I didn't know it, and I'm trying it.
The UX is really nice, though I don't understand why I needed to submit the reasons why I wanted to subscribe, and why I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities...
But thanks for the suggestion!

Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.

This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We're overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.

At least we're solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.

I used a vpn that put me in the UK and reddit asked for my ID...

And guitars.

People actually like infinite scroll?

do you think the same is true for the hornyposting?

Reddit already requires it in the UK

Yes, and do we have any numbers about UK usage before/after the changes? Do we have any idea of how many people there:

• looked for an alternative?
• looked for an alternative and were not satisfied?
• looked for an alternative and migrated successfully?

And for those that were not satisfied, what was failing to them? Was the Fediverse so bad that they rather go back to Reddit, or did they just quit social media altogether?

The UK started asking for age verification ~5 months ago. That should give us more than enough data to take a look at this objectively.

No, not ready for another USA spam shit. Other than that, the rest is fine.

yeah but more pictures of cats and dogs.

What’s the deal with lemmy.ml by the way? I know a few marxist-leninists IRL who, as you say, are quite normal.

Is there beef with that .ml instance on Lemmy? I’m new here as you can see.

Many leftists started out as liberals, it makes sense they’d believe others could also change.

-signed, a vegan married to a butcher, so don’t listen to me lol (at least he’s a leftist)

In Mbin users can enable it if they want.

my perspective? nah, hornypost all you want (keep it to nsfw communities tho if it's "hard" nsfw as opposed to "soft") - that makes it easier to sort.

or use a nsfw tag for the post

signed, a vegan married to a butcher,

This sounds hilarious! Thanks for the good laugh!

But it is as legit as anything haha, leftist here married to a Christian conservative (at least she doesn’t vote lol 😶‍🌫️) and yes “I can change her” is definitely on my mind.

This. Tagging is so important... In my opinion we could use some more tags to sort stuff. At least some nsfl and politics tag.

For politics I just use a keyword block. If it contains terms related to that orange or such, I block.

Piefed does have a nsfl tag option, a bot filter, as well moving communities to another instance.

Imho, those are the three big things that most fediverse places should have. Being able to move to another instance is a gamechanger, should an instance disappear or get seized by asshats.

I would actually make the bot filter on by default. Is this the case?

For piefed, my main criticisms are these;

Voting Privacy – Votes can be private (not federated); in meme communities, upvotes don’t affect reputation (optional).

Enabling private votes may make it easier for bots, but as these votes are not federated, it should not affect what other users see, I think.
Upvotes not affecting reputation in meme communities is an issue because this way someone could make a far-right community and call it a meme community, and get off scot-free. How do Piefed devs tackle this?

Likewise;

Default Comment Collapsing – Comments at -10 score or below are collapsed automatically.

Low Reputation Indicator – Identifies consistently downvoted users.

This can be an issue, with bots en masse downvoting comments to have them be less visible. How is it ensured that the bot filter would work, without far-reaching measures like "age verification"?

Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they're gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again.

But I guess it's still a single point of failure. If they don't properly ensure there's several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there's legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can't afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn't know whether they're in a healthy place or not.

I mean there's nothing wrong with FediNSFW's existence. I just think it's massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the "Fediverse", a decentral platform...

no i meant do you think it's the cia doing it

Not specifically age-verification, but they are considering checks of some sort at some point to deal with the bot problem on there. That's at least one angle. They've also just rolled it out in small scale to suspicious accounts. So whether or not it is done for the purposes of verifying age, or just dealing with bots - I suspect it'll arrive in the end once they feel they have the capital to do it.

As for the UK specific issues, it's hard to get a concrete numbers because most people in the UK just switched to a VPN. In the event of Reddit implementing global ID-check measures, it wouldn't matter what VPN you switched to - so the situation would be a bit different.

the cia would try anything, but hornyposting isn't their main thing. They'd try that with high-profile individuals.

I recall them having made a fake sex video of Sukarno (the first leader of Indonesia), and trying to blackmail him. Upon seeing it, he said he was delighted and wanted more, lol. Here's a source.

That is odd, normally you are only asked for a reason when you sign up for a new account and not when you just subscribe to a community. Can you share the community you were trying to subscribe?

I have to wait to be subscribed to the different communities
That is unfortunately in the nature of the decentralization. Your instance cannot be sure that that the instance the community is on will respond in a timely fashion so it shows it as "pending". The only thing we could maybe do about this is to be overly optimistic. Most requests to subscribe a community go though without a problem so we could just show it being subscribed even though are are not, but that would introduce other problems.

There's some anime titties but not enough to go around.

Yea bro, I need it more than reading for the hundred time what Trump will do. I don't leave in hell, yet feels live living in it.

doesn't matter where you live, the people living in hell will force it down your throat because they want everyone else to be as miserable as they are.

🫡

My bad choice of wording, they asked me for reasons during sign up, not subscribing to communities.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation, any chance you can share also android apps?
I'm currently using Summit linked to my PieFed account

You've just posted a great example.

The authoritarian tankies masquerading as leftists/progressives is a problem too.

For new users the local feed is the recommendation algorithm. If you are on a instance that caters to your interests you will discover stuff that interests you there automatically. If you're not, then you might conclude, that Lemmy has nothing for you and bounce off the platform entirely. This is especially true if you are looking for non-English content.

The paradoxical situation with federation and instances is that those least likely to understand it are among the more likely to profit from it if they did.

I don't want people from Reddit here.

The fact that half of Twatter moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon is a blessing.

ActivityPub is by design a data harvesting goldmine, the fact that it flies under the radar is the only saving grace.

I'd explain it like this. I hope that that works.

An easy analogy

View the fediverse like a few forests, linked by many wild bridges. PieFed might be one forest, Peertube and Mastodon yet other ones. These forests have a lot of different trees.

An instance is like a single tree. And a community a branch. Users are leaves. You can help keep the tree alive, by giving donations as nutrition.

Some parts of the fediverse allow leaves to move and join another tree.

Traditional social media, on the other hand, are comparable to a single, isolated and big tree, far away from other trees. You cannot jump to other trees, and cannot easily go to a forest.

More technical explanation

Social media are built on 'protocols'. Protocols tell for example social media what they can do and how to 'talk' to each other.

The Fediverse is a group of social media that use ActivityPub, Diaspora, or AT Protocol. These three protocols allow something special that 'traditional' social media like Facebook and Instagram don't: they can communicate across each other, without using a centralised server for hosting content.

It's comparable to email; you can mail to someone not using your mail provider, and vice versa.

On one of these fediverse social media, people self-host or join a self-hosted group. Such a group is called an 'instance'. Each instance functions independently and can have its own policies.

Instances (and users) can decide with which other instances they allow their own content to be seen. They can also decide what instances their users can see content from. An instance that is connected to another instance is said to be 'federated' with the latter. If that is not the case, they are 'defederated'. Instances are supported through donations.

Within each instances, there are many communities. There's a community for Linux, a community for cat pictures, a community for nature, and so on. Users can subscribe to many of them, receiving their content.

Casual endorsement or sympathy for summary executions based on class alone. With or without, "just joking bro"

A failure to accept the possibility that societal collapse will probably hurt more people than it helps.

Every time I think about starting a community about one of my hobbies, I look at a random modlog and realize I don't want any part of it.

Sign up is still a confusing, exclusionary, inaccessible mess. So, no.

Wow, thanks a lot, this is the best explanation that I was able to find so far!

Im not sure if you are aware but you do not have to create a new Account on there. Photon is another client just like Summit is, so you can login using your piefed.social account.
Sadly im not on android anymore but will be coming back soon! There are couple to choose from, just from the looks i like sync and interstellar but im not sure how well they support piefed. Lemmy was first so it was first supported.

https://join.piefed.social/docs/piefed-mobile/
https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app

I'm happy to say I've managed to marry a leftist

The Good ending.

We've always been ready. Ready for the drama. 🍿

She didn't even really have the liberal pit-stop many of us take.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one. Imagine my chagrin after years of rigorously checking the assumptions and programming of my conservative upbringing and converting to liberalism, when I found out that leftism and liberalism are actually different things, with a diversity of opinions and worldviews that I then needed to parse in order to determine where I stand...

This mentality where "If you weren't born leftist and raised leftist and been leftist all your life and all your friends are leftist, then you're fascist scum who needs to perish in the revolution" is doing incalculable harm to any genuine leftist movement.

PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach: it blocks the most controversial instances but not as defederations i.e. at the instance level, and instead does so automatically for every new account upon sign-up, then sends the user a message explaining how to remove that block. From there they can unblock, reblock, back and forth as they choose at will. It thus makes federation with hexbear and Lemmygrad as opt-in rather than opt-out or obligatory or neglected as all other instances across the Threadiverse do.

I do not recall if it does this for lemmy.ml as well - I would suspect not, sadly, but then again it would be fairly unique in that respect if it did, as virtually no major instances do so.

And as far as far-right instances, those do not really exist, though nonetheless the historical ones are in the defederation list (exploding heads, freespeechextremists, and ofc threads.net:-P), and surely over time new instances could be added as well.

Finally I will add that I've never seen the tiniest hint of documentation for any of this - not in https://piefed.zip/defed_policy, or the welcome messages in their !announcements@piefed.zip or !home@piefed.zip local communities, and now I don't see their listing anywhere in the instance picker site, despite trying multiple host instances of that including themselves. I only know about this since I too questioned how Newbie-friendly any instance was that federates with the above-mentioned pair, and the instance admin told me about this, but even now months later I still don't see an official description written down about this somewhere easily accessible by people.

The Threadiverse is still very much a Work-In-Progress! But... it's getting better, and PieFed.zip is a major part of that progress, it looks to me.

It's not a problem on PieFed, it's mostly been delt with

Gatekeeping, nice.

I don't think I have ever felt this validated in my entire life, thank you.

The trick is starting a community, but delegating moderation to someone else. Admin ≠ Mod.

Is reddit blocking VPNs now? I don't use reddit anymore, but sometimes I search something on the web and like it or not, redditors in niche communities have good answers to uncommon questions. Definitely better than can be found on quora or other places.

But it doesn't let me view them, supposedly because I'm using a VPN now...

If that's the case, fuck spez and all corporate sellouts. Reddit used to be a mecca for freedom of association...

It's 2026. We've more than accepted that the people who simp for capitalism are the problem.

I have changed instances several times and it seems to me to be the simplest mechanism humanly imaginable.