Hal

Clair Obscur: Exposition 33?

How do we know Dr Pepper is a person doctor not a vet?

Or maybe Dr Pepper has a PhD?

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.

I thought the implication was that you may only be able to buy from that registrar if you’re from/in that country?

Can’t you just put the stuff in the trolley unbagged then bag them when you get to the car?

So if your toast isn’t taller than those sides, can you open it sideways or something? Remember those bars are scorching hot.

My favourite is when a toaster with the lift function raises to a high point that’s lower than the high point on one without the lift.

Or that time I went through every display toaster in the store to get the one that lifted the highest, then when I bought one and took it home the one in the box only lifted to a high point an inch lower than the display model.

Shit, with the M2 chip (and I guess later versions), I saw tech people I would never have imagined as Mac users jumping over to Apple.

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.