1. block all news

2. post stuff about things that you care about? gardening? horses? wildlife photography?

There is a no politics rule but I see plenty of anti right wing, critical of tech bro and capitalism posts. The posts getting flagged are generally pretty low effort garbage.

I'm doing my part! 🥳

The kind of immigration we had in the 40s was way different than the one we have nowadays though. Come to Italy and you'll see what l mean. You would be scared to walk alone at night.

note that this is accounts. So for example, I have 3 accounts I use regularily.

If you want random people across the world to validate Sweden's distaste for immigrants, no, you won't like the outcome here.

I dunno anything about the specific thread. I'm only highlighting that maybe it's a sign to reflect on how you communicate with others on here, since it's not an isolated incident. It's possible to question people without hurting them or using harsh language.

For what it's worth, I had a really rough time in my entire school life as well. I also tend to ask questions and point out inconsistencies, rather than "going with the flow" or accepting things at face value. I ended up with a 30% attendance rate, for various reasons. The difference here is that most people don't have the authority to retaliate to disobedience, other than using strong words or downvoting me.

Personally, I often run into people on here who want to "argue semantics" rather than the spirit of the argument. They have their dictionary out and are ready to endlessly debate the definitions of every word in a comment, while also refusing to actually read what I wrote properly and misquoting me out of context to look bad. It's not fun or interesting, and language isn't as important as they think it is. I used to get mad at them for arguing in bad faith, but now I just disengage with them or tag or block them if they're really bad.

True, same for me. But I have been for quite a while and I'm not creating new ones. I'm guessing legit users don't need many accounts, so I'd be more concerned about botting.

As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.

I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.

There is NO such thing as just blocking when it's everywhere, and if you can downvote it you've already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.

So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y'all in November -- or December, if shit gets real.

news.. Ewwww

There is just so much you can do as a human even with multiple accounts. So unless you're daily driving 50 accounts somehow and most others got nothing better to do as well, I still count that as a positive trend.

The problem is that Lemmy is trying to be Reddit instead of being something better. Reddit's model was always flawed: a central feed of endless content where the community is secondary to the algorithm and the upvote chase. That model rewards outrage, spam, and bot farms because those things generate engagement.

The old forums worked differently. A forum was a place you went to for a specific topic or community. The content and the discussion lived together. You knew the regulars. Moderation was local and accountable. There was no algorithm shoving rage bait into your feed because there was no feed in the modern sense.

Lemmy instances should be built like those old forums. Each instance should feel like a real site with its own culture and purpose, not just a node in a Reddit clone. The posts and the community should be the reason people stay, not a firehose of engagement bait.

Splitting the forums away from the content sites was the mistake. We need to put them back together.

Fwiw, a number of highly popular 3rd-party apps including Voyager now offer support for PieFed. Most do not provide the full range of features as compared to the web interface, though some like Interstellar provide the large majority of them - see fully detailed listing of each app and which features are supported at https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.

Anyway, I confirm first-hand that using Voyager to access a PieFed instance is nearly identical to accessing a Lemmy one, except for the gain in back-end functionality of PieFed doing what Lemmy cannot (e.g. you apply some settings rarely in the web UI - maybe a couple times a year - and then those continue to function as you switch to more daily usage in your app of choice).

So use whatever you like - sh.itjust.works seems to me to be a fine instance - but I'm just saying that for a new person joining the Threadiverse, the web browser UI of PieFed is not the only or even the main way that people can choose to access it.

I used to download an app for everything, but now I can't talk myself into so much as considering it. Unfortunately, it's web interface or nothing for me

Yeah, literally all of the major communities here have politics constantly in them. If you ever need a break, there is e.g. https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, but of course there's not even an hour a day's worth of material there.

Oh well, touching grass is a far better use of our time anyway, r-r-right!?!?

Thank you for sharing, especially your first-hand perspective.

Im not downplaying the growth. Just putting out there that it is easy to think active users means different people, which is not true.

Fwiw, there are spaces such as https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, and with that being a PieFed instance, can also offer blocking of any text keywords (like "Musk" or "Trump"). Stuff will still manage to come through (e.g. a preponderance of orange clowns with a fairly obvious meaning that nonetheless make it through the filters), but it can cut it down by a ton.

But if you just absolutely need to block it all, then I wish you happiness during your vacation from the bleakness! :-)

Are the numbers actually shrinking for Lemmy+Piefed?

Lemmy has gone from 36,600 monthly active users to 33,600 users in the last year. A loss of 3,000 monthly active users.

Piefed has gone from 1,600 MAU a year ago to 6,900 MAU now, an increase of 5,300 users.

This means the total has increased by 2,300 MAU in the past year.

Note that this drop in Lemmy and rise in Piefed can be explained by lemmynsfw shutting down and being replaced by fedinsfw, which runs piefed and has 3,600 MAU. Arguably both Lemmy and Piefed are slowly gaining in MAU.

Fwiw, it gets this way right before every single election in most western nations - especially a USA one.

And you can go to places such as lemmygrad.ml and read how proud they are at creating tools to subvert any and all bans - e.g. the automation of a process to simply cycle through all registered accounts in an app until one is found that is not blocked at the instance, community, or for a comment reply the user level (possibly by now, even including the creation of a new one if necessary?).

NO, to some, means to simply push forward all the harder. It's Man vs. Bear, and they've chosen their side: incel. It is intentional and even purposeful - strategic in fact, a "winning" approach, if the goal is to convey a message regardless of your interest in receiving it.

Yeah, obviously if I'm on lemmy.world then I have to wait for those improvements. I have looked into moving instances, and I will save your comment; I appreciate the information.

In the meantime, thanks for the well-wishes, and same to you!

Reddit ban people -> people look for alternatives

PieFed is working on that. Seeing the pace of development of Lemmy, I highly doubt that it ever will.

There are quite a number of challenges to overcome though. e.g. if you suddenly had tend to hundreds of people "following" you, how would that make you feel?

On the Threadiverse we tend to prefer to remain anonymous - as a quick glance at usernames can attest - while on the Fediverse the set of expectations are different.

Absolutely, but not as much as Lemmy is going down, so the Threadiverse overall is decreasing its MAUs - not merely shifting from Lemmy to PieFed.

My comment isn't asking how to improve my own personal experience, but an explanation of why users might be declining.

I've definitely noticed my shitpost comments get a lot more engagement than they used to, so that's fun

Fwiw this is mainly the most popular subs. The niche subs are much more chill, though still Reddit hence full of bot spam, influencers trying to pretend to offer organic content that was not bought and paid for, and people who overall are just spoiling for a fight (which if we are honest, the latter category used to include most of us here?:-).

Not that I am advocating for Reddit, mind you, just saying that you either have to go to where the content is - Facebook, Insta, Reddit, Xhitter/Bluesky, Tiktok - or else give up on knowing stuff altogether. Which if you are talking about like events in your local town, then at least Reddit seems preferable to the others?

Obligatory fuck spez, I'm just acknowledging that the network effect is real, yo.

Yeah, I'm new (also driven from Reddit after the recent changes) and within like a week I signed up for three different servers, and I'll probably sign up for more if I can figure out how to navigate servers well enough to find what I'm looking for.

It's actually rather nice to have separate accounts for different use cases and not mix, say, a memery and general discussion account with an art account.

(・_・;)

FWIW, I joined that instance because it had the only RWBY community I could find.

(Also love the FLCL avatar)

On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good neighbors.

When we feel like we are forced into platforming every single batshit insane ideology - like hexbears to name one, though your instance at least had the foresight to defederate from it early on - then we expose people to all the dregs that social media can offer to people.

Like, how can two adults converse with one another, when surrounded by children screaming their heads off - which is not "wrong", but like... can't there even be so much as one room where that level of noise is prevented?

Anyway, I agree that Lemmy's blocking tools are vastly inferior to the task of trying to deal with the situation that you mentioned. The upcoming release of Lemmy 1.0 will help somewhat, by allowing mods to receive remote reports from other instances, but it still would need a LONG way to go - like e.g. implement a true instance blocking capability.

People's perception they are being 'hurt' my internet comments is entirely the problem.

And the problem is in themselves.

And those are the same people who think nobody should ever be able to question them, and are apt to response to violence and rage and insults.

There is no 'civil' way to challenge someone who is emotionally distrait at the existence of people they don't like existing... and that's what drives so much of the online hate discourse. They want to exterminate the bad feelings and think they can do so by exterminating the bad people.

Rather than... exert or develop any emotional control of themselves... they think that is hate speech if you suggest that. It's 'ableist' now to suggest that people are responsible for their own emotions and reactions.

It's far worse than that: after leaving they continue to talk about us, as someone might do for an unfaithful ex, trashing our reputation. We can be toxic AF here, with little to no warning labels about which spaces have what echo chamber policies in place; only people with extraordinarily thick skins can stand this space, especially for long periods of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Conservatism depends on the context within the nation, but Anglosphere conservatives at a minimum work within a liberal democratic context. Everything listed under ideological liberalism is something "conservatives" used to claim as their values.

Used to. That "conservatives" are openly embracing fascism as their "third way" is reflected in that very Wikipedia article which has been radically changed from it's state even from last year as I recall.

That the article has been changed to claim the "three main ideologies" of the past century as "liberalism, socialism, and conservativism" is some straight up scary revisionist nonsense. Just ask yourself which of those three fascism belongs to and you'll understand why.

Churchill was a Conservative. The Australian Liberal Party are conservatives, etc etc etc.

In other words, there is the ideological definition of liberal, of which conservativism is supposed to be a branch, and there's the casual usage that means "right winger" and that is contextual and rapidly coming to mean fascist.

Yep, TubularTittyFrog is one of a handful of accounts that I recognize as regularly commenting something reactionary, rude, or ignorant. Usually all three, and then they get angry when people disagree.

i remember having arguments like that on reddit on a daily basis. but that was a over a decade ago.

and sadly i keep thinking i'll be able to find that again... but it won't ever happen.

Its kinda hard to extrapolate either way honestly. Its easy for me to say that 90+% of the traffic to my tiny home server is AI crawlers now. I have NO idea definitively for the others. When I made a python fix, it jailed quite a few IPs and now its not too much of an issue. But I did notice a couple of status servers like fedidb get incorrectly jailed.

So yeah. Fun times for admins.

Tbf, this is done by extremists on both sides, hence seems a function more of extremism than of anything else.

I haven't gotten any new users on my app so this has to be fake

If it's privacy you are worried about, note that several alternatives like Voyager are FOSS.

But otherwise, yeah then that leaves you with the web UI, or at most a pinned webapp, which constrains you to the standard web UI.

Unless the PyLova fork of PieFed begins offering more tweaks to the UI that you want to see. The developer team is actively soliciting suggestions and have implemented a couple of mine already - like adding downvotes next to upvote counts - so you might voice your preferences to them to see if they can address your concerns.

maybe the posts are just getting shitttier?

Yeah agreed. Honestly my main issue with Reddit is the algorithm and "doomscroll" effect. I don't like how I felt after using Reddit and how addicting it was. I found myself feeling anxious, stressed, and tense after using it; it wasn't good for my mental health. I used to use the third party apps because I could control my experience better, but we all know what happened there.

At least here I can add keyword filters and such to Voyager. And my favourite feature of Lemmy is that it ends. I can read all there is to read in the last 24 hours. I don't get a repeating loop of content algorithmically selected to maximise my engagement. I don't see anything outside my bubble by default unless I'm feeling like exploring in "all".

Maybe if the "ability to turn off algorithm" law passes in Australia, I might return for some of the niche communities. But I honestly feel mentally healthier since quitting Reddit. Deleted my 15 year old account, no regrets.

Yeesh that's... horrifying. Hopefully new tools can be developed to make that process easier for you in the future.

Humans are social creatures. If you say mean things to people, it will emotionally harm them.

In the same way that I'm responsible for my reaction, you're responsible for your action; communication is a two-way street. For example, I'm currently disagreeing with you in a civil way (at least I believe so), with the intent of not harming anybody's feelings.

If you're frequently encountering people who are that extreme in opinion, it's possible you're either "in the wrong neighbourhood", or misinterpreting their intent. I would suggest some combination of reporting, blocking, tagging; or carefully calling them out in such a way that a bystander wouldn't confuse you with being the aggressor.

For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.

But as for how much or even whether we've dropped within the last year - which the graphs show but as you deservedly are saying that you would like confirmation for - I suspect that the answer is that nobody knows, really.

Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic "go"? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?

While that situation was over a year ago now, it does illustrate that I personally at least have no idea how these numbers shown in the graph are being calculated. Nor do I trust them in the slightest - e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs, and maybe more depending on the month examined. Lemmy servers used to be significantly less stable than they are now, so whenever one would become almost entirely unresponsive for a few days, many of us active on the Threadiverse at that time would simply hop over to another alt. Plus some of us like to experience features first-hand like what does PieFed offer, in comparison to Lemmy.

On the other hand, I have no other source of numbers, so I discussed what was presented in front of us. 65K down to 33+/-~7K is already a large enough difference that I believe that we have lost many users. Plus we can see them all over the place talking about how displeased they are with their experience while here - over on Reddit, and Bluesky, and I'm not going to look but presumably also X, Facebook, Insta, etc.

Whether these numbers are valid over the last single year or not... I cannot truly say. Although that alone seems quite telling, given how horribly Reddit is treating its user base lately - e.g. beginning to (or is it done for everyone already) shut down old reddit, and blocking people that use a VPN, etc. The fact that many more people are not coming here already should be sufficient for us to make inferences about our popularity, separately from precisely how many people are actively leaving the Threadiverse or not.

For example, read the comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. Copying and pasting a few that I had highlighted previously:

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

Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily religious (Christian, Muslim, Mormon, whatever) centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but... in truth... they AREN'T ⁉️

The fediverse is not a safe space, excepting a few instances like blahaj.

People can and should make instances for different philosophies but my concern is that any instance that doesn't enforce leftist purity is going to be defederated.

Same. I noticed that I had become argumentative, even combative, and I got to where I would write out whole responses and then just delete them rather than send, knowing what replies I was almost certain to receive. It's not a place for good faith discussions... at least, not anymore, and that was true even by the time of the Rexodus/APIcalypse.

Any social media - including the Threadiverse - can be addictive. Fortunately there is no real incentive here to do so, and many blocks in place to prevent it actually - like as you noted, limiting scrolling to pages rather than allow infinite.

Extremely unfortunately, niche communities don't exist here and so you have to go to wherever those are. But I find myself lurking with no desire to engage, most of the time even in the form of voting. I like the OC but the system that presents it is distasteful to me, to put it mildly, and I find that extremely off-putting.

Fuck reddits mods

Careful, your colours are showing.

The kind of immigration countries like Italy face today is exactly the one they asked for: Europe raked Africa and parts of Asia (not to mention the Americas) with colonialism and imperialism for centuries, extracting produces and value for the shareholders while leaving behind famine, plague and war. The least they owe the African and American peoples is to take them in, the same way they took everything else from their lands.

If not that, they should work to restore what they took or destroyed, in terms of not only economy but also society.

Lemmy makes me use social media considerably less. That's a plus.