Comment on What Fediverse services do you use?
OpenStars@piefed.social 2 days agoYeah the learning curve is real... but fortunately it's bc there is so much more that can be done, not bc like it's "difficult" or anything, just that you get to choose how you want things to be.:-)
Like anything, you get better with practice, so yeah, just start strolling through the posts and enjoy!
PieFed really is the best (most often only) answer that I've seen to SO VERY MANY questions for how to accomplish something on Lemmy (usually you cannot, unless some app provides that feature). Like how to see posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics: the topics (often if not always tend to) do that, like Arts & Crafts - and another cool trick is that if you ever do want it, News & Politics is always right there just waiting for you, so there's no longer any need to "subscribe" to those (or maybe subscribe to some of the lower traffic, less contentious communities?), hence you can both have a Subscription feed free of politics (as an example, for someone who wanted that) and still have full access to politics whenever you wanted. It's a whole new way of browsing the Threadiverse, i.e. even if accessing the same Lemmy communities, you approach it all differently - or, you can, if you want.
It's so nice to have choices!:-)
gon@lemm.ee 1 day ago
:D That does sound nice…
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
It is nice. I use my older Lemmy account less and less often these days... I am glad that Lemmy exists for people - especially someone just using it as a back-end for whatever app of choice they use as an actual interface - but I am even more glad to have PieFed, which suits so many of my needs (tbf not all) perfectly or at least more so than Lemmy.:-D
gon@lemm.ee 1 day ago
What do you think is missing from PieFed?
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
The search function for content is abysmally bad. Tbf it hasn't been shown much love yet, and Reddit's was not great either. Though Lemmy's is superb, especially newer features will allow restriction to post titles.
Another one: PieFed has a post preview option, but only for posts, not comments. So I either find out about problems (like an image not being displayed properly) afterwards, or I have to open a new tab and try a preview with either Lemmy, or a new post on PieFed.
One annoyance: you can receive notifications for things that don't exist, or you don't have access to (e.g. if you block all users from an instance - which on PieFed you can do that! Lemmy's version is misnamed and so weak as to be misleading to be called an instance block, when it allows content from users on that instance to be displayed, and they can also reply to you, trigger notifications, etc., really it should have been named a community mute rather than instance block, but PieFed's version is so helpful! - but anyway if you do that, they can still trigger a notification for you, even though you cannot see their actual reply. Another annoyance: if you leave on the default settings for either the auto-collapse or auto-hide features, then it may take you to a space on the page that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual reply, and you have to hunt it down (which if it were removed rather than just collapsed, you will literally never find it). Also if the post or comment OP deletes their content, then the notification should likewise be removed, but right now it's not.
So it's not "perfect". I maintain a backup Lemmy account for whenever the server has connectivity issues (all Lemmy instances do that too), and for whenever I run into one of these issues above.
It also would be nice to more often be able to navigate to the original location of everything, which often works on PieFed but not nearly as readily as the rainbow colored Fediverse icon in the Lemmy web UI.
Even so, these minor issues of polish aside, PieFed is a strong option, hence why I use it as my daily driver, with (next to) zero regrets, again especially for someone who is familiar with doing searching for content in Lemmy.
And new features continue to be added, sometimes weekly but definitely at least monthly. It's so FAST! And the main dev Rimu is so helpful and friendly, as are so many others I've interacted with. I would suggest to make an account and check it out! The worst that could happen is that you don't enjoy it enough and want to keep using your old one, in which case you'll still have seen something new, plus have a not-brand-new account to use later if you ever wanted (e.g. you are prevented from sending someone a DM for the first two weeks, which is appropriate imho). However, even though the learning curve is real (bc having access to additional options offers up new ways to structure your content delivery to yourself to be more fully optimal), I am confident that as you see more what it has to offer, you'll return the older account less and less often (you'll still need to for moderation activities, especially since mod activities do not federate even among Lemmy instances much less across from PieFed, but for daily driving it's quite a treat, really!).