not if they dont hear about it

Hopefully. I am already on both sites (though on reddit I hardly ever start new threads and only use it on desktop) and would love getting opportunities to talk about all the topics here that I currently talk about only on reddit.

It is so incredible. I used to think the main threat to a free and open Internet was copyright. Then in the mid-2010s the talking points against it shifted to misinformation and hate speech.

Now it's age verification? How did we get here?

Reddit is doing age verification now?? lmao

Old.Reddit is getting sign ins required too for “safety” reasons. So even my limited desktop browsing is going to be limited now.

They're doing the double whammy. Mandatory sign-in (even on old.reddit) and any account they can't estimate as belonging to an adult through their use of invasive spy metrics and AI will be forced to do age verification.

Reddit is 80%+ bots so I don't expect those accounts to shift platforms. But I do imagine some former reddit users will trickle over as it continues to alienate its fanbase with stupid choices like getting rid of old reddit.

I expect reddit will roll it out slowly and stop if they're losing too many users. If they actually follow through and impose age "verification" on everyone it'll be a bigger exodus than anything seen before — so they probably won't.

We need to start spreading word of mouth, with posters, etc.

Certainly. Don't know how large and when, but a significant (relative to our size) bunch of people would likely show up. That plus people who dabble in both would increase their activity here. The threadiverse is more or less guaranteed to grow and form a solid contrubutor base. We don't seek to increase profits YoY so our services are only going to get better over time. For-profit socials have to grow profits over time, so they are going to get worse. Increase in service quality for for-profit platforms is a temporary stage of their development. The threadiverse will be around in 5-10 years time, in some shape or form and it'll be larger and better than it is today. This is why I keep pushing the vote buttons and type words every day. Deliberately spending more time than I'd like. 😄

Don't call the fediverse threadiverse...

My guess is, all NSFW communities will see a surge.

Probably not large scale, but definitely a spike. We've been seeing more signups lately due to the US talking shit about Canada.

We publish some graphs here https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/data/lemmy/users

I was specifically talking about the subsection of the Fediverse that structures itself similarly to reddit (e.g. Lemmy, piefed, mbim, etc).

Ah, the discord approach

Didn't realize you made the rules

/r/RedditAlternatives

But that isn't really Threadiverse now, is it?

Given Thread itself is more akin to Twitter, so Threadiverse would rather be thr Mastodon style microblogging rather than the community-oriented approach of Lemmy/Piefed/mbin/kbin.

It literally is called the Threadiverse. The terminology predates Threads as a platform.

People have been using Threadiverse to refer to the link-aggregating community based Fediverse platforms with threaded discussion topics for way longer than Threads has existed as a website.

If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn't really roll off the tongue.

Not sure what you mean by exodus. I “left” Reddit for Lemmy, but Lemmy doesn’t do what I want, so it doesn’t replace Reddit. I went back to Reddit. Now I’m on both, for different reasons.

I don’t have any issues with bots on Reddit, but all the subs I’m on have very small numbers of users. The “equivalent” Lemmy communities are ghost towns where people haven’t made a single post in 2 years.

Simply speaking. No

Lets be real, while many do care, it isn't going to be a "I need to leave the platform" level care.

Furthermore, the people impacted by it, may also not actually be in the majority either. For example they are doing similar to how discord is doing their age verification, where they are using existing metrics to infer your age without hard requiring it. Reddit has stated that said metrics include account age, email provider and topics you navigate.

Unless they have a super heavy handed way of doing this, I doubt anything super meaningful like another mass exodus like how the API issue was will happen.

Most of Reddit's users do not post, comment, or even vote.

Reddit's product is the ability to sell people the perception of a natural conversation between two ordinary people on the internet, where the conversation is shaped by corporations and state agents.

Actual ordinary people get in the way of that. Reddit does not want users.

I think the biggest threat is all the billionaires who don't want working class people getting together and agreeing with each other on the internet.

Everything you mentioned - misinformation, hate speech, age verification - works towards that same goal.

We have a winner

Reminder: Piefed is cool, Lemmy is run by pro-fascist tools of Russia and the CCP.

I think most who would leave have already left.

I can get out of lemmy what I got out of reddit a long time ago. It only takes a few hundred smart/funny people to make a chat board good. We're here now. Hopefully some of the niche communities get ported over soon enough, but the real greatness of reddit was that it was mostly uncensored and intelligent opinion. That's mostly dead.

It's a lot of dead internet with most posts being dredged up reposts and celeb gossip/worship (which has gotten way worse btw). It's starting to resemble instagram "memes' and the nerdier shit is definitely coming over here.

I mean, they're required by the law in certain countries. With their size, there's no way around that.

And some of them upon arriving here, noped out (either immediately or waiting a few years first) and went back:-(.

That type definitely will not be so eager to return.

This is simply not true.

1. nothing in life is ever fully "guaranteed"

2. our numbers have been actively decreasing since the Rexodus - from 60k (edit: 65k actually) at our peak down to ~35k now

3. PieFed now shadow-censors all votes with a daily vote quota, thereby limiting such interactions

Not everything always moves in a positive line. We might improve here, especially if we put in the efforts to do so, but it is not assured, especially without having put in such efforts.

I don't feel guilty about looking at reddit now and then, but I do it through browser and I will NEVER contribute content or moderation, ever again. Fuck them. I used redact, deleted all my shit. Site is 90% dead internet trash 10% humans who haven't been banned yet for saying a bad word.

1. That's my bet for the reasons I outlined. It's not a bet in vacuum. I think it's strong enough to consider it "certain," colloquially speaking. Is it certain in mathematical terms? No, as you said - nothing is certain.
2. That's not inconsitent with my bet. We can get into why but probablt don't need to.
3. No idea what that's about, not using PieFed. They limit what? Why do they do that? I read your explanation.

E: BTW I'm not unaware of the ability of for-profits to siphon people away from existing corporate platforms into new corporate or corporate-adjacent platforms, for example. E.g. Twitter -> Bluesky. I think that would be insufficient in the long run to halt the fediverse growth because every time this cycle occurs, some people fall off into the fediverse and that's usually the more aware people. They tend to create more content.

Would you mind elaborating on PieFed vote quotas? I haven't heard about that.

If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn't really roll off the tongue.

its also reductionist. its not like we are just hoarding links here for hoarding's sake. discussions. and many non-link posts too.

Here is an interesting post on the topic. The TLDR is that the term Threadiverse predated the shitty attempt by Threads to do whatever, and some of the biggest names in the Threadiverse including the software developers underpinning it decided not to allow Meta to steal it from us.

Besides, Threads is more or less fully dead now, isn't it? And anyway it's preemptively defederated by pretty much literally every instance out there, including those that famously defederate from virtually anything (edit: nothing) else - including even CSAM spammers.

Regardless, long live the Threadiverse! Other terms like Forumverse or just Verse may have worked better but... meh, people got used to calling it the Threadiverse and it just kinda stuck, or rather they did not want to change it. Feel free to advocate for something better, but the matter feels kinda settled now, so you would be going against what everyone else does routinely now.

In that post I included links to older comments proving usage of that term prior to Meta announcing its naming of Threads. We truly had it first, so using the term now is not in homage to them, but rather in spite of them.

Also, at this point I usually add an obligatory fuck spez... except I realize that I haven't done so for months now, because at some point it's okay to simply move on and forget him. That's the real way to dispose of trolls: just forget they ever existed in the first place! :-P

https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2190040/who-decides-what-you-see-on-the-fediverse-a-look-at-voting-patterns

PieFed instance admins can set a limit to how many votes each account can cast each day. I set the default value for this at a level that 99% of us will never reach.

This pissed off some of the 1% (or people who thought they were the 1% but weren't) so they spent weeks spreading FUD about it.

The Threadiverse is not named after Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc. The term "Threadiverse" is older than Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc.

It is named after Lemmy's and /kbin's and Mbin's and PieFed's "killer feature" of enclosed threaded conversations, with exactly one post followed any number of comments, where everyone always receives all of the comments. Something that was (and often still is) considered exclusive to these four applications.

In stark contrast to the de-facto Fediverse default, Mastodon. Where everything in a thread is a post. Where the concept of comments doesn't exist. Where conversations are a filthy hack because it's social media, and replies to replies aren't part of the concept.

Where timelines always only consist of single posts with seemingly no context, and only a small variation in a small icon tells you that there is a context in the first place. Where seeing even only the branch of a conversation that any given post is in takes some effort, and seeing the whole conversation with all branches takes even more effort, not to mention the knowledge that this can be done in the first place, much less how it can be done.

Where you have to be mentioned to know that someone has replied to you. Like, where I would have to mention everyone in this branch of this conversation (@fonix232@fedia.io @speedythefirst@lemmy.zip @OpenStars@discuss.online @ceiphas@feddit.org) so that even only they receive my reply (everyone else in the conversation doesn't). Where whoever will reply to me will automatically mention these four participants plus me.

The "Thread" in "Threadiverse" doesn't stand for Meta Threads. It stands for "we can do proper threads, as in enclosed threaded conversations, something that Mastodon can't, something that most Mastodon users believe the whole Fediverse can't!"

Good question. There is a lot of active disinformation circulating about PieFed - like it supposedly "hard-coded" certain filters into it, which btw it does the precise opposite of that, not only not hard-coding those but actually making them opt-in, the absolute most friendly and non-mandatory that a code option could be. The main author Rimu argues back against such in his blog post at https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/14/open-source-runs-on-good-faith/.

All that said, the daily vote quota criticism unfortunately is for real. Unlike all the false criticism before that, this one is opt-out rather than opt-in, forcing admins to be aware that it even exists and then figure out a calculation to determine a value that would effectively disable it (which tbf is not hard at all, if someone is aware of its existence). Instance admins were apparently given no notice, expressing surprise at the behavior of their instances after an update that barely mentioned it and rhen buried it deeply in a long list as if it were nothing. Also this anti-feature was rammed through despite somewhat strong criticism, for reasons that seem to make sense to the author and at least one other person but make little sense to the rest of us (i.e. no attempt at reaching consensus or striving for buy-in among stakeholders, at least least not a successful one, and at least as far as I have been able to ascertain).

Briefly, PieFed has decided that by default, unless an instance admin goes out of their way to request otherwise, voting now is limited. Which is arguably fine if it were internal, except this applies to votes received by accounts across the entire wide Fediverse - from Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, little to no indication of that fact is provided - votes simply are discarded, leaving people to wonder why, and Rimu's response was to get creative in finding alternatives to voting. Votes are (according to him) not meant to make people feel good, but strictly to influence the visibility of an item of content (which ofc makes a LOT of sense, at least in pure theoretical terms) hence it was decided - AGAINST a large outcry from the community - that it was "unfair" that people who use the platform a lot can cause more influence than others.

Many counterexamples were put forth - e.g. a doctor or nurse working days as 12+ hr rather than 8 hr shifts, then wanting to relax and consume Threadiverse content on their rest day, but being blocked from doing so by the quota being strictly a daily one. PieFed thus now imposes restrictions on the style that people use the platform by. Numerous alternatives could have been done - e.g. banning people who purely vote thousands of times yet never write comments, or conversely allow people who do write posts and comments and not merely moderate but put in enormous efforts to actively grow up communities to have a higher limit than those who do not. But instead... everyone has the same (daily) restriction on votes allowed to be received by a community on an instance that implements this restriction.

And again, as evidenced partly by the fact that you are not familiar with this aspect of PieFed: the discoverability of this anti-feature is exceedingly poor. PieFed is currently shadow-censoring votes coming in from other platforms (e.g. Lemmy) without telling them why.

Here is PugJesus' goodbye message citing his reason to leave the Threadiverse as the implementation of this vote quota along with prior hints that the PieFed software is becoming quite opinionated, in a manner that is accepting of serious discussions but high critical of meme and shitposting styles, i.e. the more "social media" style. So it's not that PieFed is "bad" here, but it is opinionated and pushing its own agenda, more and more lately, which can still be mitigated by instance admins but with features being opt-out rather than opt-in, PieFed is becoming increasingly less friendly towards the traditional "social media" style of conversation, and is imposing its own vision of what might be better. And again, without really disclosing that fact much where people can see an acknowledgement that it is currently happening.

Here is a post directly from Rimu about the bias underlying the change to implement the vote quota. And here is the OG release announcement, showing this feature buried in the list. Here is a community push-back that lead to what I consider a fascinating technical exploration of the topic, and another one.

If this has been released as merely another opt-in feature, and affected merely votes internally to a PieFed instance, then everything would be different. But instead, people are still sore at Huffman trying to tell us that we are landed gentry, and this change smacks of a similar situation whereby despite the lack of corporate enshittification, nonetheless the people in charge are telling others what they can and cannot do, for opaque reasons that don't resonate with seemingly much of anyone.

Spez allowed a subreddit for child pedofiles to defend their actions and advocate for no age limits for statutory rape or porn. It didnt get removed until the fat people hate banning created outrage. Pretty sure the laws about not fucking children didnt dictate how he ran his platform and theyve been around a tad bit longer than age verification laws. Just sayin, dont confuse investor appeasement with choosing to follow the law. Plus i wouldnt put it past them if i found out they lobbied to have these laws past so they font have to track every click and person underneath their front end. This just made it their front door.

Ran by fascists and CCP? Talk about oxymorons!

Reddit has a long tail of small communities you really can’t find elsewhere. Some of the ones I frequent tried to move to Lemmy but it really didn’t work out. Ended up moving to Discord, which is far worse than Reddit.

Well said.

I think nodeBB also is included as part of the Threadiverse, although it seems not a full-fledged member, and I am not well-versed enough to know why (perhaps connection via the ActivityPub Protocol is still being rolled out to all the instances?).

Meta's Threads is indeed entirely irrelevant to any of this, except that they wanted to horn in on our fun, but they killed themselves before they could begin, though not before we had already preemptively blocked it all! 🤣

Oh, and also they stole our name. Or rather tried to, but fuck that noise - we took it right back!!

Thanks for the explanation. That's informative and unfortunate.

I am particularly disappointed bc I put literally all of my hopes for the entire future of the Threadiverse itself into PieFed. Lemmy is developed by tankies, and as much as we here don't care (software, particularly FOSS, is software), people on Reddit care greatly and eschew coming here as a result.

But now they won't come here to merely a different, inferior version of Reddit, where one person in charge is replaced by another person.

This is all waaaay too simplistic ofc, as PieFed is still amazing software, and Rimu is truly nothing at all like Huffman. But... how much do facts actually matter, to most people?

This is going to harm our ability to draw people from Reddit to here. They are currently pissed about the shadow-banning there, and I don't think that they will take kindly to the shadow-censoring here, even if it is limited to voting (but not posting or commenting). This place truly is better than here... but this decision opens up PieFed to that MAJOR criticism of the instance admins being landed gentry.

Fortunately - regardless of whether PieFed, Lemmy, or something else like Mbin is used - instance admins still are the arbitrators of what experience their users will encounter. And PieFed offers enormous benefits to spinning up a personal instance, plus under leadership that remains friendly to the social media style, PieFed still has enormous benefits to offer. Plus, obviously, some people even want the serious-content-only style, and will even welcome those changes (I would still argue that the transparency needs to be improved there... but otherwise the changes themselves are not so much "bad" as more surprising, being different than what people are used to, and therefore if not disclosed properly even dismaying?).

So yes, unfortunate, but we move forward regardless. Rimu still works hard at modifying the code as he sees fit, and like the Lemmy devs, offers it as FOSS - and I could ask for little more than that!:-)

The CCP are right wing fascists in every way, shape, and form from their oligarchy operated totalitarian state to their support of the election of the Trump admin and the AfD.

In what way do you claim they are different?

Most people either seem to be happy with the way things are and don't even want to grow at all - certainly not "at all costs" - or else they naively think that we will grow merely bc Reddit sucks, with zero effort required beyond that. I am glad that you are aiming at a blend of optimistic realism.

Though in that case, #2 is where the heart of the issue lies: so very MANY people overcame all the hurdles, figured out how to use this place, created an account, even posted here for multiple years, only to leave and now bad-mouth us over on Reddit. Overwhelmingly the sentiment there whenever a community decides to migrate and people ask where should they go, and Lemmy is suggested, the response is "oh HELL NO!!!"

And ofc many more people don't even make it as far as that - but people are willing to put in a lot of effort, when they see that there is VALUE in doing so. Hence, our reputation being so poor, deprives us in many more ways than just the one, if the goal was to grow.

And I honestly don't think that we will actually. Maybe in 10 years yes, but not in 1-2. And I, like so many others, have made my peace with that. Especially bc we aren't really willing to lift a finger to do anything about the main problem that plagues us here - again, our reputation on Reddit. So, we shall remain small (the direct and immediate consequence of that), since collectively that's what we have decided to do, whether consciously or no.

History memes just hasn’t been the same since the piefed nonsense 🙁

I've noticed a drop off in several communities on PieFed.social since, and people saying that they wanted to migrate their community or account but now have not.

Tbf if that's what the instance admin wants it be - mainly for serious content rather than an open and welcoming space - that's absolutely fine, it's just a transparency issue where there seems a mismatch between what is said vs. the actual direction it is headed towards.

And I would have hoped that such an unpopular anti-feature would have been made as opt-in rather than opt-out.

It does not help that people here can be INSANELY aggressive against each other.