Hal

Not OP but I use an Enterprise version that is fine, I guess a different release branch. My mother doesn’t have the enterprise version as she works for a small business and it broke.

You make a lot of good points, and I think I agree with your overarching theme - we don’t really know.

Piefed does a lot better job of not recommending the weird instances, and I do hope it overtakes Lemmy because ultimately Lemmy is built by a fringe group so they aren’t going to stop recommending fringe groups.

I think that people are unlikely to keep using both Lemmy and Piefed long term. Piefed is new and exciting, in another year we should see people settling into an account and hopefully we’ll have a better idea at whether the threadiverse is growing or shrinking.

For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. That wasn’t natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It’s kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.

Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic “go”? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?

I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don’t have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you’re back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.

Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.

e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs

Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn’t affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.

For example, read the comments

Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn’t really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn’t really “get” reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It’s an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also “getting” it is something that helps retain people.

not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️

Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It’s nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it’s hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.

On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy’s new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.

But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don’t spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I’ll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.

I’ve said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don’t think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren’t all that interested in growth.

Are the numbers actually shrinking for Lemmy+Piefed?

Lemmy has gone from 36,600 monthly active users to 33,600 users in the last year. A loss of 3,000 monthly active users.

Piefed has gone from 1,600 MAU a year ago to 6,900 MAU now, an increase of 5,300 users.

This means the total has increased by 2,300 MAU in the past year.

Note that this drop in Lemmy and rise in Piefed can be explained by lemmynsfw shutting down and being replaced by fedinsfw, which runs piefed and has 3,600 MAU. Arguably both Lemmy and Piefed are slowly gaining in MAU.

A few phones back I started getting a second hand flagdhip phone every 3-4 years, I think it’s well worth the flagship second hand 1 year old model instead of the mid range phones I used to get for the same price.

Plus the last couple have been pixels for GraphineOS, so it’s nice to not be directly handingb Google money.

Summit here too. I changed up some of the display settings so it feels like Relay for Reddit 😀

The things that got me to move from Voyager were that when images didn’t load first time, there was no way to re-try - Summit has that. And I don’t think Voyager handled drafts that well. Summit has drafts but I do wish there was a client that had drafts like Relay did, where if you come back to the same comment/post and hit reply it has your draft from where you left off on that comment/reply.

Can you explain some more? I don’t get how this separation helps unless you keep a small number of community instances.

Unfortunately Lemmy has one major problem when it comes to banning spam bots. Only the instance that a user belongs to can ban the user in a way that federates to other instances. This means if that particular instance doesn’t quickly ban the user, then hundreds of other instances need to do it manually. Currently, a pretty significant percentage of spammers get banned individually by many instances.

If we had 100x as many users and 100x as many instances, we would have 100x as many bot accounts for every instance to ban.

The solution is probably something like shared ban lists or ban mirroring (setting an instance up to ban every user that some trusted instance bans). But right now it’s just people clicking, and it’s not scalable.

Lemmy definitely has LLM bot accounts, but the Lemmy is operating at a scale of tens of thousands of users where Mastodon has a couple of million. There’s a lot of manual action by Lemmy admins that probably won’t scale well when there are millions of users.

As someone else already mentioned, it’s almost certainly already happening. Lemmy federates with Mastodon, and Mastodon has a user base and a volume of content that would be hard to ignore. So there are likely many Mastodon instances that are slurping up content from Mastodon, Lemmy, Piefed, Pixelfed, anything else across the Fediverse, and using this to train AI.

It would just be nice if they didn’t crash servers doing it.

Bots scraping the website cause high levels of server load because compiling a page is an intensive activity, and so instance admins are taking active steps to stop this in order to stop all the scrapers bringing down the server.

But if they actually wanted Lemmy content (as opposed to the bots scraping everything on the internet they can find, and happening across Lemmy) then they can just start an instance and have other instances send them the content via normal federation. It would be almost impossible to tell this from a normal instance, and would be more efficient for everyone involved.

Hot damn, and here’s me thinking thefuck was the way to do this.