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.
Wonderful!
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.
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).
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:
hexbear.net:
Lemmygrad.ml:
Average of the other 16 Instances (of Top 20, excludes lemmy.world who’s similarly crashing):
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.
I did wonder what happened to that person.
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
Encouraging people to contribute only goes so far when this place is simultaneously discouraging people’s contributions. It is systemic, not limited to ML, and needs major efforts including enhanced technical capabilities to try to solve. Note that if ML ever were to be defederated, the absolute most toxic trolls would simply switch to using their alts on some other instance such as Lemmy.World, which they have announced they will do in advance, several years ago. They even indicated that they would make apps that automate the process of trying to send messages to someone, cycling through an array of alts until one is found that is not banned on that instance (or by that recipient?) - no truly does mean to simply push forward all the harder, for some.
But making a more firm stance would also send a signal about what is desired vs. not. Are calls for murder of all people in the Western World acceptable? Apparently, judging from their presence, yes.
Most places are defederated from HB - which was not always the case (I was on both StarTrek.Website and Discuss.Online prior to blocking them), but now that it is I don’t worry about them so much as ML that is still sending out content that turns people away.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, I only showed references in support of the fact that the problem lies there in front of us. Or at this point, behind us, since once a reputation is gained (for e.g. nostr, 4chan, etc.) it is exceedingly difficult to change.
On the whole, I think our reputation is closer to nostr and 4chan than it is to Bluesky. Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM. Something must be specifically blocked in order to filter it out (either that, or a new instance can include only trusted existing instances, but that runs into problems where new ones pop up all the time and will get excluded, so this approach seems not to be used by the vast majority of existing instances, at least the major ones).
Wonderful!
That team is so energetic and helpful, it’s a pleasure to see it! 😁
My understanding is the trolls exist because .ml admins allow it. If they try using .world, I expect the .world admins would ban. If they ban evade, I imagine a new safeguard would be added to counter them.
I don’t go to other social media, so my only knowledge of our reputation is from people repeating things here.
Hopefully “our reputation” can jump to a different comparison scale (I wouldn’t want to be compared to any of those options).
Okay, I’m going to push back on this. At no point have I ever heard CSAM being accepted or allowed. The only time I’ve ever heard of it coming up, everyone reacted negatively. The poster was blocked, all the posts were deleted immediately, and new safeguards were put into prevent it happening again.
Agreed :)
Edit: missed a section.
Perhaps this is an exceedingly poor way to describe it - I just meant that federation (like with ML, hexbear, lemmygrad, and any new instance) happens by default. Instances that host CSAM - like extremist far-right content - are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.
Anyway it could still be misleading even if correct, bc this is at the instance level, whereas someone still has to subscribe at the community level in order for content to begin coming in. So the potential for content - good, bad, or whatever - to spread is baked right into the ActivityPub Protocol from the start, by design. Just like what people keep saying about 4chan (though admittedly I never went there personally).
And people must have subscribed to hexbear and lemmygrad and ML communities on all of the major instances, therefore all of that content was already there for me to stumble upon as a new joiner myself, fresh from KBin where it had been severely curtailed. I - like all other new joiners - then bad a decision whether to flee this place permanently (which I almost did, and continue to revisit that thought every year or so as expectations keep not being met, making it all the harder to hold out much hope for the future) or to begin blocking people, one by one, and even making a (successful) petition to defederate discuss.online from hexbear.net.
All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!
Ultimately, it’s arguably fine for places like 4chan and nostr to exist (unless you take the position that the echo chamber then breeds toxic trolls that when they leave it, act to harm others, though keep in mind that in this analogy, the Threadiverse itself is 4chan and nostr, in that we allow anything and everything, especially on ML that we then host on all of our machines too - e.g. if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee), but what’s far less fine is to allow people to stumble upon it unawares, particularly when it is labeled oppositely from what it truly is. A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.