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.
I didn’t think I conveyed the idea well. It would not be an automated or bot process (Reddit comments wouldn’t be added as Threadiverse comments). The good/useful comments from Reddit would be utilized by a poster to add to their own threadiverse post to help add more relevant content (Example that got 57 comments).
While that may be the fastest solution, the triad haven’t been doing great in at least the last few months, even without major intervention (Post with Data):
Lemmy.ml:
hexbear.net:
Lemmygrad.ml:
Average of the other 16 Instances (of Top 20, excludes lemmy.world who’s similarly crashing):
It looks like hexbear.net is suffocating by itself. Maybe some users move from hexbear.net to lemmy.ml or the declining hexbear.net activity is forcing lemmy.ml users to be more active (I have no evidence of either, but for argument’s sake say they do), even then lemmy.ml is shrinking too.
I did wonder what happened to that person.
Seems like some efforts toward better on-boarding could return good results (could include default blocks, etc.). I have some other analytics I need to get working again first, but after, I think I’ll take a stab at looking at decoupling and identifying key instance on-boarding differences that effect retention.
Edit: moved comma.
Edit 2: Looks like Pylova likes the subscribable block list idea: https://codeberg.org/quokkau/PyLova/issues/30
Encouraging people to contribute only goes so far when this place is simultaneously discouraging people’s contributions. It is systemic, not limited to ML, and needs major efforts including enhanced technical capabilities to try to solve. Note that if ML ever were to be defederated, the absolute most toxic trolls would simply switch to using their alts on some other instance such as Lemmy.World, which they have announced they will do in advance, several years ago. They even indicated that they would make apps that automate the process of trying to send messages to someone, cycling through an array of alts until one is found that is not banned on that instance (or by that recipient?) - no truly does mean to simply push forward all the harder, for some.
But making a more firm stance would also send a signal about what is desired vs. not. Are calls for murder of all people in the Western World acceptable? Apparently, judging from their presence, yes.
Most places are defederated from HB - which was not always the case (I was on both StarTrek.Website and Discuss.Online prior to blocking them), but now that it is I don’t worry about them so much as ML that is still sending out content that turns people away.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, I only showed references in support of the fact that the problem lies there in front of us. Or at this point, behind us, since once a reputation is gained (for e.g. nostr, 4chan, etc.) it is exceedingly difficult to change.
On the whole, I think our reputation is closer to nostr and 4chan than it is to Bluesky. Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM. Something must be specifically blocked in order to filter it out (either that, or a new instance can include only trusted existing instances, but that runs into problems where new ones pop up all the time and will get excluded, so this approach seems not to be used by the vast majority of existing instances, at least the major ones).
Wonderful!
That team is so energetic and helpful, it’s a pleasure to see it! 😁
My understanding is the trolls exist because .ml admins allow it. If they try using .world, I expect the .world admins would ban. If they ban evade, I imagine a new safeguard would be added to counter them.
I don’t go to other social media, so my only knowledge of our reputation is from people repeating things here.
Hopefully “our reputation” can jump to a different comparison scale (I wouldn’t want to be compared to any of those options).
Okay, I’m going to push back on this. At no point have I ever heard CSAM being accepted or allowed. The only time I’ve ever heard of it coming up, everyone reacted negatively. The poster was blocked, all the posts were deleted immediately, and new safeguards were put into prevent it happening again.
Agreed :)
Edit: missed a section.
Perhaps this is an exceedingly poor way to describe it - I just meant that federation (like with ML, hexbear, lemmygrad, and any new instance) happens by default. Instances that host CSAM - like extremist far-right content - are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.
Anyway it could still be misleading even if correct, bc this is at the instance level, whereas someone still has to subscribe at the community level in order for content to begin coming in. So the potential for content - good, bad, or whatever - to spread is baked right into the ActivityPub Protocol from the start, by design. Just like what people keep saying about 4chan (though admittedly I never went there personally).
And people must have subscribed to hexbear and lemmygrad and ML communities on all of the major instances, therefore all of that content was already there for me to stumble upon as a new joiner myself, fresh from KBin where it had been severely curtailed. I - like all other new joiners - then bad a decision whether to flee this place permanently (which I almost did, and continue to revisit that thought every year or so as expectations keep not being met, making it all the harder to hold out much hope for the future) or to begin blocking people, one by one, and even making a (successful) petition to defederate discuss.online from hexbear.net.
All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!
Ultimately, it’s arguably fine for places like 4chan and nostr to exist (unless you take the position that the echo chamber then breeds toxic trolls that when they leave it, act to harm others, though keep in mind that in this analogy, the Threadiverse itself is 4chan and nostr, in that we allow anything and everything, especially on ML that we then host on all of our machines too - e.g. if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee), but what’s far less fine is to allow people to stumble upon it unawares, particularly when it is labeled oppositely from what it truly is. A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.
I have no source for this, but I think, now, first content/post/comment from a new instance has to be approved by an instance admin (could be wrong and misremembering though). If not, might be worth seeing if that is a option admins would want added. Thoughts?
On that note, it seems Pylova has finished writing up the block subscription code (yesterday) and it’ll be in the next update (unknown date).
It could remain forever, but I think most instances (or at least Piefed instance) are set up to delete old content after “x” amount of time. Alternatively, admins could just manually delete the old content, if they wanted.
Agreed. I think .zip’s approach where it has the default blocks and explains them is a good approach. If the subscribable blocks also make it into the on-boarding, I think there will be a large swath of new .zip users who almost never encounter the triad issues (assuming Pylova subscribable block list spreads back to Piefed and beyond). If that on boarding spreads throughout the Threadiverse, the triad could be dealt with, without major confrontations, which I think most admins don’t want to deal with.
I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.
However, PieFed made an improvement to not need to do this anymore, and then Lemmy followed suit as well, and now the whole process is much easier. Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done. Technically admins - or again, I think anyone - can always add it the old way, but only if you know that it exists and how to make that happen (which isn’t hard but requires crafting a URL rather than mere clicking on links). Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.
Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!! Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists. It’s okay for him to work on whatever he wants, but it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.
I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.
The PieFed thing was once again another of Rimu’s rants against “unserious” meme content. He is obviously entitled to not feel forced into providing unlimited hosting for images, but I am saying that the limitation built into the PieFed software and enacted on e.g. PieFed.social may not be universally applied. I could well see e.g. lemmynsfw.app choosing differently to retain every image forever. Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.
This is a limitation of all Fediverse software that I’ve seen, including Lemmy and Mbin, so not just PieFed. Though PyLova does have the most transparency of all of them… and yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.
I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists. But… at least the software will support that now, so yes indeed this is the very important, crucial first step!!
I’m aware of that aspect, and I may be conflating it with on-boarding new instances.
The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL.
I don’t want to prescribe motives to his actions, but I feel like some of his positions and efforts are to “dominate” the threadiverse and knock out the competition.
In this case, Mbin. From my understanding, Mbin is pretty far behind in development (lots of bugs and missing features), only have 2 part time developers and they are trying to supplement that with AI/LLMs. I suspect the LLMs will help them for a bit, but the project will die when the code is only manageable by LLMs and prices for vibe-coding go up significantly.
When that happens, all the Mbin users could “easily” migrate to Piefed. Though, I imagine, if Piefed gets Mastodon implementation working properly, that may cause a migration then too (possibly death spiraling Mbin, if the migration is large enough).
Yeah, they are :)
Yeah, now that you mention it, I’m not sure how wide spread deletion is. I believe I recall one of Rimu’s blog posts mentioned it in some depth, so I assumed at least some instances are taking advantage of it (especially with the price of hardware).
That’s a good point. Maybe worth another Pylova feature request?
Hmm. I’m imagining someone will just make a block list as their only blocking measure and anytime they need to block someone, they’ll just add them to the list, and people will subscribe to that list or multiple lists.
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.