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?

Collectively this has already been answered.

PieFed allows mods to move posts from one community to another.

Actually I think hexbear might too, as it runs a custom-modified fork of Lemmy.

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.

FYI, in case you ever absolutely NEED it (people still post actual content sometimes only on Reddit that simply does not exist here on the Threadiverse), YSK that Ublock Origin has opt-in “annoyance filters” that definitely takes care of that popup.

Obligatory fuck spez anyway:-P.

It’s been a couple weeks and I wanted to add another perspective about this.

I noticed a user downvoting posts, https://lemvotes.org/user/FarStare@lemmy.dbzer0.com if it helps to have specifics. In the more than one full year of existing, they have never once contributed via making a post, never once commenting even, just doling out up- and down-votes in roughly equal proportion, and even those nearly exclusively via posts but almost never comments.

I am not concerned about receiving votes from PugJesus - either up or down, as PugJesus has earned the right to speak on behalf of the community. But who is this other person who is influencing how others see my content? Are they male or female? Do they have a degree of some kind? Do they primarily visit meme communities, as the vote pattern might suggest, or other communities as well?

So how do I feel about people who use the Threadiverse more than others? My answer is more complex and nuanced than simply yay or nay. I might prefer the opposite of the implemented feature even - the more someone posts (including comments?), the more upvotes they are allowed to make? Have they not earned such?

Also, if votes were exposed, each individual could decide for themselves how they wanted to make use of voting - perhaps someone would ban PugJesus, or conversely write special code (a 3rd party app / API recipient?) to highlight posts that PugJesus upvoted (isn’t that how “boosting” works? at least re-tweeting does).

It’s really difficult to guess what someone wants, as each person wants different things. Which is why ultimately in an effort to make things more fair & equitable, the solution can end up making it less so.

I like the follow-up suggestion to leave this new option OFF by default, so that an instance admin would have to specifically opt-in, perhaps as part of an overall suite of features limiting things like posts and comments as well. Although really, I think other approaches might work better - e.g. why would someone want to limit themselves to “some” of PugJesus’ content, wouldn’t they rather simply have it all or else ban him from the instance and therefore have none? I am not seeing the benefit realistically of having “some”, especially when the delimiter is not based on community or overall content but simply what time of day (based on an arbitrary threshold for when they starts and ends to restart the next period) the votes are cast?

This will become our new catchphrase:-)

Much better than: “Do you even Fedi, braugh?”

It’s like running Linux, btw

Thank you for your (voting) service! I hope you get to continue doing such unabated on PieFed.zip.

I also mentioned elsewhere that the FIRST up- or down-vote carries car more weight than the hundredth or thousandth. You are doing a true service to the Threadiverse - as too does someone who makes 23k upvotes (over a one month timeperiod I would guess?), but the effect of each & every one of your votes is so much HIGHER than the other scenario there: they aren’t so readily comparable, you making perhaps 1k highly effective votes vs. someone else adding background by making >20 times more votes total, yet increasing the counts from 100 to 101 or negligibly decreasing from 100 to 99, rather than you altering the entire future trajectory of the content item from 1 to 2 (DOUBLING its score) or from 1 to 0.

So if I were to be “afraid” of voters “manipulating” the content that I see - ignoring for a moment how I could browse by All/New or Local/New and thereby entirely ignore any effect anyone (other than mods) has upon what I see - then shouldn’t I be much more afraid of YOU, whose votes are highly effective? More so than someone who merely votes a lot?

I suppose the two scenarios are not mutually exclusive - someone could vote a lot and also do so in a highly effective manner that even more greatly impacts how others view content, using the default Subscribed/Top sort, but in that case it’s the effectiveness far more than the amount that has by far the greater impact upon what I see than merely the total number of votes. And not enough information was given in the OP graphs to be able to understand the situation, or to find out more (unless someone runs their own instance and can look further).

Btw thank you for your service! The Threadiverse needs people like you:-), doing what you are doing!:-)

The way you presented this is as a kind of fight: what do YOU think of THEM that influence YOUR content (implied: without your CONSENT).

But… it’s just people voting, and commenting, and posting - all normal activities that people have done since before any of the Fediverse existed?

This all seems so incongruous, as in what two days ago was considered a virtuous activity all of a sudden is seen as “bad”, and already (not under discussion to maybe possibly potentially be done at some future date) throttled.

I would have preferred a greater rather than lesser amount of transparency and control. Like if a recipient does not like one of these top-10 voters, can they opt-out of that control by blocking them? And if so, how can an individual find out who these mass-vote-controllers are, short of spinning up their own instance thereby exposing themselves to all the frustrations that any public-facing interfaces have in the modern era.

But maybe we WANT these people to control what we see - if we like what they are doing and enjoy the work having been done for us already, each day before we even log in to check the content available on today’s feed?

That is part of my answer to your OP question btw: I don’t know what I think yet about someone else controlling my feed, unless I had the data to be able to make an informed decision? I already presumed that either people were doing so - for Popular feeds - or else I knew that I could bypass that anytime I wanted, simply by browsing All.

So I am uncertain what “new information” this post is adding to my previous understanding of how matters work on the Threadiverse? I suppose it definitively rules out anything remotely resembling a more even distribution, but I would have rather assumed a Power Law curve from the start. Do these accounts upvote any action taken by Russia and downvote any response by Ukraine? In that case I am VERY interested!! Though now that they are throttled, won’t they simply switch to multiple accounts and continue relatively unimpeded?

Things I would guess are upvoted: Linux-praising tech news, USA politics, memes, pictures of cats, calls for guillotining hundreds if not thousands of people world-wide, including even the janitorial staff at Meta who aren’t ideologically pure enough, unlike us here who use <correct answer> btw.

Things I would guess are ignored: anything requiring additional effort to parse rather than continuing to doomscroll mindlessly, like poetry.

But I thought all this a couple days ago too, so my thinking doesn’t seem to have changed in the slightest after seeing these graphs? Pulling the curtain back only this far isn’t enough for me to be able to DO anything with any of this new information?

Hence your rapid implementation of this new “feature” mainly comes across as having a “Just trust me bro” mindset behind it. Less “democratic” and more “authoritarian”? (From a process standpoint I mean.)

Not true, imho. The first comment yes, maybe the second and third as well, but most comments on Reddit seem devoid of actual meaning, having devolved into merely:

^This

And my ax!

I also choose this guy’s husband

I totally agree with you, buddy

Hey pal I’m not your buddy

… and so on. Isn’t an upvote far more preferable? One can simply see the aggregated +1 effect, plus also the emoji reactions if any were added, but beyond that, why would someone comment unless they had something meaningful to say - beyond mere assent.

Downvotes are a bit different - it would be far more helpful to see WHY that was offered, but after the first reply or so that would get old too, and it becomes preferable again to see like “-50”, rather than have to wade through replies showing pig butts actively pooping - as Hexbears (in-?)famously do to one another, in large part due to downvotes having been disabled, for exactly the reason you cite here that people prefer longer-form interactions with one another.

Some people might prefer the comments, but I think most people here would prefer simply the overall vote counts and move on? Like a very popular comment might receive +100 upvotes and 10 comment replies to it? Receiving 50 upvotes and 50 replies might be overwhelming! Yet worthwhile if their content needed words to express the concept? Just not comments that should have been votes!?

An analogy might be a phone call vs. an email or text - sometimes the former is good but proper respect and decorum predisposes people in modern times to preferentially aim for the latter instead.

Edit: also, why not upvote someone’s comment and also reply to it? Maximum friendliness & interactionability!! :-P

People are different. Non-technical normal folks like sports - we here don’t, collectively, yet some people here actually do want sports content.

But it won’t ever rise to the top posts, like it does on Reddit (I presume, tbh I don’t want to go look to check:-P).

Some people even like USA politics? Others don’t. Nobody presumes that we are all the same.

I was agreeing with you that “what you get on your feed is not a representive of the majority’s opinion.”, while adding that I doubt that anyone presumes that it is - we know that we are different, from others, and from one another.