flarum, Misskey, Friendica, Mastodon, the list goes on - I don’t know so much about non-Threadiverse ones but see e.g. https://fediverse.observer/ for more details.

Note that Kbin is (semi-)officially dead - there is only a single instance (in Poland, https://bin.pol.social/) that still uses it, and the last commit of its software was on Dec 20, 2023. Everyone else switched to its fork Mbin that is actively maintained. This community really should update its sidebar text, to drop Kbin and add PieFed and Mbin. Kbin was a great idea at some point - I never would have come over to “Lemmy” with its known reputation as the place where many of the trolls went who were banned from Reddit (it’s… sigh… actually true), so Kbin was what convinced me to leave Reddit - and now Mbin carries its legacy onwards, but Kbin itself is extinct (I am not trying to be hyperbolic here, it just literally is, as far as actively maintained software goes).

There was also Sublinks but… its development got stalled by the main dev having a baby (its last commits were all in 2024 iirc).

PieFed is the hot topic though - all praise the PieFed. I admit to some bias in this regard:-P, however it is also backed up by the stats: not only do we get enormous updates practically weekly (often at least a minor one multiple times a week), but by comparison Mbin has about 700 MAUs (Monthly Active Users), compared to PieFed’s ~1500 (more than twice that). Which should increase rapidly now that app support is in the process of being firmed up, especially experimental support in Voyager the #1 Threadiverse app. Somehow PieFed has surpassed Mbin and even Lemmy in several featured areas - and astonishingly even that of Reddit (whose development for many years now has focused on increasing profits, not necessarily offering things that their user base actually wanted) - mind you it is still being polished, and some (very few) areas still need heavy work (such as the search functionality). On the other hand, it is written in Python, unlike Lemmy that is in Rust (which very few devs know, or want to know it seems, at least among those willing to donate efforts to the codebase), so feature tinkering is expected to proceed at a rapid pace for as long as people have ideas that they want to see added.

Diagnosing an issue, on a matter that you feel passionate about, is a first step towards finding a solution for it. So now that you are walking partway down this pathway, I hope that you continue - donate or help directly if that sounds fun to you! :)

And welcome to the Fediverse:).

If you will allow me to respectfully disagree, the mere fact that you can make this post at all is evidence against what you are saying, no?

e.g. Reddit has “posts”, which may have links to “YouTube” or “Wikipedia”, or to “Tiktok” or “Instagram”, or “Facebook” or “LinkedIn”, etc. - each of those requires a different account (the former three at least allow anonymous viewing, the middle two make it extremely difficult but it can be done if someone has a link to a specific item of content, while iirc the latter two mandate having an account to view the content at all).

Within each component of the Fediverse, it seems connected to a very high degree? e.g. the one we are discussing this on here now is the Threadiverse, which can be read, interacted with (voted, saved, links sent to) and commented on by people with accounts on any instance running Lemmy, Mbin, or Piefed (among Threadiverse software platforms I have also heard of nodeBB and flarum but I do not know what the current status is of their ActivityPub protocol integration). This level of interactivity is high.

And beyond that, you can interact with it via Mastodon, Misskey, Friendica, etc. Granted, this level of interactivity is much lower… but at least it exists? So it is high compared to not being able to interact with it, if that makes sense? A better phrasing might be that something is better than nothing?

And with effort put in by people donating their time & energies & attention & skills, it will improve. e.g. I am writing this to you from PieFed where new features are added practically every week (in fact it is nowhere close to being uncommon to see changes every other day). So what you are asking - it is happening, right in front of our very eyes! It might just seem slow to someone more used to “capitalistic” rather than socialist endeavors because it is not backed by corporate money that would seek a return on their initial investment, e.g. by selling user data, and instead requires the donations (especially of effort and skill, but money works too!) of individual people.

Enshittification often serves as a driver towards that behavior. However, while this platform has attempted to leave the former behind, it is not always so simple to actually accomplish that lofty goal. i.e. even if the ultimate disease is now cured, the symptoms themselves still persist, feeding forward by influencing others to continue with those old, bad habits.

Okay, created!

Yeah as Blaze said, multiple conversations spaced apart. The first one I mentioned it, the second they told me they didn’t like it, either the second or perhaps now a third they actively chide me for having mentioned it.

I did not realize that a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml. Fwiw, DuckDuckGo pulls up lemmy.world instead, as its top hit. Lemmy.world at the time had 80% of all Threadiverse users on it, but Lemmy.ml has legacy, and Google’s search algorithm prioritized it over lemmy.world or some other webpage, like an explanatory one.

I also did not realize that, when you click the link to go there, lemmy.ml shows only Local rather than Global results by default, to someone without an account on it.

Combined together, a non-technical normal person is going to Google “Lemmy”, and to the extent they don’t find the actor, will see images that mostly portray how people who own stock or even simply store money in a bank account should literally, not figuratively but literally, be killed / beheaded (/ guillotined / Luigi’d, however you want to say it). Usually within the first 2-5 pages of posts too, and especially anytime that there is any election going on in a Western nation, the bOtH sIdEs SaMe campaigns are out in full force. Lemmy is pretty extreme - you can block it all, but when you simply Google Lemmy and see lemmy.ml’s Local rather than Global content, the bOtH sIdEs SaMe content is extremely prevalent.

e.g. this one that just prior to the USA elections, subtly hints that Kamala Harris might not be the best choice to vote for:

Edit: regardless of whether the evidence fully supports their 2nd-hand assertion or not, my own statement is that 100% of the people that I have tried to introduce Lemmy to irl have actively chided me for its “extreme leftist” content. Of course, Reddit is somewhat leftist itself, so I feel that it is not quite a fair comparison, but it is something to be aware of. The definition of a “Nazi bar” is that regardless of whether we ourselves are Nazis, we allow such here and that makes people uncomfortable - although in our case not totalitarian right-wing fascists but totalitarian left-wing fascists instead (who claim to be socialist, seemingly without knowing what that word means). I probably should use less inflammatory language here, but my point is that “Lemmy” makes people uncomfortable. And rightly so, as the very name itself has a history.

Since a week ago yes definitely, since yesterday I am not certain. Here is one notification that seems to go nowhere: https://piefed.social/post/995600, where the notification, received yesterday, said “Jean-Luc Plushcard New Post in tenforward@lemmy.world”, yet I see that post neither in the modlog for the community (https://lemmy.world/modlog/526169) nor in the list of actual posts in it, on the original server (https://lemmy.world/c/tenforward). Even if the post changed its title, then (1) it can’t be in the modlog bc the last rejection there is 7 days ago iirc, and (2) that should not change the URL link to it if it wasn’t rejected. Perhaps then it was removed by the original poster? Also PieFed had that Cloudflare issue, I think it was yesterday? But I don’t know if that is related.

Do you think this situation is a good one to report on?

I would argue that it is more an anti-ad against Lemmy. 😉😶

(Although I still have a Lemmy account myself, so it’s more like against pinning all of our hopes for the Threadiverse onto one tankie-developed platform, made by people kicked off of Reddit for being too toxic and so deciding to create their own Reddit 2.0 - which btw super kudos to them bc that was not easy! Yet also I don’t feel like pinning all of my hopes on it either. To each their own I suppose - I just dare to be different myself, wherever that may lead me.)

No - see the other response to my comment. The internet is not a welcoming place, period, and I’ve ceased recommending this corner of it to people. If they bother to read things then they will find what they seek. Nazi bar and all.

Though you are right, PieFed is just now turning the corner where I feel that I could ethically do so (I still see so many bugs: especially notifications that lead to nowhere, e.g. if the post gets deleted but the notification remains, and the continued lack of a Preview ability, but at the rate things are going those could both be resolved by next month! Or possibly already are in the Voyager app support?).

Thank you for your own continual efforts advocating on behalf of the Fediverse: we need you, and I for one am so glad that you tirelessly devote so much time and love towards that goal!:-)

Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.

It does not help - and I did not know myself at first - that a Google search of “Lemmy” points people to lemmy.ml, which btw to someone without an account does not show “Fediverse” content and instead rather shows exclusively Local (rather than Global). The amount of bOtH sIdEs SaMe political content is always rather extreme, especially there.

Aside from platforming political extremism, and using Arch Linux (and beans 🫛 🫘), there just isn’t much else to this place. For us here, it is enough… unless we need to actually know about stuff and for that we go back to Reddit or whatever - especially niche topics that are discussed nowhere else -> if you want the content then you have to go to where it is at. The content creators refuse to come here and I don’t blame them: we aren’t a very welcoming bunch.

Let’s see, so we covered how we are a Nazi bar, how content creators can’t be arsed to bother posting here, oh yeah and there’s also the fact that Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit was. There is a modlog but no modmail, no notification when your content is removed, no ability to appeal or discuss (especially when the modlog merely says that the removal was done by a “mod” - it used to say the name of the mod but then it was changed to merely say “mod”, so note how Lemmy is becoming more rather than less totalitarian as time passes) or again even so much as be told that your stuff is now gone - and unlike Reddit, taking all of the conversations that happened on a post along with it (when Reddit removed a post it merely took away the link from the community, but someone with the URL could still continue to interact with it for a long time, whereas Lemmy does not even acknowledge that a post once used to exist, instead mentioning a server error and - get this - that you should try again later to access it… 🤔🥴 despite knowing full well that the post will never be un-removed; I am not suggesting that this misleading message is intentionally inaccurate, just stating once more how undemocratic this is that a mod can basically wipe out most traces that a post ever existed even in the past).

But is there a thought that making an alternative Reddit would be super easy and fun and require zero effort? Lemmy is still extremely far behind Reddit in terms of features and will take many more years to catch up, if ever, and it’s hyper-authoritian nature will always remain baked directly in (plus the Nazi bar effect… it’s literally right there in the very name!). Though you might check out PieFed - in terms of features it has already surpassed Reddit in many ways, though it is still early in development (e.g. most days there is no Preview ability for posts or comments - although some days there is so I suspect it is almost ready to remain rolled out as a permanent feature?), and it has some fascinating ideas about democratization of moderation. PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust and so features come out in days to months rather than years. PieFed still shows posts from Lemmy.ml, but unlike lemmy.ml itself, does not do so exclusively, so offers a far more global and democratic platform. I’m placing my hopes in PieFed rather than the dying Lemmy moving forward. I usually get downvoted for saying all this… yet here we are on a post saying how MAUs for Lemmy are decreasing and calling into question whether Lemmy will even survive or not - while btw those numbers for PieFed recently tripled in size - so history has and will continue to prove this point accurate. There is hope for the Fediverse, not specifically for Lemmy I think (there is just too much wrong there and the efforts continue to move in the opposite direction, more towards rather than away from authoritarian control, which trends towards fewer rather than more content, i.e. it intentionally creates “echo chambers”), but for the wider Fediverse, yes. It will take actual effort to build it up though. Each step moves towards that - e.g. apps such as Voyager, Thunder, and Interstellar helped Lemmy (& the latter Mbin) thrive, and now all of those are adding support for PieFed, thus ensuring that none of the previous efforts were wasted, even as they move forward into the future rather than remain stagnant in the past.

But there are reasons why people don’t like coming here - and those still need to be solved. First among them is that the tools have to get better, which is happening. Second, start posting content, and make it fun to spend time here. I see people doing that constantly, making my time here enjoyable.:-) Third, maybe more will be needed beyond those two steps but I don’t know anything about that, so I just focus on the former two steps and leave the rest to the future:-).

Don’t they do this already? Except the manual labor part: they get us to build the fort. And do all the crime. And give them all the pets. Yes master? They do not care about money though, only raw pawer. 😁

Cats bounce, and next you know they’ll be begging you to do it again:-)

(Probably it’s best not to indulge though - don’t want to encourage that habit:-P)

Be careful!

Very nice 👌 I hope we will see more applications for these protocols as time passes.

One issue for me, and this is also true of Mastodon and by extension Mbin, is that I greatly prefer the voting and focus on a topic area rather than person. X / Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky is where celebrities go to increase their profits, fame, and relevance, while Reddit / Lemmy / PieFed (/ + nodeBB + flarum + others) are where we discuss matters of import. I’m not criticizing your post here - this is definitely the correct community to discuss such matters:-) - just interjecting my personal preferences into the conversation, to disclose my own biases.

If Lemmy.World went away, then correct you would not “lose” the users as, well you said it, they would simply move to another instance.

But if Lemmy.World remained and you blocked it (if you had a method to do that - it’s not easy at all using base Lemmy but it is doable with some older apps or like Ublock Origin filter rules and such), then in that context you would indeed “lose” all of that content. Or like if you got banned from that instance then that’s another way that you could “lose” access to engage with communities located on it.

The more centralized something is, like Reddit, the more damaging it is to lose access to it, while the more decentralized, as you pointed out, the less overall effect that perturbations have upon the network.

That seems a very good way to phrase it.

The next issue then becomes cost. Which affects Lemmy as well: first there is the requisite effort to set up and self-host even a tiny instance (especially as it relates to potential spam and CSAM attacks), and second the network traffic costs. The latter may be tiny for a single user who only subscribes to a handful of communities, but someone trying to browse All and wanting everything to be available for their perusal (even if deleted soon-ish for storage reasons) will bear a much higher burden. Which depending on local costs may be trivially easy… or prohibitively expensive, but in either case the more data that someone wants to pull in the higher the cost.

And I imagine that Bluesky is either similar, or significantly worse.

Bluesky is decentralised in theory, but in reality it is not.

I loved how you phrased it here:-).

Looking at your other comment on this thread, thank you - that kind of breakdown was precisely what I was hoping to see!:-)

So Bluesky is more decentralized than Reddit (or Facebook), but barely, and far less so than any Fediverse platform currently.

I think what OP was trying to convey was less the current state of affairs and more the underlying protocol itself, which they re-released now under a separate post.

Nice. I remember when it was 80%, then it fell to half, 40%, and apparently now is closer to a third than half. Excellent decentralizing!:-)