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:-).

Can you send us an example of such a post as you are talking about? B/c I am not seeing it. (Edit: oops that was old and I forgot to remove this sentence - see below.)

The most recent content on lemmy.blahaj.zone that I see from sh.just.works is from 2 hours ago: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1688895/11494679, so those two definitely are federated (I checked and don’t see either one in the others’ instance blocked list). However, as expected the user https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/CDRMITTENS@sh.itjust.works has no content more recent than 7 months ago. They both say that they are running the same Lemmy version - 0.19.5.

Searching… seems not to work for these style of posts, b/c while the searches pull up zero results for common things like a single space, a colon (inside a URL?), the single letter “a”, etc., there actually are such posts, e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/27811262.

Also, !noncredibledefense@lemmy.blahaj.zone only has 10 posts total, but none are from cdrmittens.

So yeah I think you are correct - the old content that was already there in Blåhaj Lemmy’s database remains, for their content posted to !noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works, but after the ban anything that the Blåhaj Lemmy tries to pull in for that user just gets discarded, and not added to the database. i.e. it has the old but not the new content, for that user. Most likely votes as well as posts or comments (b/c why would that be different?). Though since !NonCredibleDefense@sh.just.works has nothing to do with lemmy.blahaj.zone, they can continue to post on their own home instance - it is only Blåhaj Lemmy that will not see those posts, by design, b/c of the ban.

I hope that makes sense!:-)

I don’t know all the answers - nor have any of my own alts ever been banned so I did not have an occasion to look until now, but I see where the account is not removed, and in fact can be un-banned later. Here’s an irl example: https://lemmy.ml/u/sagxd (which we can see ourselves without an account on that instance - plus it is also visible from elsewhere e.g. https://lemmy.world/u/sagxd@lemmy.ml). You can read the story behind that incident in https://lemm.ee/post/45204357.

Most of the time how it seems to show up in the modlog, at least whenever it happens from lemmy.ml, is a slew of being banned from every community on the entire instance. Although there does seem to be a modlog entry to do differently (note the presence in the pull-down menu of “banning from site”), which despite not seeming to be (commonly? ever?) used from lemmy.ml, is indicated as often being used from other instances.

In particular I don’t know if a banned account can give or receive voting - I think I’ve heard people say both ways. I’ve saved your post and I’ll check back in later to see if someone can say with some actual knowledge what is going on!?:-)

I wanted to add to others’ comments: usernames as well.

So e.g. I could go create an account called Matty@lemmy.world, and another called Matty@lemm.ee, and another Matty@lemmy.zip, etc. (assuming none of these already existed), and they each would be different - plus none of these would be you.

This is a reason why many celebrities say that they refuse to come to the Fediverse, b/c of this potential for misunderstanding regarding the account names - which tbf that is not entirely “new” issue since it would affect emails too, and yet in reality it is new b/c Twitter/X and Reddit and Facebook got people spoiled to expect a certain style of behavior so using the Fediverse feels to them a step backwards (we had a discussion about that topic recently).

So, exactly like email and a website URL, it takes the full thing to specify something exactly - a username, or a community.

I did not make this, but it halfway almost seems to fit…

Oh, mystery solved then!?

Karma’s a your bitch:-P

Except then you have to know the proper community name, which can often look very different from what is displayed. e.g. !world@lemmy.world is an entirely different community than !worldnews@lemmy.world, and damn, that example did not work bc both end up as “valid” links. Well, theoretically sometimes the feedback on having gotten the name correct could be helpful I suppose.

Also I note that what you are saying can seem in contradiction with the help docs. If you start a post or reply and click the help icon in the web UI, it will go to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html, which does not mention the word “community” at all, but does show link syntax. I am more inclined to believe you than the help docs! Especially when we can see the resulting behavior in front of our very eyes - except where it may pertain to other methods of access - but I am pointing out here again that for a new user, finding out such things is currently a terrible process! Even Arch Linux has at the very least man pages, as well as the wikis!

But I’ve been on the Fediverse since the Rexodus, and since I don’t use apps other than the webpage UI (I tried Voyager but while it looks nice, it doesn’t seem to function well, maybe that pertains to accounts on instances other than Lemmy.world such as mine - e.g. I would reply to someone but no amount of refreshing or clicking around would let me see my reply until I force-quit and restarted the app), Mbin, PieFed or Sublinks (or Tesseract), I don’t know myself what the “preferred” method of linking is. I just see what works (or not) for me. And again the help docs are of no help here.

So since you are saying that this 11-month old post is outdated, if you know the details of what would be better practice, perhaps you can write a newer post explaining that?

That is odd that your comment has 0 upvotes. The normal default is 1, and it’s only been one minute since you said it, so hardly time for someone other than me to have seen it and reacted within that timeframe!? You might have a bot following you around the Fediverse instantly downvoting everything that you do?

I’ve had situations where that doesn’t work for me, or like where I will start typing and it won’t expand quite properly - e.g. typing !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca expands not to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca but like to !newtolemmy!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca. The latter repeatedly happened to me on a desktop Chrome. Also if you user-block an instance, then the name expansion process no longer works.

There are actually two types of expansions - one done after you post, another while you are still writing. Neither of which I have ever seen written up in any guide anywhere, other than release notes from as you say like a year ago. Similarly I have not seen guides to cross-posting, in e.g. the Getting started guide.

Edit: oh, and this is the first I am hearing that the former expanded links won’t work - do you know when that happens? Maybe apps, or perhaps non-Lemmy Fediverse Mbin or PieFed? This is the first I am hearing of this iirc.

Finding out how things work on Lemmy, for those of us who do not use Arch btw, is a terrible process for new users. I was thinking, it sure would be nice if there was not just a single post here and there such as Lemmy.ml’s What is Lemmy.ml (that is the exact link that appears in their sidebar though), but an entire community somewhere where such guidance could be posted. If not this one, then somewhere else - but this is the only one like that that I have seen.

Edit: if you know more about when links won’t work, perhaps you can post the thought in that community?

Except some instances like hexbear have downvoting disabled, which tends to encourage people to comment more.

For things such as how to make a proper link that does not take people away from their instance, see !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca.

The virus will affect us all… whether directly or indirect.

I mean, compared to Win 3.1, and before that, DOS…

That one no.

I was going to ask when has it ever made sense to run Windows, but then I noticed how old those logos are. Carry on!:-)

It tends to come from… ah… certain sources though.