I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.
I'm aware of that aspect, and I may be conflating it with on-boarding new instances.
Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done.
Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.
The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL.
Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists.
I don't want to prescribe motives to his actions, but I feel like some of his positions and efforts are to "dominate" the threadiverse and knock out the competition.
In this case, Mbin. From my understanding, Mbin is pretty far behind in development (lots of bugs and missing features), only have 2 part time developers and they are trying to supplement that with AI/LLMs. I suspect the LLMs will help them for a bit, but the project will die when the code is only manageable by LLMs and prices for vibe-coding go up significantly.
When that happens, all the Mbin users could "easily" migrate to Piefed. Though, I imagine, if Piefed gets Mastodon implementation working properly, that may cause a migration then too (possibly death spiraling Mbin, if the migration is large enough).
Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!!
... it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.
Yeah, they are :)
I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I'm not sure how wide spread deletion is. I believe I recall one of Rimu's blog posts mentioned it in some depth, so I assumed at least some instances are taking advantage of it (especially with the price of hardware).
Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.
... yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.
That's a good point. Maybe worth another Pylova feature request?
I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists.
Hmm. I'm imagining someone will just make a block list as their only blocking measure and anytime they need to block someone, they'll just add them to the list, and people will subscribe to that list or multiple lists.