I find the inclusion of every federated instance in ‘All’ fairly annoying. New tiny/niche/vanity instances get added by default when federated. There ends up being too much duplication and stuff I’m not interested in.

I’d much rather a system that only includes the local instance by default with a way to discover and add other instances.

My instance block list is long but there’s always new instances to block. For me, this a design flaw of the fediverse.

Can't you just make the Local feed your default?

Personally I just subscribe to everything I want to see and browse that.

Voyager lets you set your default as All, Local, or Home.

That's the answer right there. The lemmy personal customization is quite flexible. You can even make it behave like an old-school forum if you want.

This is a feature in lemmy and piefed themselves, every app should support it.

Does instance block block everything from the instance?

Essentially, yes. I think you still see comments from users on that instance if they comment on a post on an instance that isn’t blocked.

Blocking all foreign posts, even on local communities sounds like it might be an unwanted side effect.

The only problem with that is not seeing posts from other instances I don’t want to block.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d prefer Subscribed to be personally curated communities, Local to be instance curated, and All to be a place to get a broader picture of, well, everything.

I’d just find it easier/more natural to opt-in to other instance content rather than opt-out.

sorry I don't understand the difference that you're looking for

Yes. I want All to be just other instances that I’m interested in. Not every available (federated) instance.

so you want to be able to subscribe to instances and have a new feed for the "Subscribed Instances" (as opposed to the existing Subscribed for communities)

not directly related, but have you looked at Feeds and Topics? https://piefed.social/feeds and https://piefed.social/topics

You can also follow remote feeds https://piefed.social/feed/add_remote

No, I didn’t know about those. Thanks, I’ll check that out.

You can also create your own feeds

The mislabled all feed isn't actually an all feed, but just posts from communities that you, or someone else on your instance has subscribed to.

I think for maximum control it would be cool to have separate

• Block communities from instance
• Block posts from instance
• Block comments from instance

That might be too many buttons though. Maybe hide them in your settings as separate block lists, and when you click the existing "block instance" button it just adds it to all 3 of the lists

All those things are on the 'Explore' menu.

Great point about feeds. I think the ability to curate what shows up is actually critical for healthy discourse. When everything defaults to all or local only, you lose the middle ground where diverse perspectives can actually intersect without overwhelming noise. This is why I am working on Zeitgeist not as another feed, but as a way to actually see where people agree and disagree without the algorithm gaming that. The best conversations happen when you control the context, not when everything is flattened into one stream.