Wcgw?

I think there’s a way to make that happen. Sorry I don’t use apps, I just played around with it in the past, but I recall not liking it until someone told me how to make the images larger - buried VERY deep in the customizations somewhere - and then afterwards it became my favorite app (except I don’t actually use apps, but IF I did, it would be Voyager. Or Thunder. And with full sized images that don’t cut parts out.)

Ah yes. Lemmy really was not designed to appeal to end-users so much as self-hosters who want to spin up their own instances.

Then the Rexodus came, and of course people want what they want, but the entire design philosophy only makes sense when you see it in that light. Westerners primarily still only want a “Reddit replacement”, except somehow without spez at the helm, whereas Lemmy is actually pushing for something entirely different: decentralization.

At which point instances going poof is a feature not a flaw in that model. Though images disappearing could be worked on to better serve a variety of needs - e.g. posters could set a flag that their image is higher priority - and perhaps mods and definitely admins could then modify that - which could affect the automated longer term storage handling.

But Lemmy still isn’t finished yet, despite how many years have gone by, and due to how slow it is to change (driven in large part by it being written in the highly complex and niche Rust language, but several other factors exist as well including funding, which interrelates with the whole tankie issue, etc.) now many people are giving up on it and pinning hopes instead on PieFed to drive changes to the Threadiverse (it being written in Python and with a highly productive and passionate team of volunteer developers who aren’t asking for money before making such things happen).

So I expect things to change in this regard, but in all likelihood in PieFed but whether Lemmy itself ever decides (or is able) to catch up with it I cannot guess. Maybe eventually, one day, in another few years.

And entire instances can vanish

But when they do, their entire repository of posts has already been copied to every other instance across the entire Threadiverse.

e.g. here is DMV.social’s goodbye message, hosted on beehaw.

Very relevant, thank you. @rimu@piefed.social may want to do the same for Piefed - e.g. if someone asks a technicial question and a bunch of people provide very helpful answers, then OP deleting the question perhaps should not have total control over the answers to it, for someone that has a direct link to the conversation.

(1) some communities choose to delete their posts periodically after some time period. Usually they clearly say this in their sidebar. Communities dedicated to memes - where fresh turnover is expected - are going to be more likely to use such practices than those dedicated to discussions of scientific topics.

(2) The Threadiverse does not currently inform you when your content has been removed by a moderator or admin. The only way you find out that happened is when you go looking for it and poof it’s gone, or if you are a weirdo who constantly checks the modlog for your account name for some reason. I think Lemmy is going to add a feature to change this in the near future? Here is yours - the phenomena is rare for you but not absent, e.g. perhaps you are wondering about your post “What’s with the insane level of recalls of late?” - well now you know, the mod did not like it.

(3) As others have said, the longevity is in the Threadiverse, but unless you self-host your own instance, so long as you rely on some other instance admins and post to some other community where you are not a moderator, you have given up control to others to take care of your content, on their terms. This will never not be true, so the longevity here lies in the fact that unlike Reddit or X or Bluesky, we are not controlled by a single monolithic profit-hungry corporate entity - e.g. it is not possible to spin up your own little Reddit, but you can spin up your own little PieFed, Lemmy, or Mbin (or Mastodon, Friendica, etc.). So you can have longevity here, if the admins and mods want that, whereas on Reddit you couldn’t really.

Not me 😋🙃😜🥴

I also left Reddit not for the tankies but for kbin.social, so PieFed is a spiritual successor for that:-).

Plus also the root cause, whatever that is. See e.g. Brexit as well.

Democracy requires an educated citizenry. Knowing that, yet choosing to ignore that, made Western nations vulnerable, not only to misinformation spread for reasons like profit and cheap fame, but to active disinformation as well.

But it was our fault for choosing to remain vulnerable. We knew better, but thought that the consequences would never come, so did not change. Oopsie.

In terms of number of users, rate of growth (in number of users, communities, instances, etc.), level of app support, appreciation from the Threadiverse community, and by all other metrics, yeah? Especially the sheer pace of development of PieFed, which is just a pleasure to observe such a labor of love.

Threaded conversations in Mbin appear more like an afterthought to the Twitter/X microblogging style - see e.g. its own level of app support. Also, the peak of Mbin (according to this site was 874 monthly active users in April 2024, but just one month later that had dropped to 563 and today is 719.

Though Mbin is still remembered - now as the Threadiverse = Lemmy + PieFed + Mbin (+ nodeBB + flarum, with Sublinks seemingly abandoned). There is room for us all here! :-) I will add that if Mbin ever wanted to actually get serious, it would be nice to see.

I mean yeah - but I do so less for their sake and more for the reason that we should have been responsible and not actively have caused that, you know? imho at least.

There have been mass extinction events many times on earth before, and there probably will be several more times yet again, until the sun dies out or perhaps the planet does prior to that. Perhaps humans will even be around to see the next one(s) too, if we happen to survive this one. That will not negate our responsibility here, but could be true regardless.

We can only control what is within our capability to control. i.e. we need to do the right thing - e.g. reduce our impact - but the actual result of our actions is beyond our control hence I choose not to “worry” about that part of the situation.

Stoicism.

The planet will survive. And there is even a chance that some remnant of humanity might as well - deservedly or no. It is mainly modern society that is done for, and I do not morn its loss.

You have value. Thank you for existing.

So… another year then?

I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried with Lemmy. The best I found that I could hope for was sorting by New, but mostly I just gave up hope for it.

Until I moved to PieFed, and now the issue has multiple solutions. For one, using the Topic/Feeds (which are user-customizeable and shareable) you really can have your cake and eat it too, e.g. you can unsubscribe from all politics communities so that those do not show up on your main homepage, but an entire new feed completely dedicated to News & Politics is just a click away. Or Memes. Or Hobbies. Or Movies & TV, or any of a thousand other things - again, you can build your own, or subscribe to one that someone else has made.

And for another, for sufficiently low-traffic communities you can click the bell icon (which you can do to pretty much anything - users, posts, comments, communities, etc. - plus you can even UNCLICK that to silence notifications from your own content!!), so that you get a notification for each and every single new post to it. But, if it ever does get to be too much, you can mark all as read and/or separate the different categories of notifications from one another - community posts by others vs. replies to your own content.

PieFed really is leaving Lemmy behind in the dust, as far as features are concerned.

Yeah “obscure” was definitely the wrong word there - maybe “niche”?

Thank you so much for your contributions btw! In this era of disinformation, making the Threadiverse more usable can be an enormous boon:-).

He did, as well as mental health. So perhaps it is good that he pulled back a bit rather than overwhelm himself further. He did come back from his hospital trip, but then left the instance completely unmonitored which caused the entire Threadiverse to become flooded with spam messages like advertisements, to the point where some instances chose to defederate from it. You can’t just leave something like open on the internet these days!

Anyway PieFed is fantastic, you will probably fall in love with it instantly, like so many others of us:-).

Kbin the software has died - technically there is still one small instance in Poland that uses it, but all others have ceased, and the software is no longer being maintained under that name - yet the project lives on in its fork Mbin.

Instances that include the kbin word - e.g. kbin.earth - only retain that now as a legacy.

Sadly I don’t think anyone has heard from Ernst, the original developer and admin of kbin.social.

App support finally came to Mbin though, see “Interstellar”.

A spiritual successor to Kbin’s design philosophy that is very much worth checking out is “PieFed”, which I am writing to you now using it :-). Most apps that work with Lemmy also now work with it (except Thunder support still coming “soon_™” but available only in the beta version for now, not the Play Store one). PieFed is written in Python rather than the obscure Rust language so its pace of development has been extremely rapid in comparison to Lemmy and it now has a feature set well beyond that of either Lemmy or Mbin. If you want to access both the Threadiverse/Lemmy/Mbin communities/magazines as well as Fediverse/Mastodon-style content, Mbin is still your best bet as it was designed for exactly that, but for Threadiverse stuff it offers numerous advantages. Anyway it is so nice to have choices to pick from!:-)