Nostr notes by OpenStars

PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice ...

2026-10-27T20:04:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…4evt
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PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice of admin team is far more important than platform software, I believe.

That said, PieFed.World in particular always struck me as an unfinished test project - probably bc the Topic Feeds at https://piefed.world/topics are so bare-bones. That is one of the most-requested features that PieFed offers but PW seems to basically ignore them?

Anyway from Voyager you'll never see them in any case:-).

The PieFed UI is strange but more or workable, aside from some ...

2026-10-27T13:27:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…zhqr
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The PieFed UI is strange but more or workable, aside from some things like trying to view a downvote count being incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible. Try writing a long comment in a Lemmy browser interface - it jumps and skips wildly every time you make another key press, it's horrible. Though it looks beautiful when you use it read-only.

Voyager offers a much nicer UX. Though then 90% of PieFed extra features aren't workable, with 100% of them being inaccessible from within the app.

This place is hella confusing to non-technical normies.

So very many of us around the Threadiverse have been preemptively ...

2026-10-26T22:34:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…aajs
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So very many of us around the Threadiverse have been preemptively banned from communities located on dbzer0 that barely exist - e.g. no posts or even subscribers other than the creator at the time - and called slurs (like "troll") in the modlog by pro-AI account holders who iirc are also admins of that instance (or were at the time).

So yes, dbzer0 is unquestionably the single most rabidly pro-AI instance we have, and I would even go so far as to say vehemently anti-anti-AI. If half the Threadiverse defederates from dbzer0, that will be the main reason why - especially since there is currently no other defense against modlog spam.

Although at this point dbzer0 seems more likely to itself initiate defederation from the rest of the Threadiverse, or at least Lemmy.World where sth like 90% of the most active communities are located, for following the laws of the nations the server machines are located in, and not allowing literal death threats levied against the LW admin team.

Oh, and also dbzer0 is pro-tankie now. Look up the Flotilla if you want more info. I know, shocking right? It used to be one of the more respected instances across the Threadiverse, but now... it's one step removed from the tankie triad in terms of antagonistic behaviors against everyone else. Now you are caught up on all the drama.

I would argue that the Internet with all its glorious diversity ...

2026-09-25T15:01:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…5q4x
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I would argue that the Internet with all its glorious diversity (including e.g. both kids and the olds) is far better today, yet still the Intolerance Paradox is real.

When no means "push forward harder" that will simply never be okay. People will find ways to avoid it, e.g. by leaving the Threadiverse entirely, which already offers next to no OC so what then *do* we offer to someone? A hexbear tankie screaming "death to the Western World", apparently (note the extremist "death to", not the calmer "fall of", let's say capitalism, but violent "death", plus the refusal to limit the target to an economic system and instead leaving open the ambiguity of whether that includes every single person living in a nation that practices it).

I don't blame Redditors for noping right out of that...

And fortunately some progress has been made, just not quite enough if someone can be randomly assigned to go to hilariouschaos or hexbear, rather than sent to an instance that is more in line with the recipient's preferences.

PieFed, as per usual, offers more features than Lemmy, e.g. ...

2026-09-24T21:03:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…gf8a
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PieFed, as per usual, offers more features than Lemmy, e.g. PieFed.zip places a user-level instance block upon those highly controversial instances (not Lemmy.ml though), but then tells users how to remove that block. This is an ideal scenario, not forcing users hands as defederation would but offering a real choice, as opt-in, to interact with them.

On the other hand, PieFed has a lot of problems that I think are going to preclude a lot of people on Reddit from being excited about it. Most of the criticism has ended up being proven as disinformation... but not *all*. For instance, the aforementioned user-level blocks end up shadow-banning users without any acknowledgement to them that their content is not being received. That is somewhat Lemmy's fault for not being able to handle such blocks, but in any case PieFed decided to go ahead and do it regardless - which I support that choice btw - but then it does leave PieFed open to a criticism that it implements shadow-banning procedures. Which Lemmy does not, but at the cost of simply doing nothing at all about the situation.

And now PieFed is expanding upon that practice to shadow-censor votes coming in, even from Lemmy or Mbin instances, whenever the user exceeds a daily vote quota. Which is nowhere explained to the users whose votes are being discarded. I've heard multiple communities canceling their plans to migrate from their current location on a Lemmy instance to a PieFed one over this issue. Note that it is theoretically possible for an instance admin to change this behavior - but it is opt-out, not opt-in, and it was barely announced at all, leaving many admins surprised at the new behavior occuring on their machines, plus it went against strong community push-back, citing logic that I think I've only heard one person say that they understood and agreed with.

The primary criticisms of the Threadiverse are lack of content overall and the fact that it is too confusing for people's tastes. PieFed has made MAJOR strides in making things simpler for people, but as I have described above, it is also making things even more complicated in some other ways. And the crux of it seems to be: PieFed wants to become more like Mastodon, a place for "serious discussions", not a place for social media like with memes and where people upvote content in order to make people feel good emotionally. Which, if true, would be 100% fine btw, except that it claims to be the opposite, hence muddying the issue enormously, forcing users to discern the real truth particularly when it is in direct contradiction to the words they are told about it. i.e., this place is too confusing for people to want to figure us out - it is far too much effort, for very little gain, compared to them simply remaining on Reddit, no matter how enshittified it becomes.

Fine, sure, let's set aside the 65K then, as an outlier. But ...

2026-09-24T05:40:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…9cfe
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Fine, sure, let's set aside the 65K then, as an outlier.

But see the stats yourself at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats. Now Lemmy shows 33K, last month it was 35K, a few months before that was 36K, before that 37K, at the turn of last year in Dec. 2025 there were 40K, and so on. This isn't "growth", this is "shrinking".

And since I am certain that there is a way to massage the stats (somehow) to get it to show a pattern of "growth", I will preemptively state that even if we *were* growing over this period in the past year, it's definitely not very much. So let's just agree that in the absolute very best point of view, Lemmy seems at most stagnant (or even actively shrinking) - ***even despite all of Reddit's abuses in the last year***.

Everyone said to wait until Reddit got rid of old-reddit, and then more people would come here. Well, here we are, and they are not flocking here in droves, it's more like they are trickling in, but at less then the rate of attrition where more people leave than stay (or again, at the absolute very best, break even).

The multiple accounts thing was more about why don't we simply lump together Lemmy + PieFed to get a combined count for the entire Threadiverse at once ([Mbin](https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats) has <1K MAUs). I don't see as much point in making multiple Lemmy alts these days, when the major instances are more stable, but I do think that especially as PieFed continues to add such fantastic new features, that people are more likely to have both a Lemmy and a PieFed account.

So a lot of people making new PieFed accounts could be them migrating from Lemmy to PieFed... or they could simply be trying it out. i.e. like me, having two accounts, neither both on Lemmy nor both on PieFed, but rather one Lemmy and one PieFed. I see this very often especially among the most prolific posters, e.g. someone with a Lemmy.World account testing out or even stably maintaining also a PieFed.World one. Community moderation demands such behavior, though regardless of the reason, it makes cross comparisons between Lemmy and PieFed complicated. And we could get into even deeper scenarios, like someone who greatly prefers Lemmy, but since lemmynsfw.com migrated to fedinwfw.app, now maintains a separate PieFed account as well.

Moreover, I see shrinking rather than growth over the past year, but setting that aside, note that you can also adjust how far back the stats will show for, to see earlier trends. e.g. you can observe how in most of 2024 Lemmy had 45-55K MAUs. So even if we did manage to grow (rather than shrink) by like 1-2K, the background context is that would have occurred after having lost 20K MAUs over the past couple of years. This is entirely independent of the 65K peak, a year before that in July of 2023.

So wherever you consider the "high mark" to be - 65K, 55K, 45K, or even just 40K - we are below that now.

>If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow.

Sure, absolutely - but the "if" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Where are you seeing evidence of "growth" here? Even if you point to a specific month where that might be true, relatively speaking in comparison to the month before it, I am saying that in the long run, the overall trend that I see is downwards. Yes with some slight upswings along the way, but inexorably ever downwards. Not for Mastodon obviously, but for the Threadiverse/Lemmy

And perhaps that's okay? Or perhaps we could take the challenge to do better - e.g. find a way to avoid recommending places such as hexbear and hilariouschaos, because otherwise we are a Nazi/tankie/troll bar, indistinguishable from those others who we claim are "not" us, yet we do exceeding little to nothing at all to separate or even distinguish ourselves from such. Lemmy is the "we use Arch (Linux) btw" of the Fediverse - we here know about e.g. hilariouschaos, and take steps to avoid it, but we do next to nothing to help others not be recommended to outright join it over and above all other Threadiverse instances.

> I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth

I think most of us here would be okay with that, with most likely massive differences in how people define "slow"😉. However, that's just not what I am seeing playing out, as it seems that year by year, we are in decline. Even at the time when bc of what is happening in Reddit you would have rather expected a significant increase.

Maybe something else will happen that will turn this around, but I don't know what. Instead, I think effort is going to be required, e.g. to find a way that hilariouschaos and hexbear do *not* get recommended to random people looking to escape Reddit, and will likely neither enjoy their time there nor be likely to stick around long enough to figure out how to do better. As you said, we need non-technical normal folks here, if we are to thrive.

Except that we keep turning them away.

For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we ...

2026-09-24T00:06:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…eymk
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For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.

But as for how much or even whether we've dropped within the last year - which the graphs show but as you deservedly are saying that you would like confirmation for - I suspect that the answer is that nobody knows, really.

Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic "go"? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from *both* the numerator and denominator?

While that situation was over a year ago now, it does illustrate that I personally at least have no idea how these numbers shown in the graph are being calculated. Nor do I trust them in the slightest - e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs, and maybe more depending on the month examined. Lemmy servers used to be significantly less stable than they are now, so whenever one would become almost entirely unresponsive for a few days, many of us active on the Threadiverse at that time would simply hop over to another alt. Plus some of us like to experience features first-hand like what does PieFed offer, in comparison to Lemmy.

On the other hand, I have no other source of numbers, so I discussed what was presented in front of us. 65K down to 33+/-~7K is already a large enough difference that I believe that we have lost many users. Plus we can see them all over the place talking about how displeased they are with their experience while here - over on Reddit, and Bluesky, and I'm not going to look but presumably also X, Facebook, Insta, etc.

Whether these numbers are valid over the last single year or not... I cannot truly say. Although that alone seems quite telling, given how horribly Reddit is treating its user base lately - e.g. beginning to (or is it done for everyone already) shut down old reddit, and blocking people that use a VPN, etc. The fact that many more people are *not* coming here already should be sufficient for us to make inferences about our popularity, separately from precisely how many people are actively leaving the Threadiverse or not.

For example, read the comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. Copying and pasting a few that I had highlighted previously:

> I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

> There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic

> There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

> Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier

Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily religious (Christian, Muslim, Mormon, whatever) centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but... in truth... they AREN'T ⁉️

On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good ...

2026-09-23T23:02:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…pz92
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On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good neighbors.

When we feel like we are forced into platforming every single batshit insane ideology - like hexbears to name one, though your instance at least had the foresight to defederate from it early on - then we expose people to all the dregs that social media can offer to people.

Like, how can two adults converse with one another, when surrounded by children screaming their heads off - which is not "wrong", but like... can't there even be so much as one room where that level of noise is prevented?

Anyway, I agree that Lemmy's blocking tools are vastly inferior to the task of trying to deal with the situation that you mentioned. The upcoming release of Lemmy 1.0 will help somewhat, by allowing mods to receive remote reports from other instances, but it still would need a LONG way to go - like e.g. implement a true instance blocking capability.

The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned ...

2026-09-23T12:58:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…35ma
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The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.

Note that the numbers then are *still* shrinking.

I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely *not* additional people, or rather only *some* are but nobody knows how much.

Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don't know the details there.

I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.

Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as ...

2026-09-23T04:26:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…vw84
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Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as that same webpage shows when you filter for Lemmy, currently we have 33K monthly active users, down from 35K in recent months, itself further down from 40K in Dec. 2025, having fallen from 65K at the peak during Rexodus.

See also the graph for [PieFed](https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats), which shows 7K MAUs.

Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit... *and* also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.

Iirc the development was just whatever could most easily be ...

2026-08-23T22:15:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…6l5d
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Iirc the development was just whatever could most easily be accomplished, and then once that's out, the rest becomes less urgent and offers diminishing returns in exchange for additional effort.

One crucial detail is that ~99% of all Threadiverse users are on Lemmy rather than PieFed (conversely, >99% of Fediverse users are on Mastodon rather than either, or Friendica, nodeBB, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.). So part of the decision I thought was how to structure these so as not to break Lemmy - like if something is neither an upvote nor downvote, how would that affect Lemmy users?

Tbh I wasn't deeply involved in making this feature so the last point there is my attempt at a hypothetical scenario by way of explanation, which may not strictly speaking have been an actual valid consideration - or rather I am saying that my words here are not all that precise.

Many features on PieFed are unpolished like this. Additional contributors and/or funding would he necessary to flesh them out more. Like hashing out an agreement with Lemmy how their side of this would work. And I suppose with Mastodon as well.

Yes they are. See https://slrpnk.net/comment/19752322.

2026-08-23T22:00:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…m3a0
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Yes they are. See https://slrpnk.net/comment/19752322.

Emojis are implemented as votes, not comments, so no. Fun fact: ...

2026-08-23T21:50:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…9gzd
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Emojis are implemented as votes, not comments, so no.

Fun fact: all emoji reactions are UP-votes, even the puky one 🤣.

Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if ...

2025-05-04T00:59:52Z

Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that encompasses Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, which is called... what exactly?

Is Threadiverse too traumatic & tainted by association with Meta's (all but entirely defunct) Threads? Is The Verse too cool/poetic/nerdy (but niche) to be understood? I highly advise against Lemmyverse bc mainstream normal people are far less tolerant of tankies than we who are here are willing to put up with. Simply listing the software available sometimes is the best option - like the Interstellar app supports all of Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, but most support at best 1 or 2 of those - but usually is too long to say and does not roll off the tongue, plus will just keep growing as time goes on. Is Forumverse thus the least bad of the available options, or perhaps you have a better idea? 💡

Anyway, the start to a listing:
1) Threadiverse
2) Forumverse
3) (The) Verse
4) Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed
5) Something else?

![img]( )

\- [source for image](https://pixels.com/featured/serenity-firefly-quote-painting-michelle-eshleman.html)

Bold of you to presume that they would think of that before ...

2025-02-19T18:17:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…r790
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Bold of you to presume that they would think of that *before* doing so!