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.
Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0, now that I think about it. Anyway it’s only for convenience of pulling in community names, to help onboard a new instance, while existing instances won’t need it. Also the central authority could be let’s say Lemmy.zip, or sh.itjust.works, or whatever the admin sets it to. If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen. Otherwise, yeah it’s Lemmy.ml that gets the first even if not final say in what communities are suggested to new instances.
It is things like this that prove the lie to people complaining that Rimu is too controlling of PieFed instances, when features like the above exist showing Lemmy.ml the same or even more. The vast majority of Rimu’s features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in, with a graphical wizard even helping guide the set-up process, whereas this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out. The difference is night and day. Go figure, the same people that claim that Ukraine is responsible for Russia invading it somehow claim that PieFed is more authoritarian than Lemmy?
I am not wanting to ascribe motivations behind Rimu’s actions either, though what I mentioned earlier is based on the set of features released recently, planned to come out soon, and his speaking about the situation for the past year and also looking ahead. e.g. he is not interested in the slightest in fiddling with the UI, preferring to leave that to others - ideally third-party apps, although as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.
We seem to be in a downward spiral where we would need to attract more people, in order to improve the experience here, which in turn would attract more people. Previously we had the hopes of a brave new world free of corporate enshittification to bolster at least those of us who came here. But now we see the reality that the grass is only somewhat greener on this other side, and that in particular there are other forms of enshittification that have nothing to do with corporations.
Oh well, we can only do so much, and the outcome will take care of itself.
Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn’t look to see how active they all are especially recently, and it also mentions that it is based on PHP (https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#requirements). I know very little about that language beyond that it is a scripting one, but recent news stories does make me concerned that it is a difficult one especially regarding security.
And of course you know better than most people that there are <1K total Mbin users (without bothering to check I thought it was like 500-600), so even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K. I also suspect that Rimu’s vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand, except the Threadiverse alone barely functions especially if the goal is to attract more people, who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.
Though Rimu proving extremely difficult to work together with is a major distraction from the advancement of the PieFed agenda - as he said himself in his blog post where he decided to step back from administration of his personal instance (although then couldn’t actually manage to stay away, e.g. leaving the admins surprised that the instance was now implementing a daily vote quota and shadow-censoring contributions from other PieFed and even Lemmy or Mbin instances, without disclosure of this fact).
The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it’s a win-win there!:-)
Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It’s not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it’s easy then…? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what’s easy or not:-).
Good to know.
On that front, I opened another Pylova Issue for instance settings (user facing and one for admin installs). Hopefully that will bear fruit.
My recollection is that they are now opt-in. They didn’t start that way and didn’t become that way until backlash. I think he’s learned his lesson at this point, to make everything opt-in.
Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology. Seems par for the course.
Yeah, that’s my read as well. Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.
My “2 part time developers” (looks like it’s actually 1.5 developers, 1 full, 1 half-time) is from a recent post.
My feeling is it’s less about MAU numbers (best case: +10%) and more about becoming ‘the only game in town’. I think good integration of Mastodon, could significantly increase Piefed MAU over Lemmy and would make Mbin redundant. Making a good Lemmy to Piefed conversion script after that, could knock Lemmy into a death-spiral as well. Piefed would then be the only fediverse Reddit-alternative.
Agreed. I think I was sold on the original ‘dream’ of the fediverse all being connected and it was a bit disappointing when I learned that wasn’t really the case.
It wouldn’t surprise me, if that were the case.
Yeah, I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it. I suspect, if it needs to be iterated on, it won’t be that onerous to change how it can be utilized.
I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired. #2 already exists though - for PieFed/ PyLova though not for Lemmy afaik - but also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial - I’ve seen many people either outright leave PieFed or stating that they had plans to imminently switch to it that they cancelled as a direct result; that was an extremely poor communication rolling out those anti-features, which along with other similar matters previously essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created).
Ah… interesting. I don’t know the full history and it likely depends in part on what features under discussion. There was one set of features that someone on a Lemmy.ml community lied about, stating that a bunch of “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase, and Rimu responded that they were the opposite of hard-coded since they were wrapped inside of an if-statement that was turned OFF by default, so that one was opt-in (fwiw, the original OP there never did acknowledge afaik that they had been in error - the post remained up for at least several months when last I checked and people continued to point to it as evidence of PieFed betraying the principles of the Threadiverse, despite how the entire thing had been debunked). I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in. Rimu in the past has usually been quite friendly and responsive to such, except when he digs his heels in and insists that his way is better even in the face of all opposition (maybe it is even, but it is too much at once and people don’t like having their choices taken away from them, so not the right way to go about making such changes, imho).
Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.
Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜. By the same token, MAGA is “against” the government telling people what to do.
Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw. Other than porn, which Rimu almost but not quite does the opposite of support, PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right? (I’d have to take another look myself to update myself but that was my thought at some point?) Hence this singular change is essentially an outlier that may - or may not - be representative of the situation as a whole. Or you could take the opposite position that the number of these events is simply too hard to be able to say much of anything about, but in that case what is there to learn at all? Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.
And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation. And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.
That sounds logical. I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well. Barely any third-party apps support it, and its web browser UI assumes that post titles will be very long, so for short ones it wastes a very large amount of space, plus other layout concerns as well. PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).
Very exciting indeed!! :-)