OpenStars

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.:-)

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.

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.

We'd like to keep this a welcoming environment where people don't hesitate to ask questions. While I'm not debating the ah... uh... truthiness in your examples, I do believe that they don't belong here.

Well, now you are on a firm basis to chant being #4!? 😜

Purrrrfection!

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?

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!:-).

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.

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.

You... don't want to know.

Okay so I had a little accident where I was walking in the dark and bumped into, you know what, just forget I said anything, m'kay?:-P