Coelacanth

People have been using Threadiverse to refer to the link-aggregating community based Fediverse platforms with threaded discussion topics for way longer than Threads has existed as a website.

If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

They’re doing the double whammy. Mandatory sign-in (even on old.reddit) and any account they can’t estimate as belonging to an adult through their use of invasive spy metrics and AI will be forced to do age verification.

I think it’s just not having critical mass.

It’s definitely a huge part of the issue. Also demographics. The techy slant the Fediverse has does not seem to have a huge overlap with sports. That’s why I can mostly survive on Lemmy when it comes to Formula 1 discussion (although it’s still sparsely populated) while football (soccer) is much less active here.

how come the fediverse has attracted a grand total of zero e-sports people?

Hey, I post discussion threads for The International (Dota 2) every year, and usually get some replies and discussions in them too! I would say it’s even somewhat close to the activity level football (soccer) sees, though less than F1.

But in general I think Esports is just less popular overall than regular sports, so that’s your answer.

I’d say that is Dante’s Divina Commedia.

Ah I see. I don’t think so, unfortunately. Something like that would definitely be useful, I guess as a browser extension? I wonder if something like that exists…

What’s stopping you?

Inertia is a hell of a thing. Also TikTok has one of the most efficient algorithms of any social media, and I doubt it would be easily replicated. Especially if you’re doing it in the classic Fediverse spirit of trying to be non-invasive, non-addictive, caring for the users’ privacy etc.

Yeah, and that’s really the crux of it. To 90% of people, the content is all that matters. That’s why comments like: “hey, you like TikTok? Why don’t you try Loops instead?” or “Check out Pixelfed, it’s a bit like Instagram!” are unlikely to work. For most people, it’s just a strictly worse version. The same thing but without the content. Why would they downgrade for no reason?

You have to care about something external to the core experience of consuming content to actually be here. That’s why our population at the moment is, well, just us here *gestures around.* You have to care about FOSS, or decentralisation, or anti-corporatism, or really value the more human interactions you get in a smaller setting with fewer bots, or actually enjoy putting in more work and get less served to you by an algorithm.

Most of the people with those values I believe will eventually trickle over here naturally. The rest though, this is a really hard sell for.

If anyone knew, you wouldn’t have to ask. Everyone’d already been here.

It’s an inherent problem with having both users and communities on the same instances, and just how humans tend to operate in general in that we automatically gravitate to others and clump together.

I think it was @rglullis@communick.news who was saying that in an ideal world there would be two types of instances, one for users and one that only served as hosting space for communities. That way you could block or defederate user groups without losing access to entire communities.

Of course, we’re way past the point where reorganization into a structure like that is feasible. But it’s interesting to think about.

That sounds like a great idea, that’s some of the most important information.

I’m happy with my instance, with my admins and with my /local feed. And with Lemmy at large. It is not a feature that’s critical for me (I am unaffected as I only use my phone for Lemmy anyway).

But thank you anyway!

You can copy paste the URL into you instance’s search box.

But I do think we also need this feature https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

Since I use my phone for Lemmy 100% of the time I sometimes forget what a massive issue this is. A feature like that strikes me as critical.

I mean, I don’t think they’ve done something this bad just yet but they also do hardcode a lot of things into the software, and some of the webpage blocks are apparently very tedious to take out if you want a politically neutral Piefed instance. They are very openly opposed to the leftists around here. Here is some recent stuff too.

There was also stuff like the implementation of flairs on Piefed deliberately declining to use ActivityPub endpoints, which made it an exclusive feature to entice users to switch instead of something Lemmy could create compatibility with, which felt kind of EEE-ey to me. Now that was years ago and I haven’t kept up on development, they may have changed it around since then. I think flairs are coming in Lemmy 1.0, or something sort of like it.

And recently there was the whole vote rationing fiasco, which stemmed from some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how voting works on a place like this by Rimu, was idiotic from the start and ultimately drove PugJesus (an incredibly valuable and active poster in tons of niche communities) permanently off the platform after they didn’t back down.

EDIT: more in this comment thread too: https://piefed.social/comment/12273761

Piefed has some great features but my opinion of it hasn’t been great as of late.

Hey, are we finally big enough for the bots to invade? That’s progress!

The concept was fine - if it was correctly advertised and (ideally) given multiple options of block list curators like how you can subscribe to blocklists on in Bluesky. That would actually be a great feature, because he was right about one thing - onboarding normies to the Fediverse is a struggle.

Hiding it, actually actively obfuscating it, making it unconfigurable and bundling it with the safety/anti-spam filter is not okay. That is him trying to silently make himself arbiter of acceptable conversation on the Fediverse.

Then on top of that, you add some of the bans he included being deranged at best and possibly actively homophobic and transphobic at worst.

Yes, I believe Bluesky does exactly that - custom blocklists you can subscribe to. It would actually be a very useful feature.

Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.

While a toxicity filter for normies as an onboarding tool is not the worst idea in the world, the implementation was. But even beyond that, the blocklist was so clearly going way above and beyond “sanding off the rough edges” and straight into just “I’m going to block everything I personally dislike”. Wholesome Yuri is like, the opposite of toxic but that whole community was blocked. As was using “🥺👉👈”.

What’s crazy is they could have simply:

• Apologised
• Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
• Agreed there was a lack of transparency
• Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.

But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.

Second it must be opt-in.

Third, it must clearly say somewhere that “this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences”. There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.

And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more… well-balanced individual.