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/CDRMITTENS@sh.itjust.works 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, !noncredibledefense@lemmy.blahaj.zone 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 !noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works, 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 !NonCredibleDefense@sh.just.works 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/sagxd@lemmy.ml). 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!?:-)

Uh oh, but you said that you would never say the words “not good”… /s :-P

But yeah, the wisdom of the ages seems to tell us that “what goes around comes around” and “whatever system you choose to use to measure others with, you will end up using the very same system of measurement against your very own self” - i.e. if you don’t want others to be a certain way, like hypocritical, then don’t be that way yourself. It probably has to do with formation of the superego portion of our personalities, but however it is implemented, it seems to be an accurate description of human psychology.

So if we say that others are “stupid”… then isn’t that surely what we think that we do ourselves, at least sometimes? In contrast, if we allow ourselves to realize that others may not be “stupid” but merely “misled” or “mistaken in this particular area” or “in possession of incorrect facts with which to base conclusions upon” - all of these being very distinct from such thoughts as “they are most definitely dumb as a post” - then we see others more clearly, and also thereby are more accepting of our own very selves.

Which in turn allows us to see still other things (in the world, including both them and us) more clearly as well - i.e. instead of muddying the waters, we aim to see whatever is truly there. So it’s not even something that we need to do for the sake of “kindness” (to either them or ourselves), so much as it is necessary for deeper logical introspection as well.

Anyway, to me these words seem to conjure a thought like “don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”. Or the political variation “surely the leopards who eat everyone’s faces off would never eat my face off in particular!” The converse of either of these points to a weaker, lesser, lower, unclear form of thinking… that will ultimately wrap back around to hurt our very selves, despite how at first glance someone could think that they only intended to be negative against other people. But there is a better way, and that is to realize the truth of this principle: “what goes around comes around”. So simple… yet missed by what seems like everyone that I’ve ever met (including, you guessed it, myself! 🤣).

Sometimes a critique can be most helpful, especially if delivered with kind intentions.

Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

All the rest: yup.

Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. https://piefed.social/ (3 horizontal bars -> Topics).

For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See !fedigrow@lemm.ee.

On PieFed, although I’m not sure what I think about it, posts with more than one user-defined threshold will get auto-collapsed, and then a second such threshold allows it to be hidden entirely.

So two people with opposing preferences could browse the same community but see it differently. The one wanting to see everything being allowed to do so - rather than that being the arbitrary decision of a mod (team), and the content hidden away in a mod log somewhere else, mostly inaccessible. Whereas the one who didn’t want to “waste” their time, and rather trusting the feedback of the community, could have those collapsed or hidden if they so choose.

This allows democratization of the modding process: every voter is equally a mod as the next. Or maybe some trusted members more so than others? (But if so, it can’t be TOO much higher than the others, or it could become overwhelming)

The major pitfall I see is if votes are allowed outside of the community, then it’s vulnerable to being brigaded easily by a larger outside force.

Still, it’s fascinating to see these experiments actually happen in that software that is available right now! e.g. on PieFed.social.

Genuinely… why though? Why not post once a week rather than per day? Or per month? Who is counting? If people want to join then they will, if not then they won’t, but either way will one post per day for the last six months make any difference to their decision vs. one post per week?

I am no good at what I do. I try to enjoy it anyway.:-) Do with that what you will.

It is a niche topic, here, where we all use Linux btw (or at least we keep our mouths shut if we don’t, for fear of being mobbed:-D).

We talk about what we want to talk about here. Linux, memes, TV, uh… Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, beans, jeans, not pooping - and I think that’s pretty much it, except for politics, am I missing anything? 😁

I see this, and am upvoting:-).

Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556

It might be information overload but like… it seems hard to imagine people finding out that their wells were bad to drink from, and then simply deciding not to care. Though, that’s probably naive and it’s likely always been this way.

Oh wow, gross, but therefore thanks for sharing!:-)

Man, even if you boil the water… that sounds no bueno… People act like humans live “better” lives than those from 100 years ago, as if well water wasn’t fresher and cleaner than what crap we get out of our tap. Tbf, vaccines exist now and that’s HUGE (well… for those that choose to take them), but in other ways we’ve gone backwards or at least sidewise rather than forward.

Oh, thanks for the correction!:-)