Piefed has feeds now!

Neat, it federates. Seems to work similar to a normal community, so it should be easy to follow these feeds from Lemmy.
- While the actor is a Group and you can follow it, no posts are Announced. All the federation of posts is still driven by the individual communities within the feed. You'll need to modify Lemmy to add the logic of subscribing to the constituent communities when you receive an Accept.
  Also there are Add and Remove activities sent out whenever the feed owner manages the list of communities within which would need to be handled.
  Documentation still to come...
  
  Ah its more complicated than I thought. We also have a similar or same feature on the roadmap, when I get to that it can federate with Piefed.
- That's cool, i hope lemmy federates with it in the future :D

Reminder that Piefed's patreon is only at $13 a month. If you have the means, consider donating to the project to say thanks for all of the work and effort being put into it :)
- 100%. Rimu, jollyroberts and andrew are all amazing people, providing both piefed and .social itself for free. They work very hard, and hell, the feeds PR was only created 4 days ago, and pushed today!
  Piefed and its devs deserve way more :D
- To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/

So do I understand correctly that these are identical to Topics, except customizable without requiring backend changes?
Sweet!
- Exactly :)

This is great but I still don’t think it fixed the issue that both softwares have, what do you do about wanting to share the same content between multiple same named communities without spamming?
I still really like the idea that communities can choose to federate with each other. You post to privacy at ML and LW and it shows as one post in both communities.
- Yes, that is high on the agenda.
  
  Exciting! I’ll try to get my piefed running again then
  
  Is there a plan to implement the possibility of a downvote free experience? Kind of like an instance disabling downvotes does on native lemmy?
- This doesn’t appeal to me at all. The whole point of Lemmy is that I can avoid certain instances that have oppressive admins.
  
  PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect iirc) can already do this, by blocking all users from the instance. It works much better than the Lemmy equivalent that would be better named as a community muting, since it still allows users to troll you in communities located on other instances.
  
  The whole point of lemmy is decentralization. Not being run off by bad mods. I agree that a lot of big instances have rude admins and mods but this idea is for similar communities with similar modding. If the mods agree then what’s the issue? A lot of big instances communities have the exact same mods anyways.
  An example for my use case is I want to support slrpnk and post on their selfhosting com but I don’t want only 1 answer. Federating my post to all three big selfhosting communities would allow more interaction while still being decentralized in the sense of not instance dependent.

This is huge. Thank you to everyone involved.
- Trying it right now, it's pretty sweet
  
  new blaze account? 😭

Less goo!
- Fedipie.dbon1.com? We have the technology for it.

Does posting to a feed post to all the communities in it?
- Feed isn't a place you can post to. It just collects posts from different communities into one feed/stream.

This will reduce the discourse quality significantly as it will bring in more drive-by comments from people not subscribed to the specific communities in question.
I hope there will be some way for communities to opt-out from this or maybe better require them to opt-in.
- Possibly. (Subscribing to a feed does actually subscribe you to all the communities in the feed. So technically they are not drive-by comments by non-members. But I see what you mean.)
  Discoverability is a huge huge problem with all federated platforms and this will significantly alleviate that.
  
  If I don't misunderstand then you can only add communities to these feeds that are already known to your instance, thus I don't really see how this solves the federated discoverability issues which are ultimately due to instances not being aware of each other at all.
- c/all is worse imo and with feeds you will at least have control over picking topics you're interested in unlike c/all. We should be focusing on opting out from c/all more as it causes far more damage and it's been that way for a long time unlike feeds on such a small platform that just got the feature implemented.
  Also the opt-in would be a great way to KILL the entire feature that's been the most hyped up and requested feature across the entire threadiverse. BRUH
  Imagine having all communities opted out from c/all by default. That would be stupid and make everything hard to access.
  Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.
  E: c/all is just one monolithic feed forced on all users for better perspective about the issue. With custom feeds much like with communities you pick out your interests and follow them specifically and it's all optional. I don't see how it could cause more damage than this.
  
  Opt-out on the other hand for public feeds specifically is something that I support. But then good luck having that supported on lemmy where almost all communities exist.
  Lemmy already has a setting community.hidden so that communities dont show up on the All feed. But this is not easy to access at the moment. I can fix that.
  
  Yes the All feed has the same problem, but posts need to be significantly more popular for them to even register in the All feed. Thus most small communities currently fly under the radar of the All feed, and if they do get a popular post it nearly always becomes a moderation nightmare.
  Hashtags on Mastodon have a similar problem, having given rise to the universally dreaded "reply guy" issue.
  I think most people on Lemmy haven't really thought this through and what the implications of such a feature are once it becomes widely used.
  And no, the one that is doing the opt-in is the person creating the feed without asking the community that is being forcefully opted-in. Giving them the option to veto that is better than having them realize that they have been opted into something they don't agree with by being flooded with trolls and off-topic comments.
- One REALLY super nice feature of PieFed is that the sidebar text is shown underneath EVERY single post. Lemmy does not do that, and especially some apps almost look like they are doing their best to outright hide that information for some reason, putting it many clicks away!?
  Imagine seeing a post on All, and knowing what the exact and entire set of rules are, prior to posting (including a reply to a post, as you said a drive-by).
  To be fair, someone does have to scroll down to see it. But at least it's right there on the same page, not some whole other page entirely and buried many clicks away besides (going back and forth to writing a message that way, checking specific acronyms in the sidebar area, can get really annoying that way! in those apps that do it that way I mean, while in a browser you basically would need to open up a new tab, one for the post and a separate one for the community).
  At least this seems like it would help reduce such effects? Maybe? Alternately, these feeds are basically like meta-communities themselves, created (and maintained?) by a "moderator", so perhaps if someone did not want their community included (which seems to run counter to how many communities would want to increase rather than decrease their discoverability), they could write to the "mod" to ask that it be removed?
  Alternately, perhaps communities themselves should have a "private" setting. Lemmy already has a "local-only" setting along those lines. I remember that Reddit has a bunch of opt-in features regarding discoverability, but all of this in both Lemmy and PieFed is extremely primitive in comparison. At least PieFed is moving quickly with adding new features, so for it even if not for Lemmy, there is a strong hope to see all of this that we are talking about!:-)
  
  Communities want more discoverability to get more members that post relevant things. This does the opposite and actively hides the specific community from potential posters while increasing the noise in the comments.
  I think people really need to have some serious thought about the consequences of what they are asking for. These feeds, similar to algorithmic recommendations of commercial social media, increase engagement (a dubious metric, primarily interesting for advertisers) but not discoverability.
- I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!