In recent weeks, I have posted an absolutely staggering amount of content on Lemmy.
My goal is simply to support the platform. I hate huge corporations.
Now I’m taking a break. I won’t post anything or I’ll post very little (I still feel a little guilty!! Who will post new content 😢?)
But I need to focus on improving my own life and relax.
However… I’m just curious.
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
Edit: I will still post stuff. I’ll just post a lot less!
Hey, to be fair it’s all public in the modlog. They have weird geopolitical ideas, but I don’t see a lot of ways it’s influenced the design of the platform.
Okay, that does sound dope. How is it implemented? Does it only work if the commenter is on PieFed?
Ditto for more priority going to niche communities. Way too often those posts just slip past in the waterfall of AskLemmy and Tech-related comment.
It’s not though. You not only do not receive a notification, unlike Reddit btw, but you also can’t message the person who did it, also unlike Reddit btw, and on top of that, the modlog simply says that it was done by a “mod”, so you can’t DM them either unless you DM every single mod in the entire community (tbf Reddit does NOT show which mod did something, but in that case you still have the shared modmail so there was no actual need to have it).
Even weirder, I remember when this feature was added: it used to always show the account of the mod, but over time it has become even more authoritian than it used to be. I am saying that Lemmy is somehow even more authoritian than Reddit itself. Instance admins and to a lesser degree mods have tremendous freedoms, whereas the end users not so much. The devs left Reddit, but how Reddit operated still seems very much prominent in their minds, except when they choose to do differently and yes, enormous kudos that there is a modlog, but without notifications of an event or a modmail it still on balance ends up being MORE authoritian than Reddit.
Whereas PieFed offers numerous features aimed at the democratization of moderation, allowing mods to be more hands-off and leave the end-user to decide what they want to see, possibly enlisting the aid of the entire community. e.g. one of the first things PieFed does with a new account is a sign-up wizard asking what their interests are and subscribing to communities based on the answers, and as part of that asking if the user would like to block All, Some, or None of any keywords the user would like, such as “Trump” or “Musk”. This allows mods to have additional options beyond simply remove that content vs. allow it: now, they can more readily allow it knowing that the users that are super tired of seeing it all the time have a means to see less of it, provided by the automated software (which also reduces the burden of manual moderation tasks too).
Sorry this is getting long and you had other questions but I wanted to point out that the pro-democracy stance of PieFed’s democratization of moderation and the pro-authoritarian stance (not from the perspective of an instance admin but to the end-users themselves) is very much baked into the code and a large part of the overall experiences, as it shapes what content is allowed to show up on the respective platforms.
It brings all comments together across all communities, both PieFed and Lemmy - it is one of PieFed’s most popular features! Here is an example showing 9 cross-posts where the comments are all brought together: https://piefed.social/post/1189671 (except I have Lemmy.ml blocked so those comments properly don’t show up for my account:-) - note clicking the horizontal lines shows the community sidebar with explanation and rules for each one.
As you said, it really helps posts to smaller communities maintain traction rather than get ignored by the masses of Lemmings, with that automated software feature allowing Pie-heads to be more connected across the Fediverse.:-)