Spaceman Spiff

The numbers are highly skewed because of the launch. A number of users are being paid to create content during the launch. A lot of the users are just checking out the hype. Some will stay, many won’t.

The numbers won’t really be useful or comparable until the dust settles. I give it a month.

As awful as that is, the design of those dumpsters will always lead to this. To put the bag in, you must hold the lid open well above your head (and higher than many people can reach) while holding a heavy bag of trash, then lift it even higher to get it in. If you are smaller than average (e.g. a child), physically disabled, or just not an able-bodied adult, that becomes impossible

It’s not that it’s bad per se. The whole federation thing is confusing enough that it’s a barrier to entry. There’s also the fact that change is hard. Mastodon has a different interface, with the associated learning curve. Beyond that, it’s not just having a certain number of celebrities/etc, but the right ones. That leads to a chicken and egg problem for a lot of users. Eventually enough people would sign up (and content creators posting to both) that it would trigger a mass migration, but that has not happened yet.

So, after all that, most users decide that Twitter is ok enough for now.

This really needs to be higher.

Running a Mastodon or Lemmy server is surprisingly cheap. With some specific tweaks and rules (esp. hosting images and video elsewhere), it can get even cheaper.

If your only goal is to break even, then it’s amazingly easy. Roughly 1 of every 20 users contributing $1/month. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.

Or a single, non-datamined ad at the top of the page.

Regarding Threads, It’s hard to see through the bullshit right now. End user reports are pretty abysmal, while media coverage remains glowing. Meta has clearly sunk a lot of money into promoting the launch, complete with a ton of astroturfing, paid endorsements, paid content creators, etc.

On the flip side, people have been absolutely desperate for a realistic Twitter alternative. Too many tried (and abandoned) Mastodon. It’s entirely possible that Threads will be a just-barely-good-enough Twitter alternative to abandon the Musk abuse.

I won’t even make a prediction on it until next month, at the earliest. Let the launch hype fade, and see if it has staying power.

Since email is the common analogy, I would extend that to say that you could be John.Smith@gmail. You might also have John.Smith@outlook. Someone else has John.Smith@yahoo. If you wanted, you could setup a new account John.smith@protonmail, or start your own server and be me@JohnSmith.com

Communities are the same way.

Child Sexual Abuse Material, basically the current term for child porn. Nepenthe@kbin.social is completely right on all of it. There is a missing detail that loli (along with a few other questionable/objectionable subs) were banned from LemmyNSFW, and went to a different one that promised to be less restrictive, and is widely defederated because of it.

(Side note: While it can be difficult/impossible to draw the line based on appearances, these were clearly and obviously meant to be depictions of children, and often very young children)

Thank you, I hadn’t seen that yet. Assuming it’s true, that’s going to make their claims very hard to prove. It might even get dismissed.

Sounds like you joined one of the anti-porn instances. I can’t read German, so I can only guess that the rules say that, but it’s not obvious on Join-Lemmy. I really wish they’d include some meaningful detail on their standards for fed/defend, since that’s what really matters. Instead we have that garbage about matching your values, and each one has a one-liner about who they are.

You are correct that there’s overlap of users with lemmy.ml, but I don’t see much of the offensive content coming from there. If nothing else, they put their masks on when on that instance. I’m sure there are people on EH with alts elsewhere, but they aren’t given the free reign to cause the same problems.

Lemmy.ml is no longer a recommended instance, and probably won’t be again. But yes, I agree with you that the confusion caused by defederation is a bad thing.

Does some of them being tankies have an effect on the code?

The NSFW stuff was/is a bit more complicated than it might appear on the surface. A lot of instances do not allow NSFW. No judgement, it is what it is. But people on those instances could sub to NSFW communities elsewhere, primarily LemmyNSFW. Less so now, but for a while it was common for those posts/communities to not be tagged NSFW, which caused them to show up on All for people that didn’t want to see it.

Then there was the question about types of NSFW content. Even people that enjoy your standard porn categories had lines they didn’t want crossed in their feed. Specifically animated/cgi CSAM and scat. The former is illegal in some jurisdictions, and caused a different instance (name withheld) to be widely defederated. The latter was more of an issue with limited tools, but the result was the same- either LemmyNSFW blocks that (at least until better tools are available), or they also get cut off.

I wouldn’t say defederation is rampant, but there were a few very high profile examples that hit right when people were new. Specifically, Beehaw/LW and Exploding Heads/everyone. Plus the whole thing about NSFW content and types.

While it’s true that many of the original devs have problematic views, it’s not really meaningful. The software is open source, there are tons of new developers (with varying views), and the code has nothing to perpetuate their ideas. In fact, they are pretty isolated on their own instance (Lemmygrad) since everyone defederates them almost immediately.

Tildes is just too small. The obvious explanation for growth is all of the Fledditors (Rexit? I like Lemmygrants, but that really only covers people who came to Lemmy) looking for an alternative. People wanted a drop-in replacement for what they already had. Tildes didn’t even have enough of a seed in their biggest subs, let alone their (very few) niche groups. Same for Raddle, Squabbles, etc. The only subs that made a significant migration to those are the ones that packed up, locked the doors, and left a forwarding address to anyone left - Similar to what r/piracy did, except that went to Lemmy (complete with instructions to ignore the federation questions)

As for Kbin, I think the bigger factor is coverage. As soon as anyone started mentioning people leaving for greener pastures, Lemmy was always the first thing mentioned. Kbin was always a second-place alternative, along with a few others. Since Kbin has the same confusion about federation as Lemmy, it didn’t pick up a lot of people that bailed on the first choice.

Not that it matters much anymore, since Kbin is well-federated with Lemmy

The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it’s about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.

But right now, it’s entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven’t seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.

If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That’s fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter’s publicly available data.

My understanding is that Mastodon users can reach into Lemmy communities, but not vice versa. It’s unclear exactly how Threads would fit into the picture, because it’s still theoretical.

They certainly could, but using something off the shelf saves development time and costs. Not only did someone else already do the base work, but they are fixing bugs and adding features as an ongoing task. And that all happens free, without Meta spending a dime. Meta only needs to add their customizations.

There’s been plenty of speculation on why they want to federate, which is much less clear. It could be an attempt to get around EU antitrust (etc) laws. It could be an attempt to usurp Mastodon as the primary destination for Twitter refugees. It could be an attempt to slurp up the data from people that refuse to give it to Meta. But this is all just speculation, and it’s unlikely that they will honestly reveal their reasoning.

Yeah, all of these other explanations seem WAY more complicated than needed.

Possibly. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret that part.

One plausible scenario is that they brought in a consultant, who said their data would be worth $XXXX on the open market. A common element of MBA thinking is that any potential profits are something you are entitled to, regardless of the consequences. It’s also pretty clear they don’t have a mature management team, or a viable path to realize those profits. But they had to stop someone else from getting it, so there was a rushed decision. I don’t quite know how it coincided with killing 3rd party apps, though, unless it was just more really incompetent management.

A valid point, but non-mods don’t usually have a lot of say unless the mods choose to solicit input. It’s a sign of bad mods to be sure, but one that happens all of the time. And of course, some mods will ask but just not listen.

And you consulted those 19k before attempting to take ownership?