Yeah, advocating for literal murder, e.g. of someone who chooses to own stock, we have not only a toxicity problem but overall a quite shocking divergence from the experiences visible on other more moderated platforms, such as X (which also advocates for murder these days I hear, but only in such matters as are soon to be approved by The State, like giving cops free reign to murder anyone they choose - but only lasting for one hour, bc otherwise that would be just ridiculous, you know!?🤪🫠).

On the one hand, getting out from under the thumb of regulations is fantastic, compared to not being able to do thus at all. While on the other, people can be so unfriendly and waste so much of our time having to sift through such nonsense (as is sponsored by The Other, Opposing State).

So yeah, I guess it is a bit like 4chan? (Not that I'm speaking from personal experience, but from the stories told about it, it shares similarities?:-P) But then again, Internet 1.0 did not offer the ability to federate as we now can, so actually I think it's a step forward, more than merely back - yes we are rolling back some features that were quite bad (corporate sponsorship), but we get to keep most of the good - e.g. the ability to view images and even videos directly inside the post without having to leave the site to view them elsewhere and then return. We have the best of both of those worlds!?:-)

That's so cool! Do be careful but yeah, it is such a wonderful experiment. On the one hand, if I didn't have access to Lemmy, I would never have found out that e.g. after Biden forbade the railway workers from striking (two Christmases ago iirc?), he worked with them for MONTHS to get them all the things they needed e.g. time off with paid sick leave. The corporate media (for the most part) refused to cover it, probably bc it was boring and they couldn't sell ads as effectively with such content as well as something that bleeds and thus leads.

On the other hand, Lemmy also allows disinformation campaigns to spread too, e.g.:

(For one it ignores how both Russia and China are doing genocide - relevant bc on Lemmy.ml where it was posted you are only allowed to criticize such things when the "other side", meaning Western capitalism, does it, so like you can say how the USA aids Israel's genocide but you can not say how Russia is doing similarly in the Ukraine, or China to the Uyghurs, etc. - and it ignores that Trump has said that he will write Israel a blank check to do even more, instead seemingly pointing blame at Biden's administration for doing genocide, all without ever saying so explicitly but that seems the implication, given the timing of it being released just prior to the USA election? Oh well, surely anything that fosters apathy among the voting populace could never influence the outcome now could it...? Edit: And the list of criticisms just goes on and on and on and on like that - still another is how it ignores how most "humanitarians" and even most PEOPLE in the USA are not okay with the genocide that is going on, so how is that not a strawman to say that "none such exist" as that would want to stop it, as distinct from the leadership that might also want to stop it, yet isn't doing so, thus doesn't seem to want to stop it bad enough, though it can NOT be inferred from that, imho at least, that human rights don't exist here at all, or are not cared about at all - that seems quite hyperbolic to me, and again ignores how Trump will now do more than Harris would have.)

Setting politics aside now:-).

You might point people to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, and post to that community yourself anything that you want a new user to know?

Also check out PieFed - it lacks significant polish, e.g. if you tag my username there like @openstars@piefed.social I will not receive a notification bc that feature hasn't been implemented yet, but especially for a student has such great resources so it at least is something to be very aware of and kinda show off what the Fediverse has to offer now plus where it is heading in the future. Especially as so many people want to get away from the "tankies" - e.g. Lemmy.World announced wanting to support a different project, Sublinks, though that one might be stalled at this point:-(.

Do let us all know how your experiment turns out? I mean make a post somewhere (and please tag me to make sure I see it!:-) so we can all be enriched by your efforts and the fruit that they bring:-). If you need a suggestion for a community, maybe... !fediverse@lemmy.world or !fedigrow@lemm.ee.

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, , 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!?:-)

Later: why didn't you do the thing I asked?

The secret is: it's always your fault.

Oh hell naw. I'm maintaining my sanity by letting Jon Stewart tell me all about it afterwards:-).

Roughly one year ago, you say? Gee, I wonder what could possibly have happened roughly one year ago, hrm? Can't really think of anything particularly memorable that happened roughly one year in the past... [them, OP and all the commenters]

I mean, Trump is also defending genocide too though...