Total user count is a vanity metric. Monthly active users is more relevant and on that we are still way off from the ATH of 2.1 million from 2023.

Also, with the nature of the Fediverse where one single person can have multiple accounts, even this metric might be bogus.

No, that's absolute nonsense. You want people "interacting" with your instance to also be paying you?

I'm all for charging subscriptions from users of your instances. I'm all for commercial instances, but charging from people on other servers is next-level bullshit.

Seriously, I got angry just by reading this. Imagine if Verizon wanted to charge from calls made to their customers. Imagine if Google wanted to charge people that send emails to any Gmail address.

What a stupid concept, and I haven't even touched the crypto part of it.

I use Sponsorblock, enjoy it, and promote it whenever appropriate... but do we really a whole community for that? What do you want to talk about it there?

1. You don't need to be federated to read people's activities...
2. Even if there was some type of "authorized fetch" involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?

requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.

What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?

The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying "this is my XMPP handle" was far from enough to know if you'd be able to communicate with others, and you'd have to figure out things like:

• Does the server support MUC?
• Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
• Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
• Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
• If my client supports "share live location", what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

I wrote to about a dozen journalists on Linked who loved to complain about Elon Musk on Twitter. A short paragraph saying about how Mastodon is growing and that the best way to combat Musk power would be by stripping his platform of reputable people.

Zero responses.

Instead of playing the blame game, let me see if I can help with a solution: I am fairly certain that I can take the "admin" functionality that I built for fediverser and use it as the basis for a "moderation dashboard". It's a Python/Django application that can communicate with the Lemmy server both through the API and the database. The advantages of it being a "sidecar system" instead of being built "into" the Lemmy code itself is that I am not blocked by any of the Lemmy developers and the existing instance owners do not need to wait for some fork to show up.

I can propose a deal: at the time of writing, there are ~200 people who upvoted this article. If I get 20 people (10% of the upvoters) to either sponsor me on Github or subscribe to my Europe-based, GDPR-subject suite of fediverse services, then I will dedicate 10 hours per week to solve all GDPR-related issues.

How does that sound? To me it sounds like a win-win-win situation: Instance admins get proper tooling, Lemmy devs get this out of their list of concerns and users get a more robust application for the fediverse.

The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:

• Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.
• By closing down with Threads, you'll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.
• By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say "hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden."

Well, it clearly seems that this experiment is failing, but not for any reason I was expecting...

• Fediverser is first and foremost a set of tools to help people migrate away from Reddit. I was not expecting so many "if I want to see Reddit stuff, I just go to Reddit". I thought that the people that came to Lemmy during the protests were willing to put their words into actions and leave Reddit, or maybe do what I am doing and only using it to spread awareness of the alternatives. I thought that it was understood that the problem with Reddit was on management, not with Reddit users. I thought that people liked the content from their niche subs, and I thought that people were willing to help others to move to a newer alternative, free of Big Tech and centralized corporate control. It doesn't seem to be the case. For all the talk about community and all the people crying against spez, it seems that Slacktivism is still the dominant ideology of social networks.

• Fediverser is very specific about what subreddits are being mirrored and into what communities the content is going to. To talk about "spam" honestly makes very little sense to me, until I realized that there are so many people browsing via "all". I can not understand how someone in their right mind would be looking at any content firehose without filtering, but it seems like that this is the reality for many.

• People were feeling "tricked" into responding. That's on me. My work on two-way communication is going a bit slower than I was hoping for and I thought that marking accounts as bots was enough, but clearly the UX is failing to make this noticeable.

With all that said, I will retire the bots until I deliver on my promise to make two-way communication work and/or I have better tools at fediverser.network to help community promotion.

without labelling them as such

All accounts are marked as bots.

What is the point of this one way mirroring?

The tool is to help reddit users migrate to Lemmy. By going to the portal, reddit users can "take over" their reddit mirror account and get started on Lemmy already subscribed to the same communities they subscribed on reddit.

There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.

I'm also working on two-way mirroring, but even without it is already very useful... Do you know the "rule" of 90/9/1? On every social media network, 90% of the users are just lurking. 9% participate in the discussion occasionally and 1% are prolific participants. In my case, thanks to fediverser, I managed to unsub from almost 40 subreddits I was subscribed, but I managed to bring this number to 2 (/r/fediverse and /r/redditalternatives)

As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave.

I'm not going to say which to avoid the Streisand effect, but I'm seeing some communities that already have interesting conversations between organic users which could have only have started because of some comment thread that has been mirrored.

The Lemmy developers can do good things and increase net wellbeing while being complete morons. There is nothing in Lemmy's license that says that by using their software you need to support their ideologies.

The Christian teaching of "hate the sin, love the sinner" is the best approach here. Showing support for what the lemmy devs are doing while showing how despicable are their beliefs and stating where are your differences will always work better than trying to boycott their (non-stupid-belief-related) work.