OpenStars

@OpenStars@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Ouest-France' becomes first French newspaper to stop posting on X⁩ ⁨⁨54⁩ ⁨seconds⁩ ago⁩:

  What if they were to admin their own instance? It'd be a lot of work though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I agree with their reasoning, since what is there now is pretty good, so it would be merely a refinement of an existing goodness, compared to so much else needing to done elsewhere e.g. making an API to allow existing apps to use PieFed in addition to Lemmy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Fwiw, LW seems ready to defederate from Threads at a moment's notice (post), but atm it doesn't matter since Threads isn't federating with Lemmy anyway.

  Though it's still an excellent point to wonder why they haven't done it preemptively, like pretty much every other instance I've heard of (even lemm.ee's [blocked instance list[(https://lemm.ee/instances) that is shockingly short has that one). Perhaps bc the decision to defederate from *any* instance, and especially that one, has generated such negative feedback (as the post linked above mentions), they are hesitant to do anything at all, especially again while it does not matter right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You can still use All, if you block the communities that you don't want to see, one by one. It's exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise it's hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.

  So like I blocked !memes@lemmy.ml bc of its constant (seemingly not-entirely-joking) call for guillotining irl people including average people who simply were born in a capitalist nation, but subscribed to !tech_memes@lemmy.world that I enjoy much more now - the latter created only a few days ago, check it out!:-)

  Also !fedimemes@feddit.uk. Really you miss so much only browsing by Subscribed. But do what works for you, bc I get it: the amount of extremist content on Lemmy is extremely high, and as you say depressing in its consistency.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You are most welcome:-).

  An app? Apparently an API is in development for it, but it's still in alpha stage. Even so, there's a bunch of new features in PieFed that Lemmy does not have, such as Categories of Communities, so in some ways it would be a downgrade to use an app.

  I just use Firefox to access https://PieFed.social, and it works fine. Well, mostly, bc even though PieFed has things that Lemmy lacks, it lacks some polish compared to the Lemmy web UI that has had more development work put into it. This is where an app would come in handy - if you didn't need all the new features that PieFed offers and just want Lemmy without the "Lemmy" part:-). (And didn't want to use Mbin, which iirc also lacks an API and thus ability to access via an app.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  On my account I use the (dark) theme Card Shadow. I had an issue with it where I needed to disable the Dark Reader extension in Firefox. Lemmy ignored that but it actively messed up PieFed, though after disabling it, PieFed works perfectly for me.

  https://piefed.social/communities has a create local and add remote buttons that look like they would create communities, though I did not text them out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yay! I will have hope in an upcoming API then:-). Thanks for sharing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Hehe, always never not be hacking, yes absolutely:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  This? B/c see the comment elsewhere in this thread by db0 who said he did not have time to work on it right now... :-( But I do hope it comes soon:-). And yet the web UI I would hope would be polished regardless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, so sorry to hear that! I got excited to hear that you were excited to work on it too... :-P

  Thank you for telling me so I won't spread misinformation about it. I hope you get to where you have more time irl soon - whether you choose to spend it on that topic, on Lemmy at all, or touch grass or sth else instead (our health is important!!!). Take good care of yourself (and then get back to work! only if/when you want to ofc:-P).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason my first example wasn't a good one was that this meme community (!tech_memes@lemmy.world) wasn't part of the organized hierarchy of Home -> Topics -> Chilling -> Memes, but rather the generic Home -> Communities (as in, all of them in aggregate) -> Technology Memes@lemmy.world. So yeah, it's a very new community, although !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca is older but the same happens with it too. Therefore I assume that it requires an admin approval to bundle these "Topics" together, and it definitely doesn't strike me as something that an individual user could put together.

  Then again, someone (perhaps you? or me?) could send requests to the admin to add communities to topic areas, or perhaps modify the codebase directly if it were placed into a file and people granted access (whereupon once again, the admin would have to approve - although in this case a mechanism would also be needed to assess the differences and apply them).

  Anyway, there's a LOT of polish that PieFed lacks, and this doesn't even crack the top half imho, next to things like user mentions (@openstars@piefed.social) and Notifications properly taking you to the actual thing that you are being notified about (a goodly fraction of the time it does not, right now.

  On the other hand, Lemmy has no such thing as "Categories" or "Topics" of any kind so... anything that PieFed has along these lines is surely better than the nothing that exists in that regard there, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨land before time⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, most beings never get immortalized at all so... there's also that to consider as well:-).🦖

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven't looked but that's great to know as well:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Ouest-France' becomes first French newspaper to stop posting on X⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And honestly, it may really help Mastodon out if people join it specifically to get at the content here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Also note that "blocking" it doesn't actually "block" much of anything at all - it stops you from seeing the communities located on that instance, but the users will still appear in posts all across the Fediverse, sending their harassing messages to you, pinging your Notifications every time they reply to you, downvoting your own comments, etc. The instance block function is horribly misnamed.

  If you want to avoid this kind of thing, I second that recommendation to try Lemmy.cafe - it is the only Lemmy instance that defederates from the Big 3: hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml. The latter one is like 1000x easier to deal with than hexbear, yet still nearly *all* of the most batshit insane comments I've received on Lemmy after defederating from the other two have come from it - and for similar reasons that they get used to how things work inside their echo chamber, and then behave the same way when they venture outside of it - so I consider having defederated from it too worthwhile overall. Although you will miss out on some content such as !Firefox@lemmy.ml that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Though there's a feature request for that where db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com said that he would be excited to work on!:-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PieFed, a FOSS Feed Aggregator alternative to Lemmy, but faster⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes really. Here's an example - see the communities at the top, and hashtags at the bottom.

  On second thought, that's not a fantastic example of categories, so here and here are better ones.

  There's a lot that is not yet implemented in PieFed, like no preview feature for writing messages or user tagging (e.g. @openstars@piefed.social does not send me a notification), yet it already has several features that Lemmy does not - it's so exciting to watch it develop!:-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new way to describe the Fediverse and its opposition to Big Tech⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  TLDR: just as eating too much processed foods leads to obesity of the body, consuming too much Big Tech processed social media leads to mental rot.

  It would be better to focus on quality ingredients.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Ouest-France' becomes first French newspaper to stop posting on X⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting, I think they legitimately don't know what they'll do instead:

  "Strictly speaking, there are no alternatives to what X offers today," Vincent Berthier, head of the technology department at RSF (Reporters Without Borders) told AFP.

  "But we may need to invent them."

  I imagine they'll end up on Bluesky, possibly also on Mastodon?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fediverse moderation tooling - problems and recommendations from Letterbook⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I really like the approach taken by PieFed to provide greater transparency in the decision-making process, and enable the users to make their own determinations rather than solely the binary yes-no to removing vs. retaining content.

  As one example, allowing people to block users, communities, or even whole entire instances, in a true way rather than Lemmy's way that *calls* itself an "instance block" but then acts as a mere "community mute".

  And then further to turn off notifications for individual items, which allows people to cool off rather than have to resort to jumping straight to the ban-hammer (I am trying to be funny there, but really an individual cannot "ban" anyone, so I mean block:-).

  And a big one: auto-collapsing and even auto-hiding comments based on the content's number of downvotes. If someone wants to click to expand it, then they are free to do so - and I've completely disabled the auto-hide feature for myself, by putting in a number of 10000 for the threshold - or not as they please. I would hope that the UI tools will get better in that regard, e.g. right now if you reply to someone and then receive a notification, it won't auto-expand back out the auto-collapsed entries, so you really have to hunt around for what the notification was trying to direct you to (though not as bad as the more deeply embedded "Continue thread" where the notification tries to take you to something that isn't even on the same page!). But even moderate implementation issues aside (of a very recently-added feature ofc), the theory is wonderful!:-)

  And potentially even bigger: placing a label next to a person based on their "reputation" score, or even for a whole entire instance (e.g. Beehaw), so that someone does not walk into a conversation with them unawares. They still have every right and ability to, just... hey, they were warned, you know?:-P

  A democratization of moderation, yeah it sure sounds nice:-) - ofc it still needs some "hard" limits such as spam and NSFL content that needs to flat be REMOVED as quickly as possible, but providing automated tools that allow for an entire *spectrum* of ability to engage or not engage with content is... just wow. So exciting, and futuristic, especially compared to the likes of the hard-nosed Reddit mods (and I say this as someone who *was* one of them, for two small communities - there really were only the 2 choices, and it sure would have been nice to have had more options to be able to choose from, between "allow" vs. "remove"!:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reminder for all Lemmy moderators and admins.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno, looks like a good time to me:-P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon Follow Packs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  PieFed already has categories of communities. It would be hard for Lemmy to copy the code into Rust I imagine. There is an open feature request to add API support to PieFed, at which point perhaps the same front end apps could serve both Lemmy and PieFed? I don't know which ones may have categories of communities though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I recalled Kbin having that as well, so thought that Mbin surely must, but someone pointed out to me that no it does not, for whatever reason even though Kbin had it.

  PieFed does though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Choose Your Fighter: Microblogging Edition⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Why did this put Threads first? It's not chronologically? And it's not user counts? This seems free advertising for a service that hardly compares even with the likes of Xhitter - which isn't even one of the options?

  As the recent USA election shows, nothing is billionaire-"proof". They could e.g. put huge tariffs on purchasing server machines, or on non-mobile-device internet access, or use of any IP address that is not registered with a central authority and verified(TM) to run only M$-"approved" software.

  Also I thought there is no (real) account migration on Mastodon either (at least, people have definitely reported feeling "stuck" in that while they can move, will any of their followers be able to successfully follow them after they do?). Nor can celebrities prevent people from impersonating them on new instances - which according to them is why they haven't joined it (last I heard).

  Sorry, I am probably vastly overthinking this, and the graphical style is cute. I think I'm just overreacting to the idea that Mastodon seems to be having an identity crisis where it both wants to be something entirely different than Xhitter, while also competing with / replacing it at the same time, yet refusing to do the things that would make that happen (like make changes to be more welcoming to celebrities). If we want to remain a niche, like a federated service for the common person, then just do that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First Look: Loops, by Pixelfed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At a guess, bc the timing might seem right with all the controversy surrounding Tiktok? Knowing that this is out there may increasing the number of contributors to the codebase.

  Also I recall clicking on a GitHub page at some point for a front-end web UI for this content, so while the sourcecode of the app itself may not be available yet, there is a way for someone to make their own instance to receive the federated content. I think.

  In comparison, the Sublinks project garnered so much attention that the Lemmy.World admins seemed ready to jump onto it the moment that it was halfway ready, but now we haven't heard of any progress whatsoever for months and people seem to have given up hope for it. So communication about a project can be quite important as well as the actual coding itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gam-Gam got scam-scammed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Stop trying to make fetch happen - it's not going to happen! At least not with *that* as a drone.