Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025

[termaxima@slrpnk.net]

Personally I still relate to the other graph. Lemmy posts can sometimes be much too focused on negative things, so I sometimes take pretty long breaks before coming back when it gets too depressing.

[edie@lemmy.ml]

I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of

That's not how it works. You get banned from the instance and all communities you have commented or posted in. And it wouldn't be any different if it were to happen on .world or .zip.

(I know OpenStars and piefed.social users cannot see this, however I wanted everyone else to at least understand how bans work)

[imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Updoot to that! When I am checking for technical solutions or suggestions on the internet, Lemmy has barely any info while Reddit very often has the answer I need. But when it comes to "your typical social media site", Reddit sucks donkey balls in that while Lemmy gives me nice small community vibes. Reddit is still good as long as you dont step into mainstream subs shit.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

I just had a look to find an old thread to show to @openstars@piefed.social : https://lazysoci.al/post/39100205/20292399

But I just noticed you banned me 5 days ago for "brigading"? What evidence do you have for that claim?

Edit: just found this thread: https://lazysoci.al/post/39736457/20699113

Well, I'll let openstars decide what to do.

[blackdragon@slrpnk.net]

The sealion in the original comic is completely correct, which makes me very suspicious of anyone who dismisses someone for "sealioning" and as you say, it usually is just used as an excuse not to engage with what someone is saying.

The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, "Hey, why are you being racist?" And for some reason is wrong because... they're persistent? Or because they're annoying? How is that not literally just every "anti-woke" argument?

[goat@sh.itjust.works]

You regularly post threads you comment on to YPTB's chatroom so others get involved. YPTB and other such Tankie places also regularly use alts, and as soon as you posted the thread, a few alt accounts popped up arguing with Tankie talking points. That's brigading, and I'm not going to allow it in my community.

Trying to prove you don't brigade by posting to a brigade community is certainly a move. Why should I unban you when you continue to manipulate threads and engage in snark communities?

[cowbee@lemmy.ml]

Agreed! They take issue more with the argument style to dismiss the substance.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

If you're on that chatroom, you very much know why fxomt got so stressed

i wonder why fxomt was so stressed

It was because of you, that was said a few weeks ago. That's the bad faith I'm referring to.

Regarding everything you screened, I stand by all of it. Also, linking a thread to a room with 10 active people is not bridaging, otherwise this link at the bottom of the post should be brigading too: https://lazysoci.al/post/40725899?scrollToComments=true

Now I'll stop here as this is not the place to discuss this. We can have a thread on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want.

[goat@sh.itjust.works]

I'm banned from YPTB and the chatroom, and so are most MWoG users. That's because dbzer0 is a tankie instance and YPTB is a tankie community that protects said tankies.

If you stand by all of it, don't complain about your ban, since if you stand by all of it, you know you were brigading, and you know that's against the rules of my community. You're proving my point by threatening to create YPTB threads. You're proving my point by actively linking this comment chain to the chatroom.

Or do you think your ban was unjust and you should be unbanned?

[drdickhandler@lemmy.world]

Except most posts are created by bots here too.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

As I said, not replying to any of this as this is off topic for this community.

If I find another place to continue that conversation, I'll ping you there.

[goat@sh.itjust.works]

Why should I bother to engage in any conversation with you when you've proven in these very replies that you brigade and get others to dogpile with you? Why do you insist on having a thread instead of just DMing me? Not that I want you to.

Tell you what: if you're actually earnest and acting in good faith about this, you should call off the dogpile and ask for peace between the communities. But I doubt it.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

https://piefed.zip/post/929004/comment/3251018

[cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone]

need to include places like piefed and mbin in this too; reddit is just reddit but here you can be either lemmy, piefed, or mbin and talk to one another.

[periodicallypedantic@lemmy.ca]

A statistician explain to me why these graphs seem correlated beyond general trend? They both seem to have localized events on the same day, but given their different timescales that doesn't seem like it should be possible.

I raised the same concern on the other post too, but idk enough about statistics to for sure say something seems fishy.

[openstars@piefed.social]

Excellent point and example, I agree.

MwoG and !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net have every right to exist, just like 4chan, just like NSFW content, just like bots - my beef has always been that they should all be labeled. Properly labeled NSFW can be blurred, filtered out, now a new feature on PieFed allows it to be specifically searched for even, bots likewise can be blured, filtered out, or at least you see a visual indicator that replying to it will not yield a conversation.

In fairness to CTH, the community sidebar does accurately describe what it does. Unfortunately, Lemmy's UX workflow does not show the sidebar text when browsing by All, and some apps seem to go very very very much out of their way to hide every sidebar - burying it behind 5+ clicks and also a deep scroll required. For someone who already knows what CTP is all about that's perfectly fine - you only need such text once, or perhaps in communities like YPTB rarely (for the acronyms) - but for a newbie to stumble across CTP unawares can be... well... devastating, quite frankly.

So I do not begrudge its existence, only it being so readily accessible the same as any other community, even though it is NOT just like any normal community. But, like a bot, like NSFW, if someone wanted to opt-in to it, that should be their decision. i.e. by making an account on an instance that federates with hexbear and joining that community.

Separately, but not unrelated, hexbears are known trolls. It's fine to troll in the community specifically created for trolling, but to do it all across the entire Threadiverse, especially in flagrant violation of the rules for other communities... that's not ideal. Hexbear should be defederated from because Hexbear consistently violates the rules that others set for themselves, and because consent should matter.

But if a space like PieFed.zip wants to federate with hexbear... that's its business, fine. Though WITH NO LABEL on CTP, I strongly think that it makes that instance less "Newbie-friendly". Wouldn't an instance that does not label bots or NSFW be the same? Also, note that PieFed currently has no capability (iirc?) to label all users from an instance. So when someone comes over from Reddit, makes let's say a comment in an innocuous community such as memes@lemmy.world, and gets trolled by a hexbear user, and then again by other users in other communities, over and over and over and over again, why should we be surprised when they nope right back to Reddit?

Perhaps goat should have a label as well. Perhaps I should myself? I agree that I write long messages, so if I had a label that said "writes long messages", why should I even be offended? It would help warn people away, if they did not want to receive such? Though for others of us, that's what we came here for - not just a hundred or so characters that would fit within Twitter's old restrictions, but LONG-form content, chock full of facts and detailed analyses - I change my opinions over time in response to such, when presented with such details and logic (e.g. I used to argue that while hexbear was a troll instance that lemmy.ml was not, though I now have a much more nuanced take on the subject). Choice is a beautiful thing :-).

So I am not opposed in the least to someone seeing CTP, I am slightly more opposed to federating the hexbear instance (but whatever, to each their own), and what I am mainly opposed to is that Newbies in particular can be exposed to hexbear's trolling even/especially outside of their communities without any kind of warning whatsoever - as if their trolling was the same type as any other content here. Their trolling is their decision, while our decisions to allow their trolling is on us, and all the more so to validate it when a label could be applied but we choose not to. Which makes us a Nazi bar - not that we are Nazis ourselves (or in this case, we are not hexbear trolls), but if we accept them here as if they were any other user, with zero distinction between them and us, then that makes us only one step removed from them. Especially in the eyes of someone noping out of our content because we look superficially similar to them.

We cannot force others to join here, only become as enticing as possible so that if they don't join us, that's their loss:-).

[openstars@piefed.social]

Reddit is worse both overall and on average, agreed. I will say that Lemmy.ml is extremely well-known for mass banning people even from communities that they've never heard of, so it's more than a little bit like Reddit, though as you say with the federated model someone can always go elsewhere, and still see the same content.

There are some slight ways in which the Lemmy implementation of federation is very authoritarian, like how it does not send you any kind of notification that your content has been removed, or even that you have been banned - people simply have to discover that on their own (and oftentimes never!), months to years later. And there's no modmail to be able to ask questions why, plus the modlog most often obscures the name of the mod anyway, so you can't even DM them, nor, as you could on Reddit, can you ask them in the same post that has been removed from the community yet still exists for those who have the URL, since Lemmy not only deletes the post in that case but offers a confusing generic error message as if the post never existed in the first place.

So believe it or not, Reddit actually offers some (very few but somewhat foundational) more rights to people there than Lemmy does here!!! Lemmy offers supreme rights to someone wanting to spin up their own instance and be an admin (though CSAM brigading is a constant threat), and also offers special privileges to mods as well, but normal everyday users have far less protections. It is up to each person to decide which "rights" they value most - there is no right here to not have your content deleted by a bot btw, though it is far less common on the Threadiverse than on Reddit, I hear.

Overall I think it's better here than there, though as the OP graph shows that seems to not be an opinion shared universally by all people looking for a threaded conversational platform, since we are losing slightly more people than we gain, slowly getting smaller over time (now at ~35k active users, down from the peak of ~55k at the time of the first major Rexodus).

[bazell@lemmy.zip]

Mods on Reddit can ban you and ignore anyway. But, agree. Some functionality on Lemmy still needs to be. I hope that developers add it within few years.

[openstars@piefed.social]

Excellent points. Perhaps Lady Butterfly might want to help redirect traffic from the old to the new. Like the note in the sidebar helps greatly for discovery, though some content did not look to me like it was cross-posted and instead submitted exclusively to the old communities, so at first glance it does look like it's remaining alive. But fair point that it doesn't need to be "promoted":-).

[openstars@piefed.social]

Agreed except that given its history, I strongly doubt that most of it ever will be. The developers of the Lemmy codebase made the software for their own desires, and it functions perfectly well as far as they are concerned, fitting in very well with the authoritarian nature of lemmy.ml where even mods seem cowed to barely do anything and instead the admin is the strongest initiator.

I have simultaneously both great respect to them for having made Lemmy as FOSS while also I realistically acknowledge that they do not have the same goals in mind that I and most Westerners do about the rights of individual people vs. that of the State. In their own words:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it

(In fairness here, they did later recant on that position, after great public outcry, to remove the hard-coded filters for swear words like "fuck" that were baked into the code at the time. Though Nutomic is absolutely correct in the general sense at least: if people want something that the devs do not want, it is not necessarily the devs responsibility to provide it? Similarly for changing the prioritization of which features to work on first.)

Therefore even without knowing the future plans of either platform, I can practically guarantee that you will see such features added to PieFed, probably multiple years before they show up on Lemmy. In fact it's already started a year ago now where Lemmy's "instance block" that still allows users from those supposedly "blocked" instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, even triggering notifications, whereas PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance. PieFed's version works, while Lemmy's was promised for years and then never did, and at this point I assume never will.

And in a second example, PieFed just changed how deleted posts are handled: the user controls their own content, but not the content of others, so e.g. if they ask a question they can delete that question, but they can no longer delete the answers delivered to that question by other people.

Sorry if I am salty but I have lost hope in Lemmy. And I am putting all my hope instead into PieFed:-).