For people that enjoy using Arch btw Linux, we’re good yeah. Although occasionally some of us will die or whatever, and we need to have some level of growth or else accept that we will pretty much just shrink from now onwards. i.e., people talk as if we will go mainstream, or rather as if content will spring up magically from nowhere. If we want the small niches like Reddit has, we would need the userbase first. And to get that, we’d have to ditch our toxicity issues, make the UI more functional, and above all else make better moderation tools. Which I am doubtful will happen as the Lemmy devs seem happy with their current pacing and direction of changes - that’s 99% fine with me btw, as it’s theirs to do with whatever they please; though I am all the more happy to now see the likes of PieFed grow much quicker, even though it started out so very much further behind.

Fair point about PieFed being extremely tiny, and there are only 3 of them that are open to the public to join (https://join.piefed.social/try/) - though I am somewhat surprised to see the number of users for Mbin being so low. Yeah, I suppose they must be going back to Reddit, or perhaps Bluesky, or something else.

I am not sure how much to worry about the number of instances - on the one hand the long-anticipated 0.19.6 software release came out just today, which should fix the federation issues with Lemmy.World for many of them. On the other hand, smaller instances weren’t likely to want to pull down the entirety of the Fediverse to begin with, as an actual multi-user one (even if on the small side, like Discuss.Online or Aussie.Zone) would, plus once gone, wouldn’t we expect them to never come back, i.e. regardless of the software release today? So whatever turned them away… it would have been interesting to have known (though introverts would be the last to have offered such:-).

(The USA election surely - also talked about by people outside of the USA, e.g. I saw quite a few posts on lemmy.ml about it…)

Not… entirely. In March we had 54k Monthly Active Users, while now we have only 45k, that’s a not-entirely-insignificant drop of 17% of users. Also, personally I’ve created some alts during that time-frame, so if others did similarly… the real drop could have been much larger.

Ofc, it could have been that people simply dropped their older alts and are now happy with fewer alts but the same number of people - but that gets to that very old argument that Galileo had with others about whether the moon was perfectly smooth (due to spiritual implications) or not: he observed that it was not, though others raised their objections and tried to counter with the notion that perhaps there were mountains on the moon… but that if so, surely the valley regions were covered with glass, so that the moon retains the property (again, for reasons of spiritual purity) of being a perfectly spherical object?

Ofc you can guess what Galileo said to that: surely there must indeed be glass on top of the valley regions, so that they fill in the height of the mountains with an equal height of the glass valleys, which we cannot see b/c they are made of glass, <eyeroll>, yes indeed “surely” that “must” be the case - but also, in addition to that, there is EVEN MORE glass on top of the mountains, height proportional to how tall they are, and while we cannot see that material either, that is what is causing the differences in shadows, which he could measure with his spyglass that he pointed upwards into the heavens.)

Moral of that fun story: we can conjecture such matters all day long, and how fun that would be for both of us! But at the end of the day, all we have are the facts and numbers in front of us, however imperfect they may be:-).

That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts? I am not 100% certain about that, or much of anything really, but pretty darn close b/c of how the “software” field seems to work on that site, with the other buttons like List and on a particular chosen instance to look at more details, the Main Data tabulation (and see e.g. https://mbin.fediverse.observer/piefed.social, click to expand the Main Data, and that JSON output has “softwarename”: “piefed”, but nothing at all with the text string “Lemmy” there).

The total number of Lemmy instances has also dropped 24%.

Although the total number of both posts and comments has gone up rather than down - so we see a lot more activity, from a significantly smaller number of people. I wonder how sustainable that is though, e.g. next year won’t be an election year in as many countries as this one was. Overall I am worried about the health of the Lemmyverse, though less worried than ever before about the health of the overall Fediverse b/c of the newer software alternatives that have and are still coming:-).

Can you send us an example of such a post as you are talking about? B/c I am not seeing it. (Edit: oops that was old and I forgot to remove this sentence - see below.)

The most recent content on lemmy.blahaj.zone that I see from sh.just.works is from 2 hours ago: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1688895/11494679, so those two definitely are federated (I checked and don’t see either one in the others’ instance blocked list). However, as expected the user https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/[email protected] has no content more recent than 7 months ago. They both say that they are running the same Lemmy version - 0.19.5.

Searching… seems not to work for these style of posts, b/c while the searches pull up zero results for common things like a single space, a colon (inside a URL?), the single letter “a”, etc., there actually are such posts, e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/27811262.

Also, [email protected] only has 10 posts total, but none are from cdrmittens.

So yeah I think you are correct - the old content that was already there in Blåhaj Lemmy’s database remains, for their content posted to [email protected], but after the ban anything that the Blåhaj Lemmy tries to pull in for that user just gets discarded, and not added to the database. i.e. it has the old but not the new content, for that user. Most likely votes as well as posts or comments (b/c why would that be different?). Though since [email protected] has nothing to do with lemmy.blahaj.zone, they can continue to post on their own home instance - it is only Blåhaj Lemmy that will not see those posts, by design, b/c of the ban.

I hope that makes sense!:-)

I don’t know all the answers - nor have any of my own alts ever been banned so I did not have an occasion to look until now, but I see where the account is not removed, and in fact can be un-banned later. Here’s an irl example: https://lemmy.ml/u/sagxd (which we can see ourselves without an account on that instance - plus it is also visible from elsewhere e.g. https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]). You can read the story behind that incident in https://lemm.ee/post/45204357.

Most of the time how it seems to show up in the modlog, at least whenever it happens from lemmy.ml, is a slew of being banned from every community on the entire instance. Although there does seem to be a modlog entry to do differently (note the presence in the pull-down menu of “banning from site”), which despite not seeming to be (commonly? ever?) used from lemmy.ml, is indicated as often being used from other instances.

In particular I don’t know if a banned account can give or receive voting - I think I’ve heard people say both ways. I’ve saved your post and I’ll check back in later to see if someone can say with some actual knowledge what is going on!?:-)

It seems that they are, if he can manage to sell them as people to the advertising firms.

Fuck spez.

Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)

Indeed it is good to think ahead, rather than make rash decisions:-).

I mentioned elsewhere, to the developers of PieFed that I will switch to, that Dessalines is still an ally in the flight against for-profit corporate control over everything, e.g. Reddit, Facebook, Threads, X, etc. But while I have ENORMOUS respect for having offered the Lemmy codebase, the way he runs his personal instance… it’s not all good, nor all bad, but definitely does have more worrisome elements than most Lemmy or Mastodon instances.

The lack of transparency in governance in particular, as well as how heavy-handed it is, and again the fact that the unwritten rules are so hard to guess at, and could change at any time. It leaves people feeling insecure in the situation, which seems to make it unreliable, unless you constantly dance to his tune, which he never states quite what that is. And even if you never so much as mention e.g. Ukraine or Uyghurs or Gaza, the fact that someone else in your community could, and therefore mandatorily become booted from the community (along with the entire instance), is not ideal. The rules merely state that Lemmy.ml is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but there’s far more (politics) going on besides that.

At least Reddit was more honest about Huffman’s opinion - “you are landed gentry and I will harvest your data and no longer allow third-party apps unless they pay my exorbitant fee”. Okay… good to know I guess.

Anyway, if I helped any then I am glad ☺️.

Yeah that’s what I am starting to realize over the last couple of days - that while Reddit was bad, in some ways at least, they were less bad than Lemmy, or as you say at least lemmy.ml.

The key ingredient there is the transparency: Huffman may be a dick, but at least he is upfront about things: “you are landed gentry, under MY dominion, mu-wha-ha-ha now all will bow before me” indeed, but contrast that to claiming that lemmy.ml is for “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but did you get banned for spouting paid software? Or for violating privacy? No, or at least doubtful (I didn’t look:-). Look at the four rules - which ones did you break, that would warrant a site-wide ban? Some people get banned for none, e.g. for claiming that they have Uyghur family members staying with them who have experienced discrimination and potential genocide and… BAM, ban hammer. Bc neither Russia nor China can ever do any wrong - it is the USA that is “evil”, that is “capitalist”, and “democratic”, and “doing genocide”, but again, not precious Russia or China that does so.

I am looking heavily into alternatives that will allow banning lemmy.ml users across the Fediverse. One is lemmy.cafe, another is the Tesseract UI as implemented e.g. on dubvee.org, and another is Mbin (maybe, unless a bug no longer allows that? I saw one report of such anyway, but don’t have an account so cannot confirm), and I am leaning heavily towards joining PieFed, bc it’s so exciting what it is positioning itself to become in the future. Sublinks too but it never seems to be updating anymore, so I guess it’s stalled somehow.

Dessalines can do as he pleases. If we don’t like it, we can leave Lemmy. Those are our options.

The virus will affect us all… whether directly or indirect.

Fortunately, Boeing is a responsible entity and will plan on cleaning it up… right?

It tends to come from… ah… certain sources though.

Yeesh. Things are not perfect in the USA but it does sound a bit better than that - until/unless Trump wins and then the gap will close a bit:-(.

I wonder where I will end up myself! I even wonder if I should take a break from social media altogether over the next couple of months, but that seems doubtful (if only bc it would take quite some effort to replicate the various functions, e.g. research a good RSS reader). Lemmy - like everywhere else - seems likely to become a shitstorm until the election is over.:-(

Though dropping lemmy.ml and hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml should help a ton.

Yeah it seems like there’s barely anything here for Mexico, which I guess uses just the standard sources. There is [email protected], but… you see how empty that is. There is https://lemmygrad.ml/c/latinamerica but… fuck no, not on on that instance!:-P

Yeah I see [email protected] at lemmy.cafe, though I don’t see [email protected] so perhaps nobody there has subscribed to it yet, anyway ymmv. And I see [email protected], but you may want to check your specific communities.

Damn, lemmy.cafe is somehow even running 0.19.6-beta.9. Is this too good to be true - is this a trap?:-) Or is the instance admin that much on the ball?

Click “Blocked” at https://lemmy.cafe/instances - they barely block anything except those big 3. Unless they do it without it appearing there, which is possible, but highly doubtful. In any case it looks awesome from that perspective.

Also the welcoming messages at the top of the server are amazing - “Have you installed ublock origin?”, “check out [email protected]”, etc.

Mbin I think doesn’t “block” even places such as Chapotraphouse - or at least Kbin did not - but it uses an entirely alternative voting scheme with “favorites” rather than upvotes and “reduces” rather than downvotes. That means that the popularity of something is only determined by the people on other Mbin/Kbin servers, with the upvote information still visible but not used by the sorting schemes. Also, the identity of people who use “reduces” against you are visible, so you can block them rather than have to suffer in silence, if they are super annoying about it e.g. reducing everything you’ve done without regards to its content. But yeah, I don’t know about actually hiding messages from people from particular instances - that’s what we are wanting here, and I imagine that if it is not doable now then it hopefully would be in the works?

I also don’t think I want Mastodon… or maybe I do? But anyway I don’t think we need it from the same account. Lemmy is topic-based rather than person-centered and that seems to make the most sense to me. Likewise Discord and Slack, but those are more unwieldy e.g. not indexed by search engines (such as DuckDuckGo, what else would I mean by that?:-P).

PieFed sounds the best in theory due to high integration with all those other services. Unless I end up not using or wanting those other services? I haven’t so far… then again they’re all so brand-new.

Sublinks sounds really exciting - you can even view a working demo - as it has been for the last half year with no updates that I’ve seen. Perhaps any day now… maybe…

And until my instance upgraded from 0.19.3 to 0.19.5 I enjoyed the Lemmy web UI. Now I dislike it - for a long reply (as I am wont to make myself:-D) up and downvote counts can be multiple (and variable!) screen rolls / pages away from the buttons on the bottom, and sometimes are on the right of the screen while other times on the left, having been wrapped around by a long name - go home UI, u r drunk! 😜

dubvee.org has iirc a single owner, which is usually not a sign of stability - but damn it is impressive! https://dubvee.org/about he did it all, then doesn’t even accept donations for it and guides people to give to other projects instead - that’s the opposite of capitalism, not just making fun of capitalism as people do on lemmy.ml constantly but rather living one’s literal and actual life according to one’s principles. Also I think he’s stated somewhere that he’ll switch to Sublinks rather than Lemmy as the backend when it’s ready. So… it’s a strong option as well, if a bit outside of the Lemmy ecosphere, and yet fully within the Fediverse and fully compatible with Lemmy, plus like PieFed additional multimedia enhancements of its own.

Sigh… yup. Much of that has been traced back and shown to not have originated from inside the USA, but it does not matter how it started bc it’s endemic now. And regardless of the rhetoric the news itself is pretty violent, with all the reporting of mass shootings - you know, bc they actually happened, except most of the time the for-profit news media doesn’t bother anymore, and instead prefers to sell something sexier than all the needless deaths of children.

But you can’t wake someone up if they refuse to come into the door in the first place - that is what I meant about labeling content to make it more acceptable to a mainstream audience, so as to boost subscriber counts and thereby increase the overall health of the Fediverse. Being okay with stagnation seems unwise to me, bc it predicates a fall.

Well said.:-)

One of my sentences there was a hypothetical written as if that were the case yes, but I did note that you were not from there, and the rest pertains to people trying to communicate with communities on that instance. Anyway, do whatever you want - I tried to offer an interesting counterexample but I’m not going to try to brow-beat you with anything. This isn’t Reddit - we can leave those modes behind us, if we want.

I thought I was left-wing myself, then realized that I may as well be a right-wing nut compared to global standards!:-D

But it takes time for people to learn and change. Mainstream people in the USA may still have valuable contributions to make here, like funny cartoons for us all to laugh at, and thus I decry how they are pushed away due to the extremist content on the Fediverse.

After watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook, I just cannot listen to hexbears anymore. Those attempts to bully people in just about every conversation with “tactics” other than relying on the logical truths of the issues themselves just really turns me away.

Be careful - your circumstances surely differ from mine, with like your family and job and such - but I note that they are far more likely to change you than the reverse. It’s just how that works.

[email protected]! I wish a lot more posts would go there, but sadly it is still the most recent one after all this time.