this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.

the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.

So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.

edit: source for the graph

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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

You are railing about moral issues I don't even disagree with. But there are basic, physical properties that networks have, that are scale dependent. There is no moralizing around that issue. And de-federation can and does occur all the time, its basically the norm between the major instances. And that has fundamentally crippled the growth of the fediverse (at least the lemmy side).

Just because I'm not bothering putting effort into responding to a slathering wall of text like you've composed, does nothing to change the fact that social networks, and actually, all large networked systems from the internet to a fungal colony, all base their survival in scale. I've done the work and shared it with those I've deemed worthy, here, regarding the network analyses I've built to run on the fediverse. Here's a hint: you aren't one of those.

Without scale, networked systems collapse. Without scale, complexity can't emerge.

A big part of this is architectural and we had that discussion years ago here. There are design constraints built into the original envisioning of lemmy that pretty much force these limitations. The biggest issue being that each lemmy instance is built to effectively be an "entire clone" of a reddit like system. The second is activity pub related, in that users can not "migrate" their accounts or community's to new instance, neither can we fork, clone, or merge a community.

The result is that we end up with duplicated communities, balkanized content, and an overall reduction in activity, which further suppress growth. There is no disagreement that the de-federation issue contributed directly to Lemmy's decline. We were all here for it.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 0 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

You can whine about it... or find a way to deal constructively with it.

Disinformation != Misinformation != Information

To hear your defeatest talk, Reddit has won. Survival of the fittest and all.

I think we can do better. But never by ignoring the consent of the governed. Perhaps by listening to people, a way could be found to move forward? e.g. by allowing a true block of all users from an instance, as an alternative to defederation. Which Lemmy will likely never do, despite their promises for years and years to do exactly that.

i.e. it's a skill issue. Do better.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Its not defeatism. Its a basic understanding of how systems work, which you clearly don't have. You being obtuse doesn't change that. You and I can't change the issue at play. Without scale, lemmy dies. Its not a debate and its killed plenty of projects long before it.

In other words, hope in one hand and shit in the other; see which one fills up first.

Without growing the user base, this project dies. Its not a debate.