Some people seem to REALLY dislike it, but possibly they are not numerically all that many? Which is why I initially wanted to write that post, and now there’s this one also trying to correct the source of the misunderstanding.

Interesting comment from db0:

Ye it’s a problem term. I don’t know if it can be reclaimed, but listing all the software is also not great and most people think of microblogging when they hear “Fediverse”. Maybe “Nestedverse” or “Forumverse”? I don’t really have a good catchy term in mind.

That said, I keep using Threadiverse lately and nobody seems to be challenging it so perhaps its usage is not as problematic as I thought, or as you say here, as much as in the past? It might mainly be a consideration for someone promoting us to Reddit if they wanted to use the term.

(Edit: I think instead of “was never (intentionally)” you meant “was not originally”?)

Regardless of who was first, Threads exists now. If we tell people on Reddit to come join us here on the “Threadiverse (minus Threads itself, except some instances might actually choose to federate with it, while others do not…)”, isn’t that confusing?

I wrote a post about this a couple months ago but ironically PieFed.social had major federation issues for the next week so barely anyone saw it (except those I discussed it with in other conversations). Anyway db0 suggested a really cool name: the Forumverse. 😎

And as @blaze@feddit.org mentions here, I too just call it Lemmy+PieFed+Mbin (& maybe +Sublinks someday we hope?:-)

That said, atm >99.9% of communities are on an instance running Lemmy (for now), so whatever software you use to connect with it - perhaps an app like Voyager or Sync or Connect or Thunder, or Mbin connects with Lemmy (and presumably PieFed?), and PieFed connects with Lemmy too (here is the community !piefed_meta@piefed.social that I’ve already subscribed to from a Lemmy instance so you can immediately see it in action), the majority of the content across the Threadiverse (exclusive of that actually on Threads.net itself) is being funneled through Lemmy, like even if I on PieFed submit a post to !tenforward@lemmy.world, that’s on “Lemmy” where it “lives” - right?

PieFed at least can have communities, as too can Mbin. Though one day Sublinks or some such could convert the existing database to something other than Lemmy… And also the Thunder app now has a fork that can nominally interact with PieFed, so the lines really are getting more blurry.

TLDR: Anyway, we need a cool new term!:-)

And for our accounts I keep using “Fedizen”, to be more inclusive than just Lemming, despite how cool that is - bc Mbin and PieFed (& one day Sublinks) are part of “us” all too, right!?:-D

Also even that number of Lemmy users is an artifact of people leaving instances and creating new accounts across the Fediverse. I have 3 accounts myself that I check usually once a month, bc messages sent to my old one(s) won’t follow me so it’s the only way to make sure that someone trying to reach me can do so. And I had one on Kbin.social as well so there are now 4 OpenStars (3 looking to be active on a monthly basis) - and all of them are me!:-)

The better stat to use then is not Total Accounts but rather Monthly Active Users. In this, Lemmy has been steadily declining. We are now at <41.9k, after we held steady for awhile earlier this year at 45k. The peak after the Rexodus was ~52k - see https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/, the number of instances has gone way down, the number of accounts per instance gone up, it looks like people are abandoning single-user instances in favor of the larger multi-user ones. But Lemmy.World used to hold ~80% of all Lemmy users while now it is closer to like 37% iirc, so overall we are becoming more centralized on average, but also stabilizing into a few established instances, and decentralization at the peak is also happening as well - especially after yesterday’s announcement that will drive even more people, and entire communities, away from Lemmy.World further.

Overall engagement is up though - so more posts and comments from fewer people, those of us who remain here have become more active.

We need to allow emoji reactions so I can respond with 🤢🤮. Or is there one yet for bOtH sIdEs SaMe?🤡😈

🫠🙃

I thought this as well… if “front” here means “Alt” then absolutely.

Whereas now, the changes have already happened.

A decade ago, kinda - see e.g. wildfires in California every single quarter now (since 2014 iirc?), plus just about everywhere else as well like remember when Australia was on fire?

Okay so the 1.5 threshold wasn’t reached a decade ago, but who even knows where the real tipping point is, or rather was.

But going along with your theme: it was supposed to be hundreds of years from now when the climate would change, and start to become more hostile. Whereas now, that “start” was a long way back, and some people born since then have already reached puberty.

Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

For a moment I thought this was some kind of AI-written glitch, but apparently it was taking “artistic license” to use the name of the character rather than actor without acknowledging such - and is real (wow I hate trying to mess with Forbes, it kept changing the link to some other article entirely).

You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you?

Well I know a way but you won’t like it. Actually two ways.

The first is to start your own PieFed server instance. The second is to message an existing person who admins one to add it. Whenever I add new communities, like !AskUSA@discuss.online, it just goes under the generic Home -> Communities, while in comparison !AskLemmy@Lemmy.World goes underneath Home -> Topics -> Chilling and so that’s where AskUSA should have gone as well.

Perhaps in the future, whoever brings in a community could make a suggestion as to which Topic areas it should lie underneath, but PieFed is fairly early in its development and thus kind of “polish” is still being added. But for now, it’s something that is predefined by whoever admins the instance.

The good news is that the devs & admins are EXTREMELY responsive, both in speed and concern for what they are making. Like, if you ask for it, there’s a very good chance its prioritization would be increased over other things to get it working faster. Here’s an example post of mine showing such conversation: https://piefed.social/post/301249.

Oh and perhaps I misunderstood you - something like a text listing of them should be available within the code itself, if that’s what you meant? Or there’s https://piefed.social/topics - is that what you mean? I just noticed that the way to access this list changed just today or yesterday I think - this page used to exist but it was also a drop down list as well (that never worked right in my desktop browser, though did on a mobile), so if it is being difficult lately that is likely why:-).

Though beware if you are considering making PieFed your daily driver: it helps if you know your way around Lemmy and have a backup account for when you can’t get things done using PieFed. Searching for instance is not great, so trying to find a post I usually do with Lemmy rather than PieFed. Another is that Notifications are more than a little bit broken: e.g. your very comment reply to me here I had an extremely difficult time trying to find - I read through every comment on this thread before finding yours in fact. The reasons this can happen are many and varied: posts that later get removed still remain in your Notifications area, as do users from instances that you have blocked, and if a comment is buried too deeply in the chain in a post then you’ll need to click the Continue thread button, except you won’t know which one of those to click in the first place, also a comment can be auto-collapsed or even hidden, frustratingly even if it was not at the time you replied but then that happened later then you similarly to these other situations won’t be taken right to it when you click the notification. Honestly sometimes I’ll go to Lemmy, visit the post, and search for my name and see all the people who replied to me, then walk up the chain to see some text to search for, then switch back to PieFed to actually do the reply… So anyway: TLDR: PieFed is quite interesting, and I do use it for my daily driver, but it can also be quite frustrating until some of these more foundational issues are fixed.

That said, PieFed already can do more than Lemmy, in so many ways. For one, I can have it send me a notification upon every single new post in a community or my choosing, like !tenforward@lemmy.world and !
AskUSA@discuss.online, and for another, if I wanted I could have it cease sending me notifications for a comment that I made if people decide to relentlessly troll me for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards (this is no mere hypothetical situation: both hexbear and Lemmygrad have done this exact thing to me). I can also view a post without having to read any comments at all from users posting from an instance of my own choosing - instance blocking is horrible misnamed on Lemmy and does next to nothing along those lines, while defederation is dependent upon an admin, except that PieFed puts that ability to choose into the hands of its users. That alone made me want to choose it, but everything else is does is great too! Caveat: so long as I can fall back onto Lemmy when I need to.

Also PieFed has next to no moderation tools, so there’s a lot that is still coming.:-) I am definitely here for it!:-)

I got my start on Kbin.social as well - he was ambitious, that’s for sure, but despite all the people clamoring that they could do things faster and better, that dream doesn’t look to me like it has materialized? Although Mbin is also good as it is, if you like the interface and also want the interconnection with Mastodon.

I do see features being added to PieFed over time, and hold out high hopes for it.

Sublinks also looks promising, though it was paused for basically a year due to its founder having a baby.

Well actually we use Arch btw…

No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @openstars@piefed.social is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)

Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.

Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).

That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.

Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.

The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012

We all know what that list would look like: https://feddit.org/post/3602869

TLDR version:

Beautiful! 😍

Probably it only tastes like grass to a cat. To everyone else it tastes like figgy pudding (I presume that’s a real thing that definitely must surely exist somehow). Test it and let us know? :-P

Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.

Read some more about it here (don’t click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:

Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.

TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn’t, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).

The Fediverse is a bunch of pirate and free trade ships that pass messages around with one another.

Pick a ship and let’s get going!

Then show a list of the top instances. e.g. lemm.ee has the maximum amount of content, but at the cost of including all known trolling instances - Alt-Right, Alt-Left, and otherwise. lemmynsfw.com for, you know, porn, but many people block it as a result. Themed instances for Star Trek, Star Wars, anarchy, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, computer programming, gaming, anime, climate change, general science, etc. Or location based like aussie.zone for Australia, lemmy.ca for Canada, feddit.org for Germany, feddit.uk for UK, jlai.lu for France, Discuss.Online for USA, etc.

Sorting the list at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list can help. Unfortunately it requires 2 clicks after following that link to see what I mean, as the URL won’t provide a sort ordering.

For the examples given, you could make links that show the feed sorted by Local and Active, to show what kind of content is most readily accessible there - e.g. this link, and therefore would have the least amount of federation (message passing) issues especially delays.

For the most part I would avoid instances having only a single admin as there can be problems with that, like them not responding quickly to a request to make a new account, or in the worst case what happened with Ernst at Kbin.social or dmv.social or so on where when the single person called it quits then the entire instance disappeared.

Which boat you choose can have a MASSIVE difference in how you experience the Fediverse - e.g. check out how different lemmy.ml looks from Lemmy.ca - bc of how many people will straight up block your entire instance (e.g. I have blocked all users from Lemmy.ml, bc I don’t enjoy those type of tankie/Alt-Left messages in my feed).