Breitbart on the mainstream, centrist posts. Most of it's way further out there. I have no idea which ones are inauthentic shitposts and which ones are legit. They are way beyond Poe's Law.

But more important is when they show up on other instances. Everything becomes an argument, dragging down everyone and everything they encounter. This also can't be solved by just blocking the communities on EH, it must be blocked at the community's instance or our (the viewer's) home instance.

I think every city/location sub is like this. It's the only one not governed by interest, but of location.

I'm trying to seed my own, but it's a Sisyphean task. And I know the only way to really get it going is to mention Lemmy IRL.

My understanding is that Mastodon users can reach into Lemmy communities, but not vice versa. It's unclear exactly how Threads would fit into the picture, because it's still theoretical.

Hmm...It's a bit too real. I was hoping for more of an "Explain Like I'm Calvin" answer

I've noticed that a number of comments from other instances are being edited when they appear on FMHY. After some digging, these are all clearly words being censored to prevent spam. This is not context aware, so it is blocking/modifying legitimate comments. Is it possible to disable this feature?

Example:

Original comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/894327

Federated to FMHY: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/comment/706234

Growth is (generally) fine, as long as it's decentralized and/or by trustworthy partners. I'm already uneasy about how big lemmy.world is comparatively, even though I've never seen anything to suggest any bad intent. Meta would be neither.

If we could keep Meta's volume to a level where they cannot exert undue influence, I'd even be OK with them being part of it.

Coercion seems to be a big part of the enshittification process these days. Even once you complete stage 3 and piss everyone off, forcing them to stay against their will is part of the game.

This would force a lot of unwilling people to deal with Facebook, and long-term.

I just saw their financials. For May, their server costs were about $600, including their massive Mastodon server.

Not a negligible expense, but easily recoverable from the 10k+ active users

Also, the party names are basically meaningless. In the US, Democrats (party) and liberals (idea) are left wing. Nothing to do with Liberals, Democrats, or Liberal Democrats in any other countries, some of which are right-wing.

I suppose that depends on what you consider "good" for Mastodon. I wouldn't consider growth simply for the sake of growth to be a good thing. That's stage 1 of enshittification. It also means a shitload of awful people joining, tons of mod work, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Mastodon and the fediverse becoming more accessible. I just think the growth needs to be for the right reasons.

Harder to find current and useful numbers than I expected.

According to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount,

13,213,947 accounts

According to https://me.pcmag.com/en/social-media-1/17992/mastodon-sees-another-surge-in-active-users-following-twitters-rate-limiting,

2,055,502 active users monthly (3,797,695 active users half-year)

This is only a half-answer, but you can use one of the Pre DB sites to see scene releases. It won't really help with P2P releases. Scene is almost always first (nature of the beast), with P2P releases of the same showing up a day or two later.