Vicinus

Oh, do you mean the private voting issue?

If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago.

Honestly, you could probably lay out a dozen controversial decisions Rimu has made and I wouldn’t be able to pick which one I’m vaguely recalling.

I admit to being very wrong here - I thought, and even said publicly - that surely Rimu would reverse course and walk back that decision, as he had so very many others previously.

I thought so too.

He acts like Huffman, treating people as landed gentry on his platform. Which is… the truth!! Hence people have left it, and even more are choosing to simply go to it. Nonetheless, I truly do wish the best to the project… I just no longer have any hope that it will continue, most certainly not like it had in the past.

It’s his, but at the same time, being open source, it could very quickly not be (ex. Pylova). As long as there is a solid conversion path, Rimu could one day wake up and find .social is the only Piefed instance.

GET CREATIVE?!?

Rimu not only took away voting, and did so in a way that breaks the ActivityPub model - leaving users to scratch their heads wondering what error had occurred where the arrow turned green but the count did not change - but in response to why people were not allowed to vote anymore, he said to simply move on and do other things besides voting.

Yeah, his communication skills need significant work, which wouldn’t be so bad, if he was open-minded, but it really seems, as you’re saying, it has to be his way.

… the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social had their contributions drop like a rock (I skewed those stats a bit b/c I seemed to forget for a moment and submitted 6 posts before I remembered, as I tried out different 3rd-party apps to see what those experiences were like).

Absolutely. This is what I love about open source and federation. It may take time, but the ‘system’ routes around ‘damage’. Looks to me like Pylova may be the route around the Piefed/Rimu damage.

REALLY! That’s amazing! I would guess a migration over from Reddit. I hope they feel welcomed.

I guess from Reddit too. It’s been pretty consistently 100+ new users a day. Given instance “stickiness”, I’d say ~60% stick around.

I’ve seen a couple posts from newbies, the threads look really positive, there still is the allow/block triad conversation/fighting, but it was very minor from what I saw.

About downvotes, I misrecalled: Mia said that it was added to the to-do list to be added for the next release, although that was 3 months ago, and yet I have not seen it added yet.

If you haven’t seen her response, it’s appears to be a user toggle-able setting, which may turn into an instance setting.

There are a lot of “unfriendly” aspects such as this to the Fediverse. I see some people fleeing now because their instance went belly-up - off-hand I can think of mander.xyz and slrpnk.net and… at least one more that I cannot now recall the name of (their admin team simply listed a single account beginning with “The “, which at least at one point had not posted for years), all of which are having issues. Of course that is simply par for the course for the Fediverse model!

Yeah, it’s unfortunate, but I think it could also be an opportunity to figure out problems/frictions and solutions. I think for the worry instances go down, a few things would inspire confidence, for me. Off-site backup redundancy (data), a set up non-profit with financial transparency (finances), and a “succession plan” (admins: if admin people want to leave they can but there is a plan in place to hand things off and replace them).

But less necessary are those bot spam posts made ostensibly to make the place look more welcoming and active and alive - at first glance, but then those accounts (almost?) never respond to anyone’s comment, which sours people and leaves a negative impression of this place as being a ghost town.

Agreed. I think clearly labeling that this a bot post, could be good to feature. I still like seeing articles, even if I don’t want to comment on them. Maybe having them separated out as RSS feeds would be better though. I think something is happening with regards to RSS and Piefed, but I didn’t look into the specifics.

But… it is simply not worth the effort, when Reddit and FaceBook and Insta and X and Bluesky have REAL (high amounts of) content, so investing all that effort to learn and block what they do not want will yield significantly greater dividends… they seem to think, and by the mantra that “the customer is always right”, they are correct.

One thing I kept hearing from the new users this week, is how calm it is here. Like there is much less antagonism, insults, and rage bait and much more thoughtful discussion and nice interactions. So, I think, the threadiverse will hold some of the new converts until they learn how to curate their experience better.

Thereby if we want to attrack them more, we need to offer such blocking by default, making unregistered bot accounts either outright illegal or at least opt-in rather than allowing them to be opt-out.

Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.

Yeah, I think “informed default” (like .zip), where the blocks are setup by default, but new users are informed about them and there is an easy way to disable them, if the new user chooses to, is a good path forward.

About your idea: I disagree. An admin that is hosting their own instance is different than someone who is simply using an existing instance. Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis.

I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times.

Anyway, I feel like an admin tool would be a better fit for that situation than changing the way that all posts federated all of the time - if I understood you correctly there.

It seems I may not have conveyed the idea well. So to try again, my understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”

In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

For instance if I make a post to !Fediverse@lemmy.world, even as a mere user (not an instance admin) I can go over to that instance at https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse/ and look for my post there (similarly for comments). I have routinely done that many times in the past, especially from StarTrek.Website that had such horrible network connectivity at the time that I joined it, prompting me to seek out Discuss.Online that has such fantastic uptime due to spectacularly capable admins (including Jgrim the author of Sublinks).

Previously though, I would likewise post something and then getting zero up- (or down-) votes, go seek out why, and discover that my post had not federated. Worse, when it eventually did get federated, it did not appear to others as “new”, and instead looked like it had been submitted several days in the past, at which point people were not alerted to it, and it became buried amidst all the flood of prior posts that had already been engaged with, even though those had not been. It was quite sad, how bad the connectivity of the Threadiverse was 3-4 years ago:-(. These days it is a LOT better!

I’m think the feature I’m suggesting would do away with this “federation uncertainty friction”. I rarely go to check other instances to see if my comment or post has federated or not. I’m usually on mobile and this is not an easy maneuver, so I often have a question if my post/comment federated or if I’m only talking to myself. Not a great feeling and definitely reduces the urge to contribute, for me.

I just checked the post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post). Glad I spent time on that post… :(

I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the '“hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

Probably would have missed it. Appreciate the tag :)

How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?

Honestly, as long as I can easily enable it, it doesn’t matter to me if everyone has it by default (only viewed your instance without logging in). Might be worth a user poll, but I have no idea how wanted that feature is.

FYI I altered my [FR] on Codeburg to reflect you’d already implementing the feature.

We mostly use Grafna

Link doesn’t work, but I think I know what it’ll look like.

Given both your responses, it seems I didn’t conveyed the idea well to OpenStars. My understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”

In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

Hopefully that makes sense. I graphical up-time graph is probably nice to have too. I was going to say those are available on fediverse measurement sites, but with a quick look, it seems like that was a Fediverse-Observer (RIP) only feature.

Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.

Happy to help and thanks for being so responsive, open-minded, and just all around great :)

Edit: when making my comment to OpenStars, I checked a post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, which did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post).

I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the ‘"hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).

Yeah, no worries :)

I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy.

I don’t think that was it but maybe?

… all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.

Agreed.

But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard?

Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.

Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).

Yeah, Snoopy leaving is interesting, in that I’m not sure how much new blood Rimu is going to attract in the future (he’s burned a lot of bridges). The Codeburg commits lists Rimu, Walter Schwenger (wsj018), and wltb as the only developers over the last 3 months. Looks like there were quite a few more other people pushing commits 4 months back. Looks like the Pylova split happened 5 months ago and a couple of the light commiters followed Mia to Pylova.

The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking.

Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen.

It would be kind of funny, if the effects weren’t terrible :(

PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly …

Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week (~+750 MAU). Roughly 600 for Lemmy, 170 for Piefed, and -10 for Mbin.

I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others.

I vaguely recall this, so might have seen your post/comment at the time.

PyLova has already done it though …

They did? I just checked their instances and it has the same consolidated total votes UI. It would be great if they already did it, maybe it’s an option and not the default?

On a different note, I ran across a post who deleted there account, because almost no one was voting on their posts. I think it was a federation issue, as in the community hosting instance never received the posts and they only stayed local.

I was thinking maybe a check-mark or something to let a user know their post or comment was successfully received by the target/host instance. I don’t know if hosting instances tell sending instances they successfully retrieved data or not, so could be a significant increase in traffic.

Maybe not that significant though. Piefed only had ~1700 posts and comments over the last week, Lemmy top 20 most populated instances were ~12500 (“Activity” Data). Taking the most “active” instance (lemmy.world), they had ~4700 activities, assume worst case they are all for non-Lemmy.world communities. That would be 670 extra packets per day (28 per hour). That doesn’t seem too terrible. Thoughts?

My understanding is that Piefed does group the posts together, but that no apps currently implement that feature.

From Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz, it sounds like the Connect app does stack the posts, but that may be through their own feature and not Piefed’s (no idea). I just looked for a site or post that compared app features and couldn’t find one that listed grouping cross-posts.

My recollection is that Lemmy 1.0 may have cross-post grouping, but I don’t see it listed as a feature on 1.0 beta testing post.

I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired.

Looks like they like the idea and it’ll be in v5.1. Looks like they already completed it.

… also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial …

Fair point.

… essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created …

Silver linings :)

… “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase …

Yeah, I remember that ‘argument’. That was annoying to deal with.

I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in.

There was another feature/set of features that were opt-out and poorly communicated before the vote-limiter, maybe a year ago. I don’t remember what it was though. I recall it went over just as poorly as the rate limiter and made me view Rimu in a different light.

Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.

That’s my understanding as well. I had to ask my admins to remove it.

Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜.

Haha. Yeah. I do think their call for a vanguard kind of gives away the game (wiki: “According to Lenin, the purpose of the vanguard party is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat”). I think using the word “dictatorship” at all is unlikely to go well or attract the people you want that would be okay with giving up power, once they have it.

Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw.

And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.

Absolutely. According to Fedindex, it looks like Lemmynsfw may have only had 3.6k MAU when it crashed. FediNSFW is now at ~3.6k MAU. So, weirdly it came out to be an even exchange.

PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right?

Looks like Fedindex is putting Fedinsfw creation on 02-18-2026. Fediverse-Observer data, puts Piefed at 4816 MAU on 02-17-2026. Piefed is at 6742 MAU and Fedinsfw only at 3583 MAU, leaves non-Fedinsfw Piefed at 3159 MAU today.

Last time Piefed was below 2k MAU (1990 MAU) was 2026-01-20. So, up ~59% in 10-ish months, not bad, percentage wise.

Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.

Looks like Lemmy has had 63 new instances since 2026-06-08, 20 still active (Piefed: 18 new, 8 still active). So better percentage fro Piefed, better volume for Lemmy.

From 2026-07-28 to 2026-10-27, Lemmy alive servers went from 321 -> 294 (Piefed: 66 -> 59). So, with the increased total threadiverse MAUs, it looks like some consolidation is happening.

And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation.

I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well.

With you there. ‘Whole ass 1 thing, rather than half-assing 2 things’.

PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).

This has legitimately been a huge annoyance for me on web (and a reason I prefer Voyager). I made FR about this too.

I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it.

Very exciting indeed!! :-)

Looks like it’s already live. Looks like it’s only contained to users. I was hoping this could also be an admin feature to help stop scraping (with automation only 1 instance has to be hit by a scraper before the subscribed instances are ‘inoculated’). Added another FR.

Edit: added an additional sentence to the ml discussion.

Looks like the Threadiverse is ~45k. So, relatively stable and up year-over-year. Peak would have been 2023-07-17 at 76585 MAU (Lemmy + Mbin/Kbin; during the Reddit 3rd party exodus?).

Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0 …

Good to know.

If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen.

The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it’s a win-win there!:-)

On that front, I opened another Pylova Issue for instance settings (user facing and one for admin installs). Hopefully that will bear fruit.

The vast majority of Rimu’s features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in …

My recollection is that they are now opt-in. They didn’t start that way and didn’t become that way until backlash. I think he’s learned his lesson at this point, to make everything opt-in.

… this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out.

Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology. Seems par for the course.

… as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.

Yeah, that’s my read as well. Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.

Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn’t look to see how active they all are especially recently …

My “2 part time developers” (looks like it’s actually 1.5 developers, 1 full, 1 half-time) is from a recent post.

… even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K.

My feeling is it’s less about MAU numbers (best case: +10%) and more about becoming ‘the only game in town’. I think good integration of Mastodon, could significantly increase Piefed MAU over Lemmy and would make Mbin redundant. Making a good Lemmy to Piefed conversion script after that, could knock Lemmy into a death-spiral as well. Piefed would then be the only fediverse Reddit-alternative.

I also suspect that Rimu’s vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand …

Agreed. I think I was sold on the original ‘dream’ of the fediverse all being connected and it was a bit disappointing when I learned that wasn’t really the case.

… who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.

It wouldn’t surprise me, if that were the case.

Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It’s not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it’s easy then…? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what’s easy or not:-).

Yeah, I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it. I suspect, if it needs to be iterated on, it won’t be that onerous to change how it can be utilized.

I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.

I’m aware of that aspect, and I may be conflating it with on-boarding new instances.

Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done.

Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.

The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL.

Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists.

I don’t want to prescribe motives to his actions, but I feel like some of his positions and efforts are to “dominate” the threadiverse and knock out the competition.

In this case, Mbin. From my understanding, Mbin is pretty far behind in development (lots of bugs and missing features), only have 2 part time developers and they are trying to supplement that with AI/LLMs. I suspect the LLMs will help them for a bit, but the project will die when the code is only manageable by LLMs and prices for vibe-coding go up significantly.

When that happens, all the Mbin users could “easily” migrate to Piefed. Though, I imagine, if Piefed gets Mastodon implementation working properly, that may cause a migration then too (possibly death spiraling Mbin, if the migration is large enough).

Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!!

… it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.

Yeah, they are :)

I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.

Yeah, now that you mention it, I’m not sure how wide spread deletion is. I believe I recall one of Rimu’s blog posts mentioned it in some depth, so I assumed at least some instances are taking advantage of it (especially with the price of hardware).

Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.

… yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.

That’s a good point. Maybe worth another Pylova feature request?

I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists.

Hmm. I’m imagining someone will just make a block list as their only blocking measure and anytime they need to block someone, they’ll just add them to the list, and people will subscribe to that list or multiple lists.

… are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.

I have no source for this, but I think, now, first content/post/comment from a new instance has to be approved by an instance admin (could be wrong and misremembering though). If not, might be worth seeing if that is a option admins would want added. Thoughts?

… or to begin blocking people, one by one …

All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!

On that note, it seems Pylova has finished writing up the block subscription code (yesterday) and it’ll be in the next update (unknown date).

… if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee) …

It could remain forever, but I think most instances (or at least Piefed instance) are set up to delete old content after “x” amount of time. Alternatively, admins could just manually delete the old content, if they wanted.

… A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.

Agreed. I think .zip’s approach where it has the default blocks and explains them is a good approach. If the subscribable blocks also make it into the on-boarding, I think there will be a large swath of new .zip users who almost never encounter the triad issues (assuming Pylova subscribable block list spreads back to Piefed and beyond). If that on boarding spreads throughout the Threadiverse, the triad could be dealt with, without major confrontations, which I think most admins don’t want to deal with.

Note that if ML ever were to be defederated, the absolute most toxic trolls would simply switch to using their alts on some other instance such as Lemmy.World, which they have announced they will do in advance, several years ago. They even indicated that they would make apps that automate the process of trying to send messages to someone, cycling through an array of alts until one is found that is not banned on that instance (or by that recipient?)

My understanding is the trolls exist because .ml admins allow it. If they try using .world, I expect the .world admins would ban. If they ban evade, I imagine a new safeguard would be added to counter them.

On the whole, I think our reputation is closer to nostr and 4chan than it is to Bluesky.

I don’t go to other social media, so my only knowledge of our reputation is from people repeating things here.

Hopefully “our reputation” can jump to a different comparison scale (I wouldn’t want to be compared to any of those options).

Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM.

Okay, I’m going to push back on this. At no point have I ever heard CSAM being accepted or allowed. The only time I’ve ever heard of it coming up, everyone reacted negatively. The poster was blocked, all the posts were deleted immediately, and new safeguards were put into prevent it happening again.

That team is so energetic and helpful, it’s a pleasure to see it! 😁

Agreed :)

Edit: missed a section.

My understanding is federated “payment” systems are difficult. I think there is active discussion on the topic, but I’m not sure where code/development is at, or if it’s even started.

I think flohmarkt (“federated decentral classified ad software”) is the closest we have right now. It has low (~10-30) Monthly Active Users (MAU), but is in active development.

This sounds horrific to me! The question in my mind is not how many ghosts to allow over here, but how to generate authentic interactions between real humans. We don’t need every single niche covered, we just need people to enjoy their time spent here.

I do not want to have to scroll down reading through tens to hundreds to thousands of comments, none of which represent real humans who would respond if I replied to them - that is the precise opposite of what I want.

I do not think that the overall lack of content is the problem here - it’s the overall lack of content that is worthwhile to read, …

I didn’t think I conveyed the idea well. It would not be an automated or bot process (Reddit comments wouldn’t be added as Threadiverse comments). The good/useful comments from Reddit would be utilized by a poster to add to their own threadiverse post to help add more relevant content (Example that got 57 comments).

A further 90% improvement can be attained by blocking Lemmy.ml …

While that may be the fastest solution, the triad haven’t been doing great in at least the last few months, even without major intervention (Post with Data):
Lemmy.ml:

• Difference from 3 Months ago: -103 MAU (-5.5%)
• Difference from 1 week ago: -23 MAU (-1.3%)
• Posts and Comments (per week): 727 (+106 vs historic)

hexbear.net:

• Difference from 3 Months ago: -78 MAU (-5.7%)
• Difference from 1 week ago: -18 MAU (-1.4%)
• Posts and Comments (per week): 1659 (-3545 vs historic)

Lemmygrad.ml:

• Difference from 3 Months ago: 22 MAU (+3.9%)
• Difference from 1 week ago: 0 MAU (0%)
• Posts and Comments (per week): 311 (-1 vs historic)

Average of the other 16 Instances (of Top 20, excludes lemmy.world who’s similarly crashing):

• Difference from 3 Months ago: -16 MAU (-1.4%)
• Difference from 1 week ago: +3 MAU (+0.3%)
• Posts and Comments (per week): 387 (+22 vs historic)

It looks like hexbear.net is suffocating by itself. Maybe some users move from hexbear.net to lemmy.ml or the declining hexbear.net activity is forcing lemmy.ml users to be more active (I have no evidence of either, but for argument’s sake say they do), even then lemmy.ml is shrinking too.

In this very conversation thread there was a particular onerous troll who kept following our conversation and downvoting everything I said …

I did wonder what happened to that person.

New joiners, it seems obvious from the comments they leave (usually on other platforms after already leaving), don’t bother to put in the work to curate their experiences and instead simply flee …

Seems like some efforts toward better on-boarding could return good results (could include default blocks, etc.). I have some other analytics I need to get working again first, but after, I think I’ll take a stab at looking at decoupling and identifying key instance on-boarding differences that effect retention.

Edit: moved comma.

Edit 2: Looks like Pylova likes the subscribable block list idea: https://codeberg.org/quokkau/PyLova/issues/30

That is sad to hear that mander hasn’t come back yet - I guess it’s still waiting to see if something can be resolved, since the backups weren’t recent.

But it is even more sad to hear that Rimu’s community migration tool isn’t working, on other instances without his direct involvement.

Agreed.

Some of what you said makes sense to me though, like a community “owner” must be located on the instance where it is housed - if that were not the case then the system would be vulnerable to all sorts of spam where any bot could spin up communities on any instance, so some level of accountability must be maintained.

Hmm. I see what your saying. I was thinking more someone on the instance would be required to make the community, but could hand it off to a user on another instance. I think you are right though, a user on the instance should be forced to be “owner”, as it doesn’t take much work to create a new account and they can always add their other instance username as a mod and run the community via that (never really needing to log into username of the instance the community is on again). Only issue I see is, people DMing the “owner” username that is not monitored, but I suppose that could just be stated in the sidebar and/or user profile.

I suspect the official PieFed app will be Blorp, just from the way that Rimu talked about it iirc.

I can’t recall any specific source tied to that thought, but that sounds right. Guess we’ll see.

… it’s far easier to pay Reddit and then get Reddit coins back in exchange.

Haha, sadly very true.

… an enormous fraction of our own traffic here are reposting bots, often from Reddit, …

I just saw a post that Reddit changed something to block reposting bots again and Lemmit is tired of trying to figure out a workaround and is going to shut down next year when the domain subscription ends. So, potentially fewer reposts in the future.

As a bit of an aside, JohnnyEnzyme @piefed.social just told me about a posting technique that worked well for him utilizing past Reddit posts with their best comments to create interaction in the threadiverse (his comment). So, we may lose repost bots (no great loss in my mind), but if people start taking more from Reddit and curating it personally, I think that could be a great exchange.

Edit: As an update I added a feature request to Pylova’s Codeburg about the subscribable block lists. We’ll see if they’re interested.

Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists?

I never made that connection, but yeah, this could be much easier to implement than I was thinking.

Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.

Yeah, I could see this being a few easy setting/feature addition.

It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope …

Understandable.

Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.

My understanding is that this was set up that way to prevent harassment. I’m not knowledge on the subject so could be wrong.

No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.

My understanding was that it “worked”. As in it was haphazard and a very manual effort to get what did happen to work.

Not the same thing, but die4ever@retrolemmy.com and I tried to save the past posts of ecospheres@mander.xyz to piefed.zip after mander.xyz went down. It didn’t work, I (on piefed.zip) could see the old mander.xyz posts, but no one else on any other instances could. I also had a problem with adding mods to the new piefed.zip community (lemmy mods couldn’t be added, non-piefed.zip mods couldn’t be made owner).

So, while I expect it can be done, I don’t think it’s an easy, straightforward, or automated process to move software or even communities. I know my example was not a 1-to-1 typical move, so if you have any counter-examples please let me know (I can utilize them for the !fedigrow@lemmy.zip wiki).

Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas.

I am quite aware of Rimu’s nature (he and I had discussions in the past).

Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.

Agreed and I would say he’s lost a lot of trust many times at this point (I used to be one of his biggest cheerleaders).

Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out.

I suspect so. I mentioned it to the piefed.zip admins, so they are at least aware of it. But I suspect there won’t be any piefed -> pylova conversions anytime soon, unless Rimu screws up big (again).

… all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova.

I believe their is an official Piefed app coming (https://fedidb.com/software/compare?software=lemmy%2Cmbin%2Cpiefed). Assuming it’s open source, presumably the other partially Piefed compatible apps could utilize the “Piefed Official App” 's code to improve compatibility within their own apps. I’m certainly going to suggest it to the voyager Dev when the “official app” comes out.

The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating.

Agreed, but not sure we should expect more. FOSS is generally slow moving, due to it being small, part-time teams. I’m in a place where I can help support FOSS financially, but I know that is not an option for everyone, plus it’s a new consideration/viewpoint for people coming from corporate/proprietary software (where they are the product).

Edit: okay, done - https://discuss.online/post/46939614.

Awesome! Upvoted :)

I would hope that PieFed.zip would automatically apply a user-level block to new joiners for Lemmy.ml, the same way that it already does for hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.

While I agree that would likely help new comers, I suspect the .zip admins have a similar thought process to Rimu (not antagonizing the Lemmy Devs, and keeping the lines of communication open in case there is an software issue).

i.e., being kind to and/or having empathy with people who enjoy trolling behaviors is not the same thing as offering them a platform.

I agree and block trolls immediately (“Don’t Feed Trolls!” is my motto online).

Especially one where their messages are presented identically alongside with all other messages, such that new joiners cannot distinguish between them. A warning label, an icon, a different color highlighting etc. would go a long way. But that’s a ton of effort, which anyone using a 3rd-party app won’t be able to access anyway, hence blocking is all that is left, short of full defederation.

I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level. Users or instance admins could create a list of problematic users and/or communities and any updates automatically feed to the subscribing instances or users. Obviously issue is who gets authority to amend a list, but I think if the list was in a standard format and “forkable” it wouldn’t be too big of an issue for different groups to easily create and maintain their own lists without much issue.

This could be away to block the worst offenders/trolls without risking antagonizing the Lemmy Devs. Thoughts?

The alternative, which is the current method, is to simply get comfortable being a troll bar. We feature trolls here, we make them feel very comfortable, and offer only confusing methods to people and very little guidance to new joiners to avoid them.

I don’t think we are “comfortable being a troll bar”, I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development. With ~80% of the Threadiverse on Lemmy and the Lemmy.ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, I think things have to move slowly (boil the frog slowly). There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin), so all the Lemmy instances are a little bit held hostage. I don’t currently see a way out from the hostage situation, but perhaps one will present itself in the future.

In the meantime, like you are saying, I don’t think that means things can’t improve with on-boarding or initial blocking for new users, to continue moving away from being a “troll bar”.

… when unedumacashiated people are allowed to vote, chaos is not nearly as likely to result (from such “random” inputs) as the system being taken over by a malicious actor who may then use it for their own nefarious purposes.

I understand that viewpoint, but my understanding is that there is not a “good” solution. If “education” or “knowledge” requirements are implemented, they are, or at least to my knowledge have been, used to disenfranchise the most vulnerable. An example of this could be the Southern States after the American Civil War. They implemented “literacy tests” biased toward the wealthy and whites to restrict the poor, minorities, and immigrants from voting. The “best” solution I’ve heard to stopping an uninformed populace is to educate the masses to develop critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, that “solution” is generally on generational timescales.

… that explanation neither absolves people of their failures in the absolute necessity to remain curious, nor absolves us of our own failure when we allow the system to propagate, and in fact help it along.

How do they know to “remain curious”? How did you learn to? How did I learn to? From my experience in life and learning from others about their lives, I’ve found I’ve had a quite privileged upbringing with regards to education and emotional support. This leads me to be quite generous in my view of people’s “failings”.

Anytime I run across someone “failing” to understand something I consider basic or common, I try to think back to when did I learn that and from whom. In most cases, the person or situation I learned from didn’t exist for the person “failing”. From that point, I try to, with no judgment of them, explain my reasoning and thought process to them (just as someone did for me). If they want to take in and consider my words, great. If not, that’s alright too. I could always be wrong about the topic, they could not be ready to change, or any other reasoning (you don’t need to force every seed to sprout, just keep providing a nurturing environment and you may soon find yourself surrounded by greenery).

Mostly I just try to be open minded myself (like I am truly open to changing my viewpoint to theirs) and provide an open and safe environment for others to consider alternatives. I find it works quite well.

According to this post PieFed.zip uses the same blocking system as Lemmy.zip for new joiners. See also this comment from the admin.

“This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.”, “… piefed.zip (and lemmy.zip) already blocks hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmynsfw by default, and sends a PM to the user when they sign up to let them know why we do this, and how to remove it.” Huh, TIL. I was going based on the listed instance de-federations (where they aren’t shown).

… which unfortunately neither the Lemmy nor PieFed UI offers a mechanism to expose that list publicly to the users, making the transparency of this issue rather horrible, where I have to link to messages from the admins but there is no webpage that will simply show an updated status - like does exist for instance federation vs. defederation.

Great point. This might be a time to “weaponize” Pylova. Since Piefed has been “back-porting” Pylova’s work, if Mia implemented this transparency addition, it would probably make its way to Piefed. Maybe Lemmy would follow suit, but no idea. I’m thinking worst-case its implemented in Pylova and the Pylovians all benefit. Thoughts?

Edit: Switched a word for grammar.

… Firefox is horrible at memory management, even on Android - it legit runs down my battery even when minimized unless I force-kill it.

Haha. I’ve never made that connection, but I also force kill everything after I’m done immediately using it. Hopefully we have a Servo (!servo@programming.dev) option before too long.

… PieFed vs. PyLova are still at odds. If there was attribution this time, I did not dig deep enough to find it, plus I highly doubt it. Although otoh PyLova seems to be included in the PieFed instance picker pages?

Yeah, I had a feeling. While Pylova instances are listed in the Piefed instance picker, piefed.social has “Silencing” quokk.au and anarchist.nexus. So, I doubt Mia/quokka is going to be trusting Rimu in the immediate future.

… https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app …

That’s a useful page I didn’t know about before. Thanks for sharing :)

Really? I’ve heard it said that all someone has to do is figure out who or what they are not allowed to criticize. But I suppose there are layers, and indeed disinformation is a helluva powerful effect.

I agree, to an extent, but I think it takes a significant effort to decide to question things to begin with. If everything and everyone you encounter in your life says the Sun revolves around the Earth, in my view, it takes something extra to not just find or notice a discrepancy, but also take the time/effort to go against everything you know, see, and encounter to pull on that thread and see what it reveals. Pulling on that thread could turn your friends/family/neighbors against you, it could threaten your livelihood or safety. In a non-supportive environment, I expect it’s quite scary and it’s much easier for someone to stick their head in the ground and carry on as if they didn’t notice the discrepancy.

… PieFed.zip is just about as close to ideal as one could want, except for adding a block to Lemmy.ml by default for new users …

If you feel like it, you could petition to add such a block …

For clarity, piefed.zip doesn’t block any of the ‘triad’. I believe the .zip instances marketed/known(?) as being open/non-restrictive. So, I don’t think the admins are interested in blocking any instances, unless they are spam or similarly problematic.

Somehow even Rimu who has such a contentious relationship with the tankies doesn’t even do that?

I suspect this has to do with the .ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, and Rimu needing to have a cordial relationship with them to maintain interoperability in the threadiverse.

We’ve made our choice, collectively: this is a tankie / troll bar.

I understand the feeling. It may help you to know that the ‘triad’ has decreased in total % of the threadiverse in the last 3 months. Also, look at the Threadiverse 3 years ago before the Reddit 3rd-party App Exodus, there was really only a few Lemmy instances to choose from (lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, and a couple others). So, while many instances started during the exodus, most of the established communities and instances were part of the ‘triad’ and many new users would have joined the established instances/communities. I suspect if users could easily switch their accounts between instances, you would see a huge change in the distribution of the Threadiverse.

Which obviously mainstream non-technical normies nope right out, blocking that content the only way that they know how: by leaving the Threadiverse altogether …

Perhaps some better on-boarding, about curation, could help improve the ‘stickiness’ of instances. It wouldn’t surprise me, if a change like that caused the slight decrease in users (between growth spikes) to even out, stabilize, and perhaps allow a slight increase in users to develop.

… 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 !memes@lemmy.ml …

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.

No problem. Happy to provide insight into my workings :)

So the “Sum” mentioned at the bottom of each section is only for those shown within the section - the top 20 - and not expanded for all of the category? e.g. Lemmy’s MAU went down from 30817 to recently 29683, and every other metric (even for the most part the other post you mentioned for Fediverse Growth) also shows decline, but you are saying that despite that, the numerical amount is not that much, and we are mostly stable?

Yes and yes.

Yeah, the snippets and links you provided match my understanding of the situation. I don’t recall who or where, but I recall someone saying they were having a much easier time recruiting people to Piefed rather than Lemmy, due to Lemmy already having an established reputation. That being said, I expect the Lemmy 1.0 launch will cause a significant bump.

… don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit …

I found the user saying that, but they didn’t elaborate on what missing features they wanted. It’s been years since I used Reddit, do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?

… Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account …

I recall running into this issue and being confused, before I found the setting. Do you know if this is still the default? If so, and the Dev hasn’t given a specific reason for the decision (I can’t immediately find a post about it), I don’t mind making a post to ask them to switch the default.

… it would be nice if at least one singular major instance would defederate from lemmy.ml, or in the case of a PieFed instance apply an instance block by default …

Agreed.

… they would simply use their alts to get around any such block …

Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist. If they did use alts to get around the block, their alt’s instance’s admin could be contacted. My understanding is that the “troll behavior” on .ml is allowed, may be even encouraged, by their admins/devs. So, different admin may not have a tolerant attitude toward it. Along with this, as more communities spread out from the flagship and most popular instances (.ml, .world, .social), I think things will get less toxic too.

As an aside, over the last 3-months, it looks like most of the “politically” focused instances are the ones on the heavier declining side of the range. The instances declining the least or even growing are on the “unaligned” side of things.

I think I can alleviate some of your worries. The instance post only shows the top 20 instances for a software (Lemmy has 287 active, Piefed: 59, Mbin: 16).

My Fediverse Growth Post is a better indicator for the Threadiverse’s health. From there you can see the Threadiverse is only down 2.1% from a year ago (-847 MAU). From what I’ve seen over the last >6 months, is that the Threadiverse, and most of the fediverse, grow in short spurts and then slowly declines until the next spurt.

So, unfortunately, we aren’t having continuous positive growth, but I’d say we are stable. I think stable is fine as all the fediverse developers are still adding functionality/interconnected-ness (‘this isn’t our final form’).

For HYAU (Half-Year Active Users), I think it’s important to remember that lots of times people move instances, so their old account will eventually stop being counted as active (I personally have 2 old accounts). From the Fediverse post, you can see there were 42889 MAU 6-months ago and 42276 MAU 3-months ago (-613 MAU). So, even though you may see >1000 HYAU drop off in a given week, the total number of active users over that next 3 months stayed relatively the same (-1.4%, not -28% (-1000 MAU x 12 weeks)).

I think the most important information in the instance post is MAU/HYAU (%) (“Stickiness”), which indicates how well an instance holds onto its users (they keep coming back). I think >60% should be the goal of every instance (67% is currently the peak for non-small instances (>30 MAU)).

It might be worth a study to figure out why there is such a discrepancy across instances. For example, is it correlated to UI issues/customizability, reliability/up-time/longevity, admin/mod behavior, instance rules, federation/de-federation, inter-instance activity (communities/posts/comments), etc.

Regarding politics, I can’t really say what an average or new user experiences. I’ve curated/blocked massive amounts of political content. It might be worth having an instance that initially auto-blocks all politics communities for a new user. I don’t recall exactly, but I think Tesseract? was like that, but the dev/admin was sketchy about what they were doing and then melted down when called out for hiding things. So, it seems the idea had some popularity, but needs/ed a better implementation.