oh no, not again.

Skill issue.

git guud

It’s not your fault, the tools for community discovery are exceedingly poor on Lemmy (this is one arena where PieFed really shines, having virtually solved that issue). Sorting communities by total rather than active users preferentially highlights those that died off 3+ years ago after the Rexodus waned, rather than the most highly active ones currently, which is the polar opposite of what would be most helpful.

And then sorting posts by All as people keep recommending will by definition not show those communities that are not posted to on practically a daily basis. Thus we can have meme and comics communities here, but to have such discussion communities is exceedingly difficult due to the network effect, even among those of us already here.

About tankies: I really have no desire to keep bringing it up over and over and over again, farming the downvotes that result each time. Rather I was saying that this, after the network effect, is the top response that I see on Reddit as to why they refuse to come here. i.e. I’m not spreading my own opinion here - just block people and move on, you know - I’m reporting a diagnosis as to how we can, or rather are blocked from, moving forward.

Indeed though, things change. I would argue the principle of inertia in that they do not simply change all on their own, but rather as a result of effort. Reddit had something to offer - an experience that was superior to what came before. But the experiences here are not superior: over the years there have been network timeouts, whole instances up and disappear (e.g. lemm.ee), the content is for the most part not here, and that network effect is truly real.

And the network effect and the name recognition of Twitter (X) and 4chan works for them. It does not (seem to?) work for Lemmy. I dunno, you could try to go to that subreddit and others like it and explain what Lemmy has to offer? They might ban you but then it would have been tried.

As for me I am still learning - e.g. I did not know until a few days ago about https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/. This seems like kind-of a game changer to me⁉️ Now I want to know: why don’t people recommend programming.dev more often? Do they, like me, not know about this? Surely many do not want this kind of curation to be performed for them, even though it is easily reversed? (At least, I think it is? I don’t really know… perhaps I need to make an account and find out? or find a hidden community on my own instance to test that out?)

It is not only community discovery that is so poor on Lemmy, it is also knowledge of how such things work - especially hidden communities. (De-)Federations have their own list and people have talked about them extensively over the years, whereas the concept of hidden communities has no such public exposure, either in Lemmy or PieFed. And if even we who have been here and at least a quarter paying attention to matters as they came out don’t know, then I certainly cannot blame Redditors for not knowing either.

It is also extremely frustrating that the pace of feature development is measured in significant fractions of a decade rather than more quickly, especially when Redditors already have access to so much such as user & post flairs, polls, multi-communities, notifications sent upon moderation events, a modmail (who is a Threadiverse user supposed to ask when their content is removed why that was done - are they supposed to simply DM each one and see who responds?), and posts that are not “deleted” but instead remain active & accessible to anyone with the URL, so that discussions began in them can finish despite the moderator’s decision to no longer platform the post in the subreddit’s community feed listing. PieFed has most of these things btw, while Lemmy lacks all of them, and it strongly looks like that situation will largely continue for the next 5-10 years.

What happened to Stack Overflow is happening here too. People come here less and less often, as the reasons to do so decrease alongside each user that flees from here. It would be nice to see this trend reversed. Which means attracting some new users and moreover retaining existing ones - not at the scale of millions but if the goal was to at least to retain an even distribution then at the scale of tens of thousands?

Your instance apparently hides much of the toxicity from you: https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/.

As you say, when you leave the instance and view those others you can see notable differences in what they have to offer. Like mander.xyz is primarily science based.

I don’t know if I can precisely explain all the nuances of why people on Reddit complain about us here the way that they do. Like how much of that is based upon prior experiences, which may have changed in the meantime? Or maybe they say toxicity but really mean the network effect where there is so little niche content? Perhaps they simply misunderstand entirely the nature of federated content, so that yes while e.g. hexbear exists that does not mean that all of its content is readily accessible from every other instance?

Part of the problem lies in how poor discoverability is in the Lemmy and even PieFed software. Like the above link explains in depth precisely which communities are hidden by the admins of your instance, however I recall having to stumble upon discovery of this fact on StarTrek.website where there were zero posts or public acknowledgement that ChapoTrapHouse had been made “hidden”, when it previously had not been. Lemmy and PieFed each show the list of entirely defederated instances, which is quite a long listing on programming.dev, but there is no central place showing which communities are “hidden” in this manner (nor in PieFed either).

So how then are people supposed to know the facts? Even if people take the time to investigate their findings will depend upon the method used to search - e.g. here is an example comment showing someone on hexbear.net contributing to i.e. appearing on programming.dev - so is the latter “cut off” from the former or no? The answer is “yes but really no”, although probably more accurately stated as “no but really yes” (or if we want higher levels of precision then perhaps “no but really yes but at the end of the day no”?). It’s confusing AF even for us here on the Threadiverse who know what’s going on - like when ChapoTrapHouse was removed from StarTrek.website I was very surprised, bc I had previously interacted in that very community, so I KNEW that it was possible… until it was not anymore. Also, defederations leave up old content as well, even while preventing the influx of new content.

So I do not blame others for failing to understand all of these nuances and complexities? If there were a webpage similar to the federation listings that showed hidden communities, that would have done so much to guide people to understand that particular matter? As it is though, the topic requires in-depth investigation into the ever-changing set of documentation maintained by every instance individually. Speaking of, your instance has a broken link in its sidebar text referring to a wiki site that does not work, returning a cloudflare page saying “Invalid SSL certificate”.

Lemmy can be - i.e. has corners that are - toxic as fuck. There are walls between such now, but they are not well-known or documented, and I do not blame Redditors in the slightest for not being aware of this.

Edit: oh derp, somehow I entirely misread your message as that you had not heard of Friendica’s entire existence. Sorry, ignore this if you like, or perhaps it’s interesting in a different manner now. 😜

Your instance is quite a bit cut off from the rest of the Fediverse, although even so the news of Friendica has made waves - e.g. https://beehaw.org/post/521802 with >800 comments.

Friendica is fairly niche though, and suffers from a lot of problems. For one, as a Facebook replacement it relies upon your family members and close friend group to also use it - but unless you act as tech support and install it onto their machines for them (alongside Linux and everything needed for them to self-host), then how else will you be able to communicate with them on that platform?

And it more or less does need to be either self-hosted or at least hosted exceedingly often, since it does not scale well and users of the project have started begging for technical support from outsiders (not a great example of the latter but see this informational post).

In short, there are reasons for its lack of spread so far. I do not know if those issues are solvable - though by now perhaps they already have been? It’s just a very different model from the more semi-anonymous platforms like the Fediverse, which can make things challenging.

Oh hey, that was you!!! Like I said earlier, I enjoy your contributions. Though so many other people - like PugJesus - keep leaving, and based on the number of empty communities in my subscriptions, nobody rises up to replace their level of contributions (well not nobody, e.g. there’s Lady Butterfly, tirelessly lifting up pretty much half to all of the most strongly encouraging communities:-).

I’ve wondered myself if I should help set up a community for comics. But there’s a legal liability issue, which I suppose is why I am able to enjoy older ones like Foxtrot and Calvin & Hobbes delivered daily to my Subscribed feed, but not modern ones like Nathan W. Pyle’s work.

So what I did instead was to create a community c/AskUSA. Virtually nobody reads the rules though - e.g. to avoid politics (there’s even helpful links directly in the sidebar to alternatives to post those to), and the reality of what is happening to the USA right now is too depressing to contemplate so… I became one of those people who abandons communities myself. Realistically, I just don’t think we have the subscriber base to support niche communities. Multiple times I have stumbled upon a community that someone created (to hold the name I suppose?) and became the exclusively sole poster to it, never to have been followed up with even by the creator of it themselves. Community discovery is exceedingly poor on Lemmy.

Hence I put all my hopes into PieFed instead, to be all that Lemmy never will… at least until PugJesus left due to the issue of shadow-censoring users contributions. That kind of thing is enough to kill off an entire project, causing communities to choose to not migrate there from a Lemmy instance or from Reddit, or to decide not to switch over their instance or open up a parallel one running PieFed (e.g. sh.itjust.works was considering that at one point in time, I am not sure if they still will now though…). My hopes that PieFed will “save” the concept of the Threadiverse are dashed - even though ironically there is now more reason to have hoped for it than ever before - e.g. Reddit has begun killing off old-reddit, which will cause many to look for alternatives to run to. They will not come here though, as my earlier link mentions in their very own words, nor can I argue all that believably that they should, when what awaits them is to be bullied here into expanding the base to receive tankie falsehoods and propaganda, and otherwise incel toxicity.

So I am choosing to listen rather than always only ever speak, and see if I can understand this shifting landscape better.

Oops, but here I wrote a novel along with that. Don’t worry - there is no expectation for me to receive one in return:-).

Time marches ever onwards. Each new generation (of posters) will figure out what it wants to use this space for, if anything at all, or not. In the meantime I hope it has been more enjoyable to meta-discuss these matters, or at least more so than to add to your already considerable pain.

Counterpoint: those will happen naturally and don’t need planning.

Sometimes those are fraught with frustration though. Like I remember really enjoying discussions with the highly controversial user FlyingSquid, who left Lemmy at least a year ago. My discussions were about Star Trek, and I had already blocked all politics themed communities as well as the largest meme ones. It turned out that within the politics sphere, he seems to have shown a bit of a different side of his personality to people who tried to post in the communities that he modded. Was he right? Are all the people decrying against him - many of whom I note are often proven liars in other matters - right? Actually truth is significantly more complex than that, plus not having delved in depth I honestly and truly do not know (though suspect a bit of both).

And people say likewise about PugJesus too. I was never on the receiving end of his wrath either - perhaps I never could be, since my aim is truth and he wouldn’t have to be firm as I would literally welcome correction where needed? But now he is gone too.

Most of the people that I enjoyed speaking with the most are either gone, or comment far less frequently than they used to. Or in different communities.

A lot of the communities that I do frequent the most - among those that still exist anyway - have barely anyone who comments at all. I tend to avoid the largest ones (I make an exception for this one we are in now due to the subject matter), bc that is where the toxicity is highest. But then the niche communities barely exist at all… e.g. !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev has only had one post in the last 4 months, !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca, oops that one seems to have died a year ago already, so I just unsubscribed, the last post in !dankmemes@lemmy.world was 2 months ago, oops I just noticed several places I am subscribed in were on lemm.ee so obviously those are defunct now, the last post in !dogsincostumes@lemmy.world was 8 months ago, one of my absolute favorites was !nathanwpyle@lemmy.world, but the only post other than one asking the content creator where he went was again from 8 months ago, and so on. There’s also just a WHOLE BUNCH of communities that have next to zero comments in them - maybe they are bot posts that people prefer to block? e.g. !publichealth@mander.xyz. Others are not quite as often fully zero but are still less than 5 per post, like !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !globalnews@lemmy.zip, and every single poetry community I can find across the entire Threadiverse.

Don’t get me wrong, some people like ThePicardManeuver and LadyButterfly are holding up a good half of the Threadiverse by super posting to many many communities. But people used to say the same about FlyingSquid and also PugJesus as well. Like see this old appreciation post: https://feddit.org/post/3602869.

So anyway, you aren’t wrong, but it’s not as simple as that, when a good fraction of the communities here keep turning into ghost towns, and those that remain are either the largest, which again attracts the most controversial crowds, or else super super tiny.

But I do enjoy talking with you wherever I see you:-).

Here is an example community that refuses to migrate here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/.

The top-upvoted comments are… eye-opening, to say the least. In this arena of man vs. bear, they have chosen the bear (Reddit), rather than subject themselves to our overall lack of moderation to make a place that mainstream normies - even ones technical enough to be interested in F-droid - can stand to exist in.

That said, actually I thought that programming.dev was fairly chill though, so I am not certain that I understand the reasons why, if we are specifically talking about the instance you are on? Many communities on hexbear, and some of the more extremist content on Lemmy.ml, are even hidden by default for a new account.

Perhaps it is the overall lack of transparency about such matters? Someone browsing by https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=Active would still see “funny meme” content such as https://lemmy.world/post/50297816, even without an account, which can be quite off-putting.

And there are so many people who have come here, remained for literally years, and then decided to leave. We stayed, so it’s a bias effect for sure, but their stories are quite a turn-off to new users.

Many instances have put in a great deal of effort to make the Threadiverse more palatable to new users. But… when you read the responses to posts like this one, it does reveal how large swathes of this place go mostly unmoderated, or at least what is left is annoying and tiring to have to wade through.

Example comment: “What a fucking chud loser you are”, which aside from representing a personal attack on the user rather than their argument (a direct violation of that community’s rule #2), also detracts from rather than adds to the subject under discussion.

The people in that subreddit are already having discussions in that space - Reddit is getting more annoying all the time, but they can persist. Is there is any particular reason then that they should come here and subject themselves to our toddler fights over whether Russia invaded Ukraine vs. the other way around? (which isn’t even something up for debate, realistically speaking?)

Anyway in case you are interested, there is a !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev community that you could join, although there has been only one post within the last four months, so while not quite dead it is definitely struggling rather than thriving. There is also https://programming.dev/c/cs_career_questions and https://programming.dev/c/no_stupid_questions, although they are also struggling.

Maybe we can do things to reduce our toxicity level, but I fear that the word is out about Lemmy being mainly a tankie bar, and I don’t know how to convince anyone (especially myself) that it is not the case - especially bc that is well and truly what we are, and yet I also think that it needn’t be all that we could ever be?

I mean yeah… though they can still troll you by calling out slurs from the safety of the instances that they control. We have to have a thick skin here. How this relates to the OP though is that not everyone is willing to subject themselves to such, hence leave. That is one way to “move away from the shitty communities/instances”, by simply leaving entirely.:-P.

Obviously, except that they CLAIM that they are leftists. So then they are “leftists” rather than leftists.

OP made clear the distinction by stating:

come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for?

North Korea obviously famously representing a brutal totalitarian regime that murders its own people “leftist utopia”.

The sheer amount of toxicity on the Threadiverse is a real issue. Multiple people have claimed to have been stalked irl (weirdly even incorrectly so, as in thinking they were someone else?) or received death threats (I dunno how credible but how relevant would that even be here?), over and above issues shared by Reddit mods.

My point is that it is incredibly draining. Add to this how ineffectual the tools have been all this time on Lemmy: no notification of moderation events, no modmail, no ability to continue discussing the matter on the very post that was merely removed from the community listing but not full-on deleted, and even no ability to bring on additional mods from another instance, where they can see the moderator reports (bc those do not federate). The upcoming v1.0 will help a tiny bit with very little of this, and the rest of the issues will remain. PieFed helps with significantly more of them, but not all - e.g. without a modmail, which mod do you contact on the list if you want to ask why your content was removed, especially when it is obscured by the modlog merely saying it was done by “mod”?

In all, this space is becoming simultaneously both less moderated overall, while also vulnerable to overzealous power-hungry mods who do things like preemptively ban people from communities that they’ve never so much as heard of, while using insults in the ban reason section (being protected by your admin means that you can say whatever you like, in the modlog - call people trolls, when you are a mod they have to let you do it, with no ability to stop you).

It’s a 4chan mentality, and it’s extremely unwelcoming to new users. It is entirely understandable to me why subreddits are refusing to migrate here, even as access to old-reddit is in the process of being curtailed (removed?).

Don’t forget the insult. I’ve been banned from so many AI communities, none of which I’d ever heard of before, most of which had zero posts even, and all of which called me an anti-AI troll.

On PieFed actually, anarchist.nexus.

When you’re a mod or admin, they let you do it dontcha know, grab 'em right by the gonads! Say whatever you like to go into the permanent modlog, you won’t be stopped!

They also had their own protest at the same time as the Rexodus.

On Lemmy or Stack Overflow?

Fwiw there is !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social, though with at best one post per week (or almost per month lately), and on the instance that has decided to shadow-censor votes even from other users of the Threadiverse like Lemmy and Mbin without disclosure of that fact. Announcement of the latter might have had a really chilling effect upon the community since this past month the number of posts has really dropped off a cliff.

It’s been really hard for people to be the change they want to see in the world, and to share the same spaces despite such major differences in outlook on life. And for all the criticism of their moderation policies (note I am not questioning the validity of that, especially since I don’t post or typically even comment in the political communities so have no direct experience there), each time a MAJOR Threadiverse user leaves, they take all of their posting efforts with them - I’m talking about the likes of FlyingSquid, PugJesus, and I almost hesitate to mention AdmiralPatrick since I’ve already been accused of being an alt of his:-).

I tend to not post often myself unless I really have something I want to share, as people either can respond negatively or else not at all, even for like a nonpolitical comic, and that can make it somewhat un-fun. (So instead I try to make the Threadiverse more lively by contributing comments:-)

Eternal September… except it’s fucking Groundhog Day now!!

Especially when they label themselves like “memes” and “comics” etc.

Somehow on the backend the wires must have got crossed and sent c/Lemmyshitpost content over to c/news instead 🤪

(/s …?)

PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.

PieFed allows for this already, though iirc the flagship instance PieFed.social chooses to put nothing for Lemmy.ml.

I always enjoy content on Beehaw. This is the note that appears on every single post in a community on that instance:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

Notice how the link goes to Beehaw itself for additional details, to explain their policies in their own words.

I always found Lemmy.ml’s own choice of words to describe themselves quite disingenuous though - as if it were merely FOSS or something being discussed, and as if nothing whatsoever related to politics exists, certainly nothing that might, oh I dunno, differ from their very narrow, highly specific viewpoint (which distinctly clashes with actual facts, e.g. video evidence of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which tankies declare variously that it did not happen, or if it did happen then that there were no fatalities).

Hexbear at least is extremely open about how they exist for nothing more than the sake of arguments - that’s arguably fine even, so long as it remains constrained inside the communities designated for such - where the members actually want it, i.e. consent should matter - rather than spilling out into every single other fucking community all across the Fediverse.