The domain https://fediverse.observer/ redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
Looks like they like the idea and it’ll be in v5.1. Looks like they already completed it.
Fair point.
Silver linings :)
Yeah, I remember that ‘argument’. That was annoying to deal with.
There was another feature/set of features that were opt-out and poorly communicated before the vote-limiter, maybe a year ago. I don’t remember what it was though. I recall it went over just as poorly as the rate limiter and made me view Rimu in a different light.
That’s my understanding as well. I had to ask my admins to remove it.
Haha. Yeah. I do think their call for a vanguard kind of gives away the game (wiki: “According to Lenin, the purpose of the vanguard party is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat”). I think using the word “dictatorship” at all is unlikely to go well or attract the people you want that would be okay with giving up power, once they have it.
Absolutely. According to Fedindex, it looks like Lemmynsfw may have only had 3.6k MAU when it crashed. FediNSFW is now at ~3.6k MAU. So, weirdly it came out to be an even exchange.
Looks like Fedindex is putting Fedinsfw creation on 02-18-2026. Fediverse-Observer data, puts Piefed at 4816 MAU on 02-17-2026. Piefed is at 6742 MAU and Fedinsfw only at 3583 MAU, leaves non-Fedinsfw Piefed at 3159 MAU today.
Last time Piefed was below 2k MAU (1990 MAU) was 2026-01-20. So, up ~59% in 10-ish months, not bad, percentage wise.
Looks like Lemmy has had 63 new instances since 2026-06-08, 20 still active (Piefed: 18 new, 8 still active). So better percentage fro Piefed, better volume for Lemmy.
From 2026-07-28 to 2026-10-27, Lemmy alive servers went from 321 -> 294 (Piefed: 66 -> 59). So, with the increased total threadiverse MAUs, it looks like some consolidation is happening.
With you there. ‘Whole ass 1 thing, rather than half-assing 2 things’.
This has legitimately been a huge annoyance for me on web (and a reason I prefer Voyager). I made FR about this too.
Looks like it’s already live. Looks like it’s only contained to users. I was hoping this could also be an admin feature to help stop scraping (with automation only 1 instance has to be hit by a scraper before the subscribed instances are ‘inoculated’). Added another FR.
Edit: added an additional sentence to the ml discussion.
I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).
I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy. Which made a lot of sense to me, since that happens a great deal actually. e.g. PieFed offers polls and user and post flairs, all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.
But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard? Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).
The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking. It doesn’t so much involve logic as emotional manipulation. Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen. With perhaps just one or two… “minor” adjustments, which now place them on the outside rather than in, as the enemy rather than beneficiary of all the absolute violence and horror. Like the target rather than the perpetrator of a genocide.
It really helps to realize that sometimes people lie on the internet.
PieFed is growing, agreed, though mainly due to lemmynsfw.com having fallen and chosen PieFed as its replacement. Which is valid but an outlier, skewing the stats heavily by just that singular data point. PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly, if all the decisions about planned migrations that were cancelled as a result of the daily vote quota issue do not get reversed or replaced by others.
I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others. PyLova has already done it though, as you noted, along with so many other things that Rimu was never going to get around to. Gold lining, even Platinum!?:-)
Yeah, no worries :)
I don’t think that was it but maybe?
Agreed.
Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.
Yeah, Snoopy leaving is interesting, in that I’m not sure how much new blood Rimu is going to attract in the future (he’s burned a lot of bridges). The Codeburg commits lists Rimu, Walter Schwenger (wsj018), and wltb as the only developers over the last 3 months. Looks like there were quite a few more other people pushing commits 4 months back. Looks like the Pylova split happened 5 months ago and a couple of the light commiters followed Mia to Pylova.
Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.
It would be kind of funny, if the effects weren’t terrible :(
Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week (~+750 MAU). Roughly 600 for Lemmy, 170 for Piefed, and -10 for Mbin.
I vaguely recall this, so might have seen your post/comment at the time.
They did? I just checked their instances and it has the same consolidated total votes UI. It would be great if they already did it, maybe it’s an option and not the default?
On a different note, I ran across a post who deleted there account, because almost no one was voting on their posts. I think it was a federation issue, as in the community hosting instance never received the posts and they only stayed local.
I was thinking maybe a check-mark or something to let a user know their post or comment was successfully received by the target/host instance. I don’t know if hosting instances tell sending instances they successfully retrieved data or not, so could be a significant increase in traffic.
Maybe not that significant though. Piefed only had ~1700 posts and comments over the last week, Lemmy top 20 most populated instances were ~12500 (“Activity” Data). Taking the most “active” instance (lemmy.world), they had ~4700 activities, assume worst case they are all for non-Lemmy.world communities. That would be 670 extra packets per day (28 per hour). That doesn’t seem too terrible. Thoughts?
Oh, do you mean the private voting issue? I went on record as being against that right from the start, before he even made it. Obviously (to me) it was going to come across rather poorly when a ton of votes start flooding in that in every way looks indistinguishable from spam, plus it did not accomplish what it set out to do as it was implemented - it had enormous holes in it that could easily be worked around. It can be difficult for people to accept, but we need to live in reality, not a fantasy, even if the fantasy sounds nice.
If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago. I think I might have phrased things differently and even tweaked my position slightly since then, but the overall core remains the same: individuals should be free to do as they choose, including having the ability to block out content that they do not wish to see. That is nowhere close to the same thing as an institutionalized “echo chamber” effect such as goes on inside of the Tankie Triad - that is just people making choices for their own selves.
I essentially did. I admit to being very wrong here - I thought, and even said publicly - that surely Rimu would reverse course and walk back that decision, as he had so very many others previously. But he instead dug down deeper, doubling down on being adamantly against people’s wishes. Which, as above, is his right to do so, but we have our rights too. I saw so many individual people complaining and even mentioning whole entire communities that had wanted to migrate over, but now indicated that they will not do so as a direct result of that decision. Plus the slrpnk.net entire instance was ready to migrate as well (that link is not from slrpnk.net bc it is down now for unrelated reasons so this is a cached copy on my own instance), but now is not doing so - that one I do not believe has had the full reasoning explained, and is a mixture of at least partly other factors, namely their Lemmy database corruption issue I think getting resolved or mitigated or some such. Through it all, Rimu’s response has been the same: “get used to it” / “deal with it”. He acts like Huffman, treating people as landed gentry on his platform. Which is… the truth!! Hence people have left it, and even more are choosing to simply go to it. Nonetheless, I truly do wish the best to the project… I just no longer have any hope that it will continue, most certainly not like it had in the past.
Here is a very interesting exchange illustrating that fact: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2191276/upvotes-turn-green-but-number-doesn-t-change. The complaint was that “Upvotes turn green but number doesn’t change” (title text), and goes on to add “Basically the title. Sometimes it is logged as a failure but most often it’s not logged. Been happening for a few days…” The OP user made several comments like “I like being positive and I want to encourage people to post and comment. Often times I might not like or even agree with the poster/commenter but I value their interaction and viewpoint and think it’s important to encourage participation.”, and Rimu’s response was “There are a ton of other ways to support the fediverse. Find interesting content to post, write nice comments, moderate some communities, improve the docs for Lemmy, translate the UI, report a bug in the issue tracker, report spammers, spread the word on mainstream social media, donate money, and so on. Get creative.”
GET CREATIVE?!?
Rimu not only took away voting, and did so in a way that breaks the ActivityPub model - leaving users to scratch their heads wondering what error had occurred where the arrow turned green but the count did not change - but in response to why people were not allowed to vote anymore, he said to simply move on and do other things besides voting. He is wrong btw: people do not HAVE (as in forced) to accept his decision - the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as [email protected] had their contributions drop like a rock (I skewed those stats a bit b/c I seemed to forget for a moment and submitted 6 posts before I remembered, as I tried out different 3rd-party apps to see what those experiences were like).
So I truly, genuinely wish the project all the success that it can muster. But yes, burning bridges does not bode well for its future. Technically the Snoopy thing might not be fully related, similar to slrpnk.net, but it certainly does not fill me with confidence that the stress fractures are not spreading further. Nor does the number of contributers declining. PugJesus shared with me in DMs that people were hopping mad at Rimu’s decision, but that he overrode all of their input and ram-rodded forward despite any complaints to the contrary. THAT process is the main thing that is killing off the code: not the decisions made, but HOW they were made. People need to feel like they are part of something, and that their input is valued. They feel… quite the opposite.
I do strongly hope for the success of PyLova. It has not made any major splashes yet - although this user-shareable blocklist feature alone could be a full GAME-CHANGER!! I do so eagerly anticipate more.
About politics: it is democracy itself that is dying off, globally. People were not willing to put forth the effort to maintain it, hence it is in decline, as it has literally always been throughout history. We are now doomed to repeat it, as was always going to happen. People being shocked says more about them then about the events that transpired to make them shocked.
REALLY! That’s amazing! I would guess a migration over from Reddit. I hope they feel welcomed.
About downvotes, I misrecalled: Mia said that it was added to the to-do list to be added for the next release, although that was 3 months ago, and yet I have not seen it added yet. So something must be holding it off? The screenshots showing it in action (proof-of-concepts on a test server I presume?) are now gone too so perhaps they expired. That entire conversation with Mia is here if you want more details. Those screenshots of it working got me very excited about it!! And recalling those visuals was why I thought that it had already been done but… not so, in the public release, it would seem.:-(
There are a lot of “unfriendly” aspects such as this to the Fediverse. I see some people fleeing now because their instance went belly-up - off-hand I can think of mander.xyz and slrpnk.net and… at least one more that I cannot now recall the name of (their admin team simply listed a single account beginning with "The ", which at least at one point had not posted for years), all of which are having issues. Of course that is simply par for the course for the Fediverse model!
But less necessary are those bot spam posts made ostensibly to make the place look more welcoming and active and alive - at first glance, but then those accounts (almost?) never respond to anyone’s comment, which sours people and leaves a negative impression of this place as being a ghost town. Which arguably it kinda is, but not really, and if they would invest effort into learning more and figuring out how to block such then it can be better!! But… it is simply not worth the effort, when Reddit and FaceBook and Insta and X and Bluesky have REAL (high amounts of) content, so investing all that effort to learn and block what they do not want will yield significantly greater dividends… they seem to think, and by the mantra that “the customer is always right”, they are correct. Thereby if we want to attrack them more, we need to offer such blocking by default, making unregistered bot accounts either outright illegal or at least opt-in rather than allowing them to be opt-out. All of which Rimu was helping to lead the good fight against… until he chased everyone else away and poisoned the well. Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.
About your idea: I disagree. An admin that is hosting their own instance is different than someone who is simply using an existing instance. Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis. Not having hosted an instance myself, I would naively hope that such a tool already exists, even if it is not graphical? Also, if the tool needed to spend 5 minutes and actively seek out that data to build such a graph, that is not so bad to have such a spike in traffic, for the express purposes of displaying it to someone who explicitly asked for such? I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times. For instance if I make a post to [email protected], even as a mere user (not an instance admin) I can go over to that instance at https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse/ and look for my post there (similarly for comments). I have routinely done that many times in the past, especially from StarTrek.Website that had such horrible network connectivity at the time that I joined it, prompting me to seek out Discuss.Online that has such fantastic uptime due to spectacularly capable admins (including Jgrim the author of Sublinks). Previously though, I would likewise post something and then getting zero up- (or down-) votes, go seek out why, and dis
@[email protected] - Didn’t want to post this twice and figured you might miss it considering how deep this conversation is.
How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?
We mostly use Grafna
Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.
Probably would have missed it. Appreciate the tag :)
Honestly, as long as I can easily enable it, it doesn’t matter to me if everyone has it by default (only viewed your instance without logging in). Might be worth a user poll, but I have no idea how wanted that feature is.
FYI I altered my [FR] on Codeburg to reflect you’d already implementing the feature.
Link doesn’t work, but I think I know what it’ll look like.
Given both your responses, it seems I didn’t conveyed the idea well to OpenStars. My understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”
In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.
Hopefully that makes sense. I graphical up-time graph is probably nice to have too. I was going to say those are available on fediverse measurement sites, but with a quick look, it seems like that was a Fediverse-Observer (RIP) only feature.
Happy to help and thanks for being so responsive, open-minded, and just all around great :)
How ironic given the matter under discussion that Lemmy would throw out part of my comment reply. At least it did not simply silently discard ALL of it!! Though neither did it tell me about cutting it off either… the tools of the the Threadiverse really are quite inferior to those of Reddit (e.g. unpolished). Well, here is the rest:
…cover that my post had not federated. Worse, when it eventually did get federated, it did not appear to others as “new”, and instead looked like it had been submitted several days in the past, at which point people were not alerted to it, and it became buried amidst all the flood of prior posts that had already been engaged with, even though those had not been. It was quite sad, how bad the connectivity of the Threadiverse was 3-4 years ago:-(. These days it is a LOT better! Anyway, I feel like an admin tool would be a better fit for that situation than changing the way that all posts federated all of the time - if I understood you correctly there.