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!?:-)

Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof:-)

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.

I am glad to have maybe helped, even if only in some small way.:-)

Oh that’s so awesome! Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and even if Tesseract is currently running Lemmy (though I thought you mentioned wanting to switch it to Sublinks or something when that gets ready), it too helps mitigate some of the known issues. I do have enormous respect for the hard work and effort put into the Lemmy codebase… but I am even more excited to think about the possibilities of growth that lie ahead!:-)

There is only a singular instance in the entire Fediverse that blocks all of the big 3 including lemmy.ml, from what I can see: lemmy.cafe. And roughly a month ago it was still federated with hexbear.net - though that was due to a bug/oversight and when it was pointed out to the admin was immediately corrected. It is a tiny instance, with only 18 users per day or 44 per month, which leaves me wondering how “robust” it is - how long has it been in operation? How long would it expect to remain? (I recall instances such as dmv.social dying off with little to no notice, though that was due to the CSAM attacks that have since been mitigated by software).

I may switch to them regardless - they have some nice features (including a link for new users to check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca - so friendly and welcoming!!:-), though was waiting for the likes of Sublinks, Piefed, and Mbin to catch up a bit in case they would be better than any implementation of Lemmy. Anyway I’ve been busy irl lately and not wanting to spend time thinking about this.

I say all this in case my personal example could help illustrate: there are barriers to switching.:-) Though I don’t know if everyone suddenly jumping onto that same instance would count as much of a “vote”, and especially people not doing such shouldn’t count as a vote in the opposite direction, either? Though I do take your point, ultimately we cannot control others, only ourselves, so it is our “fault” for accepting the way that things are now, rather than seeking to change them.

Also if it helps to add: many people feel that communities such as firefox@lemmy.ml that have ~2/3rds of all monthly active users for a firefox-specific community essentially hold hostage the content that they want to see, without an account that can interact with it. Ideally the politics would be separated from the non-political content - much like the NSFW tag + especially the settings button to filter out such if desired - allows us all to exist in the same space free of any conflict (barring the occasional outlier, which I’ve seen only like once or twice in the entirety of last year), however, people (such as users of those big 3 instances) refuse to label their politically extremist content, and do other things not in good faith like brigade even instance-specific communities (I can find an example if you like, also relevant is that the option to set them to “private” does not exist until… is it 0.19.6 iirc?).

So for some people, it is not enough to simply leave, they want to help migrate everyone out. By increasing awareness of the situation.

YSK that it is not length, but whether what you tried to say is agreed to by the admin of the instance or not. That is the crux of the dilemma here: that goes against the philosophies of the Western world about non-authoritarian control, which ostensibly so too does true communism, yet here we are: the USA is “doing genocide” and “is capitalist”, yet neither Russia nor China are any of those things (in their minds). This makes them a “leftist” instance in the same manner that Trump supporters are “conservative” - which is to say, not.

In short, we are trying to turn Lemmy into a Reddit clone, when it is a different toolbox with a different purpose.

Personally I think that people were just so burned out from leaving Reddit, that they just accepted whatever else they could find. Many did not even do that much - I have no idea where a great many of the content creators went, some seemingly went back to X, others from there onto Bluesky, but notably many seemed to have simply left social media altogether. And until this next USA election is over, that’s probably for the best…

Anyway, I am saying that people no longer feel the desire to put in the hard work that it takes to moderate a community. Some very few seem to shoulder the vast majority of the work, but it is not spread out. And ironically, this wraps back around to the OP issue, b/c the presence of such toxicity is precisely the reason why (okay well tbf among the top 3 lets say) I, who was a mod of two gaming subs on Reddit, did not want to volunteer my time here. 99% of the effort ends up going to deal with 1% of the people, I am talking about the people for whom “no means yes”, i.e. those who e.g. create alt accounts to get around bans and just keep going.

Also, the tools and infrastructure just aren’t really here yet. e.g., what concept could be more foundational than “helping guide new users to how Lemmy works?” Do a little digging and you will be fantastically depressed to learn the state of affairs there. e.g. Lemmy.ml’s sidebar features a post titled “What is Lemmy.ml”, except that is a broken link to a post that must have been removed at some point. And that is the chief instance of Lemmy!? Lemmy.world’s status is not much better, pointing to a neat Quick start guide, but so very many features (e.g. cross-posting, and in fact I only count a singular occurrence of the word “instance” in the entire thing). Notably, there is an entirely community to help people get acclimated to Lemmy, called !newtolemmy!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca (yes, that link is messed up, but I left it that way b/c this is how the webUI chose to expand it out - Lemmy is not polished, and is in fact broken in so many ways!), but have you ever heard of that community prior to my mentioning it here? Also nobody has posted to it in the last ten months except 3 posts from Blaze and I. We’ve asked instance admins to add this community - or some other one like it - to the sidebar of their instances but… crickets. (edit: though lemmy.cafe has it in their top banner, yay - that instance looks so damn welcoming and friendly!!:-)

Sadly, what I conclude from this is that this is still an alpha-level “experiment” in social media. I thought that we were at least in beta but… if so, it is quite low-level. We seem stuck in this downwards spiral where the people aren’t willing to put forth effort b/c the infrastructure isn’t quite fully here yet. Perhaps Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks will offer greater hope?

Genuine question: HOW though?!? I’ve user-blocked the entire instance, yet I see those comments basically everywhere I go, plus they used to not be able to reply to me and have a notification sent to me, but now on 0.19.5 that seems to have been un-done. In no way is a user-block like a personal defederation.

Also, fully 100% (not making this up) of everyone that I have told Lemmy about irl has said that this issue is why they refused to join the Fediverse. As the number of alt accounts goes up (some of them mine) yet the total number remains mostly constant, that spells doom for us eventually.

And it is not fair to the users of lemmy.ml either, for the rest of us to see the instance they come from and immediately brace ourselves for an onslaught - thereby potentially misinterpreting what they say, just b/c their fellows are so arrogant and insensitive and we have come to expect that from them.

The whole “just ignore the cancer and it will go away” approach leaves much to be desired, imho. Feel free to do as you please, but that’s not what I am talking about: you asked, and as a result now you know some (certainly not all) of the reasons why others may not wish to do the same.

First, the entire text is cross-posted from https://feddit.nl/post/16246531 - OP had nothing to add on their own, apparently. The OOP was likewise on feddit.nl. The community happens to be on Lemmy.world.

You also brought up your own personal experiences to add to the situation, so I pointed out that you, being on lemmy.world, would have different experiences than e.g. someone on feddit.nl. I note that that instance has not defederated from either lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net. If you don’t know what they are about, I’m saying that yes lemmy.ml are still “tankies”, but like 1% of the problems of toxicity compared to those other two instances, so much so that while lemmy.world remains federated with lemmy.ml, it has chosen to defederate from both of those other two.

Also, don’t miss the main reason for the drama in the first place: the images show the OOP being banned. i.e. what you do not see is the point here, bc of the heavy handed banning. So you wouldn’t “see” it then, as you say just looking at the popular posts, unless you happened to have been viewing the mod log on your own initiative. The fact that any divergence of opinion is being suppressed is very much the point here. It leads to the creation of an echo chamber, which allows solely the opinions of the admins to be allowed to be spoken of.

But you need not simply believe me: check it out for yourself. e.g. go to lemmygrad.ml and see what is there - it took me (not joking) like two seconds to find this comment: “Shoot him in the head” at https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6010525, all the while making fun of Americans for being violent etc. (though when it happens on lemmy.ml - example, this one admittedly took a lot longer to find, maybe 30 seconds, though it was still on the front page - it tends to be far more tame) Note I am not complaining about the violent rhetoric here, but the total lack of self-awareness. USA=bad bc of genocide, while Russia and China are “not” doing genocide. It’s a special brand of “my side good, their side bad”, that I for one do not find very intellectually engaging. Therefore I do not choose to engage with Truth Social, or the equivalent Lemmy instances.

Blaze for example blocks all the political communities. That’s… … … not entirely a normal thing that people are most likely to do and moreover to never not do that.

Btw, lemmy.cafe is literally the only instance I’ve ever even so much as heard of that blocks all of the big 3, including lemmy.ml.

Yeesh, I am so sorry that happened to you - tankies are just the worst, aren’t they? You could literally put a URL to those exact conversations and they would still come back with “well no, see, we aren’t that way at all bc… shut up!” They enjoy all the drama that they stir up - it’s the point (go read the actual sidebar text of Chapotraphouse and the_dunk_tank and their posts e.g. talking about defederating with the rest of Lemmy, except no they actually don’t want to do that for the simple reason that it provides moar people “to dunk on” - let me know if you want the receipt for that statement and I’ll dig it up).

It is somehow worse than talking to Trump supporters, bc at least those believe in something, as opposed to existing solely for the purpose of “the dunk”.

And then it’s so sad that the rest of Lemmy tolerates it. Not the communism mind you, I’m talking about the dunking and other harassment.

Well, we learn at least, not to mention Lemmy to people irl. It’s so sad that it must be that way… it severely limits our growth, but it is what it is.:-(

Never underestimate the utility of a useful idiot, who will do it for free ™.

Though I will add that the West also does a fantastic job, at making itself look bad:-). In large part by actually being thus:-).

Though also the West tends to be fairly open about that - e.g. here’s a segment from the Wikipedia page for Christopher Columbus:

Some historians have criticized Columbus for initiating the widespread colonization of the Americas and for abusing its native population.[300][114][301][302] On St. Croix, Columbus’s friend Michele da Cuneo—according to his own account—kept an indigenous woman he captured, whom Columbus “gave to [him]”, then brutally raped her.[303][r][s]

According to some historians, the punishment for an indigenous person, aged 14 and older, failing to pay a hawk’s bell, or cascabela,[306] worth of gold dust every six months (based on Bartolomé de las Casas’s account) was cutting off the hands of those without tokens, often leaving them to bleed to death.[296][114][307]

So our sins tend to be on full public view - Donald Trump’s suing anyone who criticizes him in order to shut them up notwithstanding - while in contrast, try saying something like “the Tiananmen Square massacre happened”, and see how fast you get banned from Lemmy.ml. They are not the same! (the badness of The West that acknowledges errors yet does nothing whatsoever to counteract them, vs. tankies who don’t even seem to be aware of the simplest of basic facts!)

Anyway, be advised that we must stop this conversation here - the last time I even so much as questioned whether Dessalines was receiving money from the Chinese government (as someone said, which I included an exact URL to iirc) or the Russian one, to develop the Lemmy codebase (nothing necessarily nefarious there by itself - grants should be sought out, no?), my comments were removed. In fact, I only have 3 comments removed across the entire Fediverse for the past 10 months that I’ve had this account, and all 3 were removed for talking negatively about Lemmy.ml. i.e. this conversation is not on lemm.ee that welcomes a diversity of ideas - we are at risk right now of being removed just for what we’ve said so far. So, I guess, if you want to criticize them further, don’t spend too much time typing it all out I suppose:-).

Generating turmoil just prior to the USA election maybe?