You forgot the most important question of all: in this scenario, am I also a doorknob? It turns out that solves a lot of the other issues...
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Is PieFed.world unstable or something? I am genuinely interested in hearing more about that as I had considered making an account there.
oh no, not again.
Skill issue.
git guudI'd love you better as a doorknob...
turns out to be the wrong answer, and I can't find the undo button 😞
No! Eat the dog instead, as this meme instructs (memes are never wrong).
Lol, pigeons are very real, and coming to get you Barbara!
I don't see anything in !lemmyworld@lemmy.world, what was it?
I choose... to upvote your comment.
It's not your fault, the tools for community discovery are exceedingly poor on Lemmy (this is one arena where PieFed really shines, having virtually solved that issue). Sorting communities by total rather than active users preferentially highlights those that died off 3+ years ago after the Rexodus waned, rather than the most highly active ones currently, which is the polar opposite of what would be most helpful.
And then sorting posts by All as people keep recommending will by definition not show those communities that are not posted to on practically a daily basis. Thus we can have meme and comics communities here, but to have such discussion communities is exceedingly difficult due to the network effect, even among those of us already here.
About tankies: I really have no desire to keep bringing it up over and over and over again, farming the downvotes that result each time. Rather I was saying that this, after the network effect, is the top response that I see on Reddit as to why they refuse to come here. i.e. I'm not spreading my own opinion here - just block people and move on, you know - I'm reporting a diagnosis as to how we can, or rather are blocked from, moving forward.
Indeed though, things change. I would argue the principle of inertia in that they do not simply change all on their own, but rather as a result of effort. Reddit had something to offer - an experience that was superior to what came before. But the experiences here are not superior: over the years there have been network timeouts, whole instances up and disappear (e.g. lemm.ee), the content is for the most part not here, and that network effect is truly real.
And the network effect and the name recognition of Twitter (X) and 4chan works for them. It does not (seem to?) work for Lemmy. I dunno, you could try to go to that subreddit and others like it and explain what Lemmy has to offer? They might ban you but then it would have been tried.
As for me I am still learning - e.g. I did not know until a few days ago about https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/. This seems like kind-of a game changer to me⁉️ Now I want to know: why don't people recommend programming.dev more often? Do they, like me, not know about this? Surely many do not want this kind of curation to be performed for them, even though it is easily reversed? (At least, I think it is? I don't really know... perhaps I need to make an account and find out? or find a hidden community on my own instance to test that out?)
It is not only community discovery that is so poor on Lemmy, it is also knowledge of how such things work - especially hidden communities. (De-)Federations have their own list and people have talked about them extensively over the years, whereas the concept of hidden communities has no such public exposure, either in Lemmy or PieFed. And if even we who have been here and at least a quarter paying attention to matters as they came out don't know, then I certainly cannot blame Redditors for not knowing either.
It is also extremely frustrating that the pace of feature development is measured in significant fractions of a decade rather than more quickly, especially when Redditors already have access to so much such as user & post flairs, polls, multi-communities, notifications sent upon moderation events, a modmail (who is a Threadiverse user supposed to ask when their content is removed why that was done - are they supposed to simply DM each one and see who responds?), and posts that are not "deleted" but instead remain active & accessible to anyone with the URL, so that discussions began in them can finish despite the moderator's decision to no longer platform the post in the subreddit's community feed listing. PieFed has most of these things btw, while Lemmy lacks all of them, and it strongly looks like that situation will largely continue for the next 5-10 years.
What happened to Stack Overflow is happening here too. People come here less and less often, as the reasons to do so decrease alongside each user that flees from here. It would be nice to see this trend reversed. Which means attracting some new users and moreover retaining existing ones - not at the scale of millions but if the goal was to at least to retain an even distribution then at the scale of tens of thousands?
Your instance apparently hides much of the toxicity from you: https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/.
As you say, when you leave the instance and view those others you can see notable differences in what they have to offer. Like mander.xyz is primarily science based.
I don't know if I can precisely explain all the nuances of why people on Reddit complain about us here the way that they do. Like how much of that is based upon prior experiences, which may have changed in the meantime? Or maybe they say toxicity but really mean the network effect where there is so little niche content? Perhaps they simply misunderstand entirely the nature of federated content, so that yes while e.g. hexbear exists that does not mean that all of its content is readily accessible from every other instance?
Part of the problem lies in how poor discoverability is in the Lemmy and even PieFed software. Like the above link explains in depth precisely which communities are hidden by the admins of your instance, however I recall having to stumble upon discovery of this fact on StarTrek.website where there were zero posts or public acknowledgement that ChapoTrapHouse had been made "hidden", when it previously had not been. Lemmy and PieFed each show the list of entirely defederated instances, which is quite a long listing on programming.dev, but there is no central place showing which communities are "hidden" in this manner (nor in PieFed either).
So how then are people supposed to know the facts? Even if people take the time to investigate their findings will depend upon the method used to search - e.g. here is an example comment showing someone on hexbear.net contributing to i.e. appearing on programming.dev - so is the latter "cut off" from the former or no? The answer is "yes but really no", although probably more accurately stated as "no but really yes" (or if we want higher levels of precision then perhaps "no but really yes but at the end of the day no"?). It's confusing AF even for us here on the Threadiverse who know what's going on - like when ChapoTrapHouse was removed from StarTrek.website I was very surprised, bc I had previously interacted in that very community, so I KNEW that it was possible... until it was not anymore. Also, defederations leave up old content as well, even while preventing the influx of new content.
So I do not blame others for failing to understand all of these nuances and complexities? If there were a webpage similar to the federation listings that showed hidden communities, that would have done so much to guide people to understand that particular matter? As it is though, the topic requires in-depth investigation into the ever-changing set of documentation maintained by every instance individually. Speaking of, your instance has a broken link in its sidebar text referring to a wiki site that does not work, returning a cloudflare page saying "Invalid SSL certificate".
Lemmy can be - i.e. has corners that are - toxic as fuck. There are walls between such now, but they are not well-known or documented, and I do not blame Redditors in the slightest for not being aware of this.
Oh hey, that was you!!! Like I said earlier, I enjoy your contributions. Though so many other people - like PugJesus - keep leaving, and based on the number of empty communities in my subscriptions, nobody rises up to replace their level of contributions (well not nobody, e.g. there's Lady Butterfly, tirelessly lifting up pretty much half to all of the most strongly encouraging communities:-).
I've wondered myself if I should help set up a community for comics. But there's a legal liability issue, which I suppose is why I am able to enjoy older ones like Foxtrot and Calvin & Hobbes delivered daily to my Subscribed feed, but not modern ones like Nathan W. Pyle's work.
So what I did instead was to create a community c/AskUSA. Virtually nobody reads the rules though - e.g. to avoid politics (there's even helpful links directly in the sidebar to alternatives to post those to), and the reality of what is happening to the USA right now is too depressing to contemplate so... I became one of those people who abandons communities myself. Realistically, I just don't think we have the subscriber base to support niche communities. Multiple times I have stumbled upon a community that someone created (to hold the name I suppose?) and became the exclusively sole poster to it, never to have been followed up with even by the creator of it themselves. Community discovery is exceedingly poor on Lemmy.
Hence I put all my hopes into PieFed instead, to be all that Lemmy never will... at least until PugJesus left due to the issue of shadow-censoring users contributions. That kind of thing is enough to kill off an entire project, causing communities to choose to not migrate there from a Lemmy instance or from Reddit, or to decide not to switch over their instance or open up a parallel one running PieFed (e.g. sh.itjust.works was considering that at one point in time, I am not sure if they still will now though...). My hopes that PieFed will "save" the concept of the Threadiverse are dashed - even though ironically there is now more reason to have hoped for it than ever before - e.g. Reddit has begun killing off old-reddit, which will cause many to look for alternatives to run to. They will not come here though, as my earlier link mentions in their very own words, nor can I argue all that believably that they should, when what awaits them is to be bullied here into expanding the base to receive tankie falsehoods and propaganda, and otherwise incel toxicity.
So I am choosing to listen rather than always only ever speak, and see if I can understand this shifting landscape better.
Oops, but here I wrote a novel along with that. Don't worry - there is no expectation for me to receive one in return:-).
Time marches ever onwards. Each new generation (of posters) will figure out what it wants to use this space for, if anything at all, or not. In the meantime I hope it has been more enjoyable to meta-discuss these matters, or at least more so than to add to your already considerable pain.
Counterpoint: those will happen naturally and don't need planning.
Sometimes those are fraught with frustration though. Like I remember really enjoying discussions with the highly controversial user FlyingSquid, who left Lemmy at least a year ago. My discussions were about Star Trek, and I had already blocked all politics themed communities as well as the largest meme ones. It turned out that within the politics sphere, he seems to have shown a bit of a different side of his personality to people who tried to post in the communities that he modded. Was he right? Are all the people decrying against him - many of whom I note are often proven liars in other matters - right? Actually truth is significantly more complex than that, plus not having delved in depth I honestly and truly do not know (though suspect a bit of both).
And people say likewise about PugJesus too. I was never on the receiving end of his wrath either - perhaps I never could be, since my aim is truth and he wouldn't have to be firm as I would literally welcome correction where needed? But now he is gone too.
Most of the people that I enjoyed speaking with the most are either gone, or comment far less frequently than they used to. Or in different communities.
A lot of the communities that I do frequent the most - among those that still exist anyway - have barely anyone who comments at all. I tend to avoid the largest ones (I make an exception for this one we are in now due to the subject matter), bc that is where the toxicity is highest. But then the niche communities barely exist at all... e.g. !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev has only had one post in the last 4 months, !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca, oops that one seems to have died a year ago already, so I just unsubscribed, the last post in !dankmemes@lemmy.world was 2 months ago, oops I just noticed several places I am subscribed in were on lemm.ee so obviously those are defunct now, the last post in !dogsincostumes@lemmy.world was 8 months ago, one of my absolute favorites was !nathanwpyle@lemmy.world, but the only post other than one asking the content creator where he went was again from 8 months ago, and so on. There's also just a WHOLE BUNCH of communities that have next to zero comments in them - maybe they are bot posts that people prefer to block? e.g. !publichealth@mander.xyz. Others are not quite as often fully zero but are still less than 5 per post, like !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !globalnews@lemmy.zip, and every single poetry community I can find across the entire Threadiverse.
Don't get me wrong, some people like ThePicardManeuver and LadyButterfly are holding up a good half of the Threadiverse by super posting to many many communities. But people used to say the same about FlyingSquid and also PugJesus as well. Like see this old appreciation post: https://feddit.org/post/3602869.
So anyway, you aren't wrong, but it's not as simple as that, when a good fraction of the communities here keep turning into ghost towns, and those that remain are either the largest, which again attracts the most controversial crowds, or else super super tiny.
But I do enjoy talking with you wherever I see you:-).
Duh, obviously. This is cat.
B-b-but anything I end up saying is... ah... nvm.
Logically, the word was "must", and the title does say "kept his word", so...
That... does not sound normal actually?
Your poll may have backfired - people are downvoting your actual comment instead:-P.
Ah that makes perfect sense. LW also gets a ton of hate, as too does PieFed, so I can well imagine trolls going so far as attacking it (obviously that's my conspiracy theory hat on, but who knows - although "death to the infidels" does seem to me like it may include some light hacking of infidel-owned machines if they can get away with it... - yet it being purely due to AI scraping is unfortunately equally plausible)
What gives me pause about the instance is that the list of Categories I thought was empty for many months, and now is still quite light. Like, whether I would use any of those or not, it seems a signal that the instance admins have other priorities than to get around to such minor matters. Now I begin to see a bit of why. That earlier exceedingly unfriendly disclosure of code vulnerabilities - with zero advanced notice - may have also caused a lot of stress too.