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.

  • Vicinus@piefed.zip
    English
    2·
    3 days ago

    Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists?

    I never made that connection, but yeah, this could be much easier to implement than I was thinking.

    Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.

    Yeah, I could see this being a few easy setting/feature addition.

    It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope …

    Understandable.

    Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.

    My understanding is that this was set up that way to prevent harassment. I’m not knowledge on the subject so could be wrong.

    No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.

    My understanding was that it “worked”. As in it was haphazard and a very manual effort to get what did happen to work.

    Not the same thing, but die4ever@retrolemmy.com and I tried to save the past posts of ecospheres@mander.xyz to piefed.zip after mander.xyz went down. It didn’t work, I (on piefed.zip) could see the old mander.xyz posts, but no one else on any other instances could. I also had a problem with adding mods to the new piefed.zip community (lemmy mods couldn’t be added, non-piefed.zip mods couldn’t be made owner).

    So, while I expect it can be done, I don’t think it’s an easy, straightforward, or automated process to move software or even communities. I know my example was not a 1-to-1 typical move, so if you have any counter-examples please let me know (I can utilize them for the !fedigrow@lemmy.zip wiki).

    Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas.

    I am quite aware of Rimu’s nature (he and I had discussions in the past).

    Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.

    Agreed and I would say he’s lost a lot of trust many times at this point (I used to be one of his biggest cheerleaders).

    Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out.

    I suspect so. I mentioned it to the piefed.zip admins, so they are at least aware of it. But I suspect there won’t be any piefed -> pylova conversions anytime soon, unless Rimu screws up big (again).

    … all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova.

    I believe their is an official Piefed app coming (https://fedidb.com/software/compare?software=lemmy%2Cmbin%2Cpiefed). Assuming it’s open source, presumably the other partially Piefed compatible apps could utilize the “Piefed Official App” 's code to improve compatibility within their own apps. I’m certainly going to suggest it to the voyager Dev when the “official app” comes out.

    The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating.

    Agreed, but not sure we should expect more. FOSS is generally slow moving, due to it being small, part-time teams. I’m in a place where I can help support FOSS financially, but I know that is not an option for everyone, plus it’s a new consideration/viewpoint for people coming from corporate/proprietary software (where they are the product).

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      That is sad to hear that mander hasn’t come back yet - I guess it’s still waiting to see if something can be resolved, since the backups weren’t recent.

      But it is even more sad to hear that Rimu’s community migration tool isn’t working, on other instances without his direct involvement. Some of what you said makes sense to me though, like a community “owner” must be located on the instance where it is housed - if that were not the case then the system would be vulnerable to all sorts of spam where any bot could spin up communities on any instance, so some level of accountability must be maintained.

      I suspect the official PieFed app will be Blorp, just from the way that Rimu talked about it iirc. It’s chief competition is Interstellar, although that was designed more for Mbin with PieFed just being thrown into the mix.

      The need to support FOSS is partially one reason why we aren’t growing, and I don’t mean the actual funds, but the enormous complexity of figuring out who to send them to. Dessalines & Nutomic? Rimu? PyLova? Voyager? Blorp? Perhaps at the end of the day it does not matter as we had fun in contributing to the development of the Threadiverse overall, but to new joiners it’s definitely very daunting - it’s far easier to pay Reddit and then get Reddit coins back in exchange. Though arguably less profitable when it merely buys you the chance to argue with bots. Yet… an enormous fraction of our own traffic here are reposting bots, often from Reddit, so is this truly “better”, enough to convince some of them to make the switch? That’s the rub - they would be buying into the future, just as Reddit kept telling them, and likely still tells them now (Reddit-trained & integrated AI will be so great…).

      • Vicinus@piefed.zip
        English
        2·
        2 days ago

        That is sad to hear that mander hasn’t come back yet - I guess it’s still waiting to see if something can be resolved, since the backups weren’t recent.

        But it is even more sad to hear that Rimu’s community migration tool isn’t working, on other instances without his direct involvement.

        Agreed.

        Some of what you said makes sense to me though, like a community “owner” must be located on the instance where it is housed - if that were not the case then the system would be vulnerable to all sorts of spam where any bot could spin up communities on any instance, so some level of accountability must be maintained.

        Hmm. I see what your saying. I was thinking more someone on the instance would be required to make the community, but could hand it off to a user on another instance. I think you are right though, a user on the instance should be forced to be “owner”, as it doesn’t take much work to create a new account and they can always add their other instance username as a mod and run the community via that (never really needing to log into username of the instance the community is on again). Only issue I see is, people DMing the “owner” username that is not monitored, but I suppose that could just be stated in the sidebar and/or user profile.

        I suspect the official PieFed app will be Blorp, just from the way that Rimu talked about it iirc.

        I can’t recall any specific source tied to that thought, but that sounds right. Guess we’ll see.

        … it’s far easier to pay Reddit and then get Reddit coins back in exchange.

        Haha, sadly very true.

        … an enormous fraction of our own traffic here are reposting bots, often from Reddit, …

        I just saw a post that Reddit changed something to block reposting bots again and Lemmit is tired of trying to figure out a workaround and is going to shut down next year when the domain subscription ends. So, potentially fewer reposts in the future.

        As a bit of an aside, JohnnyEnzyme @piefed.social just told me about a posting technique that worked well for him utilizing past Reddit posts with their best comments to create interaction in the threadiverse (his comment). So, we may lose repost bots (no great loss in my mind), but if people start taking more from Reddit and curating it personally, I think that could be a great exchange.

        Edit: As an update I added a feature request to Pylova’s Codeburg about the subscribable block lists. We’ll see if they’re interested.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          2·
          11 hours ago

          As an update I added a feature request to Pylova’s Codeburg about the subscribable block lists. We’ll see if they’re interested.

          Wonderful!

          if people start taking more from Reddit and curating it personally, I think that could be a great exchange.

          This sounds horrific to me! The question in my mind is not how many ghosts to allow over here, but how to generate authentic interactions between real humans. We don’t need every single niche covered, we just need people to enjoy their time spent here.

          90% of that is easily attainable by defederation from hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. I was on multiple instances that did neither, prior to the ability for an admin to (shadow-)block certain communities, and I very nearly quit Lemmy entirely after switching here over from Kbin. In fact, I basically did as I switched over to PieFed for my main, before I began my current campaign to test the experiences on several 3rd-party apps.

          A further 90% improvement can be attained by blocking Lemmy.ml (except that no major instance provides this by default, and also the Lemmy platform won’t allow it at all, with the instance block being so horribly misnamed as to represent disinformation - in no way does it block users of the instance from harassing people in other communities, thus missing the entire fucking point). In this very conversation thread there was a particular onerous troll who kept following our conversation and downvoting everything I said, finally speaking up with the most inane bullshit. This was not fun for me so I banned them. New joiners, it seems obvious from the comments they leave (usually on other platforms after already leaving), don’t bother to put in the work to curate their experiences and instead simply flee - to Reddit, or Bluesky, or perhaps nowhere and just touch grass from now on, combined with maybe Instagram or Tiktok or something.

          I do not want to have to scroll down reading through tens to hundreds to thousands of comments, none of which represent real humans who would respond if I replied to them - that is the precise opposite of what I want. As I browse through New, often I can be the first responder anyway. And people reply to me, and so on it goes. And I don’t want to be asked to do that for 12 hours a day - just one would be fine for me, if that. But GOOD content, not toxic crap like “c’mon comrades let’s murder everyone in sight, eh?” - I want to see stuff that quite possibly I could even enjoy seeing, and maybe interacting with?

          But even if I do see it, the endless array of trolls spoils it. I do not think that the overall lack of content is the problem here - it’s the overall lack of content that is worthwhile to read, and the fact that we get constantly slapped in the face in an unconsensual manner. It’s a cost (far too high) to benefit (with next to no OC, very little) trade-off that results in people fleeing here - even those that stuck with us for multiple years before finally giving up. Admiral Patrick had a horrible solution to it, but he was not wrong in the identification of the problem: people don’t enjoy discourse with incels for whom no means simply to push forward all the harder.

          • Vicinus@piefed.zip
            English
            1·
            3 hours ago

            This sounds horrific to me! The question in my mind is not how many ghosts to allow over here, but how to generate authentic interactions between real humans. We don’t need every single niche covered, we just need people to enjoy their time spent here.

            I do not want to have to scroll down reading through tens to hundreds to thousands of comments, none of which represent real humans who would respond if I replied to them - that is the precise opposite of what I want.

            I do not think that the overall lack of content is the problem here - it’s the overall lack of content that is worthwhile to read, …

            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).

            A further 90% improvement can be attained by blocking Lemmy.ml …
            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:

            • Difference from 3 Months ago: -103 MAU (-5.5%)
            • Difference from 1 week ago: -23 MAU (-1.3%)
            • Posts and Comments (per week): 727 (+106 vs historic)

            hexbear.net:

            • Difference from 3 Months ago: -78 MAU (-5.7%)
            • Difference from 1 week ago: -18 MAU (-1.4%)
            • Posts and Comments (per week): 1659 (-3545 vs historic)

            Lemmygrad.ml:

            • Difference from 3 Months ago: 22 MAU (+3.9%)
            • Difference from 1 week ago: 0 MAU (0%)
            • Posts and Comments (per week): 311 (-1 vs historic)

            Average of the other 16 Instances (of Top 20, excludes lemmy.world who’s similarly crashing):

            • Difference from 3 Months ago: -16 MAU (-1.4%)
            • Difference from 1 week ago: +3 MAU (+0.3%)
            • Posts and Comments (per week): 387 (+22 vs historic)

            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.

            In this very conversation thread there was a particular onerous troll who kept following our conversation and downvoting everything I said …

            I did wonder what happened to that person.

            New joiners, it seems obvious from the comments they leave (usually on other platforms after already leaving), don’t bother to put in the work to curate their experiences and instead simply flee …

            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