Yeah I can’t fully explain the total fascination with apps either, but I do see some definite advantages including the ability to separate viewing other web pages separately from the app, like in fast switching or even side by side in like a split screen context when that is possible. And Firefox is horrible at memory management, even on Android - it legit runs down my battery even when minimized unless I force-kill it.

According to the comment at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28484007, 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? So different devs seem to have different opinions on the subject.

Yes agreed about Voyager although tbf the vast majority of apps lack the cross-post comment merge feature in particular - according to https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app only Interstellar has it now (which has an odd UI that is geared more towards Mbin’s microblogging style than Threadiverse forum-style content)

someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.

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.

There’s always so much more to learn about the Threadiverse - I do find it fascinating:-). Though I also can see why others react as they do whenever it gets mentioned outside of here (Reddit, Bluesky, X, etc.).

I think 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 - or perhaps asking via the sign-up wizard, like “Do you want to see extremist content, including calls for murder?” Hey, some people do - sometimes me even for research purposes, and we can all appreciate having the option when that is desired, right? Nobody is wanting to be a “Karen” here and tell others what to do, only offer true choices to people who won’t yet be knowledgeable enough to be able to implement an instance block on their own yet - and again particularly to even become aware that they want one, in order to achieve their goal of avoiding both extremist and also trolling content in one fell swoop.

If you feel like it, you could petition to add such a block, although I’ve actually tried already in the past for a different instance, and there is such enormous resistance to doing so for Lemmy.ml that I doubt it would happen. Somehow even Rimu who has such a contentious relationship with the tankies doesn’t even do that? I do find it so odd that this is one of the most common refrains that I’ve ever heard across the Threadiverse - to be able to help newcomers block the entire tankie triad - yet not one single major instance seems willing to actually do it. We’ve made our choice, collectively: this is a tankie / troll bar. Regardless of the existence of an echo chamber inside of Lemmy.ml, outside of it we are 4chan when it comes to refusing to block the content coming in from it.

Which obviously mainstream non-technical normies nope right out, blocking that content the only way that they know how: by leaving the Threadiverse altogether (which already has exceedingly little OC to begin with, making the cost to benefit ratio simply too high).

I have no idea what you are talking about it, but I am loving it regardless, box of feet! :-P

… where’s the box?

do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?

Some people for some reason - particularly younger ones - seem to demand usage of a 3rd-party app. So my guess is that they may have meant things like user and post flairs, polls, emoji reactions, categories of communities (multi-reddits), etc., which PieFed technically offers but most 3rd-party apps have yet to catch up to utilize those capabilities. For example Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.

And 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, so at the moment they are still fairly similar.

Do you know if this is still the default?

Yes, unfortunately. I was trying out several 3rd-party apps like Summit and Voyager to see what all the fuss is about, and unfortunately some of those aspects that I would consider crucial to my own usability - like that one - are buried somewhere in the settings, disabled by default. I can’t tell you how many times I began to craft a response to someone, only to notice that they are on Lemmy.ml at which point I abandoned my endeavor as it seemed futile given that additional information. Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.

I also thought about making such a post, but 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. For one thing it doesn’t always work, especially in replies deeper into a chain, and especially dependent upon the length of the actual username itself. And for another, does it really matter? For someone who knows the culture here it can greatly aid, and arguably it helps someone learn about the culture here, but the largest majority of the time the only thing that matters is “belongs to tankie triad” vs. not, after which distinctions such as “is on lemmy.world” vs. let’s say sh.itjust.works are much finer-grained nuances that rarely rise to being necessary. In other words, if there was some major instance (like PieFed.zip) that would place a user-level block onto Lemmy.ml just like it does to hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, then display of instance names following the username is no longer necessary, for new joiners to the Threadiverse. Hence, from their perspective, I could see a resistance to that solution being used to deal with the underlying problem imperfectly.

About instance blocking, I recently 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/, although I note that while it includes explicitly “political” ones, it misses ones that end up having a huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like !memes@lemmy.ml - which can be quite a turn-off to people, especially those in the Western World, and those undecided whether to join or not, when such content appears and they don’t know yet how to distinguish it from e.g. identically-named communities on different instances (which are also extremely heavily political in those other locations as well, though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).

Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist.

Agreed - solutions need not be perfect to have at least some effect, I guess I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation, as in someone who receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes.

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.

Oh wow, that’s extremely interesting. Though all smaller numbers of course. As the technology continues to improve, the overall experience can get better, it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have where they would come to the Threadiverse using Kbin but not Lemmy, and now it seems like for the most part they simply will not come period. So it’s interesting to see that even countering with only a trickle, that is not universally true:-).

And I can’t decide if Mac OSX is flip-flops or crocs… (I mean, it is fully POSIX compliant, or at least was in the past…)

Mint users just be wearing… regular socks?

I used to think so, every time I have seen this comic make the rounds previously.

But this time I think: “source of irritation removed!”

Thank you for your detailed response.

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?

That is very good to hear:-).

Here is an example discussion of a community asking its members if it wants to migrate to Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. A few examples that seem representative to me:

I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic

There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier

Here’s another example from one month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/MorpheApp/comments/1wdbscs/we_should_switch_to_something_else/

Almost nobody uses other forum apps like Lemmy. We don’t want to run two forums and scatter discussion across two places. Collectively the mods here already spend about 2 hours every day helping users on this subreddit and we don’t want more.

Or here’s a third example, from 2 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/oldreddit/comments/1vvylak/thoughts_on_lemmy/

Opinions there run the gamut from useless due to no content to tribal politicking scaring them away from the entire federated model, though some people like it, yet don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit (with UBlock Origin tweaks to keeps some of its more insane issues in check).

We here, who have the early adopter mindset, are willing to put in the time and effort to learn how and what to block. But e.g. the most popular 3rd-party app Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account, so a new joiner won’t be able to easily distinguish when e.g. someone from the tankie triad is trolling them vs. someone attempting to converse in good conscience. Wish and hope as we might - without putting in any actual efforts to change anything mind you - we simply cannot get away from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance principle.

We are a tankie / troll bar, and the vast majority of mainstream non-technical normal folks tell other people that they very much do not enjoy visiting here as a result. Admiral Patrick very much had a bad implementation to a somewhat good idea: being forced to view toxic content should be an option that users have some control over, somehow, even if that choice is disabled by default. e.g., 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 - but sadly, literally none of them do. Of course, they would simply use their alts to get around any such block, but otherwise we are back to the Paradox of Intolerance again: with next to zero distinction made between trolls vs. non-trolls, why would most people want to come here to discuss things with us in our troll bar?

So wonderful to see so many improvements!

Oof the stats shown in your last post there make the Threadiverse look very unhealthy.

For one, the total Lemmy MAUs falling down to the <30k range (at the high mark during Rexodus it hit ~65K, and we held steady at ~40-45K for a long time it seemed, iirc).

And for another, if I am interpreting the HYAU correctly then literally thousands of people who had accounts here are simply walking away and never coming back (then hundreds for PieFed too, though still net negative). This is crucial bc these are not people who were too daunted by the complexity of learning about the Threadiverse, picking an instance, making an account on it, and joining communities - they were already here, and now they are not here anymore.

Perhaps they are avoiding coming here (even once) during the upcoming season of Western elections, with all the contentious content that is already flooding this place leading up those, but then they might come back later? Given past trends, I doubt it, though anything is possible.

The Threadiverse looks to be slowly shrinking. Perhaps the existing people on it post more often, but with an ever-diminishing pool of recipients for that content. This will lead to a feed-forward cycle where even fewer will want to join.

And to be clear I don’t blame those people who left in the slightest - I find myself visiting here far less often than I used to as well. There’s only so much politics that I want to argue about before I find myself missing the ability to discourse on some other, any other, topic.

In fairness, in the USA it was the democratically elected people’s Congress that broke long before people started turning towards wanting more authoritarian control.

We can’t have nice things if we don’t keep them up, maintaining them properly.

Even in ye olden days there was never a time (before recently) when people truly expected to receive something in exchange for nothing - i.e. in return for zero efforts invested.

So what is happening now is a direct consequence of the naïveté that brought us to this point. What I mean is that there is no use wanting to go back to where we were before - even if we could, it would only happen again, directly and inevitably. It’s like wanting to go back to being able to smoke again, after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. Sure things seemed nice, on the surface, but the seeds were being continually sown for our ultimate destruction, on a daily basis as we continued our risky behaviors, either oblivious to or in outright defiance of the knowledge of what lay ahead of us.

Until we learn from our mistakes that is, as simply repeating the same behaviors would not yield a different outcome.

But yes, we may well and properly mourn our loss of innocence - that’s a good thing.

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

They were widely considered to be neat thoughts, you know, once upon a time.

Then we must edumacate them!

PieFed provided the ability to migrate from Lemmy to PieFed, so if the Lemmy devs want to provide for the ability to migrate from PieFed to Lemmy then that is up to them to make that happen. Ofc anyone could contribute the code and submit a PR offering it.

Sublinks was going to do similarly, but the project got massively postponed when the primary dev had a baby.

Smart is knowing that there are 3 r’s in the word srtrrarwrrbrerrryr.

I have no idea - you could ask for its status in the PieFed Meta community.

Wow, that’s just… Super. 🧠🤯

Voyager offers only beta, rudimentary support for instances running PieFed, and therefore PyLova as well. In general, third-party app support for PieFed is rather poor imho - see https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.

PieFed offers a migration ability - @rimu@piefed.social would you like to explain more, particularly how it would work for an instance admin?

In practice, software is simply software, and it matters far more who your instance admins are than which software platform you use. All the more so if you use something like Voyager that replaces the front-end UI component.

And I didn’t get into it above, but Lemmy is quite opinionated as well. For instance, when you choose the option to so-called “block” an instance, what that does for you is:

1. hide post content offered to communities located on that instance

However what that so-called “block” does not do for you includes:

1. hide post content offered by users of that instance to communities on other instances
2. hide comments from those users in other communities
3. prevent such “blocked” users from sending you DMs
4. which are even allowed to trigger notifications

Thus this so-called “block” of an instance is nothing at all like a block, and acts more as a community muting.

Also, when a mod removes content it makes it disappear as if the page never existed, giving a 404 not found error afterwards (Reddit leaves the page active to anyone with the URL, even allowing conversations that were already started to continue).

Users are never notified of the event - leaving people to find out literally years later that they were banned from something, or that their content was removed, when in all that time they were not aware (Reddit sends notifications).

There is no modmail for users to contact the mods to ask for clarification - instead, Lemmy forces people to individually ask each of the mods why, e.g. via DM (Reddit has a modmail).

Even when someone goes looking in the modlog to find out why their content was removed, it often says that it was done simply by a “mod”.

Instance admins have supreme rights, community mods have a bit less so, but end-users have next to none at all. Even Reddit offers more rights to end-users than Lemmy does!!! Authoritarian practices are baked right into the Lemmy codebase.