Rimu just treats this is a hobby and goes ahead yolo'ing a bunch of these features that abuse the underlying protocol and could bring serious systemic risks if other admins start deploying it, but because the current userbase is small then there is little scrutiny and they all think it's good to go.

The Lemmy devs are trying for years to get enough support to make a living of their work and therefore a lot more "professional" about what they do, so they would never introduce a feature that could cause Lemmy to be a "bad participant" in the network. But by not taking a more "customer-focused" approach to product development, it takes a long time to bring any functionality that makes it attractive.

PieFed is definitely taking a "Worse is Better" approach and I don't know what to make of it. It seems to be poised to make it most popular software among the current fediverse users, but at the same time it makes so idiosyncratic decisions that it makes it hard to believe it will be usable if more people started joining in.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Rimu just treats this is a hobby

pay me.

[–] rglullis 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You think that if I paid you to remove features, you'd do it?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

No, but if I was paid it wouldn't be a hobby.

Before launching the feature I checked with the mod of that community to see if they were ok with it. We agreed to try it and see if it caused any problems. If it does I'll point the code at a different community instead, possibly a PieFed one.

If that is still a problem then I'll code something to spread communities to other instances using an API but that seems like a lot more work.

[–] rglullis 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Wouldn't you agree that hardcoding one specific community to provide a feature to "try it and see it causes any problems" is yolo'ing?

I’ll code something to spread communities to other instances using an API but that seems like a lot more work.

In my view, the "proper" solution to this (and that would fit right into ActivityPub) would be simply to let the actor that represents the server to post "as:Create" for any new communities that are created and then let the other software follow these if they are interested.

It certainly would be a lot more work and it would still require others to write code on their end to look for this information, but seems like the only implementation that would seem like just another ad-hoc hack.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago

No and I reject your characterization of the situation.

Every feature is a tradeoff between risk, effort, benefits for various stakeholders. I do my best to balance those and am always listening to feedback.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.

Seems accurate. This example is a good one: if you create a community and want it to succeed, you are going to promote it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world. Or maybe you aren't aware of !newcommunities, because you are a now mod, but then it's still useful to have that there.

[–] rglullis 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

On the other hand, I'm see newcommunities being flooded with posts from piefed.social and thinking the following:

If this becomes an automatic thing, I'd be less inclined to subscribe to the community.
How is concentration around piefed.social any different from concentration around LW?

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

If this becomes an automatic thing, I’d be less inclined to subscribe to the community.

Well, sure, but that's still the most active community on that topic. And I know because I've been trying to push for !communitypromo@lemmy.ca for years, without success.

How is concentration around piefed.social any different from concentration around LW?

The feature is available for any Piefed instance, there are currently 13 with more than 10 monthly active users: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list

Edit: also, Piefed has an instance chooser, if you click on Register, you end up on this page: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser