It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
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I’ve definitely noticed my shitpost comments get a lot more engagement than they used to, so that’s fun
Reddit ban people -> people look for alternatives
note that this is accounts. So for example, I have 3 accounts I use regularily.
Yeah, I’m new (also driven from Reddit after the recent changes) and within like a week I signed up for three different servers, and I’ll probably sign up for more if I can figure out how to navigate servers well enough to find what I’m looking for.
It’s actually rather nice to have separate accounts for different use cases and not mix, say, a memery and general discussion account with an art account.
There is just so much you can do as a human even with multiple accounts. So unless you’re daily driving 50 accounts somehow and most others got nothing better to do as well, I still count that as a positive trend.
Im not downplaying the growth. Just putting out there that it is easy to think active users means different people, which is not true.
True, same for me. But I have been for quite a while and I’m not creating new ones. I’m guessing legit users don’t need many accounts, so I’d be more concerned about botting.
I’m doing my part! 🥳
I joined Lemmy, like 3 years ago I think. But I didn’t start being active until this year. I think there is a lot of people like me, especially now that you have to log in to see old reddit. https://old.lemmy.world/ really tipped me over the edge in to being a regular.
Leaving Reddit wasn’t easy. I read the tea leaves and left at apigate.
I had already eschewed Youtube API and was keeping Facebook out of arms length,
I poked around Bluesky for a while, it had a very strong pull.
I do not need machine-fed unlimited social media and news I don’t thrive on it. Doomscrolling is not a good hobby.
Yea, reddit has been a serious habit for me for almost 20 years, never been on Insta or Facebook or any other SM platform like I was on reddit, everyday all day in the background. Its been a hard one to break.
One of us!
One of us!
Reddit is working hard on fediverese success
Once AI starts stealing from us you’ll know we’ve arrived.
That’s already a massive problem that brings down instances all the time.
web-scraping is. however, ai companies pretending to be yet another instance and getting the data through federation does not cause much of a slow-down, since that’s what happens with other instances already anyways.
The dorks that work at LLM companies are simply too stupid to do that.
Yeah, you can tell, way more conservative liberals on here than there used to be.
Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can you be both conservative and liberal?
Person below is using an incorrect understanding of liberalism too (economic).
When I say liberal, I’m referring to the political philosophy of liberalism, which is rooted in individualism and capital, and emerged through the cisheteropatriarchal and white supremacist system of settler-colonialism. People perceive of this as meaning “progressive” or “freedom” because much of the early rhetoric surrounding liberalism (such as the early republican era in the Americas) involved a claim to moral righteousness under the guise of individual freedoms. Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism as an economic system (which the other commenter here misidentified as liberalism), but it would be distortive to not recognize the specificities of either respectively.
Since liberalism has been the proponent of capitalism and EuroAmerican imperialism for the past couple centuries, it has developed a durability through the appropriation and subsequent assimilation of potentially challenging political movements; such as those based in social justice. Consequently, liberals have effectively coopted the language of equality and progress as natural elements of its politics, despite it consistently disarming and presently continues its genocidal campaign against vulnerable groups.
Conservatism is less a cohesive set of politics than it is the rhetoric of liberals with grievances about the failure of the system to deliver the privilege they feel entitled to, and which this system does assure them. So, a conservative liberal may vaugely subscribe to the notion of “anti-racism” but will inevitably subscribe to racist values that are more consistent with the imperatives of a white supremacist system than they are challenging of it.
Most people in Europe and North America subscribe to liberalism. Most liberals lack a level of political literacy to identify how they subscribe to it, and many mistake themselves as “leftists” or non-liberal “conservatives,” even though their values are actually closely aligned. Since I genuinely do not subscribe to liberalism, many liberals on Lemmy self-report when they take issue with some genuine anti-racism, or any anti-bigotry in general when it doesn’t align with their comfort level (most of which have been Canadians or Euros who feel free to openly express these views with the confidence that they’re “better than Americans”).
Conservatives are a subset of liberals.
I wouldn’t say that. Conservatism, at its core, is about preserving a specific way of life, while liberalism is about finding a balance between a laissez faire form of governance and having an ordered society. They aren’t congruent in terms of political policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Conservatism depends on the context within the nation, but Anglosphere conservatives at a minimum work within a liberal democratic context. Everything listed under ideological liberalism is something “conservatives” used to claim as their values.
Used to. That “conservatives” are openly embracing fascism as their “third way” is reflected in that very Wikipedia article which has been radically changed from it’s state even from last year as I recall.
That the article has been changed to claim the “three main ideologies” of the past century as “liberalism, socialism, and conservativism” is some straight up scary revisionist nonsense. Just ask yourself which of those three fascism belongs to and you’ll understand why.
Churchill was a Conservative. The Australian Liberal Party are conservatives, etc etc etc.
In other words, there is the ideological definition of liberal, of which conservativism is supposed to be a branch, and there’s the casual usage that means “right winger” and that is contextual and rapidly coming to mean fascist.
Liberalism is a conservative ideology. Conservative meaning maintaining the status quo, which liberalism does for economic, foreign, and social policy
Edit: down vote all you want but it is true. The last time liberalism was progressive was when the divine right of kings was law of the land.
Political ideologies can broadly be categorized as reactionary (supports a real or perceived status quo ante), conservative (supports maintenance of status quo), and progressive (supports developing new systems). There are the axes of social views, economic views, etc that we apply these to. The major political parties in the US are centered around variants of liberalism which is focused on the status quo of imperialism, discriminatory social hierarchies, and capitalism. There are those who think these systems don’t go far enough in their repression, especially but not exclusively within the GOP. They are reactionaries. Progressive ideologies only find any foothold on the very fringes of the DNC, but they are fighting against the policies and institutions of the party itself, not really influencing it fundamentally.
liberalism refers purely to economic policy everywhere except for the united states, and that is very much compatible with conservative views on social issues.
Liberalism is a right-wing ideology. Completely capitalist and authoritarian. It’s a major source of overt fascism.
Oxymoron the pimple cream for idiots!
deleted by creator
No, it’s the worst kind, half in and half out
Well, an alternative explanation would be LLM agent accounts, which started to appear on the fediverse around the time the above graph started to go up.
Here on Lemmy they are a bit delayed and only started to sign up in larger quantities in the last 2-3 months.
Reddit is an AI dumpster fire. There are still decent communities, but the glory days are behind it (the 20teens). Reddit circa 2012-15’ was peak. Now it’s an AI slop infested milquetoast facebook alternative. Damn shame. Hopefully the user base will finally realize the ship has sailed straight up it’s own corporate butthole, and seek alternatives, such as this one.
I checked just now and it’s still the same slop as when I abandoned it.
- Eating disorder family dinner rage bait
- Office food stealing rage bait
- “Karen” screaming at a fast food joint employees (food theme today it seems)
- E-bike driving badly rage bait
- Would you take $5 million for a minor inconvenience
- Peter explain this simple but controversial joke I already understand but want to post as a question for more engagement
- Ex lover rage bait
- Thinly veiled normal activity misrepresented as creepy rage bait
- Family drama rage bait
- Petrol prices rant
- What’s a job that seems x but is actually y
Feels like I haven’t missed anything at all
Fwiw this is mainly the most popular subs. The niche subs are much more chill, though still Reddit hence full of bot spam, influencers trying to pretend to offer organic content that was not bought and paid for, and people who overall are just spoiling for a fight (which if we are honest, the latter category used to include most of us here?:-).
Not that I am advocating for Reddit, mind you, just saying that you either have to go to where the content is - Facebook, Insta, Reddit, Xhitter/Bluesky, Tiktok - or else give up on knowing stuff altogether. Which if you are talking about like events in your local town, then at least Reddit seems preferable to the others?
Obligatory fuck spez, I’m just acknowledging that the network effect is real, yo.
Endless nostaglia, “remember this?” posts
and when they come here they will bring all their miserable drama-seeking nonsense behaviors with them.
Are you ready to get banned? Because that kind of talk will get you banned once they hold the reins.
You’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned!
Want to read more Lemmy? Download the app and log in!
this made me laugh, from despair, but laugh nonetheless.
at least in real life I have the foresight to leave the premises when those folks show up to the party.
online I’m too optimistic to think people won’t actively misconstrue everything I type into an absurd parody of what I actually said. Only on the internet if I say “i dated a 14 year old when I was 15” am I told that makes me a pedophile and I’m promoting pedophilia, but apparently that’s how people think today.
On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good neighbors.
When we feel like we are forced into platforming every single batshit insane ideology - like hexbears to name one, though your instance at least had the foresight to defederate from it early on - then we expose people to all the dregs that social media can offer to people.
Like, how can two adults converse with one another, when surrounded by children screaming their heads off - which is not “wrong”, but like… can’t there even be so much as one room where that level of noise is prevented?
Anyway, I agree that Lemmy’s blocking tools are vastly inferior to the task of trying to deal with the situation that you mentioned. The upcoming release of Lemmy 1.0 will help somewhat, by allowing mods to receive remote reports from other instances, but it still would need a LONG way to go - like e.g. implement a true instance blocking capability.
2014-2015, when r/conservative was pushed to the front page on the regular despite r/conservative banning over half of all people that post in r/conservative?
To be fair every political sub, and even the news subs, ban anyone who doesn’t conform to the echo chamber.
the right-wing subs had high engagement, that pushed them to the front page often.
Wait until they start paying the mods (which I’ve heard is in the works), who are already insufferable assholes.
You couldn’t have certain reddit subreddits here. For example, I follow r/Sverige which is the political right’s Sweden channel. And they talk about immigration as a major problem. How open would Lemmy be to discussions like that? It can’t even handle different opinions without defederation, downvoting and blocking.
No, i think Lemmy is good for memes and stuff but it can’t handle discussions that adults wants to have.
Nothing is stopping you from making a community and then banning people until it is sufficiently echo-chambered for you. ML or Hexbear might even welcome you.
I personally know several expats living in Sweden. I’m pretty aware of both sides of the discussion. From the outside, it comes off mostly tone-deaf, but with some real points around failing to integrate immigrants. There’s also a significant amount of FUD and interference trolling, riling people up.
For people living in Sweden, it’s a hotbed of controversy as the places you consider safe are changing around you.
Would anti-immigraition accepted in open arms in lemmy general social forums? Absolutely not.
But if you want your own echo chamber, there are places that would allow it.
Was that a response to me? I definently don’t want to own the discussions. I just said people want to discuss it and Lemmy is not a good place for it.
People will discuss it on reddit. It’s fine. :)
About Sweden, yes it’s a “hotbed” to say the least, the same as in Europe overall. Its not popular with massive immigration but since we can’t discuss that here, let’s not.
If you want random people across the world to validate Sweden’s distaste for immigrants, no, you won’t like the outcome here.
I don’t think there would be anything stopping them spinning up instances. It would be up to others whether they want to see their posts though.
I’m a leftie but I can handle having a conversation about immigration, as long as it’s mature, lucid and respectful.
the only discussion about immigration should be “If you don’t like immigrants, then stop supporting foreign policies that make their countries of origin shitholes, so they don’t want to leave in the first place.”
Oh no! but that might mean BROWN PEOPLE have (GASP!) “agency!!!” (Clutches pearls and faints)
I can count the number of mature arguments I’ve had on reddit on one hand. I frequently compliment the other person for being so decent.
i remember having arguments like that on reddit on a daily basis. but that was a over a decade ago.
and sadly i keep thinking i’ll be able to find that again… but it won’t ever happen.
mature, lucid and respectful.
fuck u, u got cooties
(just trying to hit all three points :) )
on lemmy it’s more the lefties who call you names than the righties.
should be fun when it’s both… but by then you will start getting banned because both will report you to mods/admins for ‘harassment’
already had a couple of incidents the past few months where someone told me to kill myself, I reported i, and my comments were removed as the ‘harassing’ ones. blows my mind, but that’s how reddit became a few years ago.
disagreement is seen as assault, and legit threats and violence are seen as an appropriate response
I’ve got you tagged as “aggressive responder” so maybe the mods had a point?
Yep, TubularTittyFrog is one of a handful of accounts that I recognize as regularly commenting something reactionary, rude, or ignorant. Usually all three, and then they get angry when people disagree.
my kindergarten teachers used to send to the principle’s office for ‘asking too many questions’.
turns out a lot of people get really mad when question what they say and 100% believe them at their word… and even angrier when they can’t articulate what they mean with any specificity beyond empty buzzwords.
Lemmy is full of wannabe intellectuals that have no idea what they are talking about and yea, they think it’s ‘aggressive’ when you call them out on their bullshit takes, and supremely angry when you point out how deeply hypocritical they are. and their reply is usually ‘go kill yourself’.
I dunno anything about the specific thread. I’m only highlighting that maybe it’s a sign to reflect on how you communicate with others on here, since it’s not an isolated incident. It’s possible to question people without hurting them or using harsh language.
For what it’s worth, I had a really rough time in my entire school life as well. I also tend to ask questions and point out inconsistencies, rather than “going with the flow” or accepting things at face value. I ended up with a 30% attendance rate, for various reasons. The difference here is that most people don’t have the authority to retaliate to disobedience, other than using strong words or downvoting me.
Personally, I often run into people on here who want to “argue semantics” rather than the spirit of the argument. They have their dictionary out and are ready to endlessly debate the definitions of every word in a comment, while also refusing to actually read what I wrote properly and misquoting me out of context to look bad. It’s not fun or interesting, and language isn’t as important as they think it is. I used to get mad at them for arguing in bad faith, but now I just disengage with them or tag or block them if they’re really bad.
Well then you’re in the minority. I do think it’s a problem that you can’t post what on most other platforms would be viewed as mainstream viewpoints without being threatened by censorship. And I do not agree with these viewpoints but at the same time, if the average person cannot post here without walking on eggshells, the fediverse will never be mainstream.
And I want it to be mainstream because fuck the tech oligarchs.
You can post racist drivel here, it will just be rightfully treated like it is.
What you can’t do on mainstream platforms is post leftist content, which you actually can here. Like Lemmy was pretty much invented because leftists got their comm banned from Reddit. They routinely censor us, like with Meta shutting down countless queer pages and spaces as of late.
Reddit is full of left leaning subs.
just because you lean left it doesn’t mean you are left. It means your ass is still squarely in the center. Being “Leftist” is to have the tacit understanding that the far right means to eradicate progressive thought by any means necessary, and that any threats of violence from “our” side are spoken from a place of self defence. The right does not want “discussion” to lead to compromise, they want it to lead to compliance. Besides, we’ve “been having the discussion” since the 1970’s and as every hostage negotiator knows: if you keep them talking, they aren’t acting. It’s a stalling tactic.
As others have said, you can make your own instance for wrong beliefs. Perhaps painting a target on your forehead would help with the feelings of being persecuted.People learning what the overton window is and that it can be very much different depending on the place you are in (i.e. instances in the case of the fediverse, but also to a lesser extend the fediverse itself) is a good thing in my view.
They’re not going to learn about it because most people who join the fediverse end up leaving and they don’t recruit anyone else.
The Overton window would be moved by people being exposed to far left ideas and finding them more reasonable than expected. But the community does a very poor job of doing that currently.
It’s far worse than that: after leaving they continue to talk about us, as someone might do for an unfaithful ex, trashing our reputation. We can be toxic AF here, with little to no warning labels about which spaces have what echo chamber policies in place; only people with extraordinarily thick skins can stand this space, especially for long periods of time.
I don’t quite agree. The people that leave silently (the overwhelimingly large majority) don’t leave as an active decision, but rather fail to come back because there isn’t enough interest (or nagging notifications).
And for people to realize their overton window is scewed to the right it is sufficient to be exposed to left wing ideas, no need to find them reasonable. The regular existence of these ideas in discourse is sufficient.
people don’t stay because reddit exists and that’s where the eyeballs are.
It’s probably worth remembering that censorship and moderation are two sides of the same coin.
And they’re not just used to silence viewpoints (like you’re saying about the Fediverse) but also an absence of it is exploited to keep people addicted to ragebait and jealousy (mainstream).
I think it’s a fundamental problem of social media as a technology tbh, and we’d be mostly better off without it.
the majority of fediverse content is already ragebait and echo chambers. it’s been that way for well over a year IME, and it’s escalating day by day.
the problem is people who love ragebait and echo chambers don’t see them as such, they see them as the one true reality and are incapable of acknowledging other perspectives on the world exist, and anyone who doesn’t share in their raging is evil and bad and tacitly supports the evil bad people.
and i won’t even go into the victim complex mentalities that dominate most communities here. the second you suggest anyone has agency over their lives… except a hostile and violent reaction or your comments being reported as hate speech.
Tbf, this is done by extremists on both sides, hence seems a function more of extremism than of anything else.
Moderation should be done with a light hand.
the problem is people confused moderation with their personal opinions and feelings.
they can’t separate the two concepts out, and they act emotionally, and hypocritically.
i cracked a joke once about a popular tourist destination, and got banned from the sub I posted it in… because the mod just visited said destination… basically because I ‘hurt their feelings’. and they openly admitted to it when I asked why… and the other mods all agreed it was a perfectly fine reason to temp ban me for a ‘bad attitude’.
that was 2019. and things only got more insane/worse in that sub and every other sub. got banned a few times in my local city sub for… supporting the mayor that I liked. reason my comments were removed ‘they were sexist/racist’ and I was like ‘how can supporting a non-white female mayor be sexist and racist?’ and banned…
and well, the world has followed suite. nothing makes sense anymore, and everything is twisted and misconstrued by insane people and other insane people believe them and anyone who tries to point out is demonized as ‘the enemy’. folks don’t even pretend anymore to care about objectivity or truth, and if they are ever referenced they are now no longer ideals to guide us, they are ‘oppressive tools of the colonialist patriarchy’ for the leftists, or ‘destroying traditional values’ by the rightoids.
A little power corrupts a lot.
yep. you can’t believe in pragmatic sensible middle grounds without being told you should die or get PMs about how they are going to rape you.
Like… what if we had limited and legal and sensible immigration policies?
No, that’s facism and you’re a nazi and you support genocide… lol
and all these dimwits preach how ‘tolerant and loving and accepting they are’ of other people… except they aren’t. they are the nazis they claim to hate so much, and their ‘standard’ is ‘well i’m justified in my violent and rage as long as anyone who is ever right-wing exists’ and will tell you how how that isn’t an extremist position, how they the ‘paradox of tolerance’ means they are the ‘good guy’ fighting the ‘bad guys’.
that said i’ve seen some good discussions of the paradox… but all the good thoughtful takes get down voted and the ‘but we have to kill the nazis’ takes get upvoted. because on lemmy being thoughtful and debating and trying to understand things makes you a nazi. just like doing so on any right wing only space makes you a mentally ill leftist.
bold of you to assume there are any adults here.
but it can’t handle discussions that adults wants to have
We already had the discussion on “immigration” and “undesirables” and other right-wing dogwhistles in the 1940s. Didn’t end too well for them. The problem is, we have forgotten the ancient texts.
The kind of immigration we had in the 40s was way different than the one we have nowadays though. Come to Italy and you’ll see what l mean. You would be scared to walk alone at night.
Ancient texts about…?
People will obviously have opinions about immigration
Someone start it on the ML Lemmy :D
There are few instances claiming that they will do less strict moderation and defederations.
However I haven’t check those instances myself yet.
any specific ones for lemmy?
Sh.itjust.works is one I think in terms of not defederating.
A big issue with not doing moderation is it pretty much leads you to becoming a Nazi bar and getting defederated by others.
(・_・;)
FWIW, I joined that instance because it had the only RWBY community I could find.
(Also love the FLCL avatar)
It really sucks how many instances defederate over nothing
We don’t want that kind of stuff here. Those people aren’t welcome. There are plenty of nice people we can welcome instead.
I know. :)
Doesn’t matter how open ‘the fediverse’ is or not to a point of view if the admin of your server are happy to have it, it will exist here. Especially when we’re talking raw numbers like this, they should all be piling into the same bucket, if we’re measuring fediverse. But as I say this I wonder what the definitions they’re using are.
For instance very different views are expressed on Truth Social, which I’m led to believe could connect to the fediverse, but choose not to. So I wonder if those numbers are included, i expect not because they’d not be connected as a fediverse participant by my understanding.
The point is, other people don’t have to put up with it in their corners of the fediverse if they don’t. This is the freedom of choice benefit that a network like the fediverse has over a centralised platform like fb, reddit, or even BlueSky. This is a fundamental difference in levels of control that makes the fediverse such an exciting project.
Its not necessarily the case that each individual user has full control of these settings, although they mostly do, and if they set up and maintain their own instance they absolutely will. But it is the case that a user has greater control to a point where its practically individualised, and if there were a case where some greater disconnection is warranted the admins aren’t some amorphous presence that travel between dimensions unseen, they have a presence in their servers and have a level of accessibility thats unheard of in previous forms of social media. Theres also a community of admins, who can learn and build off each other, which is beneficial in a cooperative-competition kind of way.
Anyway, you probably already knew all this. I ended up finding typing this out was a fun exercise to appreciate for a moment what this network is actually delivering to a couple million people.
it’s fine to allow users to block what they want, or downvote it, or block other users.
the issue is when admins and mods basically want use their own to systematically remove anything they don’t like, and then claim they are the arbiters of truth justice and all that. it’s the hypocrisy.
it’s also when non-hostile ideas are expressed, and viewed as hostile and violent by the damaged people who are emotionally allergic to anything that isn’t already in their comfort zone.
You’re talking about behaviours, i’m talking about structures. The structure of the fediverse, gives users the option to disengage, find their own spaces.
No one admin has control over this thing, no one mod controls a whole subject. They at best can control a popular community on that subject. They piss people off, people can find another server, another mod very easily. They can even import all their old data with fedibridge, i’ve bever tried that though.
Take world news as the subject.
The fragmetation of multiple world news communities across multiple servers is good. Think of each of those world news communities and their mods as bringing a certain framing to the subject, their own biases even. Then you can equate them to the world news sections of different newspapers.
In the old days you had The Atlantic, The Tribune, The Sun, The New York Times, etc. Now we have c/worldnews.beehaw, c/worldnews.lemmyworld, c/worldnews.aussiezone, and a plethora of others, with comparatively low barriers to entry than news papers.
Yes the base articles are often the same, but the comment threads are different, and the base articles selected are different. So the articles being the same is not really too different from The Atlantic buying in from a news provider like Reuters.
If accurate, then good news for all. Congrats!
Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as that same webpage shows when you filter for Lemmy, currently we have 33K monthly active users, down from 35K in recent months, itself further down from 40K in Dec. 2025, having fallen from 65K at the peak during Rexodus.
See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.
Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit… and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.
i think we need better federation with mastodon. at least, mastodon users should be able to see lemmy content and interact with it. (i can understand that the reverse, i.e. seeing mastodon content from lemmy is technically challenging)
that would give more exposure and interaction.
also not federating with mastodon would mean to break the promise of the fediverse, that it’s all (somewhat) compatible.
PieFed is working on that. Seeing the pace of development of Lemmy, I highly doubt that it ever will.
There are quite a number of challenges to overcome though. e.g. if you suddenly had tend to hundreds of people “following” you, how would that make you feel?
On the Threadiverse we tend to prefer to remain anonymous - as a quick glance at usernames can attest - while on the Fediverse the set of expectations are different.
People are just generally leaving the threadiverse because… Sorry everyone but its so bleak here.
The world is going to shit and there’s nothing any of us can reasonably do about it.
I doubt there’s a day that goes by that I don’t think about how this place does not “fill my cup with joy”.
At the same time I kind of can’t look away because I do feel b that I’m better informed because I read about how shit everything is.
Yeah, literally all of the major communities here have politics constantly in them. If you ever need a break, there is e.g. https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, but of course there’s not even an hour a day’s worth of material there.
Oh well, touching grass is a far better use of our time anyway, r-r-right!?!?
news… Ewwww
-
block all news
-
post stuff about things that you care about? gardening? horses? wildlife photography?
My comment isn’t asking how to improve my own personal experience, but an explanation of why users might be declining.
-
I honestly have one account where I just block all news. It’s been very helpful
For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven’t really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.
just block all “US politics” communities and downvote every single post that mentions trump (or the democratic alternative candidate) that appears outside of those comms.
As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.
I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.
There is NO such thing as just blocking when it’s everywhere, and if you can downvote it you’ve already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.
So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y’all in November – or December, if shit gets real.
Fwiw, there are spaces such as https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, and with that being a PieFed instance, can also offer blocking of any text keywords (like “Musk” or “Trump”). Stuff will still manage to come through (e.g. a preponderance of orange clowns with a fairly obvious meaning that nonetheless make it through the filters), but it can cut it down by a ton.
But if you just absolutely need to block it all, then I wish you happiness during your vacation from the bleakness! :-)
Yeah, obviously if I’m on lemmy.world then I have to wait for those improvements. I have looked into moving instances, and I will save your comment; I appreciate the information.
In the meantime, thanks for the well-wishes, and same to you!
i mean, can you blame them?
it sucks. it sucks wading through moutains of dogshit and miserable crazy people to like, get a trickle of good and interesting content, or have exchange comments with reasonable chill people.
for every good interaction i have on here, there are probably 10+ other ones, and everyday I have to systemtically block new communities and users that are nothing but bot spam or straight up malicious users who are pushing a delusional and angry political agenda. and it works… those types of accounts/posts get lots of engagement, way more than organic stuff.
and you can go to their comment history and see account is less than a month old, and has 100s of posts and 1000s of comments and they are all… the same thing over and over and over.
a year ago i never had to deal with that on fediverse platforms. i’m now thinking of leaving myself because it just… increasingly sucks here and I don’t have an interest in being relentlessly negative and angry like most of content here is. i also don’t have a superiority complex being here either.
Fwiw, it gets this way right before every single election in most western nations - especially a USA one.
And you can go to places such as lemmygrad.ml and read how proud they are at creating tools to subvert any and all bans - e.g. the automation of a process to simply cycle through all registered accounts in an app until one is found that is not blocked at the instance, community, or for a comment reply the user level (possibly by now, even including the creation of a new one if necessary?).
NO, to some, means to simply push forward all the harder. It’s Man vs. Bear, and they’ve chosen their side: incel. It is intentional and even purposeful - strategic in fact, a “winning” approach, if the goal is to convey a message regardless of your interest in receiving it.
The problem is that Lemmy is trying to be Reddit instead of being something better. Reddit’s model was always flawed: a central feed of endless content where the community is secondary to the algorithm and the upvote chase. That model rewards outrage, spam, and bot farms because those things generate engagement.
The old forums worked differently. A forum was a place you went to for a specific topic or community. The content and the discussion lived together. You knew the regulars. Moderation was local and accountable. There was no algorithm shoving rage bait into your feed because there was no feed in the modern sense.
Lemmy instances should be built like those old forums. Each instance should feel like a real site with its own culture and purpose, not just a node in a Reddit clone. The posts and the community should be the reason people stay, not a firehose of engagement bait.
Splitting the forums away from the content sites was the mistake. We need to put them back together.
The big problem is I have no idea what feds are out there since it is all distributed so it feels like you are wandering in a dead mall sometimes.
Either way. I’m here until the end or a rebound. The internet is dead and what I replace decentralised internet with is nothing, I’ll just go offline permanently when it comes to social media.
So, here’s hoping for a rebound cuz I’m having fun.
You can’t just count Lemmy active users. I switched from Lemmy to Piefed for example. So we need to count Lemmy+Piefed.
PieFed’s growth doesn’t make up for Lemmy’s decline
That’s why I mentioned both. Though I also personally have accounts on both so… I definitely am keenly aware that these are not counts of actual human people, but rather user accounts.
See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.
Not that I care about PieFed… But all of those graphs are going up.
Absolutely, but not as much as Lemmy is going down, so the Threadiverse overall is decreasing its MAUs - not merely shifting from Lemmy to PieFed.
Worth noting, on FediDB, Lemmy+Piefed+Mbin is sitting at 54.8k MAU. Lemmy itself is at 46.4k. Though I don’t know the historical situation there.
They always count higher, that doesn’t mean we’re growing. Pretty sure FediDB has shown over 60k Lemmy before.
That’s highly odd. Hopefully someone looks into that more - perhaps there’s a difference in what instances are allowed to be counted (like pure bot-spam and CSAM ones filtered by one site but not the other? I have no idea).
Personally I think with ai crawlers, instances are coming up with their own ways of combatting the issue and the trackers are getting stuck in the crossfire. I have a few fediverse servers so some show up, some dont depending on the tracker.
Thank you for sharing, especially your first-hand perspective.
Its kinda hard to extrapolate either way honestly. Its easy for me to say that 90+% of the traffic to my tiny home server is AI crawlers now. I have NO idea definitively for the others. When I made a python fix, it jailed quite a few IPs and now its not too much of an issue. But I did notice a couple of status servers like fedidb get incorrectly jailed.
So yeah. Fun times for admins.
Looking at the PieFed graph, and all-time peak usage seems to be for last month, and the dip for this month could be explained by the month not being over yet (and even if not, it’s not an indicator of decline).
Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit… and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.
Right: people are not so much leaving PieFed as they are leaving the Threadiverse overall, and Lemmy in particular.
Since the amount of growth in PieFed does not offset the decrease in MAUs in Lemmy (especially over the long term, from the 65K), people are still leaving “the Threadiverse” overall, even despite PieFed’s recent growth.
I wanted to avoid commenting on the goodness or badness of these trends, but yes PieFed’s recent growth is somewhat encouraging, though tiny.
Fair enough.
Why not just count the two together? At 40k across lemmy + piefed, that’s not bad.
The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.
Note that the numbers then are still shrinking.
I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely not additional people, or rather only some are but nobody knows how much.
Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don’t know the details there.
I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.
Are the numbers actually shrinking for Lemmy+Piefed?
Lemmy has gone from 36,600 monthly active users to 33,600 users in the last year. A loss of 3,000 monthly active users.
Piefed has gone from 1,600 MAU a year ago to 6,900 MAU now, an increase of 5,300 users.
This means the total has increased by 2,300 MAU in the past year.
Note that this drop in Lemmy and rise in Piefed can be explained by lemmynsfw shutting down and being replaced by fedinsfw, which runs piefed and has 3,600 MAU. Arguably both Lemmy and Piefed are slowly gaining in MAU.
I really wonder where they’re going. I can’t find any substitute for this little purgatory. Piefed? I’m not a fan of the UI. Masto? Twitter’s a weird endless conversation space without proper organization and it makes me want to scream. Modern social media? We’d have vastly divergent desires if that’s where they went.
Fwiw, a number of highly popular 3rd-party apps including Voyager now offer support for PieFed. Most do not provide the full range of features as compared to the web interface, though some like Interstellar provide the large majority of them - see fully detailed listing of each app and which features are supported at https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.
Anyway, I confirm first-hand that using Voyager to access a PieFed instance is nearly identical to accessing a Lemmy one, except for the gain in back-end functionality of PieFed doing what Lemmy cannot (e.g. you apply some settings rarely in the web UI - maybe a couple times a year - and then those continue to function as you switch to more daily usage in your app of choice).
So use whatever you like - sh.itjust.works seems to me to be a fine instance - but I’m just saying that for a new person joining the Threadiverse, the web browser UI of PieFed is not the only or even the main way that people can choose to access it.
I used to download an app for everything, but now I can’t talk myself into so much as considering it. Unfortunately, it’s web interface or nothing for me
Maybe they aren’t going anywhere. Just dumping social media. I find Lemmy a lot less toxic than reddit but it’s still basically a reddit hive mind.
Hacker news has been a nice place to browse. Yes a lot of the people are the most AI silicon valley brained ghouls but its offset by the entertainment of seeing them earnestly say the quiet part out loud. and because the forum has rules about sincerity thoughtful engagement you can open a thread and actually read a good discussion with intelligent comments.
Hacker news generally flags and shuts down posts critical of tech bros, capitalism, or the right wing.
Lobste.rs is a better alternative to HN.
There is a no politics rule but I see plenty of anti right wing, critical of tech bro and capitalism posts. The posts getting flagged are generally pretty low effort garbage.
I wonder what it says about social media that a news aggregator started in 2007 whose minimalist interface hasn’t changed much since then and which is operated by a venture capital firm to shovel ads for their own investments is literally peak social media for a certain demographic. Like, maybe that’s all that’s really needed. There should be a news aggregator for people who like cars or for people who like knitting or whatever and they should all look and behave just like Hacker News. A car company just needs to start one of these and do good moderation. Bingo. Social media is solved. Go home. It’s over. All the ideas since then? Microblogging? ActivityPub? Subreddits/communities? Apps? It’s all unneeded.
If you build it, they will come.
