this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Honestly matching the intent of an emoji to the contents of a post is a pretty big ask for a system that isn't using some sort of AI to process it.
There doesn't need to be a fancy hardcoded solution like that, if only reactions would be have its own page history would help moderators, and like @MxRemy@piefed.social asked, whether they are removable by moderators
That would definitely work.
Are they at least removable by a mod?
Emojis are implemented as votes, not comments, so no.
Fun fact: all emoji reactions are UP-votes, even the puky one 🤣.
@OpenStars @MxRemy wait what? all emoji reactions are upvotes? that makes 0 sense
Yes they are. See https://slrpnk.net/comment/19752322.
@OpenStars very strange decision
It is consistent with rest of fediverse that doesn't have down-votes but has emoji-reacts. misske, wafrn and others count them as likes, and likes are upvotes.
Iirc the development was just whatever could most easily be accomplished, and then once that's out, the rest becomes less urgent and offers diminishing returns in exchange for additional effort.
One crucial detail is that ~99% of all Threadiverse users are on Lemmy rather than PieFed (conversely, >99% of Fediverse users are on Mastodon rather than either, or Friendica, nodeBB, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.). So part of the decision I thought was how to structure these so as not to break Lemmy - like if something is neither an upvote nor downvote, how would that affect Lemmy users?
Tbh I wasn't deeply involved in making this feature so the last point there is my attempt at a hypothetical scenario by way of explanation, which may not strictly speaking have been an actual valid consideration - or rather I am saying that my words here are not all that precise.
Many features on PieFed are unpolished like this. Additional contributors and/or funding would he necessary to flesh them out more. Like hashing out an agreement with Lemmy how their side of this would work. And I suppose with Mastodon as well.
I just want to point out that Piefed has skyrocketed in users this year. When you look at users active (comment, vote, or post) in a given month, you're talking about 7k Piefed users vs 35k Lemmy users. Along with Mbin's 1k MAU, that makes 7k/43k or about 16% of active Threadiverse users are on Piefed.
I'm only saying this to point out how awesome Piefed has done at attracting and retaining users this past year, going up from 1700 to over 7000 in 12 months. Lemmy lost 2k MAU in that time, so overall the Threadiverse is growing 🙂
In all likelihood Lemmy has lost a lot more than that. The older lemmynsfw.com struggled to report its stats for a long while so I am not sure how well those MAUs are represented in the total Lemmy counts, but when looking at them directly it's gone from 3335 MAUs in August 2025 down to 161 in August 2026, which is nearly twice the number you mentioned regarding Lemmy's loss and that is merely one instance.
Also I don't see lemm.ee anywhere in the Fediverse Observer either, which probably means that the total Lemmy counts today include none of their subscriber numbers from before they shut down? (I suppose it would depend upon how those are calculated - among all known, current instances, including their pasts?) And it was a top-5 one too, along with Lemmynsfw.com that iirc might have been #2 after Lemmy.world (which tracks given the numbers I mentioned earlier and current subscriber counts, e.g. what that site refers to as the current #2 sh.itjust.works has a mere 2296 so is half again smaller).
Then fedinsfw.app's MAU gains correlates well with Lemmynsfw.com's loss, while Lemm.ee's demise spread people out more to multiple instances.
Though the Threadiverse overall is still shrinking. We used to have sth like 65k at the peak after the Rexodus, or you might say more justifiably a more stable 55k, vs. today's "mere" 35+7k. And Mbin has ~1k MAUs total, half on a single instance.
You could argue more activity I suppose, or more enjoyable style of posting or some such, but I don't see the Threadiverse growing, I see it shrinking, even if the rate of loss has lessened as of late.
PieFed has exploded though within the past year, yes. Even if that does not match the rate of Lemmy's longer-term decline.
I was only referring to the last 12 months. Lemmy lost some significant chunk in previous years, but that was expected after huge surges of people trying it out.
Lemm.ee shut down halfway through 2025 which is now more than 12 months ago.
I don't think you can say the fediverse is shrinking. The peak was after a surge of interest from Reddit and most people at the time were expecting to retain 10-20% if we were lucky. That surge has come and gone and now the Threadiverse is organically growing, IMO.
It seems like we have lost many people that were here for several years, who talk with great vitriol about us on other social media platforms, while on the other hand we pick up new joiners each time Reddit cranks up the thumb screws again.
e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1vqtor2/what_are_some_good_reddit_alternatives/ asks about a Reddit alternative, in which the top reply mentions the Threadiverse, but then the top comment is:
And this is not a one-off - pretty much every discussion about Lemmy is this way. I found this particular one by searching for "Reddit Lemmy" and restricting the results to the past month.(https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Reddit+lemmy&df=m&t=h_&ia=web) where this was the first result after discounting those about the singer. Every time I do this search it always shows comments like this, as the very top (most upvoted) ones.
Personally I would argue that Reddit is worse in this regard in so many ways, but I suppose if you are comparing niche subs there with the larger communities here (bc we barely have any niche communities), then that does seem to track.
PieFed has solved the onboarding problem, but Lemmy / the Threadiverse has an enormous image problem. People try to respectfully discuss the topic but I would say that it is far from solved now.
I guess I am fine with slow steady growth rather than everyone wanting to jump over.
One thing I think is that you need to use Lemmy in a certain way. I remember reddit not clicking for me until Digg forced my hand, and that event likely irreparably changed the reddit crowd.
We probably have some way to go before we can solve the problem but somehow we need to teach people to aggressively block (people, communities, instances) that they don't want to see.
Or something I think is important, the ability and willingness to just stop replying when the conversation is no longer constructive.
The disinformation does not help. I recall Lemmy proponents saying that instances should not defederate from places such as Hexbear.net or Lemmygrad.ml until an updated version would come out with the ability of users to block an instance. Then we waited on that for like a year, and finally the feature came!
Except it was a lie - or at least least, on the spectrum it lay closer to a false statement than a true one. What a Lemmy user can block that way includes:
But what a Lemmy user is not provided the ability to do includes:
The latter point was added later - i.e. when the user-level "instance blocking" functionality was first rolled out the DMs did not trigger notifications, but those were re-added back. In this formulation, the so-called "blocked" users have far more power to harass than the victims of their harassment have to prevent that!!
In fairness, user-level blocking still exists, but that forces this situation where new, especially non-technical users are forced to learn the hard way that a comment reply in some community found via browsing All - such as ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net, which notably most 3rd-party apps do not show the community sidebar prior to someone replying to comments - and then subsequently block people one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one... continued ad nauseum, particularly as they keep creating alts to get around community bans. A fact which some of them are quite proud to announce.
In short, we are a Nazi bar, which is another name for the Intolerance Paradox, although in this case a more apt name would be a tankie bar.
I prefer not to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the non-technical normies who would otherwise love to come to a place such as this and serve their OC here to an audience that would absolutely love to receive it. Instead, I think it is more interesting to ask what we can do to make them feel more welcomed here. Defederations are one tool, community blocks are another especially if they are opt-out so placed by people who know but easily discarded for anyone who wants a more "free-speech" environment (e.g. 4chan). Although the latter are nowhere easily accessible, and overall the tools of Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, etc. are exceedingly lacking in transparency.
And also usability too - e.g. Redditors are used to not having a modlog, but they do have a modmail, and receive notifications upon a moderation event, and can continue discussions with a mod or one another (anyone who has a link actually) even after a mod has removed the post from a community. Also they are used to polls, user and post flairs, and multi-reddits, all of which they have to give up on order to move to Lemmy. Although PieFed has all of these btw. Then again, PieFed is now shipping out a feature that shadow-censors contributions from the most highly active users without disclosure of this fact, nor the ability of someone to find out in advance whether their contributions are likely to be discarded or not - even those users who may be on Lemmy or Mbin or nodeBB rather than having made the choice to make an account on PieFed. This is extremely opaque.
The Threadiverse is simply too complicated for a non-technical normie to want to bother with understanding all of these nuances - made all the more complicated when 3rd-party apps are brought into consideration, which may or may not have half the features that the underlying choice of back-end platform would allow. We are the Arch Linux of forum software, and most people prefer Windows. Which might be mostly okay, except that we keep bleeding users and I definitely do not see our current growth as being any kind of a sign of "health". Nor, I agree, would we want all Redditors to suddenly flock here either. Having been trained on enshittified platforms, it is no wonder why they behave as they do.
I would suggest training instances where more mainstream people could go, where the most controversial of trolls are kept out? Lemmy.zip and PieFed.zip already do this, and iirc programming.dev too, but the blocks are leaky and we are now having to fight against having an existing reputation of being a tankie bar. Plus the tools themselves are simply objectively inferior (in the technical sense obviously) to what Reddit offers - e.g. we have no modmail to ask a mod team why someone's post was removed, even if they even manage to discover in the first place that a moderation event occurred; so instead someone would have to DM each and every mod in the listing in hopes of finding one that is even an active account, much less knowledgeable about why the event occurred, and also willing to explain (though tbf this aspect would persist even if there was a modmail).
Otoh, for a heavily technical user, one who is capable enough to install their own instance, the Threadiverse software offers unparalleled flexibility to have their own mini-Reddit with whatever community forums they wish to put into it. But even then, people are being driven away - see e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/55961762 - despite their ability to implement whatever defederations and other admin-level tools they wish. The Threadiverse will not grow, meaning that it will continue to shrink due to attrition, until it finds a better way to retain the people that are already here.
Yeah for sure there is some way to go on the experience. I'd like to think this will happen over time. Lemmy has come a long way since all the redditors (like me) flocked here in 2023. I hope it continues to get slowly better, hopefully it will tip the scales at some point so that it becomes a good experience for those that we want here.
@OpenStars while I love to see all these new features being worked on in Piefed, the fragmentation of how things end up actually working ends up making the fediverse ecosystem that much more confusing. I don't think there is too much of a solution to this other then more and more hashing out of details as we go. But I would love to see more micro standards/agreement across the threadiverse / fediverse / all these things that are not just trying to do mastodon...
I mean... understood, but I am not a PieFed dev, just passing along the info about emoji reactions.
Though PieFed devs will read your reply in this community.
It is always a balance between moving ahead faster vs. going more slowly and stably. Rimu the main PieFed dev put out a poll asking the community which style it preferred for 2026 and iirc by far the answer was more features. Perhaps 2027 will look different, but this is what people asked for.
Also, have you ever personally tried to converse with a tankie? I've never gotten DMs of such a hostile tone from literally anyone else across the entire Threadiverse except tankies (I literally just got one today - I made zero invitation to slide into my DMs btw, and especially did not appreciate the sea lioning tactics that are so transparently juvenile, regardless of the user's physical age). By far their "debate-bro" / incel mindset where telling them "no" means that they simply need to push forward all the harder is NOT a fun experience. And as a bonus if you block them they just come back with an alt, plus if you block the entire instance then they simply choose another and continue. So I for one am the last person that is going to tell Rimu that he needs to wrangle a consensus out of the Lemmy userbase before proceeding with anything (their devs have never anything but respectful at least, yet everything gets discussed in the open and the sheer volume of absolute disinformation coming from the devs main instance... which does not get removed by the admins, is quite "off-putting" to say the least).
However, at least in the past, before a lot of the said disinformation campaigns recently, Rimu used to be quite open to feedback. I can imagine some pushback though: like say hypothetically that you make the downvote and the vomit emoji as downvotes, while leaving everything else as upvotes. In that case, what about other emojis not in that list, like ⛔🚫🙅❌📴❎😑😶🙉❎🛑🙊? No matter how complete you make the listing, someone could always be confused by let's say a newly added emoji? So a system would need to be designed - perhaps a red slightly tinted background shading (which needs to account for both light and dark modes, as well as be compatible with all Themes) for downvotes and a green tinted one for upvotes? Except that not everyone uses the PieFed browser web UI, so anyone using any kind of 3rd-party app is still not going to be aware of which emoji translates to which type of vote...
And here I was even assuming that they could be switched in the first place with some emoji reactions being one type of vote while others are a different type, which seems reasonable enough to me who doesn't do anything remotely resembling this style of coding, but in practice could be hellishly complex?
If people want this feature, then someone has to do the work to make it. You can also put in a feature request in the PieFed codeberg, if you want someone else to do it, but I am not sure how highly prioritized it would be (or as we are doing, talk about it in this community).
That's a good question that I don't know the answer to, BUT mander.xyz is a lemmy instance so the mods there can't see the reactions even if they can remove them.