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Comment on Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025

OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I could criticize China right now, here in this community on Lemmy.world, but if I did so in a community on Lemmy.ml I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of. We have censorship here too.

And we have toxicity here as well. As too does Reddit. It is a little odd to hear Redditors of all people complain about toxicity:-). Maybe they were used to smaller communities on Reddit, avoiding the big ones, but then here with far less content you pretty much have to subscribe to the large communities (like is there another one talking about the Fediverse besides this one that is more worthwhile?), where the toxicity is more visible?

I don’t know, I haven’t wanted to actually talk to people on Reddit for several years now:-).

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Edie@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I would get banned from not only the entire instance but from communities that I’ve never so much as heard of

That’s not how it works. You get banned from the instance and all communities you have commented in. And it wouldn’t be any different if it were to happen on .world or .zip.

(I know OpenStars and piefed.social users cannot see this, however I wanted everyone else to at least understand how bans work)

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Bazell@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Well, I agree that there are some specialized comunities for people that want to believe in 1 idea. Like Lemmy.ml. And if you don’t want to be the part of a brainwashed herd, you either leave by yourself or get banned. This is normal. I am talking about the active platform wide banning regardless of comunity. I don’t see such thing on Lemmy unless you are really harming the platform like mass spamming or sharing dangerous software. On Reddit you no longer can have a normal conversation since you can get banned not only by a toxic mod but also by shitty AI system. And then you cannot even expect for the appeal to be normally processed by a human since either they are also being reviewed by AI or the workers are too lazy to properly work(which is quite relatable since there are thousands of appeals and not enough workers because of a greedy management).

Due to the decentralization on Lemmy, even if you get banned from even 2 or 3 instances, you still have a lot of platform available for you. While on Reddit your ban affects you and your account dramatically. Especially if you are not paying them for the pro version.

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- OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Reddit is worse both overall and on average, agreed. I will say that Lemmy.ml is extremely well-known for mass banning people even from communities that they’ve never heard of, so it’s more than a little bit like Reddit, though as you say with the federated model someone can always go elsewhere, and still see the same content.
  
  There are some slight ways in which the Lemmy implementation of federation is very authoritarian, like how it does not send you any kind of notification that your content has been removed, or even that you have been banned - people simply have to discover that on their own (and oftentimes never!), months to years later. And there’s no modmail to be able to ask questions why, plus the modlog most often obscures the name of the mod anyway, so you can’t even DM them, nor, as you could on Reddit, can you ask them in the same post that has been removed from the community yet still exists for those who have the URL, since Lemmy not only deletes the post in that case but offers a confusing generic error message as if the post never existed in the first place.
  
  So believe it or not, Reddit actually offers some (very few but somewhat foundational) more rights to people there than Lemmy does here!!! Lemmy offers supreme rights to someone wanting to spin up their own instance and be an admin (though CSAM brigading is a constant threat), and also offers special privileges to mods as well, but normal everyday users have far less protections. It is up to each person to decide which “rights” they value most - there is no right here to not have your content deleted by a bot btw, though it is far less common on the Threadiverse than on Reddit, I hear.
  
  Overall I think it’s better here than there, though as the OP graph shows that seems to not be an opinion shared universally by all people looking for a threaded conversational platform, since we are losing slightly more people than we gain, slowly getting smaller over time (now at ~35k active users, down from the peak of ~55k at the time of the first major Rexodus).
  
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  - Bazell@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Mods on Reddit can ban you and ignore anyway. But, agree. Some functionality on Lemmy still needs to be. I hope that developers add it within few years.
    
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    OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Agreed except that given its history, I strongly doubt that most of it ever will be. The developers of the Lemmy codebase made the software for their own desires, and it functions perfectly well as far as they are concerned, fitting in very well with the authoritarian nature of lemmy.ml where even mods seem cowed to barely do anything and instead the admin is the strongest initiator.
    
    I have simultaneously both great respect to them for having made Lemmy as FOSS while also I realistically acknowledge that they do not have the same goals in mind that I and most Westerners do about the rights of individual people vs. that of the State. In their own words:
    
    If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it
    
    (In fairness here, they did later recant on that position, after great public outcry, to remove the hard-coded filters for swear words like “fuck” that were baked into the code at the time. Though Nutomic is absolutely correct in the general sense at least: if people want something that the devs do not want, it is not necessarily the devs responsibility to provide it? Similarly for changing the prioritization of which features to work on first.)
    
    Therefore even without knowing the future plans of either platform, I can practically guarantee that you will see such features added to PieFed, probably multiple years before they show up on Lemmy. In fact it’s already started a year ago now where Lemmy’s “instance block” that still allows users from those supposedly “blocked” instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, even triggering notifications, whereas PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance. PieFed’s version works, while Lemmy’s was promised for years and then never did, and at this point I assume never will.
    
    And in a second example, PieFed just changed how deleted posts are handled: the user controls their own content, but not the content of others, so e.g. if they ask a question they can delete that question, but they can no longer delete the answers delivered to that question by other people.
    
    Sorry if I am salty but I have lost hope in Lemmy. And I am putting all my hope instead into PieFed:-).
    
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