Yeah, in colloquial usage, most people understand that China and Taiwan are two different countries and there’s no confusion over which one is which.

I still use Reddit to read episode discussions of TV shows and such. Those largely don’t exist here, outside of a handful of shows. And probably would struggle to take off even if the threads existed, as they need a lot of people and good SEO.

You definitely don’t need accounts for every instances (as long as you’re not defederated). That sounds like an app bug or something.

K3s? What did you do to the other 5 letters??

Yeah, I had a total of 3 initially and now I’m just down to one, barring an outage of my main instance.

Yeah, the lack of many of my favorite niche communities makes me constantly wonder if I should just “suck it up” and go back to Reddit. I miss so many of them. If I wanna discuss a particular TV show or video game, often I just don’t have much of an option here, cause the community specific to that TV show or game is very likely dead.

We also don’t yet have many interesting text post subs that I liked to read on Reddit, like AITA, Best of Legal Advice, Best of Redditor Updates, Hobby Drama, etc.

Similarly, my local city sub is pretty dead (and never shows up on the front page cause the sorting algorithms suck). So I barely have any local interaction anymore! I met real life people on Reddit and it was great for getting advice from others who live in my city.

The sorting algorithm fixes can’t come soon enough IMO. Small subs are dead because they simply can’t show up on the front page with most of the sorting algorithms that Lemmy has. That limits how much you’ll see in your feed and also makes Reddit a better product (due to all the niche subs it has that actually show up on the front page).

But there’s only an issue if the software you’re using auto linkifies the domain. They often don’t and won’t. This seems like a hypothetical problem that probably doesn’t exist for most major software. I certainly know no email software is gonna auto linkify this.

If you’re curious, you can see if whatever software you’re viewing this post in auto linkifies (neither are for me): hshshssu.zip iwuf8aowk.mov

(And if we’re manually linkifying, then you don’t need to use the new TLD. Eg, not-a-virus.zip.)

Yeah, I wish posts would straight up not mention the total number of accounts. It’s not something to brag about. A significant number of the difference between active vs total is gonna be bots. Especially since we’re so new. If active is monthly, then active would include almost anyone who has actually used their account.

The active users count is probably inflated for a bit, too, due to people making multiple accounts as they switch instances or try new ones out. e.g., I used a kbin account early on before switching to try Lemmy. I also have a Beehaw account that was actually the very first one I signed up for and gave up on because of the manual approval taking too long, yet I think I may have posted at least one comment cause I used it to try Lemmy first, then switched to an instance that had downvotes and didn’t defederate as many instances. So I’m counted for probably triple. On the long run, I’ll probably end up using just one of these accounts, but that would depend on features. I switched to Lemmy because of the features it had and if kbin gets better, I might switch back.

EDIT: oh, right, and then there’s also porn accounts. The way Lemmy works makes you almost surely want a separate account for the porn instances. It’s easiest to browse those instances by local posts, but that requires you make an account there (it also won’t show NSFW without an account, which is a silly barrier that is just going to hurt adoption). As well, voting is public, so if you want to privately vote on NSFW stuff, you should use a separate account. By comparison, on reddit, as long as you didn’t intend to post or comment, there was no reason to use a separate account for Porn.

But quantity drives quality. Many big names join platforms specifically for the outreach they provide. That’s by far the biggest reason that there’s still so many big names on Twitter and co that haven’t migrated.

Especially for the many people who need to make a living and thus need that outreach. The vast, vast majority of viewers will never pay for a picture they see on the internet or a streamer who makes them laugh. For a platform to be financially viable for creative types to make a living, they need a ton of viewers.

That number obviously doesn’t include those, because Instagram has over 2 BILLION users. It’s also easy to see how Threads can quickly get to 100M when that means you just have to convince 5% of your users to try your new platform that they don’t even have to sign up for.

Again, that’s billion with a B. Instagram is unfathomably huge. They only needed 0.1% of their users to rival all of Mastodon.

Bots have never been discouraged by anti-bot measures. I mean, just look at all the anti spam measures modern email providers have, any yet email spam is super common. All we’ve done is just notice a blatantly suspicious spike in account creations. It’s not gonna be so easy when a spammer puts even a little effort in.

AFAIK, there is no current recourse except defederation and defederation would be very slow and depend on every individual instance defederating. As well, there’s plenty of instances that haven’t defederated from the literal nazi instance, so who’s to say that they’d defederate from a bot heavy instance, either? Especially if the spammer would to invest even the slightest effort in appearing like there’s at least some legitimate users or a “friendly” admin. And even when defederation is fast, spammers could turn up an instance in mere minutes. It’s a big issue with the federation model.

Let’s contrast with email, since email is a popular example people use for how federation works. Unlike Lemmy (at least AFAIK), all major email providers have strict automated spam filtering that is extremely skeptical of unfamiliar domains. Those filters are basically what keep email usable. I think we’re gonna have to develop aggressive spam filters soon enough. Spam filters will also help with spammers that create accounts on trusted domains (since that’s always possible – there’s no perfect way to stop them).

I’m of the opinion that decentralization does not require us to allow just anyone to join by default (or at least to interact with by default). We could maintain decentralized lists of trustworthy servers (or inversely, lists of servers to defederate with). A simple way to do so is to just start with a handful of popular, well run instances and consider them trustworthy. Then they can vouch for any other instances being trustworthy and if people agree, the instance is considered trustworthy. It would eventually build up a network of trusted instances. It’s still decentralized. Sure, it’s not as open as before, but what good is being open if bots and trolls can ruin things for good as soon as someone wants to badly enough?

And even if you do understand the pros and cons, it can be complicated because all these instances have differences and you have to figure out which one has the things you want and potentially make compromises.

Eg, I knew I absolutely must have downvotes and several instances disable those. I wanted to be federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw (and also lower my risk that beehaw is gonna defederate my instance in the future). I wanted as large of an instance as possible because by “fun” design, the “all” feed gets better the bigger the instance (IMO a design flaw), as does the ease of subscribing to communities (being first to subscribe is harder).

You could do what Oauth does, allowing many providers to create credentials. That’s what some sites already use to let you login with google/Facebook/etc on their site. Except you theoretically could use any arbitrary sites you trust.

I only noticed a small number of bots that were posting the most.

There’s also an option in your settings to hide bot posts entirely, but I don’t personally want to hide all bots, just the repost ones.

I’ve blocked them, but I wish they’d stop entirely. The reason I blocked them was not even because I disagree with copying content (I’m fine with that in some cases), but because it was just spamming posts that nobody wanted to engage in. It was post after post with zero comments.

Side note: hot sorting sucks and need to be improved. Why the heck does it like to show so many brand new posts with not even a single other person voting on? If I wanted to see new posts, I’d browse new. I expect hot to show me things that at least a couple of people have said “yeah, this is good” to, first (and ideally more than just a couple).