eodc

You can see instance statistics at the bottom of the sidebar. Above are stats for lemm.ee. You have to be on the instance homepage though, or else it will display stats for the current community you’re on.

Thanks for all the work you've been doing admining this instance @sunaurus.

My immediate opinion from this post was that we should defederate from hexbear, since I've felt myself put off of browsing lemmy because of what I perceived as their annoying comments. I'll admit, by annoying I meant constantly bringing up leftist ideology into threads where it was just plain irrelevant. I'm liberal myself, just not as leftist as the average user on hexbear is. But sometimes I just want to browse my memes in peace, y'know?

But after reading through the comments on this thread, I'm now a little more apprehensive about supporting defederation. It's now apparent to me that the reason why their comments have leftist undertones is because that's what characterizes the instance. Hexbear wouldn't be hexbear if their userbase were centrist or right-wing. Hexbear is hexbear precisely because (for better or for worse) they provide a home for leftist ideology.

Furthermore, there are a couple of reasons why it seems like they're "brigading muh memes." One is because they're such a large instance (larger than us, but certainly smaller than lemmy.world). The other is that their interface doesn't allow downvotes, so the only way they can voice disapproval of an opinion is by literally voicing their disapproval in the comments. I personally think this is an excellent system, if it can be moderated well. I see it as promoting discussion. However if it's not moderated well, good discussion ends up getting drowned out by the shouting of village idiots.

A lot of people are pointing out how 1.4k of the 1.8k comments on this post are from hexbear users. That's ~5.8% of the instance's 24.5k member userbase. The remaining 400 or so comments come from a mix of lemm.ee and other instances. Assuming all 400 other comments from from lemm.ee users, that's 2% of our userbase. Undoubtedly, the percentage is even less because that assumption is definitely false. Thus, hexbear has a participation rate that's almost triple ours (with the best case assumptions in our favor). I'm sure the probability of encountering one (or many) of their village idiots is high. This probability is undoubtedly increased due to the fact that their instance systematically encourages participation because of their lack of downvotes. And if Trumpists demonstrate anything, it's that stupid likes to participate.

I'm intentionally avoiding using the word "discussion", since I recognize that participating in a thread and discussing in a thread are two very different things. Both village idiots and good-faith intellectuals participate, but only the latter's participation can be characterized as discussion. I've seen both types of hexbear users in this thread.

I'm wary of us defederating from hexbear. It seems like we'd be condemning a political community for the actions of their (admittedly rather vocal) village idiots. On the other hand, it's not clear to me if that community's moderators really care about controlling their village idiots, especially since they are undoubtedly wreaking havoc on other communities. My guess is that the wisest course of action is to wait and see how their rule changes take effect. If their new rules are able to control their village idiots, then I see no reason to defederate.

Not quite sure what you’re looking for, but I’ve been using avistaz.to as a private tracker

the reason people use one of the large providers is that the large providers have taken malicious and aggressive steps to break the ability of smaller providers to talk to them, in the name of “security”.

This is just a false statement; I can email my friends on GMail just fine from my Protonmail account. I think you’re meaning to characterize malicious methods to keep people on the platform, but that issue is orthogonal to getting people registered.

The issue Lemmy has right now is getting normal people registered.

I think a barrier to wide-spread adoption of lemmy is that for a regular joe, the instance system is a bit confusing. I'm seeing a lot of people comparing the instances to email servers, but I think something they're missing is that there are a few large email providers which most people default to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) and a bunch of smaller ones which people go to if they disagree with the policies of the larger ones (e.g. protonmail)

I think that if lemmy is to replace reddit as the most widely-used link aggregator, we need some kind of default server (or set of default servers) which is large enough that people feel comfortable with settling in on. That way user base growth isn't hindered by confusion. If they later decide that a smaller instance suits their needs better (whether that be the moderation practices or site reliability), they can uproot and move their account there.