Well said.

Okay but… blaming the other side gets tiring after a few decades. When will we blame those who allowed it, and moreover how much did Kamala Harris spend by comparison?

If it’s still too raw and early for such, please just ignore me. I’m still spinning, like all of us, and seeing desperately for some reasoning to help make sense of it all.

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:-).

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/[email protected]). 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!?:-)

Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

All the rest: yup.

Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. https://piefed.social/ (3 horizontal bars -> Topics).

For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See [email protected].

On PieFed, although I’m not sure what I think about it, posts with more than one user-defined threshold will get auto-collapsed, and then a second such threshold allows it to be hidden entirely.

So two people with opposing preferences could browse the same community but see it differently. The one wanting to see everything being allowed to do so - rather than that being the arbitrary decision of a mod (team), and the content hidden away in a mod log somewhere else, mostly inaccessible. Whereas the one who didn’t want to “waste” their time, and rather trusting the feedback of the community, could have those collapsed or hidden if they so choose.

This allows democratization of the modding process: every voter is equally a mod as the next. Or maybe some trusted members more so than others? (But if so, it can’t be TOO much higher than the others, or it could become overwhelming)

The major pitfall I see is if votes are allowed outside of the community, then it’s vulnerable to being brigaded easily by a larger outside force.

Still, it’s fascinating to see these experiments actually happen in that software that is available right now! e.g. on PieFed.social.

Genuinely… why though? Why not post once a week rather than per day? Or per month? Who is counting? If people want to join then they will, if not then they won’t, but either way will one post per day for the last six months make any difference to their decision vs. one post per week?

I am no good at what I do. I try to enjoy it anyway.:-) Do with that what you will.

It is a niche topic, here, where we all use Linux btw (or at least we keep our mouths shut if we don’t, for fear of being mobbed:-D).

We talk about what we want to talk about here. Linux, memes, TV, uh… Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, beans, jeans, not pooping - and I think that’s pretty much it, except for politics, am I missing anything? 😁

I see this, and am upvoting:-).

Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556

I wanted to add to others’ comments: usernames as well.

So e.g. I could go create an account called [email protected], and another called [email protected], and another [email protected], etc. (assuming none of these already existed), and they each would be different - plus none of these would be you.

This is a reason why many celebrities say that they refuse to come to the Fediverse, b/c of this potential for misunderstanding regarding the account names - which tbf that is not entirely “new” issue since it would affect emails too, and yet in reality it is new b/c Twitter/X and Reddit and Facebook got people spoiled to expect a certain style of behavior so using the Fediverse feels to them a step backwards (we had a discussion about that topic recently).

So, exactly like email and a website URL, it takes the full thing to specify something exactly - a username, or a community.

Seems legit

I did mention that it was only tangentially related. I did not realize though that programming.dev was not all that old. TIL.

Tangentially, there’s a whole bunch of issues going on with the programming.dev server for one. See at [email protected]. Lemmy’s upcoming upgrade to 0.19.6 should help - see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623 and https://feddit.org/post/3524876 discussing it.

Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)