Yeah that would do it lol. Thanks for that info.

Apologies OP, I don’t keep up with who’s blocking who on Lemmy.

It could be that LBZ hasn’t discovered the community yet. If that’s the case you may have to try a couple times before it actually populates. One of many federation quirks. Here are some other links to try.

[email protected]

https://hexbear.net/c/mutual_aid

There’s [email protected] which I believe allow GoFundMe links.

Reddit is not a “good” company but at least they are doing the right thing here.

They were tracking everybody before too right? Because terrorism or something? Fuck off feds.

mailbox.org

Yet another reason to move to SimpleX chat. Signal is better than nothing but far from perfect. Besides adoption I think SXC is universally the better option.

Don’t know, I don’t engage with that nonsense.

Editing to add:

Let’s not pretend there aren’t shitheads on every side of every argument. If people are behaving in ways that aren’t what the home instances want, they should be dealt with by their instance admins and moderation. Doesn’t matter if you eat meat, plants, or paint chips. We don’t have to be like this, it’s a choice.

not sure what we can do about it.

Discourage it instead of fanning the flames. Take a stance against bad faith actors and trolls, the same shit we’ve always done.

I think out of desperation to grow and thrive a lot of things are being let go and ignored. As always, this will only lead to things deteriorating until the place is detestable like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Instead of embracing the things we can do better than those platforms we’ve carved out a space on many of the major instances for the worst of these people, and that’s a mistake IMO.

The problem is that toxicity leeches out across the fediverse which stifles growth as more and more negativity makes it to front pages around the web. I don’t have the solution either but I do think more accountability is needed for users and moderators across the fediverse.

All of them are working as intended, can’t ask for much more than that. I don’t think it’s healthy to get caught up in subscribers and all that too much. Things are generally trending positively, good enough for me.

There’s been a disappointing uptick in negative interactions on the fediverse lately (IMO) and that’s more disturbing to me than community numbers. Some (again, IMO) questionable decisions are being made in some of the larger places on the fediverse but a lot of it is users taking it as a challenge or a right of passage to get banned from communities or instances so they can meme and rant about it. It’s silly behavior and we can do better than this.

I can’t say for certain but the fediverse is prone to behave unpredictability at times. You’re probably better off thinking about Lemmy as a collection of websites rather than one central hub like reddit or more traditional sites.

Instances go up and down all the time as well. Sometimes when a site goes down for maintenance (and probably other things like sync issues) the subscriber numbers will fluctuate because a bunch of them are on a site that “doesn’t exist” for a short time while it’s being worked on.

Everything you do on Lemmy takes longer than what you’re probably used to on a more traditional website too. Your posts to your local instance should be instantaneous but sometimes it can take minutes, hours, or even days for those actions to fully federate to other places. This is true of posts, replies, votes, and subscriptions.

There is also defederation which can cause the behavior you described. You are on one of the largest instances on Lemmy and some people have soured on it and its users. It’s entirely possible some of your subscribers were on an instance that defedderated with lemmy.world or something.

TLDR: You are likely overthinking the impact of bots and putting too much importance on subscription numbers. Make sure the community you care about can actually reach the people who might be interested and hope for the best.

Only slightly related but maybe you’d be interested -

I put together a help post for new Lemmy users on my instance describing how to find and join new places on Lemmy. Maybe these resources will help you understand more about how Lemmy works and how you can get your community off the ground.

https://walledgarden.xyz/post/1600683

Bots are not nearly as widespread on Lemmy as they are on reddit. You’re letting your frustration with a slow growing community turn into “old man yells at cloud.”

The main use of bots is for federating. They join communities but don’t interact with posts at all. Even that requires an instance admin to set up so it’s not like there are thousands of them or something. Bedsides that the rest of them are mostly news and information shares.

Lemmy is much smaller than reddit and has more barriers to entry and community growth. Expect it to take months to get a community off the ground.

It seems like you don’t actually understand how to get your community posts to more people.

Lemmy doesn’t spread content to all other instances by default. The whole process is pretty clunky and takes far more effort than it should to promote new places.

Have you announced the community on [email protected] or anything? Discovery on Lemmy leaves a lot to be desired in its current form.

That sounds like a much better implementation of community discovery.

And that’s fine for you, I’m not knocking the experimenting and learning process. That was the whole reason I spun up an instance myself.

What I’m saying is that to the other users that would be impacted by these things, it sucks. People are patient to a point but the fediverse has a lot of odd quirks that make it more difficult than it should be to use for a lot of people. Things have gotten better in the last year or so but it still feels like we’re asking people to know more than they should have to just to figure out that Lemmy isn’t empty. Many people will get frustrated and leave long before they start making excuses for a site they don’t know anything about.

It’s easy to sit around proclaiming that reddit sucks but the fact of the matter is that it’s easy to use and everything they have to offer is covered under one domain. Again, I don’t have the solution to these things for Lemmy, but we can’t deny that this platform is harder to use than most and a lot of people aren’t going to handle that well.

Maybe.

But I’d counter that it’s prohibitive to growth. People aren’t used to turning up at a domain name only to find out 90% of the content can’t be accessed without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

you can always defederate if an instance starts abusing it

Sure, but potentially after at least one of the instances subscribed to the bot goes down and someone realizes what’s happening. It’s incredibly easy to overwhelm a small server’s database just by subscribing to a lot of communities the normal way. The difference here is potentially any instance federating the bot in both directions is susceptible to this.

Not that much different to the normal flow, really.

The impact across the fediverse vs just one instance would be the main difference. Plenty of people are using that bot having no real idea of what it’s doing.

But this is only true if the user looks at the All feed

It impacts what content is available to users at all. The All feed is just the visual representation of what’s actively federating.

Let’s say you join a new instance for whatever reason with no outside awareness of how the fediverse works. If you try to search the instance for “sportball” and get zero results the natural assumption is going to be that there are no communities and no interest in that topic. The user has no idea that lemmyserver5000.com has a sportball community with thousands of users because no one with those interests ever did the work to get the content flowing in a way that they could access it intuitively. It’s a poor design IMO.

The reason I brought it up has more to do with starting a new instance or using a smaller instance. Communities that the instance isn’t aware of (via someone previously subscribing) won’t show up at all which causes places to appear non-existent or dead by default. Someone trying a federating website for the first time isn’t going to know this, so to them, that’s all the fediverse has to offer.

Note that many instances either have a bot subscribed to other communities to force federation, or use something like https://lemmy-federate.com/

FWIW this approach can be helpful but is flawed in its own ways.

Firstly, since not all instances participate you still aren’t getting the “complete” fediverse so to speak. This becomes less of an issue as more instances join the bot program, but it’s another step that roadblocks what should be an easy and organic process.

Secondly, the bot can pose a potential security risk depending on how it’s configured. If you use it to federate in both directions you’re subject to malicious actors spinning up tons of new communities on instances that don’t restrict user registration. This will in turn hammer the database an instance uses for EVERYTHING and eventually causes slow downs, crashes, etc. The solution to this is to only seed your communities outwardly but if everyone only does that the bot is rather useless…

I don’t have a solution for any of this, I’m just pointing out some rather frustrating problems this platform has in its current state.