Comment on Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day agoHas 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).
Blaze@piefed.zip 15 hours ago
!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works is a very toxic community as well, you don’t see SJW defederated from most instances.
Lemmy.ml is defederated from infosec.pub and lemmy.cafe.
Piefed having actual instance blocking at the user level make defederation less of an issue.
OpenStars@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Excellent point and example, I agree.
MwoG and !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net 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 memes@lemmy.world, 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:-).
hamid@crazypeople.online 3 hours ago
I’d much rather Hexbear than people like you who are on a deranged multiple week crusade. Thank god for the blocking feature.
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 hour ago
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
goat@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Meanwhileongrad is only a toxic community if you go into the community to argue in favour of tankie talking points or otherwise defend them.
If you believe that violence and bigotry isn’t okay then you won’t encounter toxicity.
Blaze@piefed.zip 12 hours ago
I just had a look to find an old thread to show to @openstars@piefed.social : https://lazysoci.al/post/39100205/20292399
But I just noticed you banned me 5 days ago for “brigading”? What evidence do you have for that claim?
goat@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
You regularly post threads you comment on to YPTB’s chatroom so others get involved. That’s brigading, and I’m not going to allow it in my community.
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Trying to prove you don’t brigade by posting to a brigade community is certainly a move