… demand usage of a 3rd-party app …

Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that as the answer.

… I don’t know how PyLova may change the situation still further - it offers even more features than PieFed, though the latter keeps incorporating most of those changes back into its main codebase …

Didn’t know Piefed was still back copying Pylova’s efforts. I recall the first time they removed attribution, in what I feel was a very dishonest way. Hopefully, if they are still integrating Pylova’s work, they are at the very least giving attribution.

… Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.

Yes, I strongly wish that Voyager had far better integration of Piefed features (like grouping cross-posts).

Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.

Yep. Difficult to know if you’re in one though. In my experience, someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.

… I can see from the devs’ perspective that turning on the display of instance names in Voyager is not a feature that is universally good.

Appreciate the perspective. I can see your point.

… discovered that programming.dev has a number of community-level blocks put into place to help a new user experience a more drama-free version of the Threadiverse. You can see their full listing at https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/ …

Did not know that, thanks for sharing. That was interesting to look through.

… huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like [email protected] …

That makes sense.

… though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).

Not the best for getting people to stick around :(

… I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation …

Ah, that would be a nice feature to have throughout the threadiverse. Although, I almost never see the indicator (probably too curated at this point becuase, at this point, I block bad faith actors/trolls immediately).

… it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have …

Yeah, quite frustrating, but I do think we are making progress and things are slowly getting better :)

I’ve been kind of thinking the ideal instance for new users would be something like the programming.dev community hidden list, with a de-federated triad, and run by the .zip admin team. Maybe that’ll be a thing one day.