2w ago

What Features Make PieFed Better/Worse

What features made you choose PieFed over Mbin/Lemmy?
What features do they have that you’d like to see in PieFed?

34 comments

Not really a feature but I like the general look and feel of PieFed. I think the user interface feels polished even though it is still quite early in development.
mbin on the other hand just doesn’t feel as comfortable to use. The layout feels unnatural and the buttons are in unexpected places. Also I really dislike the unconventional terms such as “magazine” and “boost”. (I know they came from kbin)
I hope PieFed will keep the UI clean while adding new features. I am quite confident with the devs based on what I have seen so far.
Thanks for all the hardworking devs providing such wonderful applications.
Edit:
Expanding on what I like about PieFed:
The "new communities" and "active communities" section on the sidebar are more useful than I expected.
Killer feature: Grouping cross posts and viewing comments from different posts in the same view
Voting is private. This gives me the peace of mind when I downvote a post from a snowflake.
Instance blocking that works
- votings never private when someone can spin up a friendica instance and see it all, or since its activityhub anyone could make an app exclusively to see downvoters.
  
  It's private because there are essentially two of you, and your vote is the anonymous you.
  https://piefed.social/post/205362
  "PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account ..."
  
  Didn't know that. But at least the extra steps make it less convenient I think.
Peertube integration works really well.
The combinational multi communities that it has makes maintaining multiple similar communities much easier.
I really like that the UI has so many options you can chose from.
User flare.
There's more but yeah I've been enjoying it.
Consolidated comments view
Keywords filter
Actual instance blocking
Multicommunities
I love that images open full width and links are just thumbnails. It makes it much easier to tell the difference.
Please get rid of the trusted instance concept for private voting. Or at least let me lick which instances I trust.
- You heard me.
- I've complained about the 'trusted instance concept' too ... I've a horrible feeling that it exists to protect piefed.social from the DB bloat it inflicts on everyone else, lol.
  
  how does that affect db bloat? or rather, how does it protect from that?
Onboarding.
So many people give up on Lemmy because they have login issues and once they're logged in they don't understand how things work etc.
PieFed makes it easy to create a account and login, and guides you once you're logged in
I tried PieFed for ~2 minutes before switching away from it. What didn't work for me was the theme selection. The default dark theme was too dark & high contrast for my taste, and the other themes were just too bright or colourful for my eyes to rest and read easy.
There was one theme I liked but it introduced a spinning element in the top left corner of the page that kept catching my eye.
Is it petty? Yeah. Could I have mitigated it by installing a browser plugin? Probably.
- The spinning element has been removed recently, there are some cache issues that might explain why it's still there.
  Which instance were you using?
  @fxomt@piefed.social
- When did you try it? The spinning thing was removed about 2 days ago. Did you try more recently than this?
  
  That was just about a week ago now, not long after Lemm.ee announced it was shutting down. I was more concerned about a different instance that I immediately could get on with and ultimately I found the theme selection to be a hurdle. Again, yeah I know it's petty.

34 comments