Lvxferre

Urban Dictionary never ceases to amuse me!

This reminds me 4chan /int/'s weird synonyms for country, from analysing the word as “cunt tree”. Stuff like “vagina bush” and similar. Oddly enough everyone understood it, even when translated.

I’m probably creating a group to deface the largest government/country flag on the canvas, regardless of: which government it’s associated with, screechers trying to boss us* against it, “ackshyually you all* should stop and define whut is a cuntry flag” sea lions, liars claiming that this is harassment or prejudice, muppets saying that I’m “welcome” to contribute to their used toilet paper on a pole “monument”, so goes on.

Additionally, I’ll use an alt account to draw some stuff that I can’t disclose here, because I kind of predict that pissed nationalists will ruin it as some petty revenge. It has zero to do with countries.

*“we” = anyone who joins the group. Potentially just me.

EDIT: ah, I’ll also be helping out with some drawings here and there, like I did last time.

Yes, it is a problem - depending on your tastes “subscribed” won’t be enough. But going “subscribed” and then “all” is bound to show less political posts than going straight for “all”.

Browse by “subscribed”, and subscribe to a lot of communities. Only do it by “all” when you can’t find good stuff in the subscribed view.

I do this and, while I do see a few intrusive US politics posts, it’s far less than when browsing by “all”.

I’m almost sure.

Your typical instance only defeds another as a last case scenario, due to deep divergences or because of blatantly shitty admin or user behaviour. But, past that, they’re still willing to let some shit to go through - because if you defederate too many other instances, with no good reason, you’re only hurting yourself.

That’s simply not enough to create those “corners”. Specially when all this “nerds vs. normies*” thing is all about depth - for example the normie wants some privacy, but the nerd goes all in, but they still care about the same resources.

*I hate this word but it’s convenient here.

I get what you say, and I agree; but when it comes to the average user I wonder if they’ll even get it. They don’t think on the grounds of a “protocol” or a “platform”, it used to be “site” and now “app”. They do it even with email, of all things, even if it’s one of the oldest cross-platform protocols out there!

They tolerate each other enough to get each into a corner and not interact much.

And yet that is not what we see in the Fediverse. Those “corners” don’t exist here.

The people here and their attitude towards people who don’t agree with them are the problem.

And that’s a structural problem. The ActivityPub was supposed to allow both the “average person” and the “nerd” to coexist in the same platform, without one getting too much in the way of the other; it doesn’t.

I’m not sure on a good solution for that.

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.

My concerns about the “immigration leftover” is not their opposing views, but their behaviour. I don’t want to deal with the “waaah the world revolves around my belly, why are you too stupid to understand that?” crowds and their incessant whining.

The drop is slowing down considerably:

And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.

That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.

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?

They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.

The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.

I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don’t even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you’re trying to grow.

However I feel like those points help to explain why the “lol lmao” crowds hate this place.

Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there’s also

• selection bias: people with a positive view of Lemmy already migrated, so the leftover is bound to have more negative views
• older userbase: older people use language in a different way, talk about different topics, and dig into those topics in a different way. That often makes younger people throw a tantrum.
• group identity: for those “AS A SNOO” we’re basically apostates.
• edit: personal drama between higher ups is more visible here than in Reddit.

The userbase is small but stable.

I like this piece. Well-thought, and well laid out.

I do believe that mods getting weathered, as OP outlined, is part of the issue. I’m not sure on good ways to solve this, but introducing a few barriers of entry here and there might alleviate it. We just need to be sure that those barriers actually sort good newbies in and bad newbies out, instead of simply locking everyone out. Easier said than done.

Another factor is that moderator work grows faster than community size; you get more threads, each with more activity, users spend more time in your community, they’re from more diverse backgrounds so more likely to disagree, forest fires spread faster so goes on. This is relevant here because communities nowadays tend to be considerably bigger than in the past; and, well, when you got more stuff to do, you tend to do things in a sloppier way.

You can recruit more mods, of course; but mod team size is also a problem, as it’s harder to get everyone in the same page and enforce rules consistently. If one mod is rather lax and another is strict, you get some people getting away doing worse than someone else who got banned, and that makes the whole mod team look powertripping and picking favourites, when it isn’t. (I’m not sure on how to solve this problem besides encouraging people to migrate to smaller communities, once they feel like the ones that they are in are too big.)

I think that it would be theoretically possible with a modified client. But in practice you’d filter a lot of genuinely active users out, and still let a lot of those suspicious accounts in. Sadly I think that blocking them individually is a better approach, even if a bit more laborious.

On a lighter note, this sort of user isn’t a big deal here in Lemmy. It’s simply more efficient to manipulate a larger userbase, like Twitter or Reddit.

Yeah, the peaks themselves and the quick (~2m) drop after them are not the big deal. The big deal is to slowly bleed users. It’s really problematic in the long term; by no means “MASTADON IS DOOMED!”, but more like “Mastodon, you need to step your game up.”

I wasn’t aware of the connection with the band - thanks for the info! Still, people are bound to associate “mastodon” first and foremost with the critter.

Either way, back in 2008 I bet people were making fun of Twitter for being named after bird sounds, so.

I don’t remember but you’re likely correct. There’s a difference though - Twitter didn’t need to capitalise on every single tiny advantage, Mastodon does it, and while the role of branding might be small it still gives you (or your competitors) some edge.

A model that explains well half of the data is as useful as a coin toss. But let’s roll with it, and pretend that we got two superimposed Gartner cycles here.

The trough would be reached after a sharp drop after the peak, and based on the first peak it would be ~2 months long. That would explain only the period between 2023-07 and 2023-09; the rest of what I’ve pointed out in red is clearly something else, the nearest of what they look like would be a sick version of the “slope of enlightenment” - going down instead of up.

Yeah, the model doesn’t work.

A better way to approach this is to consider three things:

• The main selling point is federation.
• Federation is only perceived as useful for your typical user when a competitor abuses power.
• Mastodon has the drawbacks already mentioned all the time, not just when the competitors fuck it up.

Once you notice those things, it gets really easy to explain what’s happening:

• the peaks are caused by Musk’s acquisition of Reddit and Threads being released (as it brought a lot of discussion about federation up)
• overexcitable people take 1~2 months to realise that Mastodon is not just “Twitter minus Musk”.
• the drawbacks are always there, so Mastodon slowly bleeds users, while only gathering new ones when Musk/Zuckenberg/etc. do something shitty.

By analysing the data this way, not just we’re describing it better, but we can also see where Mastodon needs to improve:

• It needs killer features that are clearly visible for everyone, regardless of federation or “Musk pissed off users”
• It needs to be promoted better. Even among non-Twitter/Bluesky/Threads users.
• Federation itself needs to be promoted better, with simple words, showing why leaving Twitter for yet another walled garden won’t solve shite in the long run.

What I’m saying also partially applies to the “Fediverse link aggregators”, like Lemmy. Lemmy does show some tendency to bleed users, but in smaller degree than Mastodon; but it’s in a better position because there’s only one big competitor, and it keeps fucking it up over and over.

Context for other users - the user above is likely referring to the Gartner cycle:

As anyone here can see, it looks nothing like that pattern that I’ve highlighted.

If the success condition for Mastodon is “to become a long-term viable and attractive alternative to corporate-owned microblogging”, then improvements of the platform are necessary.

To be clear on my opinion in this matter: I want to see Mastodon to succeed, I want to see X and Threads closing down, and IDGAF about Bluesky. However I’m not too eager to engage in wishful belief and pretend that everything is fine - because acknowledging the problem is always the first step to solve it.