Yes and it does make perfect sense just... people should be told. As a mod, were you able to tweak that setting - like could you make it shorter? Longer? Disable altogether?

Also, I took a look at a couple of them, like !artporn@piefed.social, and I see no words of any kind in the community sidebar that would indicate removal after one year. Especially if this is an instance-level setting over which a mod has zero control over anyway, then this text really should have been added automatically to the community sidebar, imho - and all the more so when others post to the community from other instances and so may have no idea how PieFed ones (those that have this setting enabled - although again, how are people supposed to know which ones have vs. have not? Afaict there is zero ability to discover this).

Otherwise, PieFed risks alienating people who find out the hard way and then nope out to Lemmy or PyLova and complain bitterly about PieFed in the process. This kind of insensitivity does not bode well for the future of the PieFed software. Then again, it's freely offered as FOSS, so as long as people know what they are getting into, it can be a great experience. Though like Lemmy, it's a great experience for an instance admin who has total control over their machine, a bit less so for mods who still have many settings available to be tweaked, and quite a lot less so for end-users who aren't even told what those settings are so that they can make informed decisions about which instances or communities to support with their efforts and attention.

Sorry - we were discussing the instance PieFed.social, but it seems impossible to not dip into issues with respect to the platform it runs, especially seeing as it is the flagship instance for that.

I've been using this instance for years now and I find Rimu and Snoopy amazing - extremely responsive, quick to address bugs, while also adding new features, very active within the Threadiverse community, etc.

Also, the About page says:

It is home to 6708 users (of which 1551 were active in the last month). In 300 communities we discussed content from 73602 websites and made 56902 posts.

This activity level is confirmed also here, which if this were a Lemmy instance would make it the #5 one (see here). And then fedinsfw.app is ~2.5-fold larger still, so PieFed based instances have gone from being niche to a major chunk of the Threadiverse. Also, I guess this makes PieFed.social the #6 most-active instance across the entire Threadiverse (the largest Mbin instance has <0.5k active users, and while technically nodeBB is reported to be much larger, I don't see content from those instances, so I guess they aren't as totally compatible with Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin?).

That said, PieFed is undergoing a number of extremely controversial changes that make it quite... "opinionated", so new accounts and people making new communities should make sure that their vision aligns with that of the instance admins before migration. For one thing, a quota has been implemented that limits how often each person is allowed to vote each day (it does not matter up or down, or emoji too iirc) - including people on Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. - with little to no discoverability about this fact (e.g. unlike other features a community description will not say what that vote quota is, for the particular instance a community is on).

Not every or even most PieFed instances use this quota - although it is enabled by default, it is also opt-out so admins can disable it if they want - so e.g. PieFed.zip has disabled it, and the PyLova fork of PieFed (used by e.g. quokk.au) has even removed it from the code. Though again, there is no standard way to see whether or not a particular admin has done this - and even if you find a message post saying one thing, the setting could change later on; nor are there any messages or visual indicators, preemptive or after-the-fact, as to why your votes suddenly cease to be accepted by this instance - your content is effectively shadow-censored. This one is VERY controversial, and some major people (including PugJesus) have left the Threadiverse as a result of it. Hopefully it either gets rolled back or at least discoverability is improved, as PieFed is now quite a major player in the Threadiverse.

Another anti-feature is that PieFed.social explicitly considers "memes" and "shitposting" to be a vastly inferior form of contribution. And image hosting really does incur monetary costs... so PieFed.social deletes images after some time, I believe it is one year. I forget the details here, like if it is an instance-level setting, or perhaps can be overridden by community mods, etc. Here too discoverability can be improved since some people have been quite incensed to discover that their content was deleted and they indicated that they were unaware that such would be the case (not all 3rd-party apps make reading the community sidebar or instance rules readily available).

PieFed.social also has a controversial "reputation" feature - which personally I love, at least in theory, bc it does not limit and instead merely labels someone to alert the recipient of what they could easily discover by a quick glance at someone's profile anyway, e.g. if you receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes routinely... that is good for someone to know, when they might otherwise respond and then not realize what they are getting themselves into by doing so!!! However, the implementation of the Reputation feature has been criticized, e.g. if you enjoy "reaction" memes, and enjoy responding with just one of those - like I'll put one of my favs below - as the sole contribution of your comment, then it will lower your Reputation score.

Another aspect is that few of these features were announced with much or any advanced notice - the controversial daily vote quota feature was quite buried and multiple instance owners indicated surprise at how their machines were behaving after updating the sourcecode, and asking how to turn it off.

Anyway, for purely plain-text posts, of serious content matter, PieFed.social can be a great home. It is improving its integration with Mastodon and already has the enormous slew of features that PieFed is quite famous for. Also, PieFed provides a number of tools to help instance admins and mods to detect and either label or altogether remove LLM spam, which I find to be fantastic! 😍 Multiple labeling options are made available including displaying the letters "AI" next to a post or showing it as semi-transparent (or hide it altogether, or simply do nothing at all in this regard). This aspect is one of the primary selling points for this instance, and is directly featured in its tagline at the PieFed instance chooser:

An instance run by the founder of PieFed. A troll-free, AI-free, bot-free space.

However, for enjoyers of meme and shitposting content including posts, comments, and people who like to be friendly and vote a lot (to encourage community growth by making contributors feel welcomed rather than like they are posting to an empty room?), you are invited to go elsewhere - except again, the discoverability of this fact is super poor, especially as the tagline even says:

Explore Anything, Discuss Everything.

Which while technically true, not all content is equally valued - e.g. won't lower your reputation for posting it and getting deleted after a year.

So I said invited to go elsewhere - where would that be? PieFed.zip is very welcoming, with a very capable admin team that is the same as their Lemmy.zip version, or an instance running the PyLova fork has removed such anti-features from the codebase (although admittedly not fully necessary btw bc with the exception of the daily vote quota that shadow-censors contributions, the other controversial aspects are all opt-in rather than opt-out anyway).

PieFed.social can be like a dream - if you love serious conversations and hate unlabeled LLM spam. Just make sure that you know what you are signing up for, so that you aren't disappointed later on.

Yes, not "shocking" at all when literally everyone you know is doing this...

Edit: with the exception of Boomers on Medicare.

Fwiw Microblogverse would pair perfectly with the Threadiverse, plus it says perfectly what it is - an interconnected network of microblogging instances.

But the name will have to come from within rather than enforced from an external source, in order to be adopted by those using it most.

Commenting on the term "Mastoverse" (I've also seen "Mastoland") - I kinda like it! It's cutesy and fun ☺️.

OTOH, it's also exclusionary, like all the other software that implements the ActivityPub Protocol that can communicate with Mastodon - Mbin comes to mind, and PieFed is making forays into it, as well as more major Mastodon alternatives, diaspora*, Pleroma/Akkoma, GoToSocial, Misskey/Sharkey, etc. - don't exist or are entirely irrelevant.

Which numerically speaking may well be true, but it is the opposite of welcoming. I would liken it to calling the Threadiverse as the Lemmyverse, which I see instead as rather a tankie-enriched subset of the former.

Is there some other term for the subset of the Fediverse that represents the user-centric microblogging format? Or is Mastoverse kinda it, even though it doesn't seem to be used all that much?

Or left if this were a mirror?

"shit session"

This is helping providing confirmatory evidence to something that I have suspected for awhile: that my time on social media is changing me, and not always for the better. The more time you spend around people, the more you will act like them, speak like them, incorporating their words and ways into your own practices. I may have justified all that you said there in my head as it being in service to a worthy cause - keeping the very Threadiverse alive as it objectively dies slowly around us (based on subscriber activity numbers, now being at ~35k down from the peak of 55k and now unlike previously, with far less hope that the situation will ever meaningfully change) - but at the end of the day, since when has the end justified the means?

Except here on Lemmy, people say that it does all the time. Outright murder, guillotining someone, Luigi-ing people, bombing AI data centers, theft, and so on - all are only morally reprehensible if done vs. the working class (and even then, are higher wage-earners exempt?), while encouraged and even outright celebrated when happening to OTHER SIDE.

Then again, I think when you plumb deeper you will agree that an act done by a moderator is quite different than an act done by a mere user, and an act done by an instance admin even more different still. Mere users can be blocked and someone can move on, whereas an admin sets the tone for a pattern of behavior that impacts the entire instance - at which point blocking the one user not only causes direct harm but also does not address the wider issues, particularly for new joiners of your own instance. (Edit: I am not dodging the issue of the messaging vs. its content, just isolating the former earlier and now doing the same in turn for the latter.)

At the end of the day: consent SHOULD matter. It seems like people differ solely (edit: primarily?) on what constitutes "informed" consent? Which is why I like some of PieFed's features to not block but at least label certain matters, e.g. my scenario involving ChapoTrapHouse was significantly less likely to have occurred if I had used PieFed at the time, due to how it puts the entirety of the community sidebar text below each and every post. Caveat: 3rd party apps (e.g. Interstellar, Blorp, even Voyager offers experimental support for PieFed) may of course choose to do differently.

Oh, before I forget (again), I was going to share this link: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed, which gives the perspective of someone who tried installing both Lemmy and PieFed software on their machine, and found the latter significantly easier. I have no direct experience there, but hope that will be enlightening:-).

Though while for someone spinning up their own instance the choice of software (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) is the top priority, I am coming to realize that otherwise it is the choice of instance admin that impacts and end-user's experience above all else.

And btw I meant everything that I've said genuinely. Also, as you dig deeper, pay attention to the comments in response to that post: people agreed, both commenters and lurkers who signalled assent merely with voting, plus backed up as you see in the comments of this very post now. A lone post from a single person is insufficient to make things happen, unless it merely stated what others already felt was true, and it got the ball rolling. Together, apes strong. We can make the Threadiverse a more pleasant space for people - especially the uninformed to more gently introduce them to what is here. Though as to whether that ends up being a good thing or not, to encourage usage of social media... that is a topic for another time, and one where I am far less prepared to address.

99.99% of the time a murderer is not in the process of actively murdering anyone at all... atm. If you look just prior to any major western election, you may notice a difference in the content. Another point there is that the tankie triad is actually HEAVILY moderated - any comment remotely reminiscent of possibly being negative (or perhaps not supportive enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea gets removed. I might be slightly hyperbolic on this point - I do not care to find the precise dividing lines between what is allowed there or not - but the fact remains that they are HEAVILY curated echo chambers. So... of course people are going to get along inside of them.

Anyway it is not for any of us to say why people want to defederate from a troll or echo chamber instance - if people desire that, then they should have that right, personally for themselves, right? Even though it makes the network effect harder to describe for the rest of us. Again, this would be a totally different conversation if there was a true instance blocking feature existing in Lemmy, but as it is, there is only defederation vs. no defederation, at which point very many instances choose one of the options made available to them.

And no means no? Or at least, it should. And we should respect that too? It is naive to try to force a victim to put up with bullying tactics, especially when it is always an option for the victim to leave the Threadiverse altogether, rather than stay and be subjected to seeing all of that.

You have not had sufficient time yet to fully inform yourself on the subject, but you will get there, at which point you won't need to simply believe what I say but you will know for yourself. One great place to start btw is the MeanwhileOnGrad community, which documents a bunch of the reasons for division.

I need to add this though: you said yourself that you ignored political topics, yes? So... if you are looking for your keys, and you remember dropping them somewhere, but you restrict yourself to looking everywhere except there, and then don't find your keys... do you see where I am going with this? Perhaps that was not even your conscious choice: maybe your admins made that decision for you by blocking certain specific user accounts, which would profoundly affect your "view" as to what Hexbear is. Having personally witnessed mods calling for users to kill themselves, then doubling and even tripling down on that, I for one have no trouble believing any of the thousands of other stories about Hexbear's toxicity. Here is one post that provides a compilation of links: https://discuss.online/post/13916278. Oftentimes the originals get removed so it may be hard now to verify those historical events, with so much time having passed between then vs. now.

And yes, I've personally experienced those interactions my very own self. I walked right into a community like ChapoTrapHouse (though perhaps it was one of their ancillary ones?), accessed via browsing All - CRUCIAL NOTE here: therefore I lacked the context of having read the sidebar text first (btw some 3rd party apps seem to go out of their way to hide that even, requiring like 5+ clicks plus moderate scrolling, i.e. buried quite deep) - and I made the mistake of saying something to the effect that Biden was at least working towards lowering the price of gasoline in the USA. I would have been up for a well-grounded discussion, replete with factual information and having cited source material, but instead people relentlessly continued to send me Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after I stopped responding, and not messages like "I believe you may be incorrect and here is my reasoning", but mere emotional vomit, venting their frustrations with the world onto me who dared speak again the trends that prevailed inside of their echo chamber, where beyond a certain level of dissent is no longer allowed. It may help to know that that is the entire point of ChapoTrapHouse, but how would I have known that, browsing by All and not even making a post, just replying to a comment inside of it?

And then either just before or just after that, I made the same mistake again, this time for lemmygrad.ml. Afaik, I am banned from neither space (unless it was done retroactively), but I almost left Lemmy altogether when I realized that it truly was not fun to be here. I continually received notifications for again WEEKS and WEEKS as people continued to dogpile onto that comment. There is no way in Lemmy to disable notifications on a comment btw (this this capability exists in PieFed). Presumably I could have deleted it but I've never backed out of my opinion before and that thought literally never occurred to me - I want to be told that I am wrong, when I legitimately am. However, these people were offering idiotic takes, and it therefore became my problem for continuing to entertain those communications.

Another point to note is that nobody is saying that ALL users on the triad, including Hexbear, are bad. Though conversely, if a majority of problematic content is coming from that source, and the mods+admins refuse to do anything about it from their side, then defederation becomes a tool of last resort to try to protect your own users from such harassment - which again, obviously is not coming from literally 100% of the users on those instances. Rather, defederation is reflective of a breakdown in communication between instance admins, with irreconcilable differences that cannot be... reconciled, any other way.

the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers.

Yes, but (1) this has already happened long ago, much of it predating the existence of the Threadiverse even, like Hexbear is very old and only later switched to using Lemmy, also Lemmy was an echo chamber even before federation with other instances (lemmygrad.ml) was implemented; (2) this theoretical FOMO about "discoverability" should not in practice trump my own personal rights to not have to listen to anything that I do not wish to see - e.g. I do not find it enjoyable to see mods tell users to kill themselves, literally, with a gun; and (3) please DO actually read about The Paradox of Intolerance. Defederation is bad, yes, amputation of a human limb is also bad yes, but sometimes it is preferable to an even worse alternative.

I think we do not differ on ideological grounds though - you concede that IF members of an instance are caught relentlessly trolling and otherwise harassing those of other instances, then in theory defederation is an acceptable outcome? Not an ideal one but... if the software allows for zero other alternatives, as has been the case now for many, MANY years? In that case all that remains is to read some of the examples of this actually happening, which you had not encountered before. The links I included above should be a good place to start at least, but there are just tons and tons and tons more where that came from.

Hypothetically, imagine someone saying "death to America"... okay, perhaps they should have the right to think it, perhaps even say it, but why should I have to be forced to hear it, constantly, and not be allowed to do anything at all to stop it? Defederations are decisions that instance admins have made regarding what content they will allow to be platformed on their machines or not. They NEED to have the right to make this decision for themselves.

This in turn places the burden of deciding which instance to join or not onto the end-users. You will want to pick one that matches your values. Here too it gets difficult, especially when instances are not forthcoming about what or particularly why they do what they do. Very little to almost no progress has been made on this front IMHO, at least on the Lemmy side, except to offer the generic advice to join Lemmy.zip or perhaps better yet PieFed.zip and use its significantly enhanced (yet still very imperfect and in fact quite problematic in other, just different ways) instance blocking tools of PieFed.

Okay but... have you ever tried to force your group to get together despite those two being unable to get along? e.g. Russia vs. Ukraine? China vs. Taiwan? Israel vs. Palestine? USA vs. a neighbor with oil?

Whether one side (e.g. Ukraine) can "get along with" the other side there (e.g. Russia) depends a LOT on whether they are able to agree to follow some shared rules (e.g. to not murder the other side). These are not mere political differences in the sense of left vs. right, but rather those who are proud to remain ungovernable (while seemingly not understanding what that phrase originally was intended to mean) vs. those who would rather nope out entirely than exist side-by-side with them.

Please also note that Lemmy's block tools are so misleadingly misnamed as to be almost worthy of the moniker of calling it disinformation. What "blocking an instance" does is to:

• Mute communities on that instance from the user, preventing discoverability and blocking that content from showing in your personal feed, including when browsing All

What that so-called "blocking" does NOT do:

• Hide content from those users submitted to communities on remote instances
• Prevent those users from being able to reply to, famously including vote brigading on, your own content
• Prevent those users from sending you DMs, which at first were not allowed to trigger notifications, but the Lemmy devs reversed that decision and now these "blocked users" can trigger notifications - which bc of the "style" preferred by people on those instances, can continue for WEEKS and WEEKS after you so much as reply to a post that you encountered on All, without having read the sidebar and so not knowing that this style differs from what you are used to

Besides, even if insurance blocking actually worked, it would still do nothing to not showcase the content for an anonymous guest account or a newly created account, i.e. it does nothing to help others deal with "the situation", only yourself. Which is especially notable when people access Lemmy's content from apps like Voyager that by default does not show the instance name, thereby treating all content from all instances as being equal. However, I would argue that e.g. Poland does not fear attack from all nations equally - does Poland want to be on guard against Taiwan? Or North or South Korea? What about Russia?

Defederation is a blunt tool, but is virtually the only one offered by the Lemmy devs. When the software is made more robust to offer some other alternative... then this issue can be revisited at that time.

Also, you are free at any to self-host your own instance. But to tell Ukraine and Russia that they must get along... or else what? I am saying that I reject the underlying premise of your argument. "People getting along" should not be the ultimate goal of the Threadiverse. A better goal IMHO would be "People enjoying their experiences while here". Which for many, means blocking Hexbear - and yes, for some it means NOT blocking it - and therefore since the answer is neither a clear yay or nay, we are forced into preaching the controversy for every new potential member, even though that very complexity itself is often what drives others away.

Though PieFed.zip offers an intriguing and innovative compromise: upon joining the instance a user block is placed upon the Hexbear and lemmygrad instances, and a message sent to the new user about how to remove or place such blocks. This makes federation with those highly controversial instances as opt-in, as opposed to opt-out or impossible to block or not block. That's really neat! However, that delves into a whole other can of worms on how PieFed instance blocks have problems - namely that people on the receiving end can still reply to them, though only people on the same originating instance will see those replies (or perhaps it's worse and everyone using Lemmy will see them while everyone using PieFed will not? or perhaps something else altogether?). Also this in turn opens up an entirely new rabbit hole on top of that, where Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) would need to agree on a set of shared practices...

In short, the technology of the Threadiverse is still quite primitive in so very many ways, despite the upcoming release of Lemmy vs. 1.0. Yes defederation is a very blunt instrument, but it's all that we have been given to wield for the most part. But the alternative IMHO would be far worse, being forced into allowing bullies to thrive. The Paradox of Intolerance is ironic, but very real: allowing the intolerant to exist in your space, worse yet platforming and even promoting them, means that you yourself are intolerant. Fences between neighbors is the only hope the Threadiverse even has of surviving. Yes you are allowed to be sad at that fact, but it remains true nonetheless. Move past your sadness, to get to what must be done to thrive and move forward in a positive direction?

e.g. learn Rust and contribute to the code development of Lemmy!? Unfortunately, merely donating money is unlikely to help, as much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the "highly controversial" Lemmy.ml, and the devs have refused to open a way to provide funding for the former independently of the latter. Or learn Python and contribute to development of PieFed? It likely won't help with interoperability between PieFed vs. Lemmy, and both require investments of several years, but if you want to help then there is no better way. So long as the technology remains as primitive as it is now, these kinds of blunt instruments are all that are available to us - someone would need to invest the effort to provide better.

TLDR: there are extremely good reasons why things are as they are now.

Many fantastic instances do exactly that.

But in answer to your question, you may want to research The Intolerance Paradox. In short, when people refuse to follow the rules it kinda becomes spam. Even if you were okay with CSAM or pictures of pigs actively showing the poop falling out of their anuses (sadly, I bet you think I am being hyperbolic here? nope, this is kinda Hexbear's major schtick), the fact remains that it scares away newcomers.

I will note that if you self-host your own instance then you have perfect control over every aspect of your experience, being able to fine-tune it to perfectly suit your precise needs. Otherwise you will want to choose an instance provider that aligns with whatever your needs are. Some people will choose one of the instances that defederates from almost nothing, while others actually want an experience that is more what they are used to and would expect coming over from the overly bot-modded Reddit, i.e. they want (even outright demand) that censorship be done for them.

This is why the instance pickers need to carefully explain what each instance is about, since there is not just one audience with a single set of needs & expectations.