This is @[email protected] and @[email protected] but PieFed told me not to use my admin account for general browsing so here I am following instructions.

  • 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 24 days ago
Cake day: September 2nd, 2026
  • Hal@piefed.nztoFediverse@lemmy.world•Fediverse is Continuing, Growing, and StrongEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    You make a lot of good points, and I think I agree with your overarching theme - we don’t really know.

    Piefed does a lot better job of not recommending the weird instances, and I do hope it overtakes Lemmy because ultimately Lemmy is built by a fringe group so they aren’t going to stop recommending fringe groups.

    I think that people are unlikely to keep using both Lemmy and Piefed long term. Piefed is new and exciting, in another year we should see people settling into an account and hopefully we’ll have a better idea at whether the threadiverse is growing or shrinking.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoFediverse@lemmy.world•Fediverse is Continuing, Growing, and StrongEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.

    I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. That wasn’t natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It’s kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.

    Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic “go”? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?

    I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don’t have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you’re back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.

    Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.

    e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs

    Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn’t affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.

    For example, read the comments

    Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn’t really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn’t really “get” reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It’s an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also “getting” it is something that helps retain people.

    not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️

    Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It’s nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it’s hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.

    On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy’s new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.

    But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don’t spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I’ll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.

    I’ve said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don’t think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren’t all that interested in growth.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoFediverse@lemmy.world•Fediverse is Continuing, Growing, and StrongEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    Are the numbers actually shrinking for Lemmy+Piefed?

    Lemmy has gone from 36,600 monthly active users to 33,600 users in the last year. A loss of 3,000 monthly active users.

    Piefed has gone from 1,600 MAU a year ago to 6,900 MAU now, an increase of 5,300 users.

    This means the total has increased by 2,300 MAU in the past year.

    Note that this drop in Lemmy and rise in Piefed can be explained by lemmynsfw shutting down and being replaced by fedinsfw, which runs piefed and has 3,600 MAU. Arguably both Lemmy and Piefed are slowly gaining in MAU.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How often do you buy a new phone?English
    1·
    6 days ago

    A few phones back I started getting a second hand flagdhip phone every 3-4 years, I think it’s well worth the flagship second hand 1 year old model instead of the mid range phones I used to get for the same price.

    Plus the last couple have been pixels for GraphineOS, so it’s nice to not be directly handingb Google money.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What lemmy client do you use on your phone? And why?English
    5·
    8 days ago

    Summit here too. I changed up some of the display settings so it feels like Relay for Reddit 😀

    The things that got me to move from Voyager were that when images didn’t load first time, there was no way to re-try - Summit has that. And I don’t think Voyager handled drafts that well. Summit has drafts but I do wish there was a client that had drafts like Relay did, where if you come back to the same comment/post and hit reply it has your draft from where you left off on that comment/reply.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why isn't it easy to transfer your lemmy account to a new instance?English
    3·
    11 days ago

    For 1, there’s no central authentication. Accounts prove themselves to other instances with a private/public key pair. I guess you could have some system where the old and new instance connect then transfer that private key so the new instance could prove it’s really you nkt someone impersonating you.

    For 2, we don’t even backfill communities when they sync to an instance for the first time because of the volume. For a while, Lemmy instances would freeze (for everyone) when a user with a lot of content deleted their account, but if you wanted to achieve this I’m sure you could do some slow, async, progressive loading of the content that might happen over days, so volume alone wouldn’t make this impossible. It would also have the potential for large storage requirements or a mismatch between what is allowed on different instances, e.g. you could create an instance, load it up with spam posts, then import it to a major instance to get thousands of views before they could ban you. So here you’d need some protection. Admin review from the new instance? Only allow import from trusted instances? What if someone faked dates or other metadata in their posts before the transfer?

    1. On Lemmy, a community owns the content. So an upvote or comment will get sent to the community’s instance then that instance will federate it to other instances. If one instance transfers a user, there needs to be a way for the owners of the user’s content to federate that update. For something like Mastodon people directly follow a user so their instance is the owner, but for Lemmy with communities you need the user to tell the community about the change then that community would need to trigger the update to it’s own content. You’d have hundreds of communities each triggering updates to hundreds of instances. I see a big risk here of a user being in two states, e.g. one community federated updates ok but another didn’t, and now some instance has two records of the same user. I’m sure smarter people could work out some redundancy here.

    I honestly do think this sounds achievable but like others have said, it’s a lot of work with a lot of edge cases to cater for. So it’s likely not a high priority.