For Lemmy that’s what I used to do yeah, bc there was no better option.
PieFed offers numerous additional options though, most especially categories of communities, including user customizable and shareable Feeds. You can even have your cake and eat it too - like subscribe to no political communities to avoid them showing up in your Subscribed, but then it’s a click away in the News and Politics Topic area. Or, the keywords filter options (for e.g. “Trump”, “Musk”, or whatever you want) include All, None, and Some, allowing you to refine your Subscribed feed to meet your interest level in a particular subject.
And then for very low-volume communities, you can even set up Notification triggers upon every new post (I also use this for a community I mod using a Lemmy alt) - e.g. poetry tends to not be highly upvoted so super difficult to catch organically on either All or Subscribed (you might have more luck there sorting by New, but this requires blocking a TON of communities like for sports and individual locations and such).
PieFed really is an entirely different experience than Lemmy! Maybe as it becomes successful, the Lemmy devs may start to port the features over? But it’s doubtful, as existing requests have languished for like 5 years already - PieFed’s being written in Python rather than Rust really makes a difference in such matters.
I think there’s a lot of development going on with the lemmy UI, for example the lemm.ee developer has next.lemm.ee for his new UI design beta. I’m looking out for a golden age of lemmy UI development where everyone’s copying each other’s functionality and they all continually improve until it ends up being about whichever interface personally prefer, like we had with 3rd party reddit apps.
To be clear to others, though, PieFed is itself its own lemmy instance first, but it’s open source so works as an example UI that could be implemented by any other instance. Every instance of lemmy is potentially different, not just in which version of lemmy code they use but any number of modifications the instance admin may choose to apply.
So you can easily subscribe to everything but exclude certain topics, is that what you mean? I have a subscribed feed but there’s too many new communities I might want to see and too much work to subscribe to everything, so I do it the other way by blocking things instead and browsing all. The main thing I don’t like about PieFed on first glance is that the image thumbnails are quite large and only one or a few posts are shown on the screen at once if they are image posts, seems very mobile focused, is there a way to change that in the settings? I prefer to only open images after reading the title and deciding I want to look at it, then closing it again so there are more posts simultaneously on the screen.
It’s cool that it uses Python, I like using Python and dislike working in low level languages.
So I never used it but apparently Reddit has this feature of multi-communities, which the only way to really replicate that on Lemmy is to have many many many accounts on several different instances, each one dedicated to a different topic. Like on one you could have it be dedicated to news and politics while on all the others you could block those, thus allowing you to get your fix but only when you so choose.
This highly-requested feature (which might make it Lemmy eventually but iirc someone said that it has been on the roadmap or perhaps it was just a feature request on GitHub for five years already) is available all within a single account on PieFed. PieFed lacks a little bit of polish compared to Lemmy, but also has more functionality, in areas like this. It’s more “experimental” than Lemmy then, and being in Python is going to catch up a heck of a lot sooner. I suppose there’s a question of how well Python would work at large scales of millions of people in comparison to Rust, except looking at subscriber numbers for the entire Fediverse including even Mastodon, that’s really not a concern for now, and the way things are going (e.g. look at Bluesky snapping up people who refuse both X and Mastodon, and love its fully featured UI) may never be a concern in the future either.
I spent a year on Lemmy learning how to curate my feed, and in like a week on PieFed realized that the vast majority of that is unnecessary here. e.g. when you sign up for a new account, the wizard asks you what your interests are and then pre-subscribes you to communities based on your answers (ofc you can always leave them later and add new ones continually). It also asks what keywords you may want to block, like “Trump” or “Musk”, and offers not only All or None, but also Some. It’s really quite amazing how well it’s all handled!:-)
What you are saying about image sizes sounds at a guess like Tile or even Wide Tile mode, which if a community looks like mostly images I suppose it may default to? Whereas other communities and topic areas reading the titles is more helpful, so for those it defaults to “List” mode. (Although I’m not sure if that’s simply a stored setting or based on measurement of things like image size to title width or some such). See for instance News and Politics where the thumbnails are smaller, as opposed to [email protected] where they take up a much wider space.
I don’t like the very recent change making it harder to switch these settings by adding in another click required, but the developers are extremely open to feedback and if others think similarly then it may be changed yet again, possibly in mere days to weeks (rather than Lemmy’s timeframe of multiple years).
There is also app support in Interstellar and a fork (not yet official but still in testing) of Thunder. Though the webpage view is quite fine as it is, usually:-).
Speaking of, I just noticed a new Settings option for “compact UI”, with numerous values, which completely change how [email protected] looks (no image previews, in Firefox on Android, not sure how desktop and other browsers would handle it), and an even tighter setting removes vertical spacing as well to fit more posts into a denser space - exactly as you wanted!:-)
I bet if you go through the sign-up wizard, you’ll be entirely sold on it:-) https://piefed.social/ is the experimental flagship instance, but there are several other options available as well.
lemmy.dbzer0.com is a damn fine instance as well, with very solid admins, it’s only drawback being that it’s still using Lemmy, which especially for established users (who have already learned how to block stuff and navigate to existing communities) is mostly fine. But damn, PieFed is so exciting how it’s developing new features monthly! Definitely worth following if nothing else (although for me, this is my main now:-).
For Lemmy that’s what I used to do yeah, bc there was no better option.
PieFed offers numerous additional options though, most especially categories of communities, including user customizable and shareable Feeds. You can even have your cake and eat it too - like subscribe to no political communities to avoid them showing up in your Subscribed, but then it’s a click away in the News and Politics Topic area. Or, the keywords filter options (for e.g. “Trump”, “Musk”, or whatever you want) include All, None, and Some, allowing you to refine your Subscribed feed to meet your interest level in a particular subject.
And then for very low-volume communities, you can even set up Notification triggers upon every new post (I also use this for a community I mod using a Lemmy alt) - e.g. poetry tends to not be highly upvoted so super difficult to catch organically on either All or Subscribed (you might have more luck there sorting by New, but this requires blocking a TON of communities like for sports and individual locations and such).
PieFed really is an entirely different experience than Lemmy! Maybe as it becomes successful, the Lemmy devs may start to port the features over? But it’s doubtful, as existing requests have languished for like 5 years already - PieFed’s being written in Python rather than Rust really makes a difference in such matters.
I think there’s a lot of development going on with the lemmy UI, for example the lemm.ee developer has next.lemm.ee for his new UI design beta. I’m looking out for a golden age of lemmy UI development where everyone’s copying each other’s functionality and they all continually improve until it ends up being about whichever interface personally prefer, like we had with 3rd party reddit apps.
To be clear to others, though, PieFed is itself its own lemmy instance first, but it’s open source so works as an example UI that could be implemented by any other instance. Every instance of lemmy is potentially different, not just in which version of lemmy code they use but any number of modifications the instance admin may choose to apply.
So you can easily subscribe to everything but exclude certain topics, is that what you mean? I have a subscribed feed but there’s too many new communities I might want to see and too much work to subscribe to everything, so I do it the other way by blocking things instead and browsing all. The main thing I don’t like about PieFed on first glance is that the image thumbnails are quite large and only one or a few posts are shown on the screen at once if they are image posts, seems very mobile focused, is there a way to change that in the settings? I prefer to only open images after reading the title and deciding I want to look at it, then closing it again so there are more posts simultaneously on the screen.
It’s cool that it uses Python, I like using Python and dislike working in low level languages.
So I never used it but apparently Reddit has this feature of multi-communities, which the only way to really replicate that on Lemmy is to have many many many accounts on several different instances, each one dedicated to a different topic. Like on one you could have it be dedicated to news and politics while on all the others you could block those, thus allowing you to get your fix but only when you so choose.
This highly-requested feature (which might make it Lemmy eventually but iirc someone said that it has been on the roadmap or perhaps it was just a feature request on GitHub for five years already) is available all within a single account on PieFed. PieFed lacks a little bit of polish compared to Lemmy, but also has more functionality, in areas like this. It’s more “experimental” than Lemmy then, and being in Python is going to catch up a heck of a lot sooner. I suppose there’s a question of how well Python would work at large scales of millions of people in comparison to Rust, except looking at subscriber numbers for the entire Fediverse including even Mastodon, that’s really not a concern for now, and the way things are going (e.g. look at Bluesky snapping up people who refuse both X and Mastodon, and love its fully featured UI) may never be a concern in the future either.
I spent a year on Lemmy learning how to curate my feed, and in like a week on PieFed realized that the vast majority of that is unnecessary here. e.g. when you sign up for a new account, the wizard asks you what your interests are and then pre-subscribes you to communities based on your answers (ofc you can always leave them later and add new ones continually). It also asks what keywords you may want to block, like “Trump” or “Musk”, and offers not only All or None, but also Some. It’s really quite amazing how well it’s all handled!:-)
What you are saying about image sizes sounds at a guess like Tile or even Wide Tile mode, which if a community looks like mostly images I suppose it may default to? Whereas other communities and topic areas reading the titles is more helpful, so for those it defaults to “List” mode. (Although I’m not sure if that’s simply a stored setting or based on measurement of things like image size to title width or some such). See for instance News and Politics where the thumbnails are smaller, as opposed to [email protected] where they take up a much wider space.
I don’t like the very recent change making it harder to switch these settings by adding in another click required, but the developers are extremely open to feedback and if others think similarly then it may be changed yet again, possibly in mere days to weeks (rather than Lemmy’s timeframe of multiple years).
There is also app support in Interstellar and a fork (not yet official but still in testing) of Thunder. Though the webpage view is quite fine as it is, usually:-).
Speaking of, I just noticed a new Settings option for “compact UI”, with numerous values, which completely change how [email protected] looks (no image previews, in Firefox on Android, not sure how desktop and other browsers would handle it), and an even tighter setting removes vertical spacing as well to fit more posts into a denser space - exactly as you wanted!:-)
I bet if you go through the sign-up wizard, you’ll be entirely sold on it:-) https://piefed.social/ is the experimental flagship instance, but there are several other options available as well.
lemmy.dbzer0.com is a damn fine instance as well, with very solid admins, it’s only drawback being that it’s still using Lemmy, which especially for established users (who have already learned how to block stuff and navigate to existing communities) is mostly fine. But damn, PieFed is so exciting how it’s developing new features monthly! Definitely worth following if nothing else (although for me, this is my main now:-).