Can you link to some good meme accounts on mastodon?

That sounds useful. I’ll give it a try

That’s a recent feature though, isn’t it? If it’s so important to you, why didn’t you join Mbin instead which has had it for ages?

what UI do you use as a that lets you add pixelfed and mastdon to your feed? I am on Voyager but it doesn’t fully support piefed and I don’t see anyway of adding non lemmy fediverse places to it.

I was getting annoyed with the duplicated posts as well. But I don’t see that on Piefed, I guess a big plus for Piefed.

That’s interesting. Although your link is dead and doesn’t let me proceed.

Oof… They’re even more problematic than I realised, then.

Yet even with lemmys people being like that, their software is free from bias and authoritarian-style features that are made to stifle free speech and to encourage an ideological echo chamber, unlike Piefed.

I agree about the attitude score he calculates but saying the word stupid is ableism is silly.

Think about it. If you are stupid, and nobody can tell you that, you get a society full of very stupid people.

Humans do stupid things and we should tell eachother. It’s fine if someone thinks I’m stupid. It’s an opinion, and I want to live in a society where people are allowed to have that opinion.

Piefed.world has a different admin and different policies— more open and less controversial ones

Even if I don’t personally agree with all of the ideology behind the lemmy devs, at least they are ideologically posed to keep the thing open, for the people, by the people. I respect that. A lot, in fact.

Piefed, on the surface, seems a lot less principled, and seems to also attract the non-leftist types by default, perhaps as some kneejerk reaction to the lemmy devs’ ideology. As a rule of thumb that sounds just outright worse to me, as a user, even if it seems not to impact much yet.

This is just me, as a political and ideological layperson, following my fragile principles. I might be betting wrong in doing so, but then again, might be right too. Either way, they work much the same and talk the same protocol, so it seems to me it’s just a choice of principle.

Either will work. Just thought I’d share my two cents.

Quite interesting discussions. I like the fact that @rimu@piefed.social gets involved to explain things.

It’s up to the mods and admins what they do with PieFed’s functions. Anything can be misused, even simple stuff. Like for example lemmy.ml has a description “a community for Foss and privacy enthusiasts” set by the admins and then ridicules and bans anyone who pushes back against the .ml political line on China. Lemmy.ml is not about foss and privacy.

The software feature of having a instance description is innocuous but it’s being used for deception.

+1 for mbin. The dev(s?) doesn’t seem to be as problematic as the Lemmy dev and it federates with a whole range of fediverse systems. The only real complaints I had with it turned out to be me misunderstanding how it works (for instance not noticing that some of the stuff on my feed is Peertube since it’s just really well integrated), so now that I understand that, I’m extremely happy with it.

Oh wow, I thought I was the only mbinaut here.

On the other hand, Piefed also has a bit of a weird social credit system that I’m not a fan of.

I was wondering what the .ml (it’s certain that Mali isn’t some important country in the Fediverse) represented. Very interesting to know

It’s actually a fun coincidence, the Mali TLD used to be free, so they picked it, but it’s not free anymore

The vote quota can be set to whatever the instance admin desires. Just like any other terms of service, it’s up to the admin what they give away for free and under what conditions.

afaik only piefed.zip and multiverse.soulism.net have chosen to increase it, though.

The Lemmy dev team likewise has pretty extremist views, and notoriously goes much further to censor and limit what uses can do… but crucially, less of that (not fully zero, but less relatively speaking) makes its way into the software.

If you were running your own instance, I would pick PieFed, hands-down with barely any resistance to that personally. Most of the controversial features are even opt-in (rather than opt-out), and such extremely nice onboarding features both for users new to the Threadiverse and those new to installing instances (e.g. the docker container) making setting one up a breeze, especially in comparison. Or there’s the nice PyLova fork that goes even further beyond merely disabling those controversial features by having outright removed them from the code, plus adding a few new features on top.

But if you are using a public instance, I see now that your choice of admin team has far more to do with your ultimate experience than whether it runs Lemmy or PieFed. Quokka even switched from Lemmy to PieFed and I think it was sh.itjust.works that announced that they would do likewise in later 2026. Either way, your admin team decides whether they want to run things in an authoritarian fascist manner, or democratic, or anarchist fashion, and especially if as an end-user you are accessing your instance via a 3rd-party app like Voyager, you will notice such things far more than what software it is running under the hood.

Ultimately I think you are correct but a lot of the details here are slightly to majorly incorrect. For instance, unless something has changed, wasn’t Dessalines rather than Nutomic the main dev, with the former having started the code and then brought in the latter later on?

Lemmy most definitely shadow-censors people’s experiences too. Did you know that every Lemmy instance - not just ML - has a hidden list of communities that it shadow-bans? Some instance admins are extremely friendly and go out of their way to publicly declare this fact, but most do not, and unlike the listing of (de)federated instances, Lemmy inherently chooses to hide rather than display this information. Lemmy.ml also by default acts as the arbiter of what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances upon first installation (though both this setting and the communities themselves can be adjusted later by someone who knows what they are doing and how to accomplish that).

Most of the manner in which Lemmy is opinionated though shows up in the features that are less obvious or non-existent rather than displayed right in your face like PieFed does. e.g. PieFed chooses to bother to notify end-users when a moderator bans them from a community or even an entire instance, while Lemmy merely buries that information deep in the modlog and most people either never find out or only do so months to literally years after it happening. Do people have a “right” to know such? PieFed prominently displays such so vehemently declares yes while Lemmy merely remains merely silent, a more implicit but equally vehement no. Likewise, upon deletion of a post Lemmy displays a page that acts like it never existed in the first place and in fact looks more like a server error than content issue or acknowledgement of the facts of the true situation, whereas PieFed by default deletes only the OP’s contribution yet keeps the comment section intact, available to anyone with the original URL (mods can override this though).

That said, PieFed’s vote quota shadow-censoring contributions from users on other platforms - Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. - without disclosure of that fact is fairly heinous, and particularly the manner behind its rollout (in defiance of all advice to the contrary) may be the forerunner to spelling out loss of confidence in the entire software project, provoking fears of additional such changes coming in the future, without notice and against all push-back. PieFed is quite opinionated indeed, and also seems to be veering away from Reddit-esque “social media” and more towards a professional, serious-content-only microblogging style.

That said, most of the criticism against PieFed has been shown to represent outright disinformation, as digging deeper most accusations were shown to be not just slightly but blatantly false (though despite that the original post remains up without having been corrected), hence made (and spread) by people without knowledge of how software works. e.g. most of the “hard-coded” features turn out not only to not be hard-coded after all, but outright (and extremely friendly) opt-in rather than opt-out (unfortunately not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out).

Someone installing their own instance can get a great deal out of running PieFed rather than Lemmy, with the former’s significantly enhanced feature set, while for people relying upon a public instance your experience will be affected far more by choice of admin team than the software that they choose to be running under the hood - especially if you are accessing it via a 3rd-party app like Voyager that offers only rudimentary access to many of the bells & whistles only accessible on PieFed anyway, like user and post flairs, polls, combining together comments across all cross-posts, categories of communities which represent user-customizable and shareable topic feeds, the initial account sign-up wizard, etc.

So a lot of what you related here about PieFed filtering out content is not fully true - like lemmy.ml’s extremism it applies to the PieFed.social instance itself, and yes it is possible to turn on that same filtering by choosing the opt-in feature upon installation of another instance (much like installation of a Lemmy instance can by default populate itself with communities that are acknowledged i.e. not banned by Lemmy.ml), but an instance admin can also make different choices too. For instance the vote quota can be essentially disabled by assigning it to a ridiculous value that would be impossible for an actual human being to reach.

Overall: PieFed is a shiny and new, fast-paced, but also opinionated and controversial project. Whether it’s going to be a “peace of mind” or “power tripping dev hellscape” software is only for you to experience.

This is… entirely accurate, sadly. Fortunately as you mentioned there is the PyLova fork actively working against these censorship features, plus adding new ones of its own, for instance admins that don’t want to have to put in all the effort to do so entirely on their own.

I hope this was helpful to get you started in your research to show that the situation wrt PieFed is nowhere close to being as bad as people have presented it to be (though certainly far from ideal, and at its core still somewhat valid in that it is quite opinionated software and becoming more so all the time), nor is the situation wrt to Lemmy all sunshine and rainbows and anywhere close to being as free of censorship as people make it out to be (though in the end it does manage to keep its politics out of the software better, hence someone may choose to place their hopes into it as a better option in the future to maintain freedom of speech).

I don’t get the opinionated part; aren’t we all? Yes, some project theirs more onto others than the rest. Personally, I see myself as humanly common-sense moderate. I used to be a political hot-head, which meant I cheered certain people I wouldn’t touch with a pole these days. I tend to avoid stupid people and situations as I mature.

Has it been working for you? It’s been down for me all weekend

Thanks for this.
At the end of the day I think political or personal views are just what they are. We often tend to find others controversial because we hold entrenched positions ourselves. We must, however, be willing to adjust those positions in the face of facts, situations, etc. Glad the Fediverse is what it is—diverse.

we dont need following individual users. It is a discuss community, not mastodon or pixelfed