In my experience, many Lemmy instances block what looks like bot traffic. I don’t think it’s as simple as VPN = blocked, but that’s probably one of the signals they pay attention to. I’ve noticed most comments will fail to post when I’m using Mullvad.
I haven’t tested the PieFed specific features as much as I should, but I think feeds are slightly different. I need to add support for feeds / topics. I’m also working on support for polls. Stay tuned
Need to add block instance. I’ll get that in the next update. For now, you can block users and communities from within the app.
I’ve also been thinking about a more complex filtering system for a long time. Imo, you shouldn’t need to block a bunch of different things to e.g. remove politics from your feed. You should have a one click “turn off politics” toggle. There would be a whole library of these one click filter presets you can browse. But that will take longer to build.
Apple does started doing this earlier this year. They generate these monochromatic icons automatically, but it would fail for random icons on iOS. It’s gotten a lot better with updates. I would see what it looks like when it’s no longer marked as a beta feature on your phone.
I did notice on iOS, it doesn’t look very good. Maybe that’s why it’s failing on your phone.
blorp blorp