Fediverse memes

No, PieFed is not in any way Lemmy. Maybe you are thinking of Tesseract, the alternative Lemmy front-end? See e.g. https://t.lemmy.world/ or https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/.

PieFed is an entirely different implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, similar to Mbin (and Kbin before it), and the Sublinks project that hasn't seen updates in a long while (the developer had a baby:-). PieFed has its own UI, with many themes and configuration elements (normal vs. compact vs. super compact mode, as well as List vs. Tile vs. Wide Tile display of posts), and app support in Interstellar and a not-official-yet fork of Thunder.

Those two apps also support Lemmy and the former also supports Mbin. So a lot of these things are interchangeable, but what I want to convey here is that PieFed is an alternative back-end, not merely a new UI for "Lemmy" (bc with those apps someone can have the same UI they are already used to, but swap out a Lemmy instance with a PieFed one).

And that's important to have another source of these forum/thread based software, bc otherwise development gets stagnated and locked in to a single dev teams viewpoint. e.g. Lemmy is actually more authoritian than Reddit itself is in a number of ways - yes there is a modlog, but there is no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod, nor even a way to know which mod did it when the modlog (if you even noticed that your content was affected and went looking) simply says it was a "mod" who did it. Lemmy offers enormous freedom to instance admins, who typically offer much freedom to moderators, but individual users have actually fewer "rights" than on Reddit - e.g. again the right to even be told that your content was removed, or to ask someone why.

In contrast, PieFed offers a very large set of features designed for democratization of moderation, e.g. keyword filtering, labels placed next to user account names (example: this account is less than two weeks old, or this account posts ten times more often than comments so may be an unregistered bot, or this account receives and gives ten times more downvotes than upvotes so is a highly contentious/toxic user), all designed to put the power of choosing what content goes where in the hands of the end user, rather than require moderator decisions for each and every tiny matter.

i.e. Lemmy was designed by people kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic to be a less feature-complete replacement for that exact experience, whereas PieFed in contrast is blazing new ground that even Reddit had not bothered to offer such things to their users (all new features on Reddit for years now have been designed to maximize profits, not make users happy with what they are seeing, very unfortunately). Even if you choose not to use it (yet? although I challenge anyone to go through the sign-up wizard process and not become enthused by what you see), it's really quite an exciting project!

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 memes@lemmy.world 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 memes@lemmy.world 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:-).