It does get all manner of interconnected doesn’t it?:-)

Your account is on Lemmy.World, this community is on Lemmy.World, and pawb.social is a Lemmy instance, so I thought we were talking Lemmy.

I don’t know much about Mastodon specifically, although I do know that Mbin servers - primarily fedia.io - can connect to both Lemmy and Mastodon instances.

Changing the software in the drop-down to Mbin shows similar stats for instances running that: https://mbin.fediverse.observer/list shows those, and sorting by Active Users reveals that fedia.io contains ~82% of all users on instances running Mbin.

In contrast, virtually nobody is still running Kbin: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list - just one instance with 48 active users.

Btw the newer Lemmy alternative “PieFed” is growing: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list, though fewer than 200 users total world-wide, so more something that we keep eagerly anticipating than something currently and fully “here”:-).

Anyway, perhaps the app just needs some time to be able to connect to that new instance? Rather than wait though, you may want to contact the developers - they could potentially add it right away and rather than resent the contact even appreciate your feedback and interest, maybe? :-)

Oh I hear you. Back on Reddit, I was not liking the idea of joining a place made for and run by supporters of Russa, China, and North Korea (I mean, software is just code, but still…), so I was ALL ABOUT Kbin!:-) Ernst let himself down - and with good reason, due to his job and his family and his overall life - and thereby all of us, by not sharing his instance admin duties with anyone else who could take over. Especially when he announced that he was going to the hospital (and then did not respond to anyone for weeks afterwards), THAT is when the spam started, I noticed, from communities where the mods had abandonded them. The big waves did not happen until later, but I noticed earlier waves even then. That much at least might not the fault of Ernst, but it became his duty at that point to shut those communities down, and yet he refused (or was unable to, either way), and so the spammers had a field day with his negligence. (Also, to be honest, the mods abandoning it really was his fault as well - I myself could not log into the server for multiple WEEKS at a time, and when we did get in it was so slow as to be practically even if not wholly non-functional. Mods only abandoned an already sinking ship at that point. And yes it did rally back a bit, and then sunk again, repeating a few more times before it finally went down and just never came back up again.)

It actually serves as quite the lesson for us all. Too bad it is at Ernst’s feet, but it is what it is - the guy was somewhat heroic I thought, for taking on the project of starting up an entire alternative codebase to Lemmy, and Mbin today is somewhat fantastic still! And yet… he was not perfect, nobody is:-|.

I am aware of quite a few examples of defederation - just go to any instance and search for that word and you’ll see many:-). But I’ve never seen one that did not cite a very specific reason, that without researching further I thought at least naively sounded reasonable to me. Also I’ve actually caused an example of defederation: see my Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, which also offers several links to other petitions from instances that did the same quite awhile ago. Here’s an interesting one from Beehaw to Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works: https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (and then their response in return: https://sh.itjust.works/post/129725).

But yeah, Mastodon has been going stronger than Lemmy for longer iirc, and I’ve heard that it it plagued by defederations, so I definitely need to preemptively agree with you that defederations for no reason are bad. It might be like talking about divorce: always bad, yet other things are worse sometimes, so sometimes the least worst choice, while other times perhaps done too readily, and either way a very very serious issue that should be given the most serious of thought. I’m with you there.

I also agree that Kbin.social was not right-wing: on the other hand I can kinda understand that one better, having heard similar thoughts before. The USA as a whole is more right-oriented than e.g. the EU that is more left-oriented, so e.g. for myself inside the USA, Bernie Sanders seems quite the leftist compared to every other politician I’ve even heard of here, and yet compared to those in the EU he would be considered centrist or even right-wing. i.e., much like introvert vs. extrovert, the standard of comparison is relative to where someone is located at, currently.

Even so, why should one instance defederate from another instance purely due to personal preferences like that? (precisely as you said) Reasons to defederate that are fully valid, imho, are when one side is not engaging in good faith argumentation. Which I don’t recall ever happening on Kbin.social. Therefore, the side defederating from it was likely to have been engaging not in good faith? So perhaps good for you to have gotten away from it then? (Though to be clear: conversely, the fact that Kbin.social later was sending out spam all across the fediverse is a perfect reason to defederate from it.)

The UX of the Fediverse is really quite poor, which is part of why so many are flocking to the likes of BlueSky even as they leave Reddit + X + Facebook, rather than Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed(/Sublinks?) + Mastodon + Friendica. A major part of the reason where Lemmy at least is concerned is the lack of cross-instance moderation ability, which severely hinders people who are not all lumped together onto one single giant instance (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, put this onto the roadmap, but not until software version ~0.20, whereas the most recent version is currently only 0.19.7, so this won’t be for perhaps another half to full year before that eventually gets added? especially considering delay also from after the sourcecode is released until it is installed, e.g. Lemmy.World that has literally ~80% of all Lemmings on it is still on 0.19.3, and they were outright EAGERLY awaiting 0.19.6)

A bit of a tangent: I wonder if the more Threaded conversation style, where you follow “topics” rather than “users”, gives Lemmy the edge in terms of UX? Like, even if you cannot follow one person - although defederations seem more rare here in the first place - you will still get access to so much great content of a similar theme.

About your tangent regarding politics: I hear you, and I sympathize. If it helps, remember that (1) America is going through a REALLY rought time right now, like repeal of the 50-year-old protection to have abortions is literally a matter of life or death for a good half the population, and also (2) we are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns being waged against us from foreign powers as well as internally, and people are just like sheep, wanting to be lead, so the problem comes when someone arises who offers to do that but has a nefarious motive:-(. And yes, there are very many internet trolls who lack nuance entirely or in part - with those you cannot converse, you are right about that, and THOSE are good targets for defederation imho, not b/c of “politics” but b/c of “trolling”, the former being a mere difference of opinion but the latter being the most important criteria there is on the internet: lack of good faith in discussions. :-)

Lemmy.World (LW) is a nice place: ~80% of the entire Fediverse is there, and it has some of the best communities and least trouble connecting with those communities of all instances.

On the other hand, using LW goes against the entire spirit of decentralization that is one of the primary hallmarks of the Fediverse. So I definitely agree that you may want to explore some additional options. If you are adamant about being defederated from nothing, some instances to look at include Lemm.ee (the #3 largest instance after LW and lemmynsfw.com, see https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for more, and for best results sort by Active Users) or lemmy.today. The #4 instance sh.itjust.works is also quite nice I hear. #6 Hexbear.net is a troll instance and while #5 lemmy.ml pretends to be leftist it is actually tankie (I hate that term as it is pejorative, but they really truly do deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually happened, as in that anyone actually died in it, so it does fit). You may want to find a regional instance, like Discuss.Online is in the USA, or a language one like feddit.org is a German/English mix, or a themed one like Lemmy.zip is for “tech, PCs, and gaming”. Pay attention to the uptime stats, that’s an important one for me. Maybe for an app that can grab content in a manner that doesn’t always have to be live it could be less so?

Btw in the future, while I have never heard of that app name, in the webpage UI you can go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings “Import and export your account settings as JSON”. Choose Export, and then wherever you want to set up a new (perhaps an Alt?) account choose Import and give it that file. Messages sent to your old account will not follow you, i.e. there is no way to set up forwarding yet, but at least your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred. Even if you have to do this once from the web UI, this will definitely affect whatever app you use after that.:-)

Oh wow this is a lot. I should have just made a post about this - maybe I will!?:-P

On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.

You can read more about it here: https://pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).

I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.

You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)

Maybe so you don’t have to look at replies?

What if the USA decides to side with Russia against Germany?

If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).

And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.

As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.

i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).

My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.

That depends strongly on which “public” we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don’t even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added “reddit” to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it’s less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.

I am thinking - hoping - that it’s an unplanned side effect of a change, but that raising the issue like this will likely get it fixed before most people even have to deal with it.:-)

Stuff happens. What’s important is how we deal with it from here, imho.

In that case, it would have been better if OP had offered the type of functionality that they wanted (e.g. cross-platform support, better responsiveness to tablet screens, etc.) to Voyager, as in like make a fork of Voyager and add in the new desired features. Elsewhere in this thread OP acknowledges that this would have been preferable… yet they are going to do their own thing regardless. Which isn’t nothing imho, even if something else might have been more ideal.

It sounds really nice. Something to decide early on is whether to make it open source. Many people who use Lemmy specifically (more so than Reddit I am saying) will only use an app that is open source.

[Breathes in…] it’s a breath of fresh air.

Translation: you have a fulfilling career and an actual life, rather than e.g. health issues that required some downtime as I did over the past year:-).

But I went through similar shock multiple times in my life, finding out that people are not what I thought they were. This recent USA election was yet another one, and the one that originally elected DT as well. It helps me understand people, which might be good I dunno, but it also makes me lose faith in the entire democratic system, especially in this post-information, disinformation age. It is like the system is under the assault of a foreign agent, which causes cancerous growths, yet we seem to have had zero immune system response to it. At which point this “body” is not “ours” anymore, it has been taken over. And yet, this is also the way that it has always been - e.g. predating the Civil War - but we were just fooling ourselves to think otherwise, again and again.

Anyway, back to the kids: they think differently than we did growing up, and also we ourselves did not pay attention at the time, but we too thought differently than others around us. That’s the reality to have to deal with, or else change careers.

A look at video games is instructive: before I was born even there were more “frustrating” games (that still persist today) like D&D where you go to all the trouble to make a character, then they die in some campaign, which gives people a “sad” feeling. Hence, most games don’t do that, preferring instead to build characters up and keep reintroducing them even if they leave, to really tell a STORY where they are the main character(s). Anyway, back to people irl: they prefer not to feel any sort of frustration at all - and btw if they do, it is the school’s fault (No Child Left Behind said so) - and instead just want short, simple, straightforward hops right into the magical “job-land”, where jobs are passed out like candy, yet do not involve doing the 4-letter word “work”.

Also, we could totally be surveilled by corporations here - everything is free and open to the public, including these very words I say right here & now. It is just that their surveillence does not dictate our user experience, as it did on e.g. Reddit, before we left it. And ofc they don’t want to resist - they hope to get jobs IN that very corporate hegemony!

Speaking of capitalism, the phrase “Make America Great Again” keeps reminding me of how the top marginal tax rate was like 90%, so the literal thing that made America GREAT was basically socialism, and government regulation reigning in the worst excesses of capitalism, i.e. I mean the slavery part. Unions were strong, protections were put into place, but then we (collectively) forgot, so now we’re losing them. It’s our own faults:-(. However, rather than return to the greater level of socialism that we had then, to make America truly GREAT again - an example could be to limit the purchasing of housing by corporations that have zero plans to actually live inside of them - we instead will turn to fascism, b/c that always ends well in history I suppose (by those who refuse to learn either “from it” or even “it” to begin with).

Get those thoughts out of your head: it will never happen. I am not saying that resistance is futile (hehehe), just that it needs to not be naive. The Democratic campaign we now see was not savvy enough to function, and if we were smart enough and could be open enough to have seen that, then we could have tried other things - e.g. perhaps Kamala Harris could have risked angering the extremely wealthy in a more desperate bid to keep DT from the throne, rather than act assured that she would win regardless. What the Fediverse is good for though - imho you understand ofc - is not to be subversive, and rather to enjoy, as you say, out from under the bootheels of corporate advertising. NO ADS is a fantastic selling point, even to those of us who use ad blockers to begin with.

BTW the mealtime videos moving has nothing to do with hexbear - it’s really a complicated situation that has little to do with anything toxic, and much more to do with how it would be preferrable to not have every single community on the entire Fediverse located at Lemmy.World. But if it is hexbear drama that you want, here is a perfect post to read: https://discuss.online/post/13387124. TLDR: they aren’t “leftist”, they are trolls who only pretend to be thus, exactly like the MAGATs that claim that they are “defending” (rather than overthrowing) democracy. And what’s more, they know it - they just don’t want you to say it, exactly like a toddler seeing what they can get away with.

Don’t forget the guy in The Matrix who CHOSE, nay BEGGED to be put back in. Apes Humans just want to “be comfortable”, it would seem. The thing that seems to get people out of that is pain, as the mother of innovation and all of that. 1984/Animal Farm. People are Sheeple. Like a drowning victim, you cannot help someone who refuses to be helped: you can only encourage / try to motivate them to try to change their own direction.

Which is why I think you will be a good teacher: b/c you care! Either that or a bad one, if you allow everyone to take advantage of you along the way and then break from the strain - b/c man is that whole system becoming predatory these days! Please, PLEASE take care of yourself - whatever you have to do in order to make that happen.:-)

I mean on the one hand kinda yeah, and it was always going to be thus. On the other hand, allow me to encourage you by reminding you that your job was not to teach them about freedom & open-source goodness so much as critical thinking skills. So even if they don’t get it NOW, so long as they have the tools to get it LATER that will be enough.

If you are in America, then realize that No Child Left Behind did a grave disservice - sorry if you said that earlier and I forgot, though also, I am hearing of similar occurrences all around the world as the wealthy do not see a need for the middle class to exist any longer, hence are pushing to cut back funding for edumacashun.

Add to that how the current generation is all about achievements involving “scores”, not really intellectually curiosity - plus, how could they truly know much of anything anyway when the body of knowledge is now so much vaster than what a human brain could hope to comprehend? Which was always true in our lifetimes anyway, but now it’s true even for one field or even sub-field underneath a field, plus Googling existed - or at least did, whereas its demise lately might feel like a blip while we merely await its return, being rebirthed from the ashes of a purifying fire, a Phoenix of internet searching if you will? :-P Anyway, in the absolute height of irony, they literally cannot afford to be too curious, or they will be kicked out of college for refusing to “learn”.

But give them a few years after leaving it and… maybe they’ll turn around, some of them anyway? Perhaps your REAL job is to inspire in them a lifetime love of learning? :-P

It does bug me that spez was correct though - he really did see clearly into the hearts of the lazy bums who endlessly mindlessly scroll through content regurgitated from decades past, plus those actual niche subs that are too frightened to move away. Then again, we can be pretty toxic here as well, just like there, so is it really all that different here, vs. there, except that here we lack the content that they have there? I strongly, vehemently maintain that the MAXIMUM experience here is better, and probably the average is too but e.g. I was reading a post this morning where someone said that they thought that lemmygrad.ml was named that way as a joke and almost joined it, before realizing that it was serious - if they had though, then its being defederated by almost other instance would have enhanced its echo chamber effect enormously, by bringing in next to no outside material, only what is local on that instance itself. And could you imagine joining hexbear, or even making a post there unawares? I still shudder from my own experience of merely making a singular reply to a comment there, all of ONCE (something middle-of-the-road such as “at least Biden brought gas prices down just prior to the midterm elections, which helped Dems win those crucial Congressional seats, which isn’t nothing” - and I got my ASS handed to me for several WEEKS and WEEKS where they would just all pile on, long past when I was so done with it, and ngl after I made the same mistake in lemmygrad.ml I very nearly left Lemmy myself rather than put up with such a barrage - all from different accounts, mind you, so that blocking is horribly inefficient).

We are still fairly new, and dynamic, and all of us still learning how to make things work - e.g. https://slrpnk.net/post/15217190. But that’s also what makes it “exciting” for some of us. And yet, the interface and interactions are legit less polished overall, so it really does seem to endear itself more to those of us with an “early adopter” mindset. And maybe that’s okay, especially for now, and all the more so if that is what keeps us kind and worth coming here to:-).

Don’t lose heart. In the assignment sure, but deeper than that, you’re doing a good work - which I can say with certainty b/c you care, and that right there is basically everything? The details you’ll work out later:-P.

Yeah, advocating for literal murder, e.g. of someone who chooses to own stock, we have not only a toxicity problem but overall a quite shocking divergence from the experiences visible on other more moderated platforms, such as X (which also advocates for murder these days I hear, but only in such matters as are soon to be approved by The State, like giving cops free reign to murder anyone they choose - but only lasting for one hour, bc otherwise that would be just ridiculous, you know!?🤪🫠).

On the one hand, getting out from under the thumb of regulations is fantastic, compared to not being able to do thus at all. While on the other, people can be so unfriendly and waste so much of our time having to sift through such nonsense (as is sponsored by The Other, Opposing State).

So yeah, I guess it is a bit like 4chan? (Not that I’m speaking from personal experience, but from the stories told about it, it shares similarities?:-P) But then again, Internet 1.0 did not offer the ability to federate as we now can, so actually I think it’s a step forward, more than merely back - yes we are rolling back some features that were quite bad (corporate sponsorship), but we get to keep most of the good - e.g. the ability to view images and even videos directly inside the post without having to leave the site to view them elsewhere and then return. We have the best of both of those worlds!?:-)

That’s so cool! Do be careful but yeah, it is such a wonderful experiment. On the one hand, if I didn’t have access to Lemmy, I would never have found out that e.g. after Biden forbade the railway workers from striking (two Christmases ago iirc?), he worked with them for MONTHS to get them all the things they needed e.g. time off with paid sick leave. The corporate media (for the most part) refused to cover it, probably bc it was boring and they couldn’t sell ads as effectively with such content as well as something that bleeds and thus leads.

On the other hand, Lemmy also allows disinformation campaigns to spread too, e.g.:

(For one it ignores how both Russia and China are doing genocide - relevant bc on Lemmy.ml where it was posted you are only allowed to criticize such things when the “other side”, meaning Western capitalism, does it, so like you can say how the USA aids Israel’s genocide but you can not say how Russia is doing similarly in the Ukraine, or China to the Uyghurs, etc. - and it ignores that Trump has said that he will write Israel a blank check to do even more, instead seemingly pointing blame at Biden’s administration for doing genocide, all without ever saying so explicitly but that seems the implication, given the timing of it being released just prior to the USA election? Oh well, surely anything that fosters apathy among the voting populace could never influence the outcome now could it…? Edit: And the list of criticisms just goes on and on and on and on like that - still another is how it ignores how most “humanitarians” and even most PEOPLE in the USA are not okay with the genocide that is going on, so how is that not a strawman to say that “none such exist” as that would want to stop it, as distinct from the leadership that might also want to stop it, yet isn’t doing so, thus doesn’t seem to want to stop it bad enough, though it can NOT be inferred from that, imho at least, that human rights don’t exist here at all, or are not cared about at all - that seems quite hyperbolic to me, and again ignores how Trump will now do more than Harris would have.)

Setting politics aside now:-).

You might point people to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, and post to that community yourself anything that you want a new user to know?

Also check out PieFed - it lacks significant polish, e.g. if you tag my username there like @openstars@piefed.social I will not receive a notification bc that feature hasn’t been implemented yet, but especially for a student has such great resources so it at least is something to be very aware of and kinda show off what the Fediverse has to offer now plus where it is heading in the future. Especially as so many people want to get away from the “tankies” - e.g. Lemmy.World announced wanting to support a different project, Sublinks, though that one might be stalled at this point:-(.

Do let us all know how your experiment turns out? I mean make a post somewhere (and please tag me to make sure I see it!:-) so we can all be enriched by your efforts and the fruit that they bring:-). If you need a suggestion for a community, maybe… !fediverse@lemmy.world or !fedigrow@lemm.ee.

For people that enjoy using Arch btw Linux, we’re good yeah. Although occasionally some of us will die or whatever, and we need to have some level of growth or else accept that we will pretty much just shrink from now onwards. i.e., people talk as if we will go mainstream, or rather as if content will spring up magically from nowhere. If we want the small niches like Reddit has, we would need the userbase first. And to get that, we’d have to ditch our toxicity issues, make the UI more functional, and above all else make better moderation tools. Which I am doubtful will happen as the Lemmy devs seem happy with their current pacing and direction of changes - that’s 99% fine with me btw, as it’s theirs to do with whatever they please; though I am all the more happy to now see the likes of PieFed grow much quicker, even though it started out so very much further behind.

Fair point about PieFed being extremely tiny, and there are only 3 of them that are open to the public to join (https://join.piefed.social/try/) - though I am somewhat surprised to see the number of users for Mbin being so low. Yeah, I suppose they must be going back to Reddit, or perhaps Bluesky, or something else.

I am not sure how much to worry about the number of instances - on the one hand the long-anticipated 0.19.6 software release came out just today, which should fix the federation issues with Lemmy.World for many of them. On the other hand, smaller instances weren’t likely to want to pull down the entirety of the Fediverse to begin with, as an actual multi-user one (even if on the small side, like Discuss.Online or Aussie.Zone) would, plus once gone, wouldn’t we expect them to never come back, i.e. regardless of the software release today? So whatever turned them away… it would have been interesting to have known (though introverts would be the last to have offered such:-).

(The USA election surely - also talked about by people outside of the USA, e.g. I saw quite a few posts on lemmy.ml about it…)

Not… entirely. In March we had 54k Monthly Active Users, while now we have only 45k, that’s a not-entirely-insignificant drop of 17% of users. Also, personally I’ve created some alts during that time-frame, so if others did similarly… the real drop could have been much larger.

Ofc, it could have been that people simply dropped their older alts and are now happy with fewer alts but the same number of people - but that gets to that very old argument that Galileo had with others about whether the moon was perfectly smooth (due to spiritual implications) or not: he observed that it was not, though others raised their objections and tried to counter with the notion that perhaps there were mountains on the moon… but that if so, surely the valley regions were covered with glass, so that the moon retains the property (again, for reasons of spiritual purity) of being a perfectly spherical object?

Ofc you can guess what Galileo said to that: surely there must indeed be glass on top of the valley regions, so that they fill in the height of the mountains with an equal height of the glass valleys, which we cannot see b/c they are made of glass, <eyeroll>, yes indeed “surely” that “must” be the case - but also, in addition to that, there is EVEN MORE glass on top of the mountains, height proportional to how tall they are, and while we cannot see that material either, that is what is causing the differences in shadows, which he could measure with his spyglass that he pointed upwards into the heavens.)

Moral of that fun story: we can conjecture such matters all day long, and how fun that would be for both of us! But at the end of the day, all we have are the facts and numbers in front of us, however imperfect they may be:-).

That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts? I am not 100% certain about that, or much of anything really, but pretty darn close b/c of how the “software” field seems to work on that site, with the other buttons like List and on a particular chosen instance to look at more details, the Main Data tabulation (and see e.g. https://mbin.fediverse.observer/piefed.social, click to expand the Main Data, and that JSON output has “softwarename”: “piefed”, but nothing at all with the text string “Lemmy” there).

The total number of Lemmy instances has also dropped 24%.

Although the total number of both posts and comments has gone up rather than down - so we see a lot more activity, from a significantly smaller number of people. I wonder how sustainable that is though, e.g. next year won’t be an election year in as many countries as this one was. Overall I am worried about the health of the Lemmyverse, though less worried than ever before about the health of the overall Fediverse b/c of the newer software alternatives that have and are still coming:-).