I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
There are an absolute shit-ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. To give just one example, PieFed offers “polls”, which do not show up on Lemmy since the latter lacks the ability to properly receive them.
Even for the posts that do federate, many features cannot federate in Lemmy, since the latter lacks the entire concept of them - e.g. hashtags, user & post flairs, user labels, limitation of community voting to only subscribers, etc. To give an example there, if a Lemmy community wanted to see fewer posts about USA politics, a moderator only has one option: make a rule and ban users who try it. In contrast a PieFed community could make a community flair and have a much gentler rule that any post about USA politics must use that flair, so that users who did not want to see such could filter them out. PieFed also combines communities into cross-community topic areas, and combines all comments across all cross-posts (identical posts sent to different communities), with the ruleset of the one currently clicked on displayed at the bottom below a post, including the description and the entire set of rules that the mods are asking the members to follow (displayed on each and every single post). Therefore even the identical communities look different when on PieFed, with many enhanced features (caveat: 3rd party apps have not yet adapted to take advantage of most of these features).
https://join-lemmy.org/instances will send you to places like hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, whereas https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser literally never will.
Even federation works differently, allowing a hierarchy of level of “trustedness” beyond simply yes federate fully vs. no defederate entirely. Also PieFed instances more efficiently send out 25x less data per post, and new instances are significantly easier to install and maintain (see e.g. irl stories of https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed and https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524, and don’t miss how in both stories there are long-standing issues/bugs that somehow never seem to get fixed…). Feel free to like or dislike whatever you choose but…
Different federation, different posts, slightly different users. Different software means everything is now up to be changed, especially as the software is written in a language that encourages more contributors, and the devs are also much more responsive to feedback.
- source: Nutomic, one of the primary Lemmy devs
Even the very model of interaction on PieFed profoundly differs from Lemmy: e.g. if I wanted to block political posts then I could unsubscribe from all (or most) of them, so that they do not pollute my Subscribed feed on the main page, yet they would all still then be just a click away in the News & Politics Topic Feed, meaning that I can literally both have my cake (no politics) and eat it too (have politics whenever I want). Everything is different here. Check it out if you do not believe me - e.g. your very own instance has a PieFed version.
Honestly I think this is a problem. I don’t think the instance picker should be so opinionated that it blocks (legal) instances. I want extremist to be directed away from the normie and moderate instances. I prefer to clearly characterize instances and let people pick their own, while also providing opinion for people who don’t care or lack understanding.
Although this is clearly a point of preference, and I can see why some people would prefer the opposite to possibly prevent the radicalization of a moderate.
The primary problem here is that because lemmy.world isn’t visible, the instance picker when organised by activity determines lemmy.ml to be the most popular instance and then not far-off, hexbear. That’s not good long-term if people are shepherded into those instances without really knowing their context.
Right, that’s why I suggest providing both an opinionated option and an opinionated option. Like a “recommended” section and a “full list” section.
Let people without contest and who don’t care to learn the context in advance use an opinionated picker, but don’t withhold from people who want to dig in.
But it turns out I misunderstood the example that was given - those instances aren’t shown because they simply aren’t piefed instances.
I mean… (to be, what’s the word, pedantic?:-P) hexbear.net still exists though? And it is their choice if they want to convert to PieFed rather than remain with Lemmy. I am 100% certain that lemmy.ml will never do so though:-D.
So fwiw I agree whole-heartedly with what you said, and that, imho, is what https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser provides? Any other new instance can make their own choice, and I like those GUI options much better. Like when I think of “lemmy.ml”, the “Technology” aspect and the phrase “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” is nowhere close to the top few thoughts that spring into my mind. And hexbears aren’t even leftist, only pretending to be such. But the “choose your own adventure” category, in opposition to “Newbie-friendly”, I feel like MUCH better describes both lemmy.ml and hexbear, wouldn’t you agree?
Ah I misunderstood your example, I thought you were saying instances were intentionally excluded from the picker rather than “instances that don’t support this platform don’t appear”.
I’m not going to opine on what constitutes a “real” leftist apart from saying that left/right dichotomy really doesn’t describe reality well.
Yeah the PieFed instance picker lists every single PieFed instance iirc, with none of them excluded. Theoretically if one was built and had CSAM then I would expect it to not be listed, but if e.g. hexbear converted to PieFed then it would, and even should, so long as it was properly labeled (e.g. don’t say that NSFW is disallowed and then be full of porn).