Yeah I don't think you quite got me. When you first start you choose topics you like and I would like to be able to go back and select more or deselect ones I previously selected. I really like what they seem to be trying to do but it is limited. You can join communities but not block them or block topics. This would be huge for me because I have no interest in sports so I block all sports communities but if I could block sports as a topic that would be really useful. I do like that they have the keyword thing. Especially short term. Sometimes something happens in the news and its like you don't want the clutter from the barrage of articles.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 4 days ago

I think that initial sign-up even if it mentioned that it was for topic areas, was actually joining you to communities? (Bc the actual "Topic" areas seems to be invariable) I mean, based on those Topic areas that you selected, it Joined you to Communities that will fill up your All feed.

You can now "leave" a community at any time, and while this doesn't seem to block it from showing up in the Topic areas list - more's the pity, bc it really should - it at least stops it from showing up in the All feed. And ofc you can (re-)join other Communities as well.

So as we are seeing, things tend to work slightly differently than Lemmy.:-) What I find helpful is how my entire "workflow" is different on it: since Lemmy doesn't even offer Notifications for posts from communities, for those where there are only like 0-3 posts per day, I prefer receiving those Notifications rather than have to "find" the communities as I would have done in Lemmy. Like, this works much better than hoping that they show up in a Feed somewhere, especially when a community is small like !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world. Then again, this would work better for someone who checks things daily, although... there is a "Mark all as read" button as well.

On Lemmy I used to browse All rather than Subscribed, but on PieFed I usually use a combination of Notifications and rarely browsing All or like when I want a concentration of news stories (ahem, even from communities that I've "Left" even:-), then that is available as well. This whole aspect of PieFed really works much better for me overall, though indeed it took quite some getting used to it at first to discover what was possible and have to re-think my workflow. I hope this description helps you think through what may work best for you, or perhaps you'll just copy this.:-)