Ask Lemmy

I joined Lemmy.world a couple years ago after kbin.social closed down, and made a Piefed account a few months ago when people said it was pretty good. I use both daily for different things.

For Lemmy I have found there is a big block button on each community page, so I use it a lot more than on Piefed. I also have my default sort set to top of the last 12 hours and to hide a post after I have viewed it. Sometimes if a post is only an hour or two long and doesn't have a ton of comments I'll wait a few hours to open it to have more comments to read. If it's immediately interesting/relevant I'll open it in a new tab, read it, then leave the tab to refresh later for further discussion since it won't show up on my home page again. I also make heavy use of the Active sort after looking at the first page of 25 (I think) top results, which often leads to finding posts that I maybe wasn't super interested in a day or two ago that now enough comments to make me interested in what the discussion is going on. There's also a bug in the Active sort where the second page doesn't load which is great to me because it encourages me to get off of Lemmy at that point.

All this has led my Lemmy usage to be very focused on what I am interested in, and there is a much higher ratio of posts that I am interested in. When I am bored and want to look at my phone, Lemmy is what I open. It's where I tend to discuss things most frequently because I tend to find posts here first and they are more frequently things I want to speak on.

Piefed is where I go after Lemmy (You'll never guess my username there). It looks like you can block communities, but you have to dig into your account settings and search for the community, which takes more work than I care to give. Unlike Lemmy, you can block keywords in your settings, so I blocked "Trump" and "Musk" when I made the account which has cut out the vast majority of the exhausting posts I would see otherwise (I do leave Politics and World News unblocked on Lemmy to see the biggest politics posts that float to the top). I have my default sort set to top posts of the last 24 hours and since I have no communities blocked I get a lot of comics and memes that I have blocked on Lemmy. The first page loads what feels like 100 posts instead of the 25 on Lemmy. I don't know what the Active sort on Piefed is doing, but I do not care for it. I really like that I can set the default comment sort on Piefed, as it saves me the click and loading time of selecting Top comments every time I load a post.

All this leads my use of Piefed to feel like a funny junk drawer of mostly memes and comics that make me go "heh" every so often and occasionally share a meme to my friend group chat. The top 100 posts of the last day don't change quickly so it usually only feels worthwhile to scroll once, maybe twice a day. I also don't (can't?) hide posts on Piefed which leads to a greater sense of redundancy, which by the time I've reached the bottom of the front page means I probably shouldn't be scrolling more anyway.

If you can, you should make an account with both and see what feels best to you. Maybe you were looking for a more technical answer, but I can only speak to how it feels as an end user. A year ago I did start to throw a couple dollars to Lemmy each month for the server usage.