No it would not, and that I would expect to mostly grow over time, while remaining low in the absolute sense. These are Monthly Active Users (MAUs), as reported by places such as https://fediverse.observer/, which not every instance reports to although the vast majority do. Your reply would count towards your particular instance, and in its particular software category - you can see 30 Active Users reported on it at https://catodon.fediverse.observer/list, and graphs for how that has changed over time for all catodon instances at https://catodon.fediverse.observer/stats, showing it stably hovering at ~100 MAUs over the past year, even rising by half again compared to a year ago (though still only double to triple digits total, nowhere close to Lemmy or even PieFed numbers, or especially Mastodon ones).

Catodon is not typically considered Threadiverse, although nodeBB is and flarum iirc would be if it ever gets around to implementing the ActivityPub Protocol for itself, but perhaps that situation would change to become more inclusive! The concept itself may start to get fuzzier as messages are able to be passed between Fediverse platforms, though it also makes sense to me to have names that provide distinction as well - like Loops is for videos, and Friendica is user-based, so even if you could view that content from software like PieFed or Mbin, the community-based topical (aka threaded) discussion format still warrants a name.

The microblogging format could use a name as well except right now Mastodon is pretty much considered just the default, so that Fediverse==Mastodon to a first degree of approximation, to most people who aren’t informed.

I love the fact that we might need new names for these, if the concepts outgrow how they are currently being used! (Sadly, Lemmy has a very toxic userbase, especially Hexbear, and this will severely limit growth from Reddit users who see no reason to join here - or who leave after giving us a chance, while complaining to others how bad their experiences here were while they were here.)

The question is already answered, but if you are curious your instance sidebar says that the alternative front-ends that are available to you on it are: Photon, Alexandrite, Old (as in looks like old-Reddit), and Blorp. Tesseract is not one of them.

Literally every person that I’ve ever recommended this space to irl has outright chided me for having done so. And eventually I saw that they were correct to have done so.

It did not help that (1) a Google search (remember, I’m talking to mainstream normies here, okay?) for “Lemmy” at that time returned Lemmy.ml (nowadays it shows Lemmy.world iirc, but a year or so ago it behaved differently), (2) the default sort for Lemmy.ml is different than most instances, and instead of showing Global it shows only Local, (3) combine this with fluctuations that seems to occur just before any Western election and you get a feed that is very different from what 99% of us here experience for ourselves. Unfiltered Lemmy in this manner is truly bOtH sIdEs SaMe bullshit (of the kind that lets just say discouraged voting for Kamala Harris), and virtually nothing else (again, showing LOCAL rather than GLOBAL on Lemmy.ml).

Mainstream non-technical normal folks are never going to come over to “Lemmy”. It simply has too much historical baggage - and this on top of the continued toxicity still existing in the present. Just one conversation with a hexbear user… by a white, Christian, straight, centrist, “normal” (/mainstream) person is enough to send most of them back to Reddit (or sometimes Bluesky). Whereupon they bitterly complain about us here, warning others against making the same mistake. Oh and yeah they take their OC with them.

Some even stuck around here for a LONG time - like a year or more. Before they too succumbed and went back. I don’t even blame them, and presume that when (not even an “if” in my mind) Donald Trump refuses to step down and this place becomes an absolute shitstorm I am very likely to do the same. Tiny Reddit subs are not the same as the large ones, whereas there are virtually no tiny ones here - at least, not enough to take more than 5 minutes a day to fully catch up on.

Incels will never learn that no means NO, rather than that they simply need to push forward even harder. At which point the issue wraps back around to us, who thereby have to answer what we will actually DO about it.

Hard agree - transparency is important.

Fortunately, this entire filter list can be turned off by the users at any time, for those who want a more unfiltered experience (although atm it’s all-or-nothing iirc).

(Though reportedly the OTHER, smaller instance hard-coded list cannot be disabled now except by using db0’s fork of the codebase.)

Do you mean Lemmy’s hard-coded slur word filter? Yes fortunately that was removed. I find it the height of irony how the Alternative Facts crowd keeps blaming PieFed for having hard-coded instance filters, which it does NOT do, while also shilling for Lemmy doing the same thing. But hey, Russia invaded Ukraine, you know? Whereas if you listen to certain people’s ah… uh… “alternative perspective on the matter”… then it was actually the other way around!! (Except again, it was NOT!!) So there’s nothing you can do about that except not feed the trolls the attention that they so desperately crave.

Or you might mean instead Lemmy’s choice to hard-code Lemmy.ml as the source of truth as to what communities are allowed to be recommended to a new instance just starting up. Not a neutral 3rd party webpage or service, but basically if that specific instance has banned it, then it does not exist in the form of acknowledgement to new instances. This also is something that they blame PieFed for doing, which here too it does NOT, whereas Lemmy truly did. Or rather, tbf came very close to almost doing - I think that decision was rolled back soon enough that it did not even make it into the official released codebase, the outcry & pushback was already too high maybe? It still exists iirc as something that now can be opted out of by modifying a configuration setting to use some alternate source of truth, though with Lemmy.ml still the default setting rather than a neutral 3rd party service.

I would think if Lemmy had actual hard-coded (instance) blocklists, that must have been like… at least four years ago?

Truly, Lemmy has gotten better and less opinionated over time - still not perfect (see attempt described in 2nd paragraph above), but better.

While PieFed unfortunately is getting more opinionated over time. Enough even to sabotage all hopes that it will be useful for both serious discussions a la Mastodon plus also funny meme scrolling a la Reddit & Lemmy. See the PugJesus incident. Perhaps this was inevitable? It began as a general-purpose software, but increasingly Rimu (while seemingly being burnt out from fighting against the tankies of Lemmy) looks to want to take on the next steps of remodeling the very underlying nature of social media itself. But… nobody is ready for that just yet, the subscriber numbers simply are not there, and damnit some of us actually DO want to look at funny cat photos and videos!!! (As well as a great discussion too.) More to the point, the roll-out was spectacularly poorly handled, as even admin teams of multiple instances cited having no knowledge of what was going on, even on their own machines after updating the software but then being surprised at the differences in how it handled things (to their credit, the ones that I heard of each handled the situation very quickly and quite professionally).

So yeah, I’m disturbed by the progressive death of the Threadiverse as our numbers keep falling (55k Monthly Active Users at our peak, down to ~35k lately iirc), and then all the infighting pushes people away still further, especially those least willing to read about the details of each incident.

Supposedly that second, larger & hidden list you can disable, it’s the first, smaller & reportedly hard-coded instance list that you cannot as readily do.

https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy

Full details in https://lemmy.world/post/49778353 including how to download and decompress (111KB of JSON).

Oh wow that’s a lot of them too. Thanks for sharing this list!:-)

I wondered the same - like Ada is one of if not the most level-headed person on the entire Threadiverse. But when I asked elsewhere I simply got downvoted bc Reddit Lemmy gonna Reddit Lemmy, I guess.

The author explains his reasoning here: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942, and specifically says about this:

Instances whose admins directly endorse violence¹, systematically look the other way²,
¹ e.g. dbzer0, .nexus
² e.g. blahaj, quokk

I don’t know the source behind that though - maybe some people on that instance calling for Luigi-ing anti-trans people, or something like that?

The author explains himself here: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942.

Like apparently it’s not “leftist” per se (or trans or furry etc.) so much as extremist rhetoric, or even instances turning a blind eye towards same, for the sake of mainstream normies coming here from Reddit.

It would be like blocking pretentious people, then vegetarians decrying unfair/biased treatment.

Note that many leftists are not blocked, like I strongly doubt that slrpnk.net would be, it’s primarily the more “militant” varieties.

Next up I think is jeans (again), or are we all the way back to not pooping?

Which are only blocked if the admin specifically asks for them to be.

In other words not hard-coded at all.

PieFed is quite opinionated, and the instance picker even more so, but the “hard-coded” arguments have long since been debunked (though last I checked, without being acknowledged by those who initially spread the story).

Also the flagship instance PieFed.social does block a lot, but that’s as different as an instance is from software. Btw Lemmy.ml rather famously blocks a lot of content as well.

Whatever software you use, pick good instance admins that you feel reflect your values (or even self-host your own), and you’ll enjoy your experience on the Threadiverse much better than being at odds with them.

It’s not an app, it’s an alternative front-end e.g. you would access your existing account and instance via https://t.feddit.org/.

Your instance’s sidebar text also mentions others too: Photon, Alexandrite, Next - I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this one - and mlmym (old), apparently not aware that there is now a fork that took up maintenance.

Like the Lemmy back-end software, it is up to your instance admins to deploy and configure these alternative front-end UIs.

Looks like it was added a couple months ago, see e.g. https://dubvee.org/post/5865082.

The hidden file though was not included in the code repository as would be more standard for a FOSS project like this. This alternative web UI is thus making use of the author’s personal blacklist, rather than one shipped with the code and that could be modified by instance admins during installation of it.

Read more about that part here: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942.

I took it to mean all the comments to posts that say nothing except like the singular word “paywalled”, essentially blaming OP for not doing the work to set up an alternative option for them (which rises to a special height of irony when multiple such options exist in the post body that such commenters obviously did not read).

Edit: but here I was talking about the keyword “paywalled”, although are you saying that archive sites are also filtered? The archive.is site has been caught altering the content of supposedly “archived” content, so that one in particular I could see being filtered for non-technical newbies who don’t know that.

Even running the co-founder himself away, which in retrospect should have been a sign of their enshittification.

(/s bc duh)

Hell yes. Tbf most of that is done already from PieFed.social. I also personally added to that a block of Lemmy.ml and I used to all the time investigate (by visiting the home instance of a post) why the comment counts looked different. I can only ever recall a single time that I regretted missing out on all that content (that one time involved Dessalines himself, who I would legit add an exception for if I could).

PieFed.zip and Lemmy.zip do an interesting thing where when you join a user-level block is automatically added for hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, and instructions sent to your inbox on how to remove that block. Thus for them, federation with those instances is opt-in, so that noobs won’t come here and not be able to tell the difference (e.g. 3rd-party apps such as Voyager by default do not show the instance name of an account), and then quit the Threadiverse in frustration before they can figure it all out.

They are thus truly New-user friendly indeed. I am talking about the language used in the PieFed instance picker, in opposition to those instances which say that they offer a “choose your own adventure” experience. That instance picker seems broken right now - e.g. zip does not appear in it at all - but it was a fantastic idea imho to offer such a list, to meet the different needs that people have.

Now unfortunately PieFed.social’s shadow-censorship of votes (even for Lemmy users) without notification as to what content has/is/will be removed make it no longer “Newbie-friendly” imho.:-( Though it does put forth significant efforts towards ensuring a “nicer” experience for its users, e.g. by outright defederation of hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, and banning of certain highly-contentious accounts on dbzer0/anarchist.nexus.

Do you really want to vote more than 240 times per day? That’s one vote per minute for four hours straight - only the terminally online would ever want to do such a thing.

I was not discussing the content of slurs, but the process of HARD-CODING them into the software (especially only in English). Elsewhere PugJesus gives a fairly great explanation as to why a slur filter is not a great idea though - e.g. those people should be banned, not merely filtered, but not by an automated procedure and rather by a human being who can judge nuance.

He has a good heart, trying to help people, e.g. offering PieFed as FOSS.

Talking about baking ideology into the code, the Lemmy devs previously HARD-CODED an English slur word filter. Nutomic said in response:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

This sounds fairly opinionated to me. Fortunately after a HUGE outcry, they did later relent.

Rimu did not have to go to all the trouble of making the vote quota into an environmental variable, easily changed without needing to modify the code (even when running PieFed from a docker container), but he did. Note I am not even defending him here, simply stating facts.

My opinion - shared by most programmers I presume - is that the ideal in both situations would have been to use an opt-in feature, rather than make it opt-out or far worse, HARD-CODE it directly in. Also, it would be nice to announce such things rather than leave people to stumble upon them.

Fwiw, people have previously reported that PieFed hard-codes other matters as well, but this was shown to be misinformation caused by merely looking at lines of code in isolation without bothering to figure out how the code actually works - in particular how those lines are never actually run without particular settings having been turned on.

IF (setting) THEN (feature)

Is NOT the same as hard-coding a feature!!

Also, Lemmy refuses to so much as notify people when their content is removed - overall its set of features is heaviest on giving power to admins, less so to mods, and least of all to the end-users. In contrast, PieFed offers tons of power to users, for instance at least bothering to tell them when their content gets removed by a mod (but ironically not when the voting quota is exceeded, reputedly).

BOTH softwares are fairly opinionated. Lemmy has historically been far more so. Lately it has calmed down and it is PieFed making the waves instead - some of it unfairly, and some of it well-deserved.