Don't forget the insult. I've been banned from so many AI communities, none of which I'd ever heard of before, most of which had zero posts even, and all of which called me an anti-AI troll.
On PieFed actually, anarchist.nexus.
When you're a mod or admin, they let you do it dontcha know, grab 'em right by the gonads! Say whatever you like to go into the permanent modlog, you won't be stopped!
They also had their own protest at the same time as the Rexodus.
On Lemmy or Stack Overflow?
Not really - all he does is ask questions ⁉️
Damn, what a pickle I find myself in. There are 69 upvotes now, and one downvote. So do I upvote? Yes. Did by doing so I destroyed the 69? Yes. Or restore the visible 69? Also yes.
And I would do it again, because I can live with it. I must live with it. Lemmy delete message... - naw, fuck if we ball.
ST-translationifier:
Fwiw there is !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social, though with at best one post per week (or almost per month lately), and on the instance that has decided to shadow-censor votes even from other users of the Threadiverse like Lemmy and Mbin without disclosure of that fact. Announcement of the latter might have had a really chilling effect upon the community since this past month the number of posts has really dropped off a cliff.
It's been really hard for people to be the change they want to see in the world, and to share the same spaces despite such major differences in outlook on life. And for all the criticism of their moderation policies (note I am not questioning the validity of that, especially since I don't post or typically even comment in the political communities so have no direct experience there), each time a MAJOR Threadiverse user leaves, they take all of their posting efforts with them - I'm talking about the likes of FlyingSquid, PugJesus, and I almost hesitate to mention AdmiralPatrick since I've already been accused of being an alt of his:-).
I tend to not post often myself unless I really have something I want to share, as people either can respond negatively or else not at all, even for like a nonpolitical comic, and that can make it somewhat un-fun. (So instead I try to make the Threadiverse more lively by contributing comments:-)
Beverly getting into the, ahem, "spirit" of things:
(TOS S02E12 The Deadly Years)
Eternal September... except it's fucking Groundhog Day now!!
Especially when they label themselves like "memes" and "comics" etc.
Somehow on the backend the wires must have got crossed and sent c/Lemmyshitpost content over to c/news instead 🤪
(/s ...?)
PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.
PieFed allows for this already, though iirc the flagship instance PieFed.social chooses to put nothing for Lemmy.ml.
I always enjoy content on Beehaw. This is the note that appears on every single post in a community on that instance:
This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.
Notice how the link goes to Beehaw itself for additional details, to explain their policies in their own words.
I always found Lemmy.ml's own choice of words to describe themselves quite disingenuous though - as if it were merely FOSS or something being discussed, and as if nothing whatsoever related to politics exists, certainly nothing that might, oh I dunno, differ from their very narrow, highly specific viewpoint (which distinctly clashes with actual facts, e.g. video evidence of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which tankies declare variously that it did not happen, or if it did happen then that there were no fatalities).
Hexbear at least is extremely open about how they exist for nothing more than the sake of arguments - that's arguably fine even, so long as it remains constrained inside the communities designated for such - where the members actually want it, i.e. consent should matter - rather than spilling out into every single other fucking community all across the Fediverse.
Oh the Threadiverse will definitely continue, and arguably it being smaller is even a good thing, helping to avoid attracting bot spam on the same level as corporate enshittified platforms. But I don't think very many additional people will use it than this - in fact all prior trends since the Rexodus have shown quite a dramatic decrease instead - and therefore the topics covered, especially apolitical ones, are going to have to be "carried" by an ever-smaller and smaller subset of people who are willing to put in the work to add content. Which itself is daunting bc then whenever you post or comment you expose yourself to downvotes and toxic insane dumbshit replies, or more commonly merely silence in return.
People are only willing to put up with such for so long, before reaching for other alternatives (like going to a local library and reading a physical book?). And btw this is not unique to the Threadiverse with tankies, it's an extremely prevalent effect across all Fediverse platforms - e.g. here is a very interesting article talking about the identical effect (maybe less on the side of outright trolling) on Mastodon as well: https://wingolog.org/archives/2024/09/24/fedi-is-for-losers. Fwiw I kinda like that terminology, except it can be so easily misunderstood: like we aren't merely "losers" here as in opposition to "winners" as the article claims, but rather in opposition to "gainers" as in greedily trying to always grow, especially at any cost. Sometimes it's okay to just sit there and be who you are, without trying to grow or expand further.
So no I don't think that we will grow. But maybe that's okay? Either way it is what it is - we can't force people to come here against their will, only try to be as welcoming as possible so that they can feel at home here if they do decide to visit.
PieFed is not entirely negligible but is fairly minor, with ~7k monthly active users (https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats), more than half of which are on the porn one fedinsfw.app.
The flagship PieFed.social has 1.6k users - which isn't nothing, and if it were a Lemmy instance would make it #5, right after Lemmy.ml with 1.8k users. However the rest (besides those two) all have <0.3k each. So Lemmy.World alone is twice the size of the entire PieFed-verse. And all the more so if discounting the porn one that iirc from those recent federation graphs is the #1 instance most often defederated from, even more so than the troll hexbear and extremist Lemmygrad instances (there has been some issues with csam on it, and it seems hard to find moderators willing to work there, making federation with it somewhat dicey - importantly here as it pertains to our discussion, for reasons entirely unrelated to the software being PieFed).
Though PieFed growth may have hit upon a major snag when its main dev quite recently forced an update against everyone's advice that now shadow-censors user contributions, even those on other platforms like Lemmy or Mbin, crucially without telling them. The software is quite opinionated (meh, though so is Lemmy too, we just don't talk about it as much), and while it is far too early to see any effects of that in the activity numbers, according to people's comments is definitely causing them to halt their future plans to migrate to PieFed from Lemmy (example discussion about the topic).
Mbin is barely a blip in comparison, with <1k active users total (https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats). Lemmy.world is >13-fold larger than all instances that use Mbin combined. Mbin is really niche not only in terms of users but of functionality: most people seem to want a client that is optimized for the type of content that they consume, rather than one that tries to combine both user-centric microblogging Fediverse/Mastodon style (with e.g. long titles, perhaps even wrapping for more than an entire line, as in news articles) with the topic-based threaded conversional style of the Threadiverse (which e.g. sometimes has titles as short as a single word, causing much wasted space, plus requiring additional clicks to see the images rather than showing in a sufficient size to facilitate quicker scrolling through larger masses of content). Back when Ernst built Kbin (from which Mbin was forked when he had health issues) the major attraction was it being an alternative to the tankie-lead development of Lemmy, but now PieFed mainly fills that roll (even while introducing issues on its own, so perhaps we could see a revival of interest in Mbin after all?).
Several high-profile instance opt out of that, including Lemmy.ml and PieFed.social.
The sheer amount of toxicity on the Threadiverse is a real issue. Multiple people have claimed to have been stalked irl (weirdly even incorrectly so, as in thinking they were someone else?) or received death threats (I dunno how credible but how relevant would that even be here?), over and above issues shared by Reddit mods.
My point is that it is incredibly draining. Add to this how ineffectual the tools have been all this time on Lemmy: no notification of moderation events, no modmail, no ability to continue discussing the matter on the very post that was merely removed from the community listing but not full-on deleted, and even no ability to bring on additional mods from another instance, where they can see the moderator reports (bc those do not federate). The upcoming v1.0 will help a tiny bit with very little of this, and the rest of the issues will remain. PieFed helps with significantly more of them, but not all - e.g. without a modmail, which mod do you contact on the list if you want to ask why your content was removed, especially when it is obscured by the modlog merely saying it was done by "mod"?
In all, this space is becoming simultaneously both less moderated overall, while also vulnerable to overzealous power-hungry mods who do things like preemptively ban people from communities that they've never so much as heard of, while using insults in the ban reason section (being protected by your admin means that you can say whatever you like, in the modlog - call people trolls, when you are a mod they have to let you do it, with no ability to stop you).
It's a 4chan mentality, and it's extremely unwelcoming to new users. It is entirely understandable to me why subreddits are refusing to migrate here, even as access to old-reddit is in the process of being curtailed (removed?).