Just saw this on AskLemmy at .ml, thought this and chuckled, and now here we are.
Will take the opportunity to thank our admins for what they do, and all you humans for being here and generally being cool.
I got here as a kbin.social refugee and I can’t say I have any complaints.
what happened with kbin?
Its creator and only maintainer started having health problems and that was it.
All this instance flexing has me feeling like a friend trying to get his other friends to like each other. Can’t we all get along? I mean, at least the ones that don’t promote hate and fascism?
Tbf, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and Lemmy.ml all promote hate via being tankies. And the latter two tangentially support fascism because they support Russia in the current war, because 'Murikkka bad and therefore anyone that hates them must then be good
I mean this is the ideal. Most of the time I’m right there with ya. I’m just really attached to this instance - doesn’t mean that others are bad for not being on this (upon review, actually somewhat problematic) list.
Why heckbear 2 times? I am confuzzled
They’re just that good at posting lol
All I see is sjw being #2.
im still relatively new to lemmy and am crossposting or whatever the term is , from lemmy.world but its mind boggling that the tankie sect is as big as it is on here.
They really aren’t, 4k monthly active users out of 43k
4k too many
Your instance defederates from hexbear and grad already. You can choose to block ml in your account settings
But then what would they complain about?
This is upsetting as fuck. This one picture just made me realize that Lemmy is likely never going to get much bigger. The top is just an exact clone of Reddit, meaning there’s no reason to use it over Reddit, and the next three are active propaganda mills filled with fascists and tankies. After that you get normal servers. That’s a terrible look. That guarantees anyone new joining will likely join one of those 4 and will either think “what’s the point, this is just Reddit with a percent of the users” or “JFC these people are all Nazis” or worst of all which seems to already be the case “finally, somewhere I can speak freely about those dirty Ukrainians/Palestinians/Americans/Women/LGBTQ/OtherMinorities!”
It is far worse than that imho, sadly.
For one, we are most definitely actively getting smaller, both since the Rexodus and also since just earlier this year. I think people are returning to Reddit but wherever they are going it is not here. We lack sufficient content for them, despite having the good apps that Reddit used to. This is software built by tankies, and has authoritarian purposes baked into the core.
And for another, a Google search for “Lemmy”, after the singer, pulls up as the top instance lemmy.ml, which notably uses a Local rather than All feed by default. So it’s just absolutely full of posts hating on the USA, UK, Germany, and anyone else who opposes the interests of Russia and China and North Korea. THIS is what “Lemmy” is, to people who don’t use DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine.
It may already be too late to reverse this trend: we lost the momentum of the Rexodus, and we won’t even be honest about who and what we are now, which would be a prerequisite for change - we are a Nazi bar.
An example of our authoritarianism is the modding tools here. The fact that we have a modlog at all is awesome, but the fact that it just says “mod” rather than who removed something, while simultaneously offering no modmail to communicate with whoever did it in order to ask why, is not. Also reports don’t federate. Lemmy was built by the admins of lemmy.ml, and if we want more of a non-authoritarian experience - e.g. a modmail - it seems we would have to build such ourselves?
Also, on Reddit (at least, prior to the Rexodus, I dunno if it still does today?) when a post is removed the post link remains viable, and people can still have discussions within it. On Lemmy, a capricious mod can remove something entirely. Imagine writing our a long response (such as I’ve done here:-), only to find after all of that that the post has been removed in the meantime and I can’t even respond to the person I was talking to, even if they were not the OP. Nor can I even finish reading through the comments - they are just, poof, gone.
As authoritarian as Huffman made Reddit into, we are so very similar - not at the top, obviously, bc open source makes all the difference, but when it comes down to the actual user experience, e.g. how a Redditor will look at us and judge this place to be, based on how we will treat them (and I haven’t even begun here to get into how centrists from the USA will feel in this leftist dominated environment!:-P). We have the seeds to be more, but we won’t make the computer code to make that happen.
Pretty good assessment! When I was using Reddit I used it like a lot and the way the Reddit admins treatet it made it not feel like home. I spent like so much time there so I ended up deleting my account. It wasn’t even the powermods or admin scandals although what kinda pushed me over the edge was the exclusivity contract with google. Only google was now supposed to be able to use web crawlers on Reddit. I use Qwant as my main search engine and didn’t like the way they gate kept the content made by people. Then only google is supposed to be able to train their AI with this data. They act like they own what I upload and create and I loved the idea of lemmy so I migrated to a german instance. After the big FUCK SPEZ on r/place I think a mod of r/ich_iel Hubi got like banned or something for a certain time so they decided to push for a migration to feddit.de, later feddit.org after feddit.de went down.
Reddit is already a left leaning platform in a political sense and lemmy is on another level. Even if you block out all the tankie instances. Sad to see the number of users slowly dropping bit by bit. It around the same but I’m kinda like just waiting for it to get better but it might never will. I’m a real sucker for FOSS and privacy so to think lemmy might now ever become more popular is sad to me.
If we don’t grow then we’ll shrink merely due to attrition. Or perhaps I’m overblowing things out of proportion, but I definitely am saying that we won’t simply grow as if by magic - that would take effort, and part of that is making this place welcoming enough for others besides ourselves to want to come here. Which we really struggle with, despite how great this space truly is, in part bc perhaps the people that we most want to come here - comic artists and the like - are not like us.
In particular they may not care about politics at all, or even have a different stance than most of us. I mean centrist, bc Alt-Right MAGATs can just fuck all the way off! So… do we want to remain as we are, or change to become more inclusive and invite them in? We can do whatever we want, but it takes being honest and then making it happen. And right now we are an Alt-Left Nazi bar, just as X is an Alt-Right one, leaving the biggest place in the middle as… sigh, Reddit.
I wouldn’t go as far call lemmy Alt-Left Nazi if you block these commie instances but even then I feel like I am not left enough for much of the content at parts when phrases like class traitors/warfare, violent fantasies about murdering rich people and things alike as well as celebrating murder. I support unionization and peaceful protest but when I share my views which I consider left leaning but moderate I feel like an outsider. Its always just. I guess in a way maybe you’re right. I want people to vote in their own best interest and it seems like thats an issue with democracy but I think having more variety of opinions and at parts more popular less political content would be beneficial.
Personally I would go with Monthly Active Users, e.g. since Hexbear has managed to run off a good fraction of its users over time (which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well).
This puts sh.itjust.works as #4, which it’s been for a good long while, above Lemmy.ml and Hexbear and nearly all other instances.
Link, but the URL does not preserve the options shown, so you have to resort by Monthly Active Users.
(which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well)
I’m one of them. Luigi censoring was the catalyst. I came to Lemmy to get away from corporate censorship. It also doesn’t help that it’s slow as fuck on desktop compared to the others I tried.
I’m surprised to hear about the slowness issue - I think this is the first time that I have, though I am definitely spoiled at Discuss.Online that has such a great technical admin (he also is the one who was developing Sublinks, before life and a baby intervened:-). Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?
Tbf there is legit fear in the USA that Trump will start to place bans or at least watchlists on social media outlets that Musk does not make money off of. Then again, I thought that LW wasn’t really associated with the USA in any way besides having a bunch of users from it, and anyway you have found a perfect solution to the problem - if they don’t want it, go somewhere else that does allow what you need.:-)
Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?
Yes, MUCH. Sh.itjust.works is much faster as well. I don’t know if it’s because LW is still on 0.19.3 or what, but it’s a very significant difference.
LW isn’t associated with the US except for the fact that they’re keen to kowtow to corporate censorship to avoid being sued and the like. Since they’re by far the most visible instance on Lemmy I can’t really blame them and it’s probably better that they’re more cautious to possibly take some of the heat off of everyone else. As you said, they didn’t serve my needs, so I went elsewhere - having that option is what I love about the fediverse.
If LW helped you migrate from Reddit to the Threadiverse until you knew more what you were looking for and could find a true home in lemm.ee that meets your needs better, then both of them sound awesome at their respective roles to me.:-)
dang I did not expect .ee to be on top behind .nsfw
At a guess, bc it doesn’t have that many communities on it?
Efforts are underway to change that but yeah it definitely lacks the same punch as others - like sh.itjust.works has 5 communities that are each larger, some by almost 3 times, than the absolute largest one on lemm.ee.
That instance seems not so much a “source” of content across the Fediverse as a “destination” for posts made to communities elsewhere.
Then again, very little else compares to Lemmy.World in that regard - it has another 10 communities each larger, some twice as large, as sh.itjust.works does. It would be healthier for the network effects to split that up a bit more… but fortunately their upgrade process over the next few months should help a little.
sh.itjust.works is at #4 by total posts as well, since hexbear was counted twice in the OP.
It’s both amusing and unsurprising that lemmynsfw is second though
Wouldn’t total posts bias towards older instances though, counting posts over time rather than activity today? So then good point that sh.itjust.works is so high up by both metrics:-).
While lemmy.ml continues to fall - by active users I think I recall it was #3 at some point, then #4, while now it’s #5, where based on the gap below it, it seems likely to remain since users are now more distributed than previously (which is a good thing!:-).
Oh yeah, monthly active users is definitely the better metric, I just wanted to point out that in this case, it falls in the same place either way.
I wonder what the best metric would be for measuring how distributed Lemmy is. Maybe the ratio between total active monthly users vs the top 5 or 10 instances?
People used to say how Lemmy.World had ~80% of all users on the Fediverse. I’m not sure if that was older defunct accounts or what. But it does illustrate one thing: does it even matter where user accounts are located, when the federation model means that someone can access the entire thing, minus only whatever someone’s instance has chosen to defederate from?
On Mastodon that matters greatly, due to the discoverability aspect, but here on the Threadiverse (or whatever we want to call ourselves to distinguish the forum vs. microblogging nature of our spaces, accessible via Lemmy, some app, Mbin, Friendica, PieFed, Tesseract, perhaps Sublinks one day, etc.)? On that note, my instances (Kbin.social, then StarTrek.Website, Discuss.Online, and now a mix between that and PieFed.social) have mostly been extremely tiny, but I never felt like I was excluded, being able to browse by All.
In fact quite the opposite! Having wandered into Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and thereby exposing myself to their echo chambers, right inside the very ones hosted on their own instances but due to federation, hosted likewise on my instance as well, I strongly wished that the Fediverse would have been a little less connected - or at least if it has offered me some warning! (The sidebar text is only shown on a “community” page, not an individual post when arrived at via browsing All.)
And then there’s communities to consider - so many are on Lemmy.World, but how much should that matter, vs. the users? Moderation though is primarily something related to communities. So like sh.itjust.works doesn’t have all that many, there’s e.g. !whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ca also, like there’s !pcgaming@lemmy.ca and !canada@lemmy.ca, yet these general-purpose instances have so very many users, even if the communities themselves are mostly on lemmy.world.
If lemmy.world were to go down though, we’d lose a LOT, at least in the short term. Archived copies of older posts would remain cached on remote instances, but a new community would have to be created somewhere in order to allow continued posting.
So I don’t think that the Threadiverse is all that distributed - but I also don’t think that it matters for us?
It would be nice to see a way of unifying communities on multiple instances for redundancy and improving the situation with redundant communities across instances.
I’d imagine it would probably need to be an opt-in option on a per-community basis where one community can request to unify with another one, then from the other community the moderators can accept or reject the request, then the posts, scores and comments would be mirrored and maintained simultaneously across instances. Differences in block lists between instances would probably be a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Bigger challenge might be latency problems with the mirroring and federation but there’s enough existing redundancy protocols that allow for servers with rediculous latency so that’s probably also not insurmountable
It would be nice to see a way of unifying communities on multiple instances for redundancy and improving the situation with redundant communities across instances.
It’s really on the mods to accept to consolidate in one community.
All the issues you mention in your other paragraph are why this is probably never going to happen.
I’m mostly talking out a technical solution for community redundancy, similar to setting up redundant VM hosts or more accurately like redundant network hardware, where the data and configurations all exist on both servers, and might be load balanced to some degree between both servers, but ultimately should one go down there’s no loss of uptime as the other server takes over until the time that it’s mate comes back online or a new one is setup and connected
Mods are generally not going to surrender their power, especially as differences in moderation techniques is what most often leads to new community formation in the first place:-).
Other than PieFed’s Categories of Communities, the only other ways I know of to make Topic aggregations like that is to either find and switch to using an app that provides such (I have heard of at least one, but I don’t recall which:-), or else have many Lemmy accounts and constantly switch between them - like one for News, another for Memes, etc. Or you can browse by All, and see mostly only memes and news from the USA all the time:-P.
But PieFed provides numerous methods handle this: not only Categories but also Topics to aid community discovery, and you can trigger Notifications for anything - a person, a comment, post, or even an entire community.
One day very soon I strongly believe that PieFed will surpass Lemmy in terms of usability. It already has in so many ways, though not quite all.
I’m thinking more unifying communities that either have the same mods or for annexing communities with inactive mods, and I keep referring to redundancy because that’s the specific purpose in my mind, with the side effect of cleaning up the multiple dead communities with the same name on various instances.
There’s a real risk in the Fediverse of the one server hosting a community going offline, and we’ve already seen at least one notable Lemmy host shamble on as a zombie server with absent instance administrators. Instead of forcing communities to tell eachother to migrate or to recreate themselves on a new instance should one disappear suddenly, by having the community effectively load balanced and replicated across 2 or more instances is a lot more resilient
I fully respect when moderator teams have different opinions running similar communities with different rules and expectations and in not saying that should be taken away. I’m just thinking about technical solutions to improve overall Fediverse health
Man, I just wanted to chant “We’re #5”, now I have people coming at me with facts. :p
(Jokes aside, I appreciate it. There’s nuance to these metrics and what best accounts for ‘size’, particularly for those cases/services where the metrics reflect a little bugginess anyway)
Well, now you are on a firm basis to chant being #4!? 😜
I think when we yell “five”, there should be a spirited booty shake.
🎶🎤🎶Errybody get yer shit onna dancefloor! Now work it. Just work it. Errybody getcher shit n work it🎶
🎤Wanna drive a lamborghini? Drink martinis? You betta work bitch🎤
See, everyone is coming in and talking about different means of measuring instances, the implications for the fediverse and the position of federated services against corporate monoliths like reddit.
But you, verity - you get it.
It’s the Non-Credible Defense in me.
Lemmy.world has become a pro-censorship toxic shithole lately. Sooo glad I was made to find other instances.
Beauty of the fediverse… If one place sucks, just find a different one 😊
Yeah… I’m actually okay with censorship so long as it is clearly explained in advance and fairly applied - then again, I don’t necessarily want to join it either, just saying that I’m okay that it exists… over there somewhere (away from me:-).
*#4, hexbear (ew) is on there twice.
Did hexbear go through mitosis?
(Or are they going through mitosis like how USSR did in 1991? 🤣)
Good spot. I also want to know, but I fear the backstory…
It’s the same one, not sure why it’s reported twice.
That orb they have a puppet instance the same way ask their users have puppet accounts.
I’m surprised lemmy.ml isn’t on there, it seems really big from my limited experience.
Huh, you’re right. In fairness this is cropped from an image shared on the AskLemmy .ml thread, so I’m not 100% sure what’s going on there. Edit: Image is legit. Weird…
Post on an instance are not necessarily the right metric to how active the users of an instance are, just how many large and active communities are there.
No really, .ml isn’t even in top 10? Did they opt-out from these statistics or are they that small?
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Edit: well I guess they really are that small. But total posts they have at 147k, what is going on here?
so small and yet so loud
Honestly I think their higher upvote / post ratio is a better formula. Most of Lemmy has too little engagement on it’s posts for my tastes.
based on the creation date advertised by the instance, lemmy.ml exists since 2019-04-20. lemmy.world exists since 2023-06-01.
They’re just loud. Like a terrier.
Wow. So great. Amazing. Truly exceptional.
Damn right!
So? Is there a contest?
So!? We’re #5! Or 4! Or something!
(Not everything needs a point - I just felt like posting this. Though it does look like it’s started a discussion about the relative size of lemmy and different instances, which is neat to think about once in a while - or disheartening depending on your perspective)
I appreciate your effort, shitjustworks needs more silly shitposts no cap
more like #4 considering the hexbear duplicate
And not a pretty company to have around ngl
This is the best instance in fediverse in my opinion.
![[sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5!](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/58e76358-5e82-4f03-b7ed-a6754b7875b9.jpeg){kind=link}