Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5!

• OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Wouldn’t total posts bias towards older instances though, counting posts over time rather than activity today? So then good point that sh.itjust.works is so high up by both metrics:-).

  While lemmy.ml continues to fall - by active users I think I recall it was #3 at some point, then #4, while now it’s #5, where based on the gap below it, it seems likely to remain since users are now more distributed than previously (which is a good thing!:-).

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  • Revan343@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Oh yeah, monthly active users is definitely the better metric, I just wanted to point out that in this case, it falls in the same place either way.

    I wonder what the best metric would be for measuring how distributed Lemmy is. Maybe the ratio between total active monthly users vs the top 5 or 10 instances?

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    • OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      People used to say how Lemmy.World had ~80% of all users on the Fediverse. I’m not sure if that was older defunct accounts or what. But it does illustrate one thing: does it even matter where user accounts are located, when the federation model means that someone can access the entire thing, minus only whatever someone’s instance has chosen to defederate from?

      On Mastodon that matters greatly, due to the discoverability aspect, but here on the Threadiverse (or whatever we want to call ourselves to distinguish the forum vs. microblogging nature of our spaces, accessible via Lemmy, some app, Mbin, Friendica, PieFed, Tesseract, perhaps Sublinks one day, etc.)? On that note, my instances (Kbin.social, then StarTrek.Website, Discuss.Online, and now a mix between that and PieFed.social) have mostly been extremely tiny, but I never felt like I was excluded, being able to browse by All.

      In fact quite the opposite! Having wandered into Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and thereby exposing myself to their echo chambers, right inside the very ones hosted on their own instances but due to federation, hosted likewise on my instance as well, I strongly wished that the Fediverse would have been a little less connected - or at least if it has offered me some warning! (The sidebar text is only shown on a “community” page, not an individual post when arrived at via browsing All.)

      And then there’s communities to consider - so many are on Lemmy.World, but how much should that matter, vs. the users? Moderation though is primarily something related to communities. So like sh.itjust.works doesn’t have all that many, there’s e.g. !whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ca also, like there’s !pcgaming@lemmy.ca and !canada@lemmy.ca, yet these general-purpose instances have so very many users, even if the communities themselves are mostly on lemmy.world.

      If lemmy.world were to go down though, we’d lose a LOT, at least in the short term. Archived copies of older posts would remain cached on remote instances, but a new community would have to be created somewhere in order to allow continued posting.

      So I don’t think that the Threadiverse is all that distributed - but I also don’t think that it matters for us?

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      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        It would be nice to see a way of unifying communities on multiple instances for redundancy and improving the situation with redundant communities across instances.

        I’d imagine it would probably need to be an option-in option on a per-community basis where one community can request to unify with another one, then from the other community the moderators can accept or reject the request, then the posts, scores and comments would be copied and maintained simultaneously across instances. Differences in block lists between instances would probably be a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Bigger challenge might be latency problems with the mirroring and federation but there’s enough existing redundancy protocols that allow for servers with rediculous redundancy so that’s probably also not insurmountable

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