There are loads of weird plans causing people to panic and leave - e.g. here’s an article about it https://www.axios.com/2025/03/14/trump-migration-britain-canada - but I wanted to note that you do not have to share every thought that crosses into your head. If you aren’t sure, and also don’t believe that what you just said is true, then why bring it up?

The question is rhetorical btw, to prompt you to think rather than needing an answer to be shared with me or anyone in particular.

Pants-less but wearing a hat while doing chores outside? You brave soul, I love it: be your free self! :-P

Yup, and it’s their choice to do so. All we can do is attempt to make the switch easier for anyone willing to try. In the end, even if people were mostly split between X, BlueSky, and Mastodon (rather than just between X and BlueSky with Mastodon being ignorable) that would still be a success, to even be on the map to be counted.

I took a quick look and it seems that SDF is not defederated from virtually ANYTHING at all (just one instance that as it was dying got taken over by spam) - not even the known CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) ones, nor the most controversial triad across the entire Threadiverse: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and the one that the main Lemmy software developers also run, lemmy.ml.

One time I said something in hexbear.net along the lines that Biden, who was then President, at least lowered gas prices, so at least there was that - and my inbox just BLEW UP with replies streaming in for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. Then I did something similar at lemmygrad.ml with the same result. They are purely engagement trolls, enjoying their argumentation style of… well, as you said it. They are basically 4chan.

And it is not like I am on a campaign to wipe out their very existence, but neither do I want to recommend the Threadiverse/Fediverse to people if that is the kind of experience that those people will receive - and then look weirdly at me for having recommended it to them in the first place. There are stories aplenty on r/RedditAlternatives saying exactly as you: they came, they got disgusted with what they saw, and they immediately noped out, heading right back to Reddit. People here can be kind - whereas on Reddit that is extremely rare, especially in the larger subs. Traffic here is low and you can feel like you will be heard - on Reddit you are buried beneath an avalanche of thousands of comments, some of which are proven bots (repeating identical patterns of messages spaced years apart, just from different account names but they are word-for-word and it is beyond any rational thought of credulity to think that they could be otherwise - e.g. if you repeated this, my entire message here back to me, not even just this sentence or paragraph but the entire thing, then I would surmise that you had copied and pasted it, not responded organically, and would not believe you if you claimed otherwise, especially upon finding out that you literally could get paid irl money $$$ for having done so, to increase “engagement stats” and therefore advertising revenue).

I doubt you will remain long on SDF - the Lemmy software has very few features to help you deal with such trolling, although you can help reduce the clutter a little bit by blocking the instance. Unfortunately this does not “block” the “instance”, instead only muting the communities on it - leaving the users there free to reply to you in other communities, triggering notifications, blowing up your inbox, and otherwise wasting your time. You will convert nobody there as they exist in their own artificial echo chamber realities, and instead you will become more like them.

I recommend checking out PieFed - the list of features that it has that Lemmy lacks is long and it is FANTASTIC! e.g. polls, flairs (both user and post), Topics/Feeds that are both user-customizeable and shareable, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., but most importantly the ability to block all users from an instance, which that one feature alone silences I am not even kidding basically 99% of all trolling negative experiences on the entire platform. See more at https://join.piefed.social/ e.g. a list of instances at https://join.piefed.social/try/. Or if you want to stay with Lemmy (but… why though?) and are in the USA then discuss.online or if in Europe then feddit.org - neither of which defederate from lemmy.ml nor allow you to personally do so unlike PieFed, but both of which at least defederate from both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.

Unless you are also a troll:-P, but the above is still sound advice imho.

I said that journalists said that Mastodon is bad. Personally I love PieFed and the Lemmy software isn’t half bad, plus both are improving, the former swiftly and the latter slowly but does grow. I don’t know what is holding Mastodon back, as I do not code in those languages. I only tried to help shine light on a diagnosis that could help us move forward past whatever it is that represents people’s major obstacle to joining Mastodon, or yeah perhaps the Threadiverse instead would be more to their liking.

Lemmy.ml is famously authoritarian, I dunno how you haven’t gotten banned from the entire instance yet, you must have only pissed off a mod rather than admin.

Most other (non-tankie) places across the Threadiverse are pretty chill, just be respectful/polite to people as you argue your salient points and counterpoints and you’ll be actively welcomed.

Of course the other side to that is that if you can’t or won’t stop yourself from causing agitation aka trolling then mods may have to stop you by banning you, choosing to protect their existing members over you - though the level of desired or even allowable level of contention varies greatly depending on the community, which is what this post is about. Just make sure to read the sidebar and you’ll easily be able to tell which ones are which. e.g. Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net loves a good fight, though that instance has been defederated from discuss.online so you’d need a different account to participate, perhaps one on hexbear.net itself.

You are, intentionally or otherwise, distorting what I said. Who cares about “me” - yes I stopped recommending Fediverse tools bc it’s useless to do so especially when the developers themselves don’t even seem to care about making it a good platform to use for others besides themselves, meh it’s their code and their right to do whatever they wish - but anyway I’m just one person.

What I said though was that journalists are writing articles saying how much Mastodon sucks. That could have been listened and responded to, but instead the concept was attempted to be buried, and the position of the person offering such rejected - exactly as you are doing here to me now btw, as if consent of the governed should not matter somehow, and they all just need to suck it up, get with the program, and use the same platform regardless of what it personally costs them? That btw is also the identical position of X as well.

I even included a link to one example of such an article. There are MANY others.

I hope you choose to be curious, rather than think that you already have the answer. There is so much more that I think that you are missing here. We seem to not have the same goal at all if I would like to entice people to use the platform but you would rather tell people that they “must” - that approach will not work out well in the end, imho, and you do not get to decide what is “better” in the minds of other people. If others likewise display it, that kind of hubris will continue to leave Mastodon in the forgotten bin of history. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Ikr? However that is not politically expedient hence major pushback exists to even do much as diagnose that issue much less deal with it. Even so, I (successfully) petitioned Discuss.Online to defederate from Hexbear.net, although in that I also asked for this instance to be removed from lemmy.ml as well, but that portion was rejected. Lemmy.ml is STRONGLY anti-Western, so whether its philosophies are correct or wrong (they are wrong imho:-P) either way it is a barrier for specially Western people who check us out and then nope out back to Reddit.

Even after that partial success though I basically gave up that idea since Lemmy does not allow for true blocking of all users on an instance, so nowadays use PieFed (which does offer that ability, as well as SO MANY other additional features) 99% of the time and only occasionally check my old Discuss.Online Lemmy alt. So at this point I’ve lost any hope whatsoever for “Lemmy” to become mainstream, but if there is even a sliver of hope left for that then I am putting it all in on PieFed rather than Lemmy. Perhaps I am wrong but I doubt it.

But it too moves slowly to catch up to being something that mainstream normies will want to use. I am making codeberg requests to try to help it along, even if I cannot contribute code directly. I understand the position of a mainstream person though: we here are fairly (and sometimes even extremely) toxic, especially to newcomers, and all the more so if they are non-techical. It would require much more extensive moderation to kick out people being mean to newcomers, which actually PieFed offers some great tools for that, and yet at the same time a level of traffic that makes coming to the Threadiverse worthwhile. Those two goals seem incompatible though, so realistically I don’t expect it will ever happen. Still we have to try!?

Celebrities are told by some people to go to Mastodon though? Perhaps they think that Bluesky being a more centralized server will not be prey to the issue of impersonation as Mastodon is? I do also think that the call to go to Bluesky is being received better. If you read articles espousing that call they are like “come check it out, it’s so fantastic!” whereas the calls to Mastodon were like the calls to vote for the not-Right party in the USA each time that Donald Trump ran: "hey, Mastodon sucks, and let me list all the reasons why, but here’s why you need to eat your vegetables even though you don’t want to: X is so much worse (except it feels so good but… we really should do the moral choice, I/we don’t want to but we should…).

People basically laid down the line saying: fix this handful of things and then I will join (perhaps that has just 2 items on it - the impersonation and discoverability issues - or perhaps there is more). But then Mastodon ignored that demand, and now here people are saying “can’t you see what a nice man we are?” as if consent does/should not matter but it does! If we really want people to use Mastodon, teach yourself Ruby on Rails and Typescript/JavaScript and get busy making the implementation better to use - it’s the only way, or else people are just going to use what (they think) already works: Bluesky.

Ask yourself why people all flock to the same platform. The network effect is real yo, and not to be brushed aside lightly.

How the hell did I end up being all 3? 🤔🤪

As a distraction from everything else he was doing at the time and would do in the future?

At some point we really should just stop asking why, especially if we don’t want to know the answer 🥴

/s

Thank you for that context. Perhaps then one day Mastodon can try to hope to pull people away from Bluesky after people have given up on Mastodon and on X and spent all that time and energy moving to Bluesky, and then don’t want to have to move still yet again. I didn’t really use Digg but that seems to me to be an apt analogy where people gave up on it and seeing nothing better switched to Reddit, and then finally we here moved to Kbin, now Mbin, and/or Lemmy, and now PieFed as an option as well. Except so many remained on Reddit.

Once people move to Bluesky, they will stay there and resist moving elsewhere. Many would RATHER move to Mastodon, if only it would make its experience actually usable,. Especially by journalists who then write negative things about their experiences trying to use it and how frustrating it all was for them.

Also as I understand it, searching for content is really poor. e.g. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/ says:

To allow you to discover potentially interesting content, Mastodon provides a way to browse all public posts. There is no global shared state between all servers, so there is no way to browse all public posts. When you browse Live Feeds > Other Servers, you see public posts from across the fediverse. Your server shows posts it knows about through various methods. Most posts come from accounts that other users on your server follow.

PieFed + Lemmy + Mbin has the same problem: someone must first join a community before it can be “discovered” by others on that same instance. Which typically means that someone must know about it - somehow? - via other means, and then go hunting specifically for it. I have tried to be the one who braved this trail for many a community on smaller instances such as Discuss.Online and PieFed.social (back when both were smaller than now), but not everyone - even scientists - are as technically minded as to want to deal with such complexities.

So if let’s say some University decides to set up their own Mastodon instance, by default it will not know most of what is available out there in the wider Fediverse, and anyone using that instance will get frustrated when it seems so very empty to them.

And the voting thing. And the impersonation issues. And so very, Very, VERY many other issues as well. I am not trying to criticize Mastodon here so much as I am advocating that will people please open their eyes and have some EMPATHY: mainstream normies do not enjoy using Mastodon. This is what is driving them to BlueSky where they say that it is FUN to use. We can cry about it, whine about it, do all the purity testing that we want and downvote me for saying this, but at the end of the day these people will either remain on X/Reddit or else move to BlueSky, but they will not, they will not, THEY WILL NOT move to Mastodon. They do not want it, and at the end of the day their consent is actually required if it were to happen.

Eww gross, I just looked up what programming language Mastodon uses: it is Ruby on Rails and Typescript/JavaScript front-end. No wonder it is so slow to be developed!! (not so many people use those languages) PieFed in contrast is written using the extremely popular Python language (+ more pure HTML, some CSS, and JavaScript), so at this point I wonder if (a modified?) PieFed would be used more by scientists sooner than Mastodon if the latter will not be able to catch up to the former’s pace of development? :-P

If only Mastodon would spend time making the platform more usable, perhaps they would. e.g. the impersonation issue, which is much less of a problem on a non-federated platform, plus Bluesky takes a highly aggressive stance against it.

Also the enormous discoverability issue on Mastodon has lead people to say that “Mastodon seemed to actively discourage discoverability.” This article seems very worth reading btw, as many of the same issues plague the Threadiverse as well - hostility to non-technical normies, hostility towards anyone less ideologically pure than oneself, hostility towards… wait, am I sensing a pattern here!?!:-P Early adoptors (who are proficient in using Arch Linux btw) are quite a very different crowd and while yes scientists are smart, they are also smart enough to realize that moving from a place where their work can be seen to a place where it will not be is not a very productive endeavor, in the short-term, for themselves.

Edit: also, when the tools go for years and years and years and years without ever getting any better at solving the issues that matter most to them, it sends a signal that they aren’t welcomed. I will state that again, unequivocally: mainstream normies are not really welcomed onto the Fediverse. … … … am I wrong there? Do we welcome them even here, on the Threadiverse, or are there a myriad of rules that are nowhere written down, must be discovered by each new person, all the while people talk down to them, criticize and even laugh at them, plus also laugh at them behind their backs when they go back to Reddit and share their experiences here, warning others not to come? From what I read at r/RedditAlternatives, this usually is b/c of facing “leftist” toxicity, which I put in quotes b/c it’s not actually leftist, but it just seemed that way to them, since e.g. Hexbear makes no distinction b/c facts and reality, only what works inside their echo chambers that are then exported everywhere else they - and their alts - are allowed to go. But please feel free to visit that subreddit and verify all of this for yourself.

Here is some additional evidence: (1) at https://mander.xyz/c/science, the top-most link points to a lemmy.ml community. Is lemmy.ml known at all for its stance on “facts” vs. “alternative facts”, and in particular which facts are allowed to be shared or not? This is a choice by mander.xyz to feature that particular link though. (2) look at https://join-lemmy.org/, and pay close attention to the very first image on the screen. “Landlord Love”, “Tankie…” - yes this is a screenshot from lemmy.ml. Does that instance make people in the Western world feel comfortable when they visit it - especially mainstream normies… or even scientists, who often trend toward liberal but even more aim to stay out of politics altogether, in order to more closely focus on science? The words on that page also are things like “mod tools” and “host your own server”, not things like “a place to discuss topics of interest”. That site helps people who want to become admins more than those who want to become a casual user - i.e. an early-adopter, Linux-using, config-file-editing crowd, not a bench scientist grad student who just wants to chat about science.

This is the part where you say “but mander.xyz does not itself espouse tankie beliefs and philosophy - I mean yes in truth it actually does promote that e.g. by putting in those links, but it does not PROMOTE promote that, not REALLY!? _{(not directly at least)}” In which case bam, now you understand why scientists continue to use X rather than spend time learning how to make use of Mastodon. Everyone does what is easiest and they feel is best for them. We do not really reach out to make them feel welcomed, so they find it easier to simply stay where they already are.

That should not matter - the same as if it had moved to some other Lemmy instance, you can use the new community the same way from your same lemmy.world account as you always have. YOU don’t have to move, just subscribe, if you want to.

Even Russia is a “democracy”.

Some people need none:-)🍒🥧

“Oops”

Furiously google’s “how to unread book”…

Yeah and as you have pointed out, the PieFed API is very new and not as mature yet as Lemmy’s, so there is value in waiting for it to advance while you work on other things like Svelte upgrades.

So long as you enjoy yourself in the doing, it’s all good 😊