I never said that that image proves that the originator is a tankie. For one, such content turns people away from the Fediverse, regardless if offered by a conservative, a leftist, a tankie, or whoever. Mainly why I included it is that it is an example of content offered on an instance known to have tankies. See e.g. https://feddit.nl/post/16246531.

What “makes” them a “tankie” instance is that they literally deny that the Tiennamen Square massacre involved any fatalities (and ban anyone from every community on Lemmy.ml, even ones that you’ve never posted or commented in) if you say otherwise. They are really quite open about it too - it definitely is no secret, though you won’t see it immediately upon looking at the sidebar for the instance, so usually people from the Western world (which they seem to be so against in many of their more politically aligned communities) have to discover that fact on their own, then get disappointed (especially those considering themselves liberal and therefore a bit “left-leaning”, not knowing just how far left the scale really goes, i.e. nearly every American is fairly right-leaning, when using the global rather than USA scale).

But more generally, if that instance wants to make fun of the West, particularly Americans, that’s fine - do their thing - but then why is it so shocking when Americans get offended by that? All the more so when reading the sidebar of such places as e.g. Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ca, but then the content federated from Lemmy.ml’s communities work according to an entirely different set of rules.

As we try to entice people over here from Reddit, it’s confusing to them to have all these conflicting sets of rules and behaviors - e.g. in some instances people are allowed to behave as trolls, even encouraged to do so apparently by their admins, but then they also come out and do it here as well, where it is a violation of the rules.

Anyway, again, I’m not using that image to try to prove tankieness - that’s already been established. This is content from tankies, as the person I replied to said “that place is full of whack jobs”, and this whataboutism seemed a kind of illustration of that, not proof.

Oh I’ve seen it - some people receiving downvotes between replying to me and me seeing their content, which I thought was odd so I checked out their post history and literally everything had been downvoted. Obviously that’s a sort of troll attack (except one case where the person said that they were doing it to themselves, so as to imprint upon themselves how worthless those scores really are). Admins can see such and ban accounts doing it, but some instances allow automated signups so there can be an unlimited number of accounts that would need banning though, if someone were determined enough to keep making new ones.

But that’s not what drove my irl friends away - that was content that e.g. made fun of the Western world & society, and which they considered “extremist”, and did not want to see so they left. And as others have noted, if you remove politics and Linux, then other than Star Trek what else do we even have here?

A community, that’s what. But that takes awhile to see, yet they were already gone.

PieFed is odd in both having several features that Lemmy lacks - categories of communities, tags on posts, and most pertinent here, the ability to truly block all users from a specified instance without requiring admin approval (which neither Lemmy nor apparently Mbin offers) - while at the same time lacking in several fundamentals, e.g. user tagging such as @openstars@piefed.social generates no notifications, and the UI is highly difficult to work with for posts with many comments and especially deeper chains that are nested (there is no option to go one level up, the only choice is to start all over at the top level, at which point browser searching does not work when the comments are buried too deeply, as is our very conversation here).

Yes there is a request for a PieFed API. In the browser the display options are a List, a Tile, and a Wide Tile. Off the top of my head, Lemmy seems the most polished - e.g. there are many apps providing choices for how to access it - followed by Mbin and PieFed that each offer different feature sets.

Sorry to hear that. It sounds like you would have to switch to PieFed (which can do it but the UI isn’t as polished, plus then it can’t also read content from Mastodon) or use an app (which I thought none were available that worked for Mbin?), or as you say put in the effort for every single community and annoying user who is trying to push their agenda.

On the bright side, you’ve done it now so henceforth it is merely maintenance:-).

Thanks for letting me know.

Ah, so URL link-type posts pointing to that domain. Have you ever tried it though - might it also block users or communities from that instance as well, even if it isn’t obvious just from glancing at that page?

I would try it myself but I don’t have an account on any Mbin instance. But if you are positive that it does not also block users - as multiple people kept telling me - then I need to remove that wording from my post telling people that Mbin can do that.

That… makes no sense to me.

Meh, at this point, do we really want to live forever? :-P

Many people left lemmy.ml for that reason. Some of us even left Lemmy altogether - e.g. I’m writing this to you from PieFed, which allows blocking of all users from Lemmy.ml (Lemmy itself does not support that - its “instance blocking” only stops communities from an instance, but not users).

Some of the communities are fine, but make sure that you never EVER talk about politics in any way. And even then, why support such a place that has such a reputation? Most communities - though not all - have counterparts elsewhere. Judge for yourself, though it’s nice to at least know that you have options:-).

In fairness, people outside of the instance may legit be receiving the brunt of their more extreme members coming out from the echo chamber and talking shit elsewhere. Then again, why choose to be inside that echo chamber, even if the toxicity is dialed way down?

And there are answers to that question that may depend on your circumstances: e.g. !Firefox@lemmy.ml is by far the largest Firefox community across the entire Fediverse. Also the ire of people inside Lemmy.ml is mostly directed at the primarily democratic capitalist Western society, but you may not feel impacted by such as much, as e.g. they make fun of the USA.

Only you know what will work best for you:-).

Actually it is. I don’t have an Mbin account but supposedly if you go to https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml then you should be able to accomplish it from there. It’s quite hidden though, isn’t it!?:-P More details in this post: https://piefed.social/post/307636.

I’d be interested to hear how it works out for you - like on PieFed if you do that, it blocks the users but not the communities, and in Lemmy it blocks communities but not users. I don’t know what it will do for you, beyond blocking users - but like, is it similar to a full defederation in blocking the communities as well?

Edit: sorry, I intended this to the person you were responding to. I’ll send it on to them, but leave it here in case you want to know as well, with this message explaining how strange it is that I would be responding to you who is not on Mbin:-P.

Actually it is. I don’t have an Mbin account but supposedly if you go to https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml then you should be able to accomplish it from there. It’s quite hidden though, isn’t it!?:-P More details in this post: https://piefed.social/post/307636.

I’d be interested to hear how it works out for you - like on PieFed if you do that, it blocks the users but not the communities, and in Lemmy it blocks communities but not users. I don’t know what it will do for you, beyond blocking users - but like, is it similar to a full defederation in blocking the communities as well?

Twitterverse - oh that’s interesting!:-)

Irrelevant software - especially if forum-based (Threadiverse), user-based (Twitterverse), and other content (PixelFed/Insta, Loops underneath that, and whatever Friendica is about) were all to end up conjoined into a single “Feed” of whatever mixture proportions the user wants, that would indeed become a true “Fediverse”:-).

But until that time… some of them do still seem somewhat separate, though perhaps artificially so.

federation - I made a post yesterday, but due to federation issues it now sits solely on PieFed (viewable from https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@lemmy.world?sort=new&layout=list), and presumably is not available from any other instances as well (e.g. looking at https://discuss.online/c/fediverse@lemmy.world?dataType=Post&sort=New, I do not see it). That’s perhaps a fine example of how the various vehicles that we use to access the Fediverse are distinct from the sources of content - although tbh that type of occurrence is nowhere close to being unique wrt PieFed, as I’ve had similar things happen with StarTrek.website and heard of many such occurrences with the likes of Aussie.Zone and Programming.Dev, etc.

Some instances COULD theoretically hold content - e.g. PieFed has a Local filter where people discuss the specific issues relating to PieFed software, as well as a trollyproblems community, etc. - but in practice, the vast majority of content derives from Lemmy.World, or wherever the particular community (or magazine) is based in. And this too is not unique to PieFed - e.g. my previous instance Discuss Online likewise has a couple of communities (e.g. !linus_tech_tips@discuss.online), but the vast majority of that instance is as a “general purpose” one that mainly pulls in content from elsewhere rather than holding it on its own.

So such “onramp” servers are common across the Fediverse - whether running Mbin, Kbin, Lemmy, PieFed, or one day Sublinks, that’s just a property of how the instance admin chooses to do things, and the people who want (or don’t want) to make communities there.

And yeah, if Lemmy.World switched from Lemmy to Sublinks, or to PieFed, or even Mbin, then it would cease to be called “Lemmy” (although other servers would still be that, like Discuss Online), though would still fall under the heading “Fediverse”, and whatever mid-range term used like “Threadiverse” as well. Although people seem to hate that term and argue whenever it is brought up.

I totally agree though - such software details shouldn’t matter, and rather it’s the “content” that we want to aim at, however we end up getting there:-).

Confirmed that the ones that don’t block hexbear and lemmygrad.ml are significantly worse:-).

I like !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world, but there’s less than a post a day to it. At some point it’s up to us to build what we want to see in the world, which is harder when there are fewer of us - so if becomes a cache-22 where we need more people to make new content but we would need more content to attract new people.

And apparently mod tools here are inadequate, though hopefully improving.

One line of thinking that intrigues me, which you might be interested in as it relates even more to Mbin: at what point do we differentiate between where the content is located, vs. how we access it?

So like PieFed exists - I am talk to you from it right now - but if I were to make a post, let’s say to !tenforward@lemmy.world, then am I posting on “Lemmy”? There is next to no content that is exclusively located “on” an instance running PieFed itself, so PieFed is my vehicle to access Lemmy content, in a way?

Then again, a better way would be to say that it was PieFed content, shared “with” the Lemmy instance where the community is moderated (via the ActivityPub protocol), and from there shared around the world, to whatever people are running to receive it - Mbin, Kbin, Sublinks, Tesseract, etc.

And all of that is still just within the Threadiverse, but how to say what Mbin does? Does Mbin access “Mastodon content” as well as “Lemmy content”, or rather “microblog content on the Fediverse” as well as “threaded content on the Fediverse”?

I am not even sure what name the “microblog content on the Fediverse” goes by, b/c people usually say just “Fediverse”, but also things like PixelFed (Instagram replacement) and Friendica (Facebook replacement) are part of the Fediverse too, so if “threaded content on the Fediverse” becomes “Threadiverse”, then “microblog content on the Fediverse” is going to have to be renamed to something other than Fediverse too?

Since in the last six months Mbin doubled the number of comments made monthly, the distinction is becoming more noticeable - yet it is still 10k posts and 75k comments, vs. 9.4 million posts and 16.7 million comments from something running the software “Lemmy” (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats).

Then too, if Lemmy.World switched over to use Sublinks (as they hinted at several months ago…), would most of this content (especially since ~80% of the Lemmy userbase is located on that server) switch from being “Lemmy” to now “Sublinks”? Setting aside the question of “what even is Lemmy, anyway?”, my question to you is: what even is Mbin, anyway? Does it cross-browse “Mastodon and Lemmy content”, or is it like a new, hybrid thing, b/c it doesn’t just browse e.g. Mastodon content, but also can host its own microblog-formatted content too, shared with servers that run Mastodon as its software, as well as its own forum-based content shared with servers that run Lemmy (which can replace themselves with Sublinks) and PieFed.

Whew, this is getting complex!? No wonder people just say “Fediverse” and leave it at that!:-P

Wouldn’t it also cause confusion for some people to say Threadiverse while other people refuse to say that and instead use Fediverse?

Ofc strictly speaking both are true.

Hehe, Forumverse? :-)

I hear that but they nabbed Al Capone on taxes so… whatever works I suppose?

I am not certain I can explain it, but for one thing they have defederated from two of the largest instances including Lemmy.World, bc they wanted a narrower range of experiences yet the mod tools would not allow them to keep up with vetting the flood of content from them and thus their userbase would have been “exposed” to it.

The mantra is “be nice”, but I also saw people discussing literally murder of “others” who they disagreed with, like they voted the wrong way, or didn’t vote despite being in a deep blue USA state or something. So I have no idea of what the criteria really is.

In any case, people report being banned from there at the drop of a hat, bc their mods are quite zealous. Which can be quite shocking to someone coming from a place that has significantly looser moderation practices.

So anyway the label I see for a post hosted on a Beehaw community says:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

And then that link goes to Beehaw’s own description of their own policies. I love this approach! It’s quite friendly - it allows Beehaw to speak for itself, and rather than penalize the instance for being different, yet it addresses the interface between it vs. the wider Fediverse that is more used to content such as appears on Lemmy.World, which again has significantly looser standards (due in large part to severe lack of moderation efforts, which in turn relates to lack of development of tools that mods seem to consider sufficient).

Thanks for the additional insight:-).

The PieFed devs indeed seem very responsive, and I have great hopes for it too.

Though I don’t know if e.g. Lemmy.World would consider switching to use it as they were hoping to do with Sublinks. For it providing a “social media platform” it is coming along nicely even if currently lacking polish, though from the perspective of migration of existing content into… well perhaps that’s doable as well but I definitely know far less about that:-).

I don’t know Rust or much about the Lemmy codebase. Possibly people were simply complaining about a time delay - a large part of that being understandable due to the nature of how Federation works, i.e. you don’t want to cause corruption even among servers running older versions of the software.

ARE we a healthy service though? Setting aside how any social media can be addictive, Lemmy in particular is incredibly toxic. It can be MADE into something that is far more tolerable, but it is not that way fresh out of the box, for a new user - particularly a mainstream one - who does not know what they are doing, e.g. how to block, what an “instance” even is (neither Reddit nor X has an equivalent), etc.

Blaze, when he preaches about the benefits of Lemmy on Reddit to entice new users to come here, mostly tells people to choose lemm.ee, and even specifically mentions the tankie issue for those who are worried about it, specifically regarding lemmy.ml. However, lemm.ee does not block e.g. hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse, nor does it block even the incredibly offensive lemmygrad.ml. I almost left the Fediverse entirely when I commented in each of those, and received WEEKS and WEEKS of replies (EACH) to what I considered an innocuous comment (e.g. “at least Biden lowered gas prices, which is not nothing imho?”) - I could do nothing (that I knew of) to halt it. Nor, having arrived in them via All, did I have the first inkling of what those communities were all about, or those instances. I did not consent to that! Having read the rules of e.g. Lemmy.World, and coming as I had from Kbin.social, I was not expecting anything remotely close to… THAT!!!

So I understand why my irl friends have all absolutely refused to use Lemmy, and moreover give me a dirty look for even having suggested it. It’s nasty. WE (who use Linux btw) know how to manage software, and can make it into something beautiful. But a day-1 noob with a guest or fresh account, trying to compare this place to Reddit, will not likely stick around long enough to see what we do.

As for the rest, I most definitely get what you are saying, and there are a couple of recent(-ish) posts in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca that cover those topics in more detail, if you want!:-)