OpenStars

The forerunners to these trends were observable even back then, and also, history repeats itself. Check out HG Wells Time Machine from 1895 (not 1985, actually 1895), and Animal Farm by George Orwell in 1945, or even Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, written around 380 BCE.

The closer we get to the future, the higher the resolution of the prediction - using our exact words & phrases like “social media” - but it is eerie how accurate those hundreds to thousands of years old works are as well.

Some people seem to REALLY dislike it, but possibly they are not numerically all that many? Which is why I initially wanted to write that post, and now there’s this one also trying to correct the source of the misunderstanding.

Interesting comment from db0:

Ye it’s a problem term. I don’t know if it can be reclaimed, but listing all the software is also not great and most people think of microblogging when they hear “Fediverse”. Maybe “Nestedverse” or “Forumverse”? I don’t really have a good catchy term in mind.

That said, I keep using Threadiverse lately and nobody seems to be challenging it so perhaps its usage is not as problematic as I thought, or as you say here, as much as in the past? It might mainly be a consideration for someone promoting us to Reddit if they wanted to use the term.

(Edit: I think instead of “was never (intentionally)” you meant “was not originally”?)

Regardless of who was first, Threads exists now. If we tell people on Reddit to come join us here on the “Threadiverse (minus Threads itself, except some instances might actually choose to federate with it, while others do not…)”, isn’t that confusing?

I wrote a post about this a couple months ago but ironically PieFed.social had major federation issues for the next week so barely anyone saw it (except those I discussed it with in other conversations). Anyway db0 suggested a really cool name: the Forumverse. 😎

And as @[email protected] mentions here, I too just call it Lemmy+PieFed+Mbin (& maybe +Sublinks someday we hope?:-)

That said, atm >99.9% of communities are on an instance running Lemmy (for now), so whatever software you use to connect with it - perhaps an app like Voyager or Sync or Connect or Thunder, or Mbin connects with Lemmy (and presumably PieFed?), and PieFed connects with Lemmy too (here is the community [email protected] that I’ve already subscribed to from a Lemmy instance so you can immediately see it in action), the majority of the content across the Threadiverse (exclusive of that actually on Threads.net itself) is being funneled through Lemmy, like even if I on PieFed submit a post to [email protected], that’s on “Lemmy” where it “lives” - right?

PieFed at least can have communities, as too can Mbin. Though one day Sublinks or some such could convert the existing database to something other than Lemmy… And also the Thunder app now has a fork that can nominally interact with PieFed, so the lines really are getting more blurry.

TLDR: Anyway, we need a cool new term!:-)

And for our accounts I keep using “Fedizen”, to be more inclusive than just Lemming, despite how cool that is - bc Mbin and PieFed (& one day Sublinks) are part of “us” all too, right!?:-D

Also even that number of Lemmy users is an artifact of people leaving instances and creating new accounts across the Fediverse. I have 3 accounts myself that I check usually once a month, bc messages sent to my old one(s) won’t follow me so it’s the only way to make sure that someone trying to reach me can do so. And I had one on Kbin.social as well so there are now 4 OpenStars (3 looking to be active on a monthly basis) - and all of them are me!:-)

The better stat to use then is not Total Accounts but rather Monthly Active Users. In this, Lemmy has been steadily declining. We are now at <41.9k, after we held steady for awhile earlier this year at 45k. The peak after the Rexodus was ~52k - see https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/, the number of instances has gone way down, the number of accounts per instance gone up, it looks like people are abandoning single-user instances in favor of the larger multi-user ones. But Lemmy.World used to hold ~80% of all Lemmy users while now it is closer to like 37% iirc, so overall we are becoming more centralized on average, but also stabilizing into a few established instances, and decentralization at the peak is also happening as well - especially after yesterday’s announcement that will drive even more people, and entire communities, away from Lemmy.World further.

Overall engagement is up though - so more posts and comments from fewer people, those of us who remain here have become more active.

Mostly, though there’s also fire-fighting too.

I got my start on Kbin.social as well - he was ambitious, that’s for sure, but despite all the people clamoring that they could do things faster and better, that dream doesn’t look to me like it has materialized? Although Mbin is also good as it is, if you like the interface and also want the interconnection with Mastodon.

I do see features being added to PieFed over time, and hold out high hopes for it.

Sublinks also looks promising, though it was paused for basically a year due to its founder having a baby.

No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @[email protected] is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)

Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.

Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).

That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.

Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.

Sadly, there are no “great” options here:-(.

Side-note: “instance blocking” is misnamed, don’t be mislead - all that does is mute communities on that instance, but it still shows you all of their comments on posts to communities not on that instance (cough Cowbee cough cough), plus they can reply to you, generate constant notifications (for WEEKS and WEEKS on end if they choose to - it’s happened to me, once for hexbear.net and again for lemmygrad.ml, back when my instances were still federated with those, and when I was naive and fresh and had no idea what I was walking into by replying to a post that I had found on All, not having read the community sidebar first), and also they can vote on and influence your content. Only true defederation will prevent the latter though.

1. lemmy.cafe as you saw, but it has some technical problems - e.g. notice how none of the image previews load when you visit? I have no idea what further problems lie behind that one - all I know is that it has persisted for weeks, which does not fill me with confidence. Still, not a bad idea to at least test for yourself?

2. dubvee.org, which has a friendly site admin though a nonstandard (& nonintuitive?) web UI “Tesseract”; he is super aggressive at blocking both the Alt-Right and also the Alt-Left and also trolls regardless of instance; the major down-side being that it is not a wide-spread general-use instance, and limited to W. Virginia USA atm. Anyone who likes to argue may get booted quickly though.

3. quokk.au, although it has only a single admin rather than a team of such, and people say that their requests to join can get ignored for days as a result, also it’s in Australia, so with that geographic distance I would worry about federation of content particularly from Lemmy.World that holds ~80% of the Lemmy users and most of the Fediverse content (at least, this is a major issue for Aussie.Zone also in AU). Here too you could make an account and test it out, prior to recommending to friends? If so, let us know your experiences with it?:-)

4. PieFed allows you to block all the users from any instance of your choice without needing a site admin; this Lemmy alternative also has many fantastic upgrades over Lemmy (categories of communities, hashtags, YouTube video embedding, which Tesseract also offers, and more), however it lacks many of the more foundational aspects (user tagging, searching is primitive, many Notifications do not actually go to what they point at so that gets super frustrating), so while I am located there myself this is not something that I would recommend to everyone, only “early-adopters”, particularly those who can fall back onto a Lemmy alt when necessary.

5. I have heard that the Sync and Connect apps can block all users from any instance of your choice, without needing admin approval. They have a number of other nifty features as well. I have never used either of these, but these might be your best option?

6. Sublinks… well, that’s not an option “soon” at any rate.

7. Otherwise someone would need to spin up a new instance, at which point they can do whatever they choose, but it’s a lot of work, particularly a lot of network bandwidth. Or convince an existing admin team to defed from lemmy.ml? It’s hard enough for most to decide to defed even from lemmygrad.ml and/or hexbear.net though.:-(

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Face it: we are a Nazi bar, or rather the Alt-Left equivalent of one. It takes enormous efforts to carve out a corner of this open social web that fights back hard against a Nazi fascist, and most are unwilling to do what it takes. Though slowly but surely, I do see MAJOR improvements over time - e.g. Discuss.Online recently defederated from hexbear (though unfortunately not also Lemmy.ml), so I view that as a strong even if not entirely sufficient step forward.