Isn’t ActivityPub extremely network intensive though? If all you wanted was a single user subscribing to a handful of communities then Lemmy would be inexpensive but to pull from a lot of communities I thought people have said that it can cost a bit of money, time, etc. Also defending against attacks such as CSAM.

Maybe make a distinction then between running a “tiny personal instance with only a few niche community subscriptions” vs. a small instance, either with multiple users or even just one person subscribing to many communities, if that cost would start to become more prohibitive?

Depends - what is their half-life? If it’s less than the rate of eye blinking, then we aren’t even keeping up a stable population!

Yes and moreover, feeds work at the community level, not individual posts. Which is a step in the right direction but you may want finer-grain control. Filters may offer more what you are looking for in that case.

I did not mention previously but PieFed also allows you to block all users from a user-specified instance, without requiring admin approval to perform full defederation. It is not perfect but it is very good and e.g. I use it to block Lemmy.ml, which saves me a lot of headaches as most of the worst, most argumentative and unfriendly (and batshit insane) comments I’ve seen come from there. Lemmy’s instance filter is horribly misnamed - it would have much better been called a community muting, as it blocks communities from that insurance but the users remain free to troll you in communities located in other instances, leaving replies, triggering notifications, etc.

The Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can also block all users from an instance.

Edit: also check out !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world - it uses cross-posts to build up a curated listing of “good” posts by some metric. Conversely, the entire instance of beehaw.org works the opposite by extensive manual curation efforts to remove “bad” content by other metrics.

I can think of 3 easy ways to do it off the top of my head… all using PieFed. (1) Straight-up filtering of keywords, which allows All, None, or Some; (2) user customizable and shareable Feeds, so someone creates a good collection and everyone benefits; (3) the entire model of browsing content using PieFed is different: by offering more than simply Subscribed vs. All, you can do something like not subscribe to any political or news communities (i.e. have your cake), so that it doesn’t show up in your Subscribed feed, but then when you want to read that content, it is a click away in the News and Politics Feed (or another similar one of your choice made by you or other users; i.e. eat your cake too).

Using Lemmy though, no not really (not “trivially” I mean). Search for people using ad blocking filters, possibly Ublock. Maybe an app would help? But I don’t know which ones and kinda doubt it - I haven’t seen such a thing in Voyager or Thunder or Interstellar, etc. Development of the Lemmy codebase, in the highly difficult Rust language, is super slow. Basically if you want something like this, you’d have to code it yourself.

A workaround could be to make several Lemmy alts - one for each type of content you would want to include in your Subscribed feed. Like one could be only uplifting news. Most of the time you’d be looking at the same older content though… without being able to widen your view that would allow bringing in of new content.

Edit: I did think of another way: you could run your own Lemmy instance, and use a bot to curate the content however you wish.

Or again, PieFed already has multiple forms of it.

Instance blocking works on:

1. PieFed
2. the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect
3. instance admins who can choose to defederate
4. someone willing to go deep and make a custom web browser filter (presumably like Ublock Origin I would guess)

Nothing else works.

The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon

You used it the correct way 😉

Most people wanted more content then the niche subs could offer though.

Nowadays I do think like read physical books 📚😃.

It is not “rational discourse” so much as “emotional vomit”, assuaging loneliness with robots.

The only ones who win that game are the investors in Reddit, who sell more advertisements by using the “engagement metrics” that such argumentation ramps up.

Normal, satisfied people stop talking eventually, which lowers the profit incentive so they can’t have that, now can they?

It’s like gambling but worse - it’s not mere dollars that can stop upon running out of them, but people’s time that gets bled away moment by moment, until all the other opportunities they could have been spent on are gone. Taking advantage of people’s mental illnesses, which they help foster in the first place.

As a mod of a small(-ish) gaming sub, I noticed.:-)

One example is how on r/Android, people would ignore the daily posted and pinned (or perhaps it was weekly?) mega thread, and constantly ask questions like “what phone should I buy?”, “which Android device should I purchase?”, “should I get an Android and if so, which one?” Setting aside how these are impossible without sufficient details e.g. what price range, what country is the OP from, are there relevant sales they are eyeing that would make the calculations different than from simply reading the existing posts that all ask precisely the same question ⁉️… anyway in addition to all that, it made it extremely difficult to have discussions of any real substance.

Combine this with the engagement algorithms and Reddit pushes all that crap (bc it’s “new”) above even extremely highly rated content, even if it was merely a few days old.

Post flairs helped, except that submitters entirely ignore those rules just like they do everything else. User flairs as well, except… same.

About the only thing that really worked was writing your own moderation bot. Ofc the disruption of the 3rd-party tools by making the API cost irl money 🤑💰💵💸 stopped that from working as well.

In short, you must have been in some very well-moderated spaces, possibly also niche, and if you did not browse r/all (or rather r/pop) then yeah, you could miss that trend. But it was definitely happening, and people talked about it in the subs dedicated to moderation.

It did not help that Reddit continually made changes that made it worse over time - practically hiding the rules from new posters to a community, seemingly in an effort to switch the focus away from the roots (before I joined Reddit) of having multiple forums on one combined platform - e.g. each having their own design, like CSS elements (I even made some of these!:-), to having all forums be part of one giant interconnected space, with efforts to erase divisions when moving from one community to another.

i.e. the endless streaming of “content”, but ENCOURAGING interaction via commenting or at least voting, despite whether the audience has any business doing so, e.g. whether their interactions add, do nothing to, or even detract from the conversation.

^THIS

I also choose this guy’s wife

And my bow

etc. To be fair, a little of that is just plain funny, and I hope we can allow for such here on Lemmy (it seems we do actually, when offered with respect?), but when the comments are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such in a row, such that it becomes impossible to find anything ELSE besides that… that is when a line has been crossed, and the platform becomes more difficult to read than it is worth. Imagine walking past a preschool on your way to work, and no matter how old you get (30, 40, 50, 60), they always remain the same - babbling as they play. Which they NEED, and hopefully you can enjoy engaging with it yourself. But at some point… don’t you need to get on over to work? When the noise crowds out the signal entirely, making more adult conversations next to impossible, then the only solution is to leave.

Or kick the kids out, i.e. moderation, but that requires enormous efforts. Some subs still do it, but the more Reddit enshittifies the harder it becomes.

And it’s not merely Reddit, it’s simply the nature of the game: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

I wonder if Gen X’s truly “have” homes, or just have been paying on a mortgage, which at the rate 2025 is going might put them in the same category as Millennials, or even behind, so like Z?

Come, join us… uWu…

You say that like you have access to healthcare.

Google searches used to work, they don’t so readily - technology, and things in general, always change(s), but it would be hubris to assume that such will always lead to it becoming “better” (for who? how?)

PieFed is trying a bunch of new stuff that even Reddit does not have, enabling the democratization of moderation by putting more power into the hands of individual users (e.g. mods don’t have to be as aggressive as removing many posts with keywords when users who want such can set their own preferences via the built-in keyword filtering, which enables All, Some, and None).

Lemmy to me looks more like a straight attempt to copy, although the modlog is a great addition - unfortunately in the absence of notifications of a moderation event, lack of modmail, and presence of an obscured moderator name, Lemmy has somehow become even more authoritian than Reddit.🤷😳

Though with a MUCH more friendly userbase, and most admins, and ofc lack of profit incentive which all by its lonesome helps a ton.

Bc he’s just that chill, obviously! 😁

Never heard of that one - neat!

The average age of a Redditor started to go down even several years ago, long before Rexodus, in large part as the platform changed things to encourage speaking even without bothering to read anything at all.

Thus I decided to leave Reddit regardless, and only fortuitously decided to come here. Some things simply are not worth the trouble.

Fwy, some apps allow for automatically applied icons to indicate such. I forget exactly which ones, but I know PieFed’s web UI does it. It’s very helpful imho.

PieFed also marks people who receive like 10x more downvotes than upvotes. That way you can still choose to read their content, but seeing that, decide how best to respond.

I used to think it was that, but now I realize that it’s not “just” communication.

Like Lemmy for instance is somehow more authoritian than Reddit itself - not for an instance admin but for the end user I mean. While there is a modlog, there is no modmail, no notification about an event such as removal of someone’s post, no ability to even know who to DM to ask for clarification or appeal (the modlog used to say more, but nowadays simply says “mod”), and on Lemmy.ml people are routinely banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, for making a comment in some other community, and importantly, for violation of an entirely unwritten rule (that while the instance is e.g. pro-genocide when done by certain nations, any negative portrayal of an action done by other nations is not allowed). The latter, especially when the end user receives no notification of it happening, sounds an awful lot like shadowbanning to me.

Instance admins are free, mods can be depending upon the graces of their admins, but end users… are given whatever freedoms the admins allow. Just like Reddit, except less content, and no modmail. No amount of merely explaining this to people who tried Lemmy, got bullied (stories abound in r/RedditAlternatives), and went back, is going to convince them to try again. The tools themselves just don’t live up to the hype that people have already tried promising, and the development moves at a snail’s pace.

Though PieFed gives me more hope.

Omg it’s amazing! Treat yourself enough to make an account. Once you see the sign-up wizard, asking you what your interests are and pre-signing you up to communities based on your responses, and it asking you how much content you would like to see containing the keywords “Musk” or “Trump” (importantly, not just All vs. None, but an intermediate Some as well), you’ll see what the Threadiverse has been missing!

After that, it does take quite some getting used to, coming from Lemmy and Reddit, but that’s a good thing bc it has so many more CHOICES that you can make, like not just All vs. Subscribed (vs. Local), but categories of communities. Like e.g. you could choose not to subscribe to any political communities so that you won’t be deluged with such every single time you log on, and yet all the News and Politics are available in the appropriately named News and Politics - which (it just keeps getting better and better) are also user customizable and shareable as well!

It’s not perfected yet - notifications are sometimes buggy and the search function sucks compared to Lemmy - but it serves my needs 99.9% of the time and for the rest there’s my Lemmy alt to fall back to anyway:-).

So yes indeed, try it and you’ll fall in love instantly, finding yourself using it more often until it’s your main. You’ll see.:-)

Oh and the developer team adds features practically weekly, plus is super friendly and responsive, so there’s that too.:-)

Me too. I found a post via browsing by All, and responded with something innocuous (I thought) to the effect that “Biden may not be perfect, but he did at least lower gasoline prices and that’s not entirely nothing”… and the responses kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS. And then I did it again - once was on Lemmygrad.ml and the other on hexbear.net.

Even taking it as a given that I’m a dumb stupid idiot (am I though?), it was obvious to me how “consent” matters not at all to them. I was being “dunked on”, which tbf is literally written in the side-bar text of ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net!.. EXCEPT that I found it by browsing All, so had never seen that!?

So to clarify, it’s not that I think such places shouldn’t exist entirely, just that they are not a match to everyone else across the Fediverse, particularly the more mainstream normie, mostly centrists in the USA that were coming over from Reddit (including myself).

Mind you, PieFed provides full solutions to all of these issues: the side-bar text is shown down below EVERY post from a community (okay so someone could still find something via All and respond via comment without ever seeing it but… it’s something?), and more importantly it provides the ability to place messages attached to like URLs or more relevant here, Lemmy instances. Hexbear is fully defederated from PieFed.social but if it were not, then for one I wouldn’t be here, but moreover I would push heavily for such a message to be added that warns people who do not know the lore already. Also you can do personal defederations without needing admin support, by truly blocking all users from a given instance (I do it for lemmy.ml), unlike Lemmy’s horribly misnamed feature that would be better termed a community muting (that still allows those users to spam your inbox with notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS). Also, PieFed allows you to trigger notifications for anything at all - a user, a particular post, a singular comment (whether yours or by someone else), and thus CRUCIALLY allows you to STOP receiving notifications for something when you don’t want that anymore.

And those aren’t even the top features of PieFed:-). However, back then PieFed didn’t exist, so I can well understand all the people complaining in places such as r/RedditAlternatives (as I mentioned but I’ll bring it up again:-) why they tried out Lemmy and decided to abandon it. You and I almost did the same - and we are by no means alone in that, as, still yet again, many did do so.

Unfortunately Lemmy’s feature set in this regard have actively gone backwards lately - e.g. instance blocking used to not allow notifications, but now it does. And Lemmy.ml seems integrated heavily into the Lemmy processes, so much so that most instances don’t dare to defederate from it. This seems relevant since the OP was talking about “centralization”, and while in theory the Lemmy sourcecode doesn’t absolutely 100% mandate that a new instance be federated with lemmy.ml, in practice it is true that every single major instance has done so. i.e. we talk a lot about decentralization, even while we have this major centralization feature present in the Lemmyverse.

Thus forcing new users to be exposed to the anti-Western propaganda (e.g. “bOtH sIdEs SaMe”), before they learn how to block those communities and users (but are prevented from doing so for the entire instance) one by one…

Do you work at Boeing? 😜