Lies, damn lies, and graphs that don't have the Y-axis starting at 0.

10% growth in a day is nice, but far from a revolution. Let's see this trend going for a month.

FYI: it looks like Trump is going to win the popular vote on this one as well.

Repeat after me: anything I write on the internet should be treated as public information. If I want to keep any conversation private, I will not post it in a public website.

It's a good thing they get verified. It means they can not take back anything they post and they have to take accountability for the account.

Do you think it would be better if they didn't verify it and let them spread misinformation and propaganda with plausible deniability?

https://fediverse.hanbitgaram.com/

410 Gone!
I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far.
We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed.
The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.


I trawled unintentionally.

Evidence No. 3783 that "social media" and "privacy" do not mix well together.

Let me repeat one more time:

• anything you write online should be considered public.
• There is no "consent-based" fediverse.
• There is no "GDPR protects me from that".
• There is no "security through obscurity".
• There is no "dark corner of the internet".

No matter your morals and ethical values, If you need to have any type of conversation that you think might get you in legal trouble, do not have this conversation in a public forum. Use #matrix if you have to, and even then you'd still need to worry large group chats which may have some undercover agent.

And if you are really concerned about "censorship", then ActivityPub is not for you. Go join forces with the bitcoiners and use #nostr.

There is less of everything. Less sports, less hobbies, less local groups, less crafts, less academic discussions, less indie hackers and entrepreneurs, less fashion/brand/style enthusiasts...

Memes and entertainment are too shallow and can be found anywhere, we need to focus on getting some people focused on the deeper end. Reddit's strength is in its long tail of interests. Instead of running blackouts or general protests, we should have focused on bringing one specific community to Lemmy (like e.g, knitting), figure out the issues and support them to migrate fully. If we pulled that off, other communities would have a template to emulate.

we’re avoiding

"We" are a minority share of the market and no one really cares about "us". "We" are irrelevant and we will keep being irrelevant unless we start actual and effective evangelizing for an open web.

This is not just about "avoiding", it's about fighting for culture change.

A few reasons:

• The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.
• The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support an ad-based economy. Even if by some magical powers we got an ethical ad network working here (which didn't track users and focused solely on paying people by the opportunity of broadcasting their inventory) there wouldn't be enough eyeballs to attract advertisers.
• The userbase is still anti-business.
• For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.
• Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.

I've added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year, and even people who are active on the Fediverse and have a vested interest in having monetization alternatives turned it down. This is why all we see are these completely fringe ideas that can only appeal for the get-rich-quick crowd.

There is also a lesson in implementing proper tests. During these holidays I started to play a bit more with Rust and went on to look at Lemmy's backend code. Not a single unit test in sight...

The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:

• Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.
• By closing down with Threads, you'll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.
• By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say "hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden."

https://xkcd.com/605/

Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the "admin" functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a "moderation dashboard". It's a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a "sidecar system" instead of being built "into" the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.

I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.

How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.

Total user count is a vanity metric. Monthly active users is more relevant and on that we are still way off from the ATH of 2.1 million from 2023.

Also, with the nature of the Fediverse where one single person can have multiple accounts, even this metric might be bogus.

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying "this is my XMPP handle" was far from enough to know if you'd be able to communicate with others, and you'd have to figure out things like:

• Does the server support MUC?
• Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
• Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
• Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
• If my client supports "share live location", what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.

If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.

I use Sponsorblock, enjoy it, and promote it whenever appropriate... but do we really a whole community for that? What do you want to talk about it there?

requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.

What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?

The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.