OpenStars@piefed.social 4 days ago
PieFed has some features that I find helpful in this regard.
One is the Categories of Communities. You'll only see News in the News category or in the non-category search methods (standard Subscribed/All/New/etc.).
Another is the ability to follow - and arguably more important unfollow - everything. Including communities, posts, people, etc. I once made the mistake of replying to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net, and another in Lemmygrad.ml, and the replies kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS - I almost quit the Fediverse entirely at that point, and I hear that scenario repeated by others as well. But on PieFed, not only can I unfollow any conversation at any time, but unlike Lemmy it also allows a true blocking of all users from any instance you choose.
Ofc nothing is perfect - e.g. I decided to unfollow poetry@lemmy.world bc I don't want to read 5 of those in a row every morning, and rather would want to savor just one at a time. Also it would be nice to separate comment replies (that seem more urgent, for the sake of an active conversation) from e.g. a new post that you haven't seen yet? But for a true niche community, with let's say less than a handful of posts every day and you want to be notified about every single one? It seems perfect for that.
The UI for PieFed needs far more polish, especially outside of the narrow range of short comments on posts with few of those in number. e.g. far too often the existing notifications don't work as the reply to your comment got buried away onto some other page entirely, in an effort to streamline reading but then that not interacting well with the newer (unfinished?) notifications feature. But while it lacks much polish that Lemmy's UI and apps have, it also has so many features like those mentioned above that Lemmy lacks as well, and may move faster in its development due to using a more common programming language. It is so nice to have choices to pick from:-).
Otherwise on Lemmy you could make alts, like one subscribed to News communities, another for Memes and Shitposts, etc. Blocking users would get super annoying bc you'd have to do it multiple times. Blocking the largest news communities *and* the accounts that usually fill them, and then sorting by New can help, but it requires enormous curation efforts to get there and even then falls far short of what you asked - e.g. you *also, still* have to bookmark or otherwise check each one of your highly active communities one by one.
Lemmy is great for checking memes, reading tech or politics news, and liking Linux - but for everything else it needs improvements to be made to support. I'm not going back to Reddit though:-).
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I think that Lemmy would benefit from a tag system, one that allows both adding tags to communities but also to posts, the upshot is that these could be handled like hashtags on other federated platforms like Mastodon. Lemmy already does this with posts in a community, but it’s just a hashtag of the community name, would be good if users could add their own tags.
OpenStars@piefed.social 4 days ago
Well actually... I neglected to mention that PieFed has hashtags already. Here's an example post showing them. Note the categories at the top and the hashtags below the post. Click them and they seem to work perfectly.
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s great, hopefully Lemmy can support something like that soon. I know the devs said following tags is out of the question but I don’t think that means content shouldn’t have tags.
OpenStars@piefed.social 2 days ago
I mean, theoretically I could put hashtags right here and now. #seewhatimean? And if you copied and pasted them into the search bar you could theoretically use them to find other content that also used the same ones. But the whole entire point is to allow the submitter to make their content easier to link up with other content, so that you can simply see something, click it, and instantly find other similar things? It's really not hard at all, and like PieFed *already* has it. It sounds like the Lemmy devs simply don't care about that style, hence it won't be done. Unless someone wants to donate their time to make it happen I suppose?