OpenStars

Thanks for the validation - indeed being able to block out what does not match our values is quite helpful for our sanity.

Fwiw, I’ve been on a crusade against hexbear for years, as many others here do as well.:-P

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:-).

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”:-).

Piefed allows to block instances at the user level, making defederation less of an issue. You have to keep in mind that there’s another part of the Reddit population that prefers to have control over their own experience, and for which having a short defederation list is appealing.

Agreed, my issue is that Newbies specifically will not be aware and thus not know. So if e.g. hexbear was added to that blocklist by default and all the user had to do was remove the block, that would solve the problem of making PieFed.zip more “Newbie-friendly”.

Or ideally a sign-up wizard question asking if people preferred a cleaner experience without more controversial content (read: trolls) vs. to be exposed to them and be able to make their own decisions.

Though without either of those, I disagree that PieFed.zip is fully “Newbie-friendly”. Which to be clear is a perfectly fine choice to make, I am just saying that it would help to refine that label. This is like arguing whether a picture showing someone in a thong bikini should have the NSFW label applied to it: if it does then it makes for maximum friendliness, and anyway what’s the harm in having done so?

I have zero desire to police someone else’s NSFW experience anywhere, just offering these suggestions in case it may help more people feel encouraged to visit the Threadiverse and feel welcomed rather than get trolled and, being new, unable to at first figure out what to do about it. Just because we here were all hazed upon entry to the Threadiverse does not mean that the conditions must continue unabated.

Or perhaps they should - if that serves as a filter for new people to select only those most matching the current crowd? I would disagree, but it seems a lot of people hold to that view, and also it is the default to continue unless changes are made. Change will require effort.

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).

Excellent point and example, I agree.

MwoG and [email protected] 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 [email protected], 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:-).

PieFed helps solve that with categories of communities, and also by gathering together all comments across all cross-posts. Seriously, it’s an enormous difference, check it out, e.g. on PieFed.social.

You can whine about it… or find a way to deal constructively with it.

Disinformation != Misinformation != Information

To hear your defeatest talk, Reddit has won. Survival of the fittest and all.

I think we can do better. But never by ignoring the consent of the governed. Perhaps by listening to people, a way could be found to move forward? e.g. by allowing a true block of all users from an instance, as an alternative to defederation. Which Lemmy will likely never do, despite their promises for years and years to do exactly that.

i.e. it’s a skill issue. Do better.

People seem to still be posting to them though? Like Lady Butterfly made 6 posts to the latter one just today alone. And much of that content does not look to be reposted anywhere else, like this post in the former community:

You might want to shut those old ones down then if people are not supposed to be using them anymore?

I could criticize China right now, here in this community on Lemmy.world, but if I did so in a community on Lemmy.ml I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of. We have censorship here too.

And we have toxicity here as well. As too does Reddit. It is a little odd to hear Redditors of all people complain about toxicity:-). Maybe they were used to smaller communities on Reddit, avoiding the big ones, but then here with far less content you pretty much have to subscribe to the large communities (like is there another one talking about the Fediverse besides this one that is more worthwhile?), where the toxicity is more visible?

I don’t know, I haven’t wanted to actually talk to people on Reddit for several years now:-).

Yeah the PieFed instance picker lists every single PieFed instance iirc, with none of them excluded. Theoretically if one was built and had CSAM then I would expect it to not be listed, but if e.g. hexbear converted to PieFed then it would, and even should, so long as it was properly labeled (e.g. don’t say that NSFW is disallowed and then be full of porn).

Ah, searching is super difficult on Bluesky but I finally managed to find something relevant using Google and the site: function. Here is what it had to say in https://bsky.app/profile/lagotrasimeno.bsky.social/post/3lzwma6eg7k2l:

New here Just exploring some alternatives to the always more nazi-like policies and TOS of Reddit and X. So far I’ve tried Mastodon (which is dead btw) and Lemmy, the so-called best alternative to Reddit whose community is even more toxic than the original. This seems pretty chill 🤷 maybe too much?

(Bold emphasis added)

I am not trying to be negative, at least not for its own sake. This is legitimately what I see that people are saying about us here. Certainly not all of them to be fair - some people on other platforms love us here - but from the perspective of diagnosing why are many people leaving, and what do they say about us when they do, this is the top #1 cited reason that I have seen: our toxicity. And I cannot think of any better example of that than hexbear.net, which is why I am such a fan of either outright defederation if that is the only option, or at least making that instance opt-in rather than force it to be opt-out, which apparently seems to cause many people to flee us and go either back to Reddit or to Bluesky or whatever, hence opting out of the entire Threadiverse. Basically: either hexbear goes, or the newbie users do. And even that is only a start to reducing our overall toxicity level as presented to newbie users, though PieFed at least has several wonderful tools to help with that built-in already:-).

Has anything changed since a year ago in this regard though? Tankies are still here, lemmy.ml not defederated from anywhere, hexbear almost disappeared but managed to come back. We made discuss.online a better landing space for newbies, but now the shift is more towards PieFed, which I mentioned several thoughts about in a separate thread.

Not only on Reddit, even on Lemmy there are a bunch of people bashing on the tankies being present on Lemmy, in that community e.g. in the recent discussion at https://piefed.zip/c/fedibridge/p/795307/r-redditalternatives-comments-ask-for-alternatives-piefed-and-lemmy-are-mentioned-a-few-ti, like this comment:

That’s the problem, they do manipulate it. There was a thread a while back that showed how ml basically shows up as one of the random instances to join, like 95% of the time. So it’s not actually random.

We can say all we like how we wish that it were not a problem, but people on Reddit seem to disagree and not want to join regardless. Though I have noticed that either positive or negative opinions are very rarely delivered these days in r/RedditAlternatives. I wonder if people are simply tired of the subject and now just tune it out like noise. If so, then we missed a major opportunity to offer a true alternative to Reddit. Hopefully there will be more, and I am not suggesting to give up, only trying to highlight a major issue of concern so that we can move forward.

Chiefly imho, by recommending PieFed rather than Lemmy instances (and strongly preferably one that defederates from hexbear).

That is a superb idea. Plus PieFed.social defederates from hexbear, so there’s no chance of them accidentally wandering into let’s say [email protected] and get dunked on without understanding why. That community has a right to exist, but it most definitely should be properly labelled so that users are forewarned - unlike how Lemmy handles it where you can get into a post via All without ever once seeing its sidebar text.

It wouldn’t be so bad if another 5k people joined PieFed.social, but after that then yeah I would agree, especially in principle. People should spread out.

Would PieFed.zip possibly consider blocking all users from hexbear by default, thereby making interactions with them as opt-in rather than a nasty surprise waiting for someone to have to discover and then find out how to opt-out?

It is hard to achieve consensus, or for one instance to meet all the needs, but right now PieFed.zip does not even have so much as an instance label for them!! To be fair I see that such a label is lacking for Beehaw communities as well. I am sorry to say but the more I look at PieFed.zip, the less “Newbie-friendly” it seems to me, especially in comparison to PieFed.social. The latter has for Beehaw:

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

Which is very helpful for people who have never heard of Beehaw to know about, is it not?

I note that https://thriv.social/ has many Topics, Feeds, and has hexbear blocked, what about using it as a place to recommend? It is pretty new though, and it lacks the Beehaw label (an extremely minor point most likely as it could be easily added?).

The same for https://quokk.au/, and that admin has a lot of experience hosting Lemmy. Although I don’t see pinned posts for some reason, from multiple communities, so I wonder if there was a problem migrating over from Lemmy to PieFed.

Otherwise, PieFed.social might just be the best recommendation specifically for newbies, until a more newbie-friendly instance could be built up?

Here is one such very relevant post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/

A really interesting discussion in particular is below the reply saying:

The issues you brought up are very much on Reddit too. They are just more noticeable on Lemmy because there aren’t enough niche subs or fluff to drown them out.

Other replies included “I did end up shutting down my instance.”, which continued on with “But, for me, seeing people blindly bash the USA every chance they get, It’s a turn off.” - like, I get that the USA is unpopular (especially now), and also I am okay with the Threadiverse remaining small, but I did want to push back against this magical type of thinking that we can both have our cake and eat it to, in the form of both bashing people from it and also reaching out to invite people on Reddit (who are primarily from the USA) to join us here. Maybe Lemmy will have more success by marketing itself as more “European” (or at least “non-USA”, so maybe European + Global South)? Whatever goal we want to aim for, we should keep our eyes open as we aim directly at it, imho.

I do not think that all or even most Threadiverse instances should defederate from lemmy.ml, but on the other hand it would be extremely nice if just ONE instance would do so, which we could then share to people on Reddit as a nicer entry point for those more centrist-leaning users who are primarily people from the USA. Or else decide that that goal is (collectively) not what we all want. The latter being what ended up happening, whether intentionally or no.

Fwiw, Lemmy has gotten much better over the years in this respect, imho, with many more instances having banned lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net specifically.

Like, look at those contortionist comment replies trying to state that, e.g.:

(if anyone’s out of the loop - lemmygrad isn’t “lemmy”, they are usually defederated by regular instances and their content isn’t visible in “lemmy” as it is colloquially understood)

This topic is a MAJOR, oft-repeated reason why people on Reddit refuse to come here and check us out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1jjl8g5/i_tried_lemmy_again_after_a_year_long_hiatus_and/ (the title there gets cut off but continues with “it’s still beyond terrible”), and here is that post’s concluding paragraph:

If you have a very narrow worldview, politics is your entire personality, and you enjoy dry, charged humor then I guess Lemmy is a good alternative for you, but if you’re anybody else it’s not worth it. Reddit is not good, everybody here agrees. However, despite it’s numerous flaws it’s still a product than Lemmy at it’s very best. It’s simply not a viable alternative imo. Even Instagram and Tiktok are better alternatives than Lemmy.

Note that I do not agree, just stating how these people said that they felt, if that is helpful for a diagnosis of the state of affairs and what we could potentially do to help mitigate those concerns. e.g. I successfully petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from hexbear.net, thinking that could help make Redditors feel more welcomed here. Although now I am placing my hope more in PieFed (which e.g. allows users to perform their own personalized defederations without needing admin approval to block all users from any specific instance), while giving up much hope for Lemmy to keep up with its wondrous pace of adding new features.

Is it not both though? I’ve noticed several users that joined here only recently - mere days or a few weeks or months - so are we not observing both users leaving and also new ones joining? Although this graph only shows the net traffic differences, so is insufficient to make claims beyond that. You could theoretically make a different one, overlaying the new subscriber numbers on top of this, that could disambiguate those two effects (people leaving vs. new ones joining)?

I saw this post on lemmy.ml just prior to the USA election, seemingly portraying the bOtH sIdEs myth that helped encourage people to not vote and thereby get Donald Trump elected:

Make of that what you will.

The difference, one would assume, is that on the whole, Reddit’s political biases influence more what is not shown (much like lemmy.ml banning people for any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, or the echo chamber in hexbear), whereas Lemmy’s tankie issue also manifests as people actively sea-lioning (e.g. Cowbee) and (especially from hexbear) overt trolling, which shows up more in people’s faces. Both are issues, neither are good.

That is exactly what happened. https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats shows for instance that the numbers spiked from 352 MAUs (monthly active users) in May 2025 to >1k in June, then again to >1.6k in July, where it has mostly stabilized and we are currently at ~2.0k (half of that on piefed.social itself, half distributed across other instances, see list at https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list, click Active Users a couple times to sort that descending).

PieFed.social alone has 964 MAUs, now making it larger than such well-known instances as programming.dev, discuss.tchncs.de, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net (which announced a decision to migrate over to PieFed by the end of 2026).

Below PieFed.social, most instances have only a hundred or so users, but this too is a sign of healthy federation where many new instances keep spinning up - exactly like Lemmy where e.g. startrek.website has 152 MAUs, ttrpg.network has 127, ani.social has 172, mander.xyz has 196, and so on. Over a thousand users distributed across many instances is much healthier than all of them on a single one.

Note that most 3rd party apps haven’t caught up to the PieFed software’s latest API changes, so e.g. users of Voyager are mostly getting the same experience on a PieFed instance as they would have on a Lemmy one (iirc no polls, user or post flairs, categories of communities aka Topics and Feeds, etc.) - except even there, back-end changes can still be very impactful to the user experience (such as the ability of a mod to move a post from one community to another, or the ability of an end-user to block all users from a specific instance without needing admin approval to perform defederation).