(The USA election surely - also talked about by people outside of the USA, e.g. I saw quite a few posts on lemmy.ml about it...)
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, , 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:-).
~~Can you send us an example of such a post as you are talking about? B/c I am not seeing it.~~ (Edit: oops that was old and I forgot to remove this sentence - see below.)
The most recent content on lemmy.blahaj.zone that I see from sh.just.works is from 2 hours ago: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1688895/11494679, so those two definitely are federated (I checked and don't see either one in the others' instance blocked list). However, as expected the user https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/CDRMITTENS@sh.itjust.works has no content more recent than 7 months ago. They both say that they are running the same Lemmy version - 0.19.5.
Searching... seems not to work for these style of posts, b/c while the searches pull up zero results for common things like a single space, a colon (inside a URL?), the single letter "a", etc., there actually are such posts, e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/27811262.
Also, !noncredibledefense@lemmy.blahaj.zone only has 10 posts total, but none are from cdrmittens.
So yeah I think you are correct - the old content that was already there in Blåhaj Lemmy's database remains, for their content posted to !noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works, but after the ban anything that the Blåhaj Lemmy tries to pull in for that user just gets discarded, and not added to the database. i.e. it has the old but not the new content, for that user. Most likely votes as well as posts or comments (b/c why would that be different?). Though since !NonCredibleDefense@sh.just.works has nothing to do with lemmy.blahaj.zone, they can continue to post on their own home instance - it is only Blåhaj Lemmy that will not see those posts, by design, b/c of the ban.
I hope that makes sense!:-)
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/sagxd@lemmy.ml). 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!?:-)
Very true and very well said.
Though multiple things can be true at once - if both OP was acting in bad faith (I didn't look) and people get banned from Lemmy.ml at the drop of a hat, i.e. moderation is done in bad faith as well.
I get what you are saying - and yes, compassion is awesome - but also, look at the history of that instance and you'll see what I mean. If they really have lost the faith then they could step down as moderator of that instance and allow someone else to take that burden. Or just shut it down entirely (that's what the dmv.social instance did, when they felt like the pressure was too much). Not that I am advocating for either option (especially since the next person who replaces them would likely be actively worse at this point?), but just pointing out that after receiving the bad vibes, spreading them further is still a matter of choice.
Yeah unfortunately it's not quite ready for mainstream yet. I've noticed over the last several days that I've been using it a bunch of small UI things that would really frustrate someone without a high level of tolerance to such. e.g. you get a notification telling you that you have a message, you click it, but there's no message; so you do a control-F to try to find it... nope, still no message; next you have to hunt through the entire page for every "expansion block" and "Continue thread" (which takes you to another page) and those "auto-collapse" (based on comment threshold), and I disabled "auto-hide" but surely that might really be a problem if there's a Notification for something that becomes impossible to see later without changing your configuration settings.
For extremely basic things it's fine... mostly. Just never edit your messages and someone will be fine. I say that b/c you can't edit comments in-line in the page where they are at, and once you are done editing one, it doesn't take you back to it but rather to the OP thread instead. Whereupon again you have to hunt for your comment all over again as mentioned above. Which is especially annoying when you have to do it multiple times, b/c there is no Preview feature to let you know what is coming after you submit it - did you insert a space between your [alttext] (link here)? did you mess up your "quoting" rules? does an image not render?
(the above on purpose:-)
On the other hand, they can allow YouTube embeds without having to wonder what is on the other side of that sus-looking link and click and leave the page. And personal instance blocks - that actually work - and categories, and like it will tell you, for every comment, both the time something was posted and the time it was last edited, woot!:-) There's just a ton of fantastic features, more so than Lemmy in many ways, and yet at the same time less too - if that makes any sense at all.
But then again, more people know how to code in Python, so I hope it will catch up soon:-). That might even be what we're seeing now - the core UI needs to be not monkeyed around with by a bunch of people all working at cross-purposes, but then all these nice little additions could each be someone's side project? But they need to get the core working too.
Not really. Well, instance admins can defederate from it, but as a normal user you have a pitifully small list of all not easy choices. First, a couple apps like Sync and Connect can (but for them I don't know if they would block e.g. images from there); second is move to PieFed or Mbin (I moved to PieFed myself, but could not find this post there so had to come back to my previous account, as an alt now I guess, to be able to reply here - so it's got issues); third is move to one of only 3 tiny instances that I've ever heard of that have blocked it; fourth is spin up your own instance, and defederate from them. The long version.
Edit: oh, there is a basic Lemmy "instance block", which blocks only communities on those instances - but not users, their posts, replies, votes, etc., and even that much was rolled back somewhere between 0.19.3 and 0.19.5 so that they can now send notifications to you. So it is very misleading named. The last one there is what almost caused me to leave the Fediverse entirely when I accidentally replied to one comment in ChapoTrapHouse and another somewhere in lemmygrad.ml. The replies to each kept coming in for WEEKS and WEEKS, long after I wanted it to end. The rule "remember the human" seemed to not apply to them.
Uh oh, but you said that you would never say the words "not good"... /s :-P
But yeah, the wisdom of the ages seems to tell us that "what goes around comes around" and "whatever system you choose to use to measure others with, you will end up using the very same system of measurement against your very own self" - i.e. if you don't want others to be a certain way, like hypocritical, then don't be that way yourself. It probably has to do with formation of the superego portion of our personalities, but however it is implemented, it seems to be an accurate description of human psychology.
So if we say that others are "stupid"... then isn't that surely what we think that we do ourselves, at least sometimes? In contrast, if we allow ourselves to realize that others may not be "stupid" but merely "misled" or "mistaken in this particular area" or "in possession of incorrect facts with which to base conclusions upon" - all of these being very distinct from such thoughts as "they are most definitely dumb as a post" - then we see others more clearly, and also thereby are more accepting of our own very selves.
Which in turn allows us to see still other things (in the world, including both them and us) more clearly as well - i.e. instead of muddying the waters, we aim to see whatever is truly there. So it's not even something that we need to do for the sake of "kindness" (to either them or ourselves), so much as it is necessary for deeper logical introspection as well.
Anyway, to me these words seem to conjure a thought like "don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes". Or the political variation "surely the leopards who eat everyone's faces off would never eat my face off in particular!" The converse of either of these points to a weaker, lesser, lower, unclear form of thinking... that will ultimately wrap back around to hurt our very selves, despite how at first glance someone could think that they only intended to be negative against other people. But there is a better way, and that is to realize the truth of this principle: "what goes around comes around". So simple... yet missed by what seems like everyone that I've ever met (including, you guessed it, myself! 🤣).
Enemies should think twice before "pissing off" (hehe) someone who has access to a crapulence cannon!
Sometimes a critique can be most helpful, especially if delivered with kind intentions.
For people that enjoy using ~~Arch btw~~ Linux, we're good yeah. Although occasionally some of us will die or whatever, and we need to have some level of growth or else accept that we will pretty much just shrink from now onwards. i.e., people talk as if we will go mainstream, or rather as if content will spring up magically from nowhere. If we want the small niches like Reddit has, we would need the userbase first. And to get that, we'd have to ditch our toxicity issues, make the UI more functional, and above all else make better moderation tools. Which I am doubtful will happen as the Lemmy devs seem happy with their current pacing and direction of changes - that's 99% fine with me btw, as it's theirs to do with whatever they please; though I am all the more happy to now see the likes of PieFed grow much quicker, even though it started out so very much further behind.
Fair point about PieFed being extremely tiny, and there are only 3 of them that are open to the public to join (https://join.piefed.social/try/) - though I am somewhat surprised to see the number of users for Mbin being so low. Yeah, I suppose they must be going back to Reddit, or perhaps Bluesky, or something else.
I am not sure how much to worry about the number of instances - on the one hand the long-anticipated 0.19.6 software release came out just today, which should fix the federation issues with Lemmy.World for many of them. On the other hand, smaller instances weren't likely to want to pull down the entirety of the Fediverse to begin with, as an actual multi-user one (even if on the small side, like Discuss.Online or Aussie.Zone) would, plus once gone, wouldn't we expect them to never come back, i.e. regardless of the software release today? So whatever turned them away... it would have been interesting to have known (though introverts would be the last to have offered such:-).