The domain https://fediverse.observer/ redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
No problem. Happy to provide insight into my workings :)
Yes and yes.
Yeah, the snippets and links you provided match my understanding of the situation. I don’t recall who or where, but I recall someone saying they were having a much easier time recruiting people to Piefed rather than Lemmy, due to Lemmy already having an established reputation. That being said, I expect the Lemmy 1.0 launch will cause a significant bump.
I found the user saying that, but they didn’t elaborate on what missing features they wanted. It’s been years since I used Reddit, do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?
I recall running into this issue and being confused, before I found the setting. Do you know if this is still the default? If so, and the Dev hasn’t given a specific reason for the decision (I can’t immediately find a post about it), I don’t mind making a post to ask them to switch the default.
Agreed.
Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist. If they did use alts to get around the block, their alt’s instance’s admin could be contacted. My understanding is that the “troll behavior” on .ml is allowed, may be even encouraged, by their admins/devs. So, different admin may not have a tolerant attitude toward it. Along with this, as more communities spread out from the flagship and most popular instances (.ml, .world, .social), I think things will get less toxic too.
As an aside, over the last 3-months, it looks like most of the “politically” focused instances are the ones on the heavier declining side of the range. The instances declining the least or even growing are on the “unaligned” side of things.
Some people for some reason - particularly younger ones - seem to demand usage of a 3rd-party app. So my guess is that they may have meant things like user and post flairs, polls, emoji reactions, categories of communities (multi-reddits), etc., which PieFed technically offers but most 3rd-party apps have yet to catch up to utilize those capabilities. For example Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.
And I don’t know how PyLova may change the situation still further - it offers even more features than PieFed, though the latter keeps incorporating most of those changes back into its main codebase, so at the moment they are still fairly similar.
Yes, unfortunately. I was trying out several 3rd-party apps like Summit and Voyager to see what all the fuss is about, and unfortunately some of those aspects that I would consider crucial to my own usability - like that one - are buried somewhere in the settings, disabled by default. I can’t tell you how many times I began to craft a response to someone, only to notice that they are on Lemmy.ml at which point I abandoned my endeavor as it seemed futile given that additional information. Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.
I also thought about making such a post, but I can see from the devs’ perspective that turning on the display of instance names in Voyager is not a feature that is universally good. For one thing it doesn’t always work, especially in replies deeper into a chain, and especially dependent upon the length of the actual username itself. And for another, does it really matter? For someone who knows the culture here it can greatly aid, and arguably it helps someone learn about the culture here, but the largest majority of the time the only thing that matters is “belongs to tankie triad” vs. not, after which distinctions such as “is on lemmy.world” vs. let’s say sh.itjust.works are much finer-grained nuances that rarely rise to being necessary. In other words, if there was some major instance (like PieFed.zip) that would place a user-level block onto Lemmy.ml just like it does to hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, then display of instance names following the username is no longer necessary, for new joiners to the Threadiverse. Hence, from their perspective, I could see a resistance to that solution being used to deal with the underlying problem imperfectly.
About instance blocking, I recently discovered that programming.dev has a number of community-level blocks put into place to help a new user experience a more drama-free version of the Threadiverse. You can see their full listing at https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, although I note that while it includes explicitly “political” ones, it misses ones that end up having a huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like !memes@lemmy.ml - which can be quite a turn-off to people, especially those in the Western World, and those undecided whether to join or not, when such content appears and they don’t know yet how to distinguish it from e.g. identically-named communities on different instances (which are also extremely heavily political in those other locations as well, though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).
Agreed - solutions need not be perfect to have at least some effect, I guess I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation, as in someone who receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes.
Oh wow, that’s extremely interesting. Though all smaller numbers of course. As the technology continues to improve, the overall experience can get better, it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have where they would come to the Threadiverse using Kbin but not Lemmy, and now it seems like for the most part they simply will not come period. So it’s interesting to see that even countering with only a trickle, that is not universally true:-).
Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that as the answer.
Didn’t know Piefed was still back copying Pylova’s efforts. I recall the first time they removed attribution, in what I feel was a very dishonest way. Hopefully, if they are still integrating Pylova’s work, they are at the very least giving attribution.
Yes, I strongly wish that Voyager had far better integration of Piefed features (like grouping cross-posts).
Yep. Difficult to know if you’re in one though. In my experience, someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.
Appreciate the perspective. I can see your point.
Did not know that, thanks for sharing. That was interesting to look through.
That makes sense.
Not the best for getting people to stick around :(
Ah, that would be a nice feature to have throughout the threadiverse. Although, I almost never see the indicator (probably too curated at this point becuase, at this point, I block bad faith actors/trolls immediately).
Yeah, quite frustrating, but I do think we are making progress and things are slowly getting better :)
I’ve been kind of thinking the ideal instance for new users would be something like the programming.dev community hidden list, with a de-federated triad, and run by the .zip admin team. Maybe that’ll be a thing one day.
Yeah I can’t fully explain the total fascination with apps either, but I do see some definite advantages including the ability to separate viewing other web pages separately from the app, like in fast switching or even side by side in like a split screen context when that is possible. And Firefox is horrible at memory management, even on Android - it legit runs down my battery even when minimized unless I force-kill it.
According to the comment at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28484007, PieFed vs. PyLova are still at odds. If there was attribution this time, I did not dig deep enough to find it, plus I highly doubt it. Although otoh PyLova seems to be included in the PieFed instance picker pages? So different devs seem to have different opinions on the subject.
Yes agreed about Voyager although tbf the vast majority of apps lack the cross-post comment merge feature in particular - according to https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app only Interstellar has it now (which has an odd UI that is geared more towards Mbin’s microblogging style than Threadiverse forum-style content)
Really? I’ve heard it said that all someone has to do is figure out who or what they are not allowed to criticize. But I suppose there are layers, and indeed disinformation is a helluva powerful effect.
There’s always so much more to learn about the Threadiverse - I do find it fascinating:-). Though I also can see why others react as they do whenever it gets mentioned outside of here (Reddit, Bluesky, X, etc.).
I think PieFed.zip is just about as close to ideal as one could want, except for adding a block to Lemmy.ml by default for new users - or perhaps asking via the sign-up wizard, like “Do you want to see extremist content, including calls for murder?” Hey, some people do - sometimes me even for research purposes, and we can all appreciate having the option when that is desired, right? Nobody is wanting to be a “Karen” here and tell others what to do, only offer true choices to people who won’t yet be knowledgeable enough to be able to implement an instance block on their own yet - and again particularly to even become aware that they want one, in order to achieve their goal of avoiding both extremist and also trolling content in one fell swoop.
If you feel like it, you could petition to add such a block, although I’ve actually tried already in the past for a different instance, and there is such enormous resistance to doing so for Lemmy.ml that I doubt it would happen. Somehow even Rimu who has such a contentious relationship with the tankies doesn’t even do that? I do find it so odd that this is one of the most common refrains that I’ve ever heard across the Threadiverse - to be able to help newcomers block the entire tankie triad - yet not one single major instance seems willing to actually do it. We’ve made our choice, collectively: this is a tankie / troll bar. Regardless of the existence of an echo chamber inside of Lemmy.ml, outside of it we are 4chan when it comes to refusing to block the content coming in from it.
Which obviously mainstream non-technical normies nope right out, blocking that content the only way that they know how: by leaving the Threadiverse altogether (which already has exceedingly little OC to begin with, making the cost to benefit ratio simply too high).
Haha. I’ve never made that connection, but I also force kill everything after I’m done immediately using it. Hopefully we have a Servo (!servo@programming.dev) option before too long.
Yeah, I had a feeling. While Pylova instances are listed in the Piefed instance picker, piefed.social has “Silencing” quokk.au and anarchist.nexus. So, I doubt Mia/quokka is going to be trusting Rimu in the immediate future.
That’s a useful page I didn’t know about before. Thanks for sharing :)
I agree, to an extent, but I think it takes a significant effort to decide to question things to begin with. If everything and everyone you encounter in your life says the Sun revolves around the Earth, in my view, it takes something extra to not just find or notice a discrepancy, but also take the time/effort to go against everything you know, see, and encounter to pull on that thread and see what it reveals. Pulling on that thread could turn your friends/family/neighbors against you, it could threaten your livelihood or safety. In a non-supportive environment, I expect it’s quite scary and it’s much easier for someone to stick their head in the ground and carry on as if they didn’t notice the discrepancy.
For clarity, piefed.zip doesn’t block any of the ‘triad’. I believe the .zip instances marketed/known(?) as being open/non-restrictive. So, I don’t think the admins are interested in blocking any instances, unless they are spam or similarly problematic.
I suspect this has to do with the .ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, and Rimu needing to have a cordial relationship with them to maintain interoperability in the threadiverse.
I understand the feeling. It may help you to know that the ‘triad’ has decreased in total % of the threadiverse in the last 3 months. Also, look at the Threadiverse 3 years ago before the Reddit 3rd-party App Exodus, there was really only a few Lemmy instances to choose from (lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, and a couple others). So, while many instances started during the exodus, most of the established communities and instances were part of the ‘triad’ and many new users would have joined the established instances/communities. I suspect if users could easily switch their accounts between instances, you would see a huge change in the distribution of the Threadiverse.
Perhaps some better on-boarding, about curation, could help improve the ‘stickiness’ of instances. It wouldn’t surprise me, if a change like that caused the slight decrease in users (between growth spikes) to even out, stabilize, and perhaps allow a slight increase in users to develop.
PyLova: agreed, sadly.
Disinformation: yes, exactly like MAGA. They aren’t bad people, just disinformed - as in actively utilized as tools to achieve the objectives of the one(s) pulling the strings. Arguably we should all resist such, but as you say the barriers against such are high, and I think we can agree that some people are simply too preoccupied with the basics of living to have either the time or inclination to become properly informed. One implication then being that it is the very foundational principle of democracy itself that works against its own demise: when unedumacashiated people are allowed to vote, chaos is not nearly as likely to result (from such “random” inputs) as the system being taken over by a malicious actor who may then use it for their own nefarious purposes.
But even so, that explanation neither absolves people of their failures in the absolute necessity to remain curious, nor absolves us of our own failure when we allow the system to propagate, and in fact help it along.
According to this post PieFed.zip uses the same blocking system as Lemmy.zip for new joiners. See also this comment from the admin. Like programming.dev, the .zip instances (like all other instances) can also block particular communities - which unfortunately neither the Lemmy nor PieFed UI offers a mechanism to expose that list publicly to the users, making the transparency of this issue rather horrible, where I have to link to messages from the admins but there is no webpage that will simply show an updated status - like does exist for instance federation vs. defederation. The tools here, again both Lemmy and PieFed, are abysmal at such transparency topics.
This is the kind of stuff that I would love to see added - to Lemmy, to PieFed, or to PyLova - and I feel like the increased transparency would help entice new joiners.
‘death to america’ is a hyperbolic idiom meaning an end to american imperial dominance, not a wish to harm american people. as an american myself i say it all the time. i want to see an end to the system, not the people living under it. ‘marg bar amrika’ has been a protest chant for 50 years and has been deliberately mistranslated by propagandists to demonize dissent.
what good is ‘america’ to the people it bombs, imprisons and impoverishes anyway?
To your point, I’ve heard this meaning before, although I don’t think it is commonly known to the general populace (which is also to your other point about propogandization).
Potentially against your point, if a slogan/idiom is being intentionally misused for misinformation, it might be time to move to a different phrase, rather than sticking with the corrupted one. Additionally, if multiple phrases could be utilized, it may get the point across better (less likely to successfully propagandize multiple options, than a single option). Although, I suspect propagandists would weaponize the ‘weakest’ commonly utilized option against the cause.
one example that comes to mind is the ‘from the river to the sea’ slogan; it’s a call for equal rights across historic palestine, but gets labelled as a call for genocide by detractors.
changing the slogans doesn’t help because the target isn’t the words, it’s the underlying demand. propagandists will weaponize whatever language you use if the politics behind it threaten them.
the way i see it conceding the rhetorical terrain just means constantly retreating to increasingly watered down language while the actual demand gets no closer to being heard.
I guess my point is a base/group can’t increase membership/size if no one knows what they stand for, or believe they stand for something else completely (misinformation propaganda).
Agreed.
I may not have previously conveyed my thought clearly. I never meant that any slogans/idioms should be watered down. More that they should be utilized like guerrilla warfare. By the time the propagandists have a counter to a slogan, the movement would have already moved to the next (the underlying sentiment/demand remains the same, the words relaying the goal are constantly shifting to prevent capture/misinformation propaganda).
Also, if a slogan doesn’t get countered by the time its switched out, the movement could go back to it again later. The slogan’s return could act as a unifier between the groups the different slogans energized, as I suspect different slogans will have different effects on different sub-groups, and returning to a prior slogan could let everyone know they are on the same team, even if they didn’t know that previously.