have any evidence?
Here’s the writeup about it, going around
Some of the code snippets are cringe. Ew…
So it basically is a worse version of Reddit’s karma.
Essentially, yes. And maybe that’s part of why people jumping from reddit like it so much, but personally, I don’t think the things like this that Piefied is doing are good for the fediverse ecosystem
I can understand where the reputation comes from - spammers and trolls will do everything they can to shit all over everything. Maybe this isn’t the best way to address that problem, but I definitely understand the desire.
I run a forum for a very specific model of RV, and fucking spammers came in so often that I shut off registration and register everyone manually after they send me an email. It raises the bar just enough. Every now and then someone will whine about it, and I’m like, I hear you but this is much easier than cleaning the mess the spammers always leave.
props to you for running such a niche forum! That kind of thing is rare online nowadays
Lmao that “AI filter” would destroy me. Let me have my goddamn em dashes goddamn it
To be fair, it only sends a ping to admins. And it only does it for new accounts.
Thanks. Disgusting
Thanks. Disgusting
It has a lot of cool features, I’m almost tempted to switch but am waiting on the app I use to finish supporting it first.
Also, to avoid doing unpaid labour for Jeff Bezos, go from Goodreads to Bookwyrm!
There’s also StoryGraph - it’s not federated, but ran by a tiny UK company, but seems pretty popular. I like the content warnings feature and stuff like readers rating the pacing and moods of the books, which is then displayed with graphs on the book page, but they have also introduced some AI features :/ (fortunately opt-in)
Bookwyrm is cool, it just needs more attention and interaction. It would be cool if it could expand into other forms of media (games, movies) like NeoDB, which again feels like posting into the void.
I’m a little behind on this, what does goodreads have to do with bezos?
In 2013 Goodreads was sold to Amazon 😭
It’s impressive how Goodreads has been owned by 10+ years by the company with the largest cloud infrastructure and supposedly great engineers, and still it loads like shitty personal blog from the 2000s. It’s pretty obvious it was just bought so they could redirect traffic to Kindle store, just like IMDB redirects to Amazon Prime.
As pointed out, Goodreads has been owned by Amazon for a good while. And they also own slices of some other similar book sites (LibraryThing, for example, and some other site that was merged into Goodreads).
Nice suggestion. I didn’t know this was a thing. :)
Every day is a good day to switch
