And to be clear, hyper-focused isn't "bad", just not the same as someone wanting to join a more general-focused one.:-)
Thank you for sharing some of that back story.
Working as intended indeed. "Move fast and break things" somehow being a goal to be aspired to.
But that page is for "Kbin", not specifically "Kbin.social" which I note does not appear among the list of all Kbins already - https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list. So you don't have to wait for tomorrow - it's already too late to see its former traffic today.
Interesting: the Active Users Monthly (https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats) for Mbin is 568, whereas that stat for Kbin was 2280. So even without including the extremely large Kbin.social (well... large in terms of total users, but obviously not active ones bc the service is down, which by definition precludes people being active on it:-), the suite of Kbin instances still seems to have ~4x more active users than the Mbin ones.
I would not have expected that, given the chatter about Mbin being exciting, and I wonder why - potentially historical precedence, if an older server simply has more traffic bc it was created first?
But obviously something more is going on with that data - i.e. & e.g. supermeter.social is reported to have the highest user count among the Kbins, but with only 736 total users, and if you add up all users from all 8 of those servers you get only about half of the 2280 "Active Users Monthly" figure - so I suspect that the activity for Kbin.social is being included in that after all? Otherwise something is very wrong with the extrapolation of "active users", to be more than twice the total ones (one possibility... past active ones vs. a smaller current total of people who deleted their accounts rather than merely abandoned them by walking away without going to the trouble of deletion).
Which would make sense - the website is reporting numbers accumulated over time, and even though Kbin.social is down now, it was not always thus, and it seems it cannot discriminate the history in terms of active users (Kbin.social vs. some other Kbin server I mean).
But that does complicate - possibly even invalidates - trying to compare the non-Kbin.social Kbins vs. the Mbins, in terms of active users.
So leaving active users aside then, I note that the largest Mbin has a ~6-fold higher total user count than the largest Mbin server. Also there are 8 total Kbin instances (aforementioned not including Kbin.social bc it does not appear on that list today), vs. 23 total Mbin instances. It's shaky, but it really does look like the Mbin instances seem healthier than the Kbin ones? (Again minus Kbin.social, which despite monthly active users seems by no means "healthy" to me?)
This ignores things like possible hyper-focusing on specific niche topics so a deeper look would involve how many communities are there, and perhaps traffic patterns like do people actually comment in those or is the server mostly just a base from which to access the Fediverse at large (which may not be a bad thing at all? just a bit different), etc.
According to that website, Kbin.Social has >10x more registered users (had? looks like it only counts accounts) than all Mbin servers combined.
At this point people need to stop being surprised - whether he is sick or whatever the cause, this is by no means a rare occurrence for that instance.
I would actually not go that far - I respect the devs enormously for having written the code and shared it with the entire world. If someone else wants to write new code - K/Mbin and Sublinks come to mind - then sure replace Lemmy for those instances that run that, but e.g. Lemmy.World is definitely a Lemmy and I'm okay with that.
I'm also okay with Fediverse - should I not be? I suppose an alternative is something that implements the ActivityPub protocol, but why not the Fediverse?
Basically I am okay with anything so long as people don't stumble upon it unawares.
But I do see your point that we can't just say that we are a Reddit knockoff, even though that's literally what we are. It should be the start of additional description. So far I call it "social media" - where people share and talk, bc that seems about right. "Link aggregator" doesn't do much for me, and suggests more of a purpose to read news stories rather than make our own posts.
I knew it all along!
I made a tangential point, where some people are okay with having less content as a result of being defederated even from as large and central an instance as Lemmy.World - i.e. it's not always the amount of content so much as its quality - to then apply that same principle to the Fediverse at large.
Tolerance of the intolerant is not okay. As you try to bring in more people, some people will balk at coming and others already here will leave, if the experience seems unwelcoming to them.
People need to feel safe in the space they are in, or else they will not enjoy talking. I guess it may sound counterintuitive, but being intolerant - but only of the intolerant!! - actually increases engagement and participation, not the other way around. imho.
I don't go to Facebook, X, Instagram, or Reddit. Some people that I talk to irl also don't follow social media. Why should they - what does it offer then? To those people I have been recommending Lemmy in the past, and now I don't do that anymore. I would like to though.
Agreed - as Blaze always says, save the why and how it works (under the hood) for later and for now just show them the goods.
And when a major instance defederates from Lemmy.ml I will start recommending that exact instance to people.
Or, an admin at sh.itjust.works mentioned the possibility of automatically applying a user level block to it for all new users, along with a bot message about how to remove that block. As discussed above, it would be far from perfect (e.g. someone mentions that the genocide going on in Ukraine is bad and gets hit by many downvotes with no clue where they came from bc they are not shown notifications from the people who may reply to say how it is actually good though, bc Russia is the one doing it...), but indeed it would be better than now.
I would rather, instead of dividing between have vs. lack smartyness, focus on have vs. lack kindness, consideration, empathy, etc. Remember Reddit? (A half-joke bc although you just came from there more recently, some of us haven't been for a year or more and are legit starting to forget, almost blissfully!:-)
I don't mind talking to people all along the intelligence scale, but I do mind talking with people who engage in trolling behaviors. I will hang out with the humble uneducated plebes but I refuse to with their opposites. I am not phrasing it well but somewhere in here it gets complicated bc those scales overlap, as often the least intelligent behave as if they were somehow entitled to be treated as the most - e.g. Dr. Fauci gave the entire world a vaccine, but it was people who flunked or never took biology in the first place who are trying to block access to not only it but to simple masks. One side works to earn respect, the other does not yet not only demands equal treatment but somehow more than equal, and sometimes at the point of a literal gun. One side actually reads the Constitution of the United States, while the other side does not yet attempts to overthrow it regardless, bc they apparently know "better" how the country should be run than those who founded it.
So while I think that fascists should have a place they can talk - that's just humane - I also do not want to be in that place. Their rights end where mine begin. So if (like I/we did to Reddit) that means that they win and therefore I have to leave, so be it - I will leave social media entirely if need be, before I compromise and enjoy watching people "dunk on" others. If it is X or bust, then I choose bust.
Or the less hostile but just as damaging form of this where people treat social media as a place for emotional venting rather than real conversations with real people. Those two are related bc just bc you can get away with doing something, bc you have that power/ability, does not mean that you should do it. e.g. one or maybe three comments like "^This" or "I also choose this guy's wife" or "And my bow" etc. is fine but a hundred of them!? in a row, or even like twenty, is just too much. They speak, and therefore people cannot even listen anymore bc of the crowded noise from everyone else speaking.
Who sees the last ten posts to a community being "which android phone is the best these days" (no other details provided) and decides to add an eleventh to the group? Answer: people who are lonely and need someone to talk to, but don't care about the rules of politeness, and are so self-centered that they want another post devoted entirely to themselves. Never mind the fact that there being so many of those drives people away who would have actually answered their question. They not only whisper but SHOUT into the void, and if the only way for me to have peace is to mute them, or not go to where people do that, then so be it. Their right to post such runs up against my right to not have to listen to it.
And maybe, for some anyway, their lack of etiquette is merely bc they are young? But whoever they are, their presence foretells the absence of the people that they will drive away. So you cannot simply increase tolerance infinitely in order to grow the size of the Fediverse, bc that works in opposition to people who refuse to tolerate the intolerant and inconsiderate. We cannot have it all there - one or the other is the best that could be achieved even in purely theoretical terms, much less making it happen irl.
A reminder that this is not about Beehaw - this is about Rin, and their own personal preferences:
I’m 1) very much already tired and don’t want to spend a ton of time curating a block list and 2) just trying to find a community to fit in where I’m comfortable.
Each person may have their own idea as to what is "comfortable", for them. If Beehaw works fine just the way it is, then that's fantastic!
More broadly across the Fediverse though, individual users have to put in a lot of effort to curate their experience. e.g. not going to political communities is insufficient, when people (including myself:-D) bring up political matters or adjacent philosophies to many types of discussions - memes, about freedom to enjoy the Fediverse, technology, etc.
Oh no, pier pressure!
(But not for long...)