I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Piefed allows to block instances at the user level, making defederation less of an issue. You have to keep in mind that there’s another part of the Reddit population that prefers to have control over their own experience, and for which having a short defederation list is appealing.
Thriv.social is indeed nice, but they don’t provide a lot of details about who the admins are and how long the instance can last. Maybe you can try to reach out to them?
The instance label thing is really minor indeed. You can still probably reach out to the .zip admins about it.
Quokk.au is very Australian focused, I wouldn’t use it as a general recommendation.
About Piefed.social, if it reaches 5k active users, then the snowball effect will start and Rimu would have to actively lock it down for new users to spread. I prefer to avoid confusing people by linking to Piefed.social when it might be closed for new users in a few months.
Agreed, my issue is that Newbies specifically will not be aware and thus not know. So if e.g. hexbear was added to that blocklist by default and all the user had to do was remove the block, that would solve the problem of making PieFed.zip more “Newbie-friendly”.
Or ideally a sign-up wizard question asking if people preferred a cleaner experience without more controversial content (read: trolls) vs. to be exposed to them and be able to make their own decisions.
Though without either of those, I disagree that PieFed.zip is fully “Newbie-friendly”. Which to be clear is a perfectly fine choice to make, I am just saying that it would help to refine that label. This is like arguing whether a picture showing someone in a thong bikini should have the NSFW label applied to it: if it does then it makes for maximum friendliness, and anyway what’s the harm in having done so?
I have zero desire to police someone else’s NSFW experience anywhere, just offering these suggestions in case it may help more people feel encouraged to visit the Threadiverse and feel welcomed rather than get trolled and, being new, unable to at first figure out what to do about it. Just because we here were all hazed upon entry to the Threadiverse does not mean that the conditions must continue unabated.
Or perhaps they should - if that serves as a filter for new people to select only those most matching the current crowd? I would disagree, but it seems a lot of people hold to that view, and also it is the default to continue unless changes are made. Change will require effort.
Hey so I’m like a week behind here, but piefed.zip (and lemmy.zip) already blocks hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmynsfw by default, and sends a PM to the user when they sign up to let them know why we do this, and how to remove it.
I’ll look in to instance labels. Piefed has a lot of features, which is great, but are many hard to find or not well documented.
@[email protected]
That’s a fairly perfect answer imho, ticking all the boxes: (1) choosing to see that content becomes opt-in, rather than have to opt-out, crucially the reason why being that they have failed to abide by the rules of the wider community, and even been caught outright lying to instance admins; and (2) explaining the reasoning behind it, and how to un-do that decision (which can always be reversed later).
Yes PieFed has a ton of features but I agree that it needs some work still on its level of polish, which Lemmy does ever-so-slightly better with, being older. Fwiw [email protected] has asked the community whether it desires more of the former vs. latter and typically the past answers have leaned towards more features (although I suspect the tide is beginning to turn on that based on posts submitted to [email protected]). I do think that PieFed will end up being the future and leave Lemmy behind (e.g. Jeena’s story), though it would be even more ideal if they could both compete in offering fantastic utility as FOSS to everyone world-wide, in efforts to combat against enshittification of the internet!
I have recommended piefed.zip (and also lemmy.zip) in the past to people, but after you explained that I have zero reservations about it being labelled as “Newbie-friendly” and will recommend it all the more as the default go-to instance - with nothing against piefed.social obviously (I am on it myself!:-P) but as a bulwark against centralization I agree with @[email protected] that it would be most ideal to spread people around, which right now means more off of piefed.social.
Thank you for being a MAJOR part of the solution to advance the Threadiverse forward. I don’t care that it’s a week behind, I am so very glad that you responded here:-).
Minor note: the ToS in the instance chooser on piefed.social for Piefed.zip points to https://piefed.social/tos which says “not found”. That is the instance chooser pointed to by https://join.piefed.social/ so even though piefed.zip has its own could be helpful to change for people thinking of joining.
Glad to hear
I never said it was the perfect newbie-friendly instance, it’s just the one that I choose to point people to.
Feel free to reach out on [email protected] to make your suggestions.