Yeah, it would figure that if the activity is flat but the number of servers is declining that it's either consolidation or that people are abandoning very small instances.

Some of it had to do with there not being enough admins to go around afaik. Lemm.ee for instance couldn’t find enough admins so they shut down. Moderating an instance seems like one of the hurdles that go along with running an instance. I could imagine some people dipped out of Lemmy for a little while if their server was deleted since they’re starting from scratch again. It took me a good month or so to make this account and ramp back up my own activity here for instance.

The admins across the servers do a good job of keeping bots out imo. If it ever becomes a problem the admins could look to adopt BlueSky’s moderation tools down the line, I feel. As BlueSky makes it easy to filter bots, misinformation spreaders, and have user level content controls.

Wasn't July 1st when lemm.ee shut down?

@fuckwit_mcbumcrumble @AFKBRBChocolate Is this users on a lemmy instance or users on any type of activitypub server engaging with lemmy communities? ive stopped using my lemmy account because I just subscribed to those communities from my friendica account

As for why it subjectively seems to be declining… maybe you know what you’re gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts?

I don't think so. For ages (maybe two years) I'll sometimes sit in bed in the morning and browse New until I hit the stuff I saw previously. That used to take me well over an hour - maybe two - but now it takes less than thirty minutes.

I don't see much of an increase in those charts.

Fewer things are sadder than the reality of the Internet compared to what we envisioned early on.

I don't know, but I was thinking it might be causing people to be less online generally, even if Lemmy itself isn't a problem. I wonder what the Lemmy NSFW people are doing.

I don't know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.

no

UK user here, several big lemmy instances are unavailable for me apart from when I'm on erm holiday

Right, but I'm assuming there's a nontrivial number of UK users.

Yeah, it is that. I'm way left leaning, but I actually wish Lemmy was more of a cross section. I'm not sorry to see the total assholes on the far right not here (or not very vocal), but I don't prefer an echo chamber.

Yup, as said already, exactly like that.

Most social media these days is a single system / platform, like Facebook or Reddit. Federated media is rather like email where whichever service you send it from (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), the recipient receives it and you don't need to care about exactly how.

I feel that analogy is overly simplistic, and leaves people baffled as to what defederation means. So instead I like the idea that federation is akin to ships (pirate or free trade) passing messages around - some captains have beef with other captains and refuse to talk with them, but otherwise you have access to the entire network of all messages.

It does get slightly more complicated when you rise up above the forum-based "Threadiverse" (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and arguably flarum and nodeBB) to discuss the wider ActivityPub-based "Fediverse" - those entirely different platforms can pass messages between them, but it is not always so easy or straightforward, e.g. Mastodon is based on people whereas the Threadiverse is centered around "communities" (on Reddit these were called subreddits), so for someone on Mastodon to talk to someone on Lemmy (or PieFed) they would have to jump through several hoops to make it happen (although Mbin eases that process). That's basically the end of my knowledge there bc I don't use Mastodon but I hope that helps to have gone that far at least.

Getting back to the ship analogy, you personally could, in theory, have your own ship, which you could use either privately, or share with a few friends, or even open it up to the public. That "machine" that you use, that "server", in Fediverse terminology is called an "instance". And it will have "admins" who run it, as well as "moderators" who run the communities on it. Also, it will need to pick which variety of software to run, so like there are Lemmy instances, and PieFed instances, and Mbin instances, etc. Sometimes the same admins run multiple of them, e.g. lemmy.world is by far the largest Lemmy instance, and now they have branched out to try out a PieFed instance as well called PieFed.world. It's the same people, possibly running on the same machine or at least you could imagine that, but a different software platform.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is a Lemmy instance, and one day that awesome admin dbzer0 (a real person, though surely that's not their irl name😂) may likewise make a PieFed instance, perhaps it will be called PieFed.dbzer0.com, or something, who knows.:-)

Regardless, the messages will get passed between them. Your choice of instance gives you a different experience bc you are picking a different captain of your boat - maybe you'll even decide to become one yourself - and then yes the software that is run on the instance greatly changes your method of access. e.g. PieFed has flairs (both user and post varieties) and polls, but since Lemmy lacks those, the only way to participate in such is to use that same software, i.e. to sign up on an instance that runs it (or maybe one day Lemmy will catch up and offer all 3 of those? I am sure that it will, but I sincerely doubt it will happen anytime "soon"). Here is an example of a post that uses a poll (and a couple of post flairs, and also hashtags too). Btw the sidebar of that community has some good resources to learn more about the Fediverse if you are interested. But that post itself is not able to be viewed on a Lemmy instance, since it uses a poll which Lemmy does not know how to handle.

And then defederation is a whole other thing. When one captain (admin) gets mad at another captain (admin) for just absolutely REFUSING to respect the rules that collectively were agreed upon - sending spam, harassment of users, trolling behaviors etc. - defederation can be a method of last resort to cut off all communication with them. It stops any messages from that point forward - for good or bad - which can cause confusion but I want to point out that the captain ("admin") is literally the owner of their personal ship (machine/"instance") and so has the right to do as they please with it. And all the more so if the instance is open to the public, in which case they arguably have the responsibility to protect their users from the trolling and harassment campaigns. "Free speech" is never free, someone must always bear the cost, of maintenance, of platforming it, and so on.

Exactly like that.

Quality over quantity:-D

subbed.

I'm trying to relate that to the experience back on Reddit, where the same thing happened. Didn't seem to hinder growth. But often people would abandon the smaller versions of the communities for the larger ones.