Eh, I don’t see a significant exodus from the threadiverse. I’d say it’s with in variance (41k +/-2000 over the last year).

It’d be nice if it went up significantly, but I’ll take relatively stable.

Happy to see the next section and looking forward to the third :)

I wasn’t really able to follow the last couple paragraphs. Is he trying to grab and separate versions as they switch into Eternus?

Another enjoyable read, thanks for sharing. I’m looking forward to seeing how this chapter ends :)

Since this community and proposed wiki was going to be targeted at community creators/mods, I was thinking that people would probably hangout a bit in the threadiverse (learning the intricacies) before creating a community. But that’s a good observation, that many are probably joining and looking to add a community soon after. Added your idea to the wiki subsection of the post :)

I feel like there’s a bot or something that helps with finding all the communities for smaller instance, but the exact thing escapes me. Probably also worth putting into the wiki when I figure it out. Haha.

I thought the linked post/conversation was quite good. I didn’t read all the comments, but I would have upvoted all that I did, because they added to the discussion in a respectful way (I found them assertive, not angry).

You were also one of the earliest parent comments and had a confrontational, but not disrespectful take. So, to me, it would make sense you have more upvotes than most other comments.

Not to say if it is or isn’t, but I think you may be having an issue because you believe your viewpoints are “moderate/normal/reality”. The linked post is in an anarchist community, on an anarchist instance. In which case, the anarchist point of view would be the “normal” one. This may be the case for many of your other “comments are angrily opposed” situations.

Just to add to the viewpoint consideration, a quick search showed only 1 of the 56 comments was from a .ml user.

Based on your comment and the linked discussion, if you wanted to make a “r/moderatepolitics” you would probably want to do so one a neoliberal instance (ex. .world). I think this would better align your world view, with the potential views/commenters of your posts.

I know quite a few of those specific communities exist, but I like the idea. It just may not work best as a community. Perhaps a “Feed” (Piefed feature, maybe others?) that groups together a bunch of communities of a similar topic into it’s own “Feed” that people can subscribe to.

The “CottageIndustry” idea is interesting. I’m worried about just a flood of spam from people trying to see if they can make the threadiverse an Etsy. Maybe if it was a mod only posting community with weekly posts that potential artists crafter’s could post their “wares” to? Seems like it would be pretty easy to automate the posts, just need a mod who doesn’t mind watching the comments.

Thoughts on either/both?

Thank you. Glad you like it :)

Having your (someone relatively new) opinion would be great. Feel free to let me/us know if you’ve noticed anything “missing” from your experience or even if it difficulty/confusion using the software (though not the main purpose, I’ve passed along a couple ideas from these posts to the devs).

Yeah, that would definitely be a nice to have. I’m not sure it’s a Lemmy feature though, so not sure most of the threadiverse instances (~600/750) would be able to have one, without creating one, the way your instance did.

Although I imagine some instances wouldn’t have much to say in theirs. I feel slrpnk.net is pretty unique in that way. The unique content and outlook is a lot of the reason it’s my go to recommendation to my irl friends if they want to try out the threadiverse :)

Haha. Guess we both replied basically the same thing to the post.

Does look like +50k real growth over the last month. With the caveat that that is only counting the software I track, so could be greater.

There’s some caveats to the rise. There’s likely spam waves hitting pixelfed (~300k), 2 months ago a spam wave hit writefreely (~400k), and possibly Bookwrym currently (~4k).

A weekly post breaking it down by software: https://piefed.zip/c/fedilytics@piefed.zip/p/1838661/growth-of-the-fediverse-20260920

Edit: replaced link because the threadiverse link doesn’t seem to be working. Fixed spam accounts on writefreely.

Couldn’t get it to load on mobile (via Voyager) but works on desktop.

Linked Text:

BarnRaising
Help others relate.

BarnRaising
Meatball is a BarnRaising community. We help others with their projects in return for them helping us with ours.

“People and People and Computers and People.”
Our motto is People and people and computers and people.

Meatball is a LearningCommunity of the leaders of online communities–their proprietors, developers, mentors, and samaritans. We explore what it means to build an online community or, perhaps better, a community online. As it is a community, it is defined solely by the personal relationships that form it. Our breadth of interest is fairly wide as we take a holistic stance to community development. What differentiates us from many online meta-communities is that while we do talk about technology, we spend more time talking about sociology; and when we do talk about technology, we do so in a social context.

Politically, we are biased heavily towards democratic principles, even if we disagree (vehemently) on what those are, which is nice in a way. Consequently, we are also an experiment to see how far we can take SoftSecurity before it breaks. While the simpler aspects of soft security are relatively well understood, we are learning painfully what it means to take these principles through an ever larger community.

Finally, we are PublicArt. We strive to be beautiful. We want to shimmer and make people smile, and we want to do this by attracting and showcasing life.

Keywords
Here are some keywords to help you sort out the range of ideas we are willing to explore here.

In general, OnlineCulture, OtherHypermedia, communication technology, Internet standards or anything else that is involved in building online communities is on topic. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, business management or any other subject that bears on organizing people is on topic. Political science, economics, journalism or anything that describes the consequences of society is on topic.

Wikis
MeatballWiki represents in large part a Community of Practice of how to run a wiki according to a very purified and distilled sense of experience from the original wiki, WikiWiki (aka Wiki, capital W), and the wikis that surround it. This is often termed the WikiWay. This does not match with most wiki experiences, but it is a valuable tradition to maintain in order to see what it can do. This also means Meatball does not strive to represent all wikis, just that in the process of exploring online community theory, we frequently study them and write about them. From that, we often form relationships with those involved in wikidom; and as we said above, Meatball is nothing but personal relationships.

For those curious, a simple summary of the WikiWay is playful wisdom.

WebLog""s and OtherHypermedia
Meatball as a whole (wider than MeatballWiki) attempts to grapple with the complex issues surrounding all digital and hypermedia. We have several important texts on weblogs here in particular. We have also explored OtherHypermedia and we will be building beautiful things you haven’t even dreamt of. We will then break them apart, shake them up, and then figure out where they fit in our lives, if at all. This is the anvil and the horse.

Values
Meatball was founded on a series of core values. They were chosen carefully, and we care deeply about them.

Support. The value of Meatball is not the text or the code or the URL but the mutual support we give each other: CommunityOverContent. We care only about you as a person; we believe everything good will come out of our friendship. Our value to you is our support; your value to us is your support. Similarly, we support other OnlineCommunities; we are beneath them, but behind them. We study other online communities to learn from their mistakes and successes. We explain solutions clearly. We provide assistance to those who need it. In turn, we gain support by being valued.

BarnRaising. We work together within the community, and work collectively with other communities. We, TheCollective, have a SuperordinateGoal to make something valuable. Our only value comes from working together.

Powerlessness. We only use our hands, hearts, and minds. We do not exist to control or influence other communities or people. We do not use technology to create power; we only use the social power of having many friends. We will only support others, not control others. We share our values by explaining them clearly and demonstrating that they are useful, not by coercion.

Humane. We are human beings. We have RealName""s and real lives with real feelings and we exist in the RealWorld and talk to each other. We care more about how people feel than what is technologically possible. We care about how technology impacts our lives, and we seek to ensure it does so positively. People and people and computers and people.

Growth. We aim to grow not in size, but in spirit. We seek to be better people. We unfold and help to unfold. We strive always to find the better answer, not just one that is self-satisfying. We make an effort to teach what we know, and learn from each other.

Timelessness. Meatball does not exist in time. We write for those five years from now with those who have past five years ago. Today is not important, only the WikiNow. We intend to be salient decades from now.

Boredom. Meatball should be boring to everyone who is not interested in us. We do not aim to be popular, we aim to be useful. Quality, not quantity. ContentOverForm. LimitTemptation. DefendAgainstPassion.

NonViolence. Do no harm, even to those who would harm us. Even social power can be used to cause harm, and we reject such uses.

Pluralism. Meatball strives to be as open as possible for contributors of all origins, cultures and opinions. Variety is richness. We seek a small common denominator: “acting as real persons”, “interest in community” and “willingness to unfold and help to unfold”. As a “community of communities” Meatball does not seek and has no chance to establish a unified worldview (like for example a clique, club or church) but has to follow the model of a society with views living side by side.

Goal
The goal for MeatballWiki is to be a professional guidebook for how to build and manage collaborative hypermedia, comparable to the [Designing Social Interfaces wiki]. For MeatballWiki to be truly useful, eventually, all the text in the wiki will have to conform to this level of quality. As a resource, it would be incredibly useful to have a large corpus of the Right Thing To Do for any given situation as it would dramatically lower the cost of development and experimentation.

I’m a bit confused on some of our interactions. I can’t tell if we are using different language to describe the same thing or actually talking about different things.

Subscribed covers all that you are subscribed to.

Yes, I’m aware?

I don’t actively subscribe to instances that are in all…I just view all.

I’m assuming you mean “communities” rather than “instances”. If you aren’t using subscribed, you might want to try it out. You can basically make your own feed with subscribing to select communities.

And for growth well it’s a bit of a vicious cycle. New communities are constantly being added, but because they are not heavily populated they get little traction so they don’t show up on my feed, so no joins.

I almost always sort by “New”. That helps me discover new and different communities (in addition to the “Community Growth” weekly posts). May be worth trying.

If I could browse by genre and it was capturing a mix of my old plus any new communities that fitted the genre it would likely help.

I think this is a really good idea. I could see “Feeds” implementing this. Like at community creation, each community could select what categories they relate to and be automatically added to that “Feed”. Might have a spam/troll problem and each “Feed” require its own mods, but still worthwhile, in my view.

I don’t really want to change instance. I’m happy where I am.

Totally, get you. Just thought I’d throw out the option for completeness’s sake.

And I’m ok, I don’t think it’s a feature request, I just thought I’d add the comment as well I find it frustrating finding content, I tend to stumble on it more.

No worries. I’m glad you brought this up :) I think I might let the Devs know, because I could see it as a significant barrier to new and existing users.

I can honestly say, I’ve never looked at the explore drop-down. I get basically all my subscribed from posts in “All” .

It looks like the “Public Feeds” button will bring you to a “better” list of ‘feeds’. It looks like you can subscribe to all the communities in a feed with a single button press there. But I think you are right, and that section (explore/feeds) needs a real overhaul to be useful.

Side-note, the Community Growth posts can be a good place to find new subscriptions.

Since I don’t use that feature, I can’t really tell if I addressed your question well. It might be worth making a post on !piefed_meta@piefed.social to notify the developers of your issues/difficulties.

Alternatively, you can reach out to Mia. She develops the Pylova (!pylova@quokk.au), a soft-fork of Piefed, and is always looking for ways to improve the software/add features. You would have to switch to a Pylova fork instance though.

I wasn’t going to get notified, otherwise. In future, if you make a significant edit, I’d use a fresh comment form so that the other person will see it.

Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t be notified, but I figured you may be done with the conversation, for now, and didn’t want to pester you. If you saw the edits, great, if not, not a huge deal.

Reddit itself is great for poaching from. Probably half of my posts in Quotes! come from selections I’ve made from r/QuotesPorn.

Good to know. Thanks for the lead.

I was genuinely pumped about leaving Reddit (at least partially) and helping a P2P alt become successful.

That’s cool to hear. I knew there was some non-reddit exodus people that joined with that in mind, but don’t run into them very often.

I’d recommend refining the text over time, making it as clean and efficient as possible (less wordy). That way it will be easier for people to process and engage with.

Strong agree with you there. Sadly/funnily what’s there wasn’t my first attempt and is the better attempt.

I’ll make another run at it next week. Hopefully get it down 50%. I wish there was more markdown formatting options, to make text easier to read. Oh well :(

Appreciate the suggestions, I’ll add them to the list :)

Looks like !android@lemdro.id has some decent activity (11 posts in the last week), but like you’re saying, given the number of potential android users in the Threadiverse, probably on the very low side. Although, with the locking down of the android ecosystem, I’ve been looking more toward !linuxphones@lemmy.ca and !postmarketos@lemmy.world . So that may be a more common sentiment among other users, driving down activity in the android community.

!ecospheres@mander.xyz is very cool. Looks like I was already a subscriber.

Regarding mander.xyz, it looks like it’s been consistently up for the last ~3 months (last 2 days have been the only downtime I saw) and lost ~10% of its monthly active users during that time (not particularly important, just added info I saw while looking through my MAU data).

I’ll add it to the list. It sounds nice and I’d subscribe.

Again, no worries about not wanting to be a contributor or mod. The post’s goal is just to gather info :)

I’m thinking maybe a couple posts trying to introduce and build the idea could work, then a monthly autopost

Makes sense to me.

I’m recovering a little from this low point a month ago.

Yeah, I’ve been there. Glad you’re recovering :)

I don’t really want to start up this project without doing it properly, but I’m not sure I have the gas to get to the finish line. I guess we’ll see.

No worries. Go at whatever pace works for you, even if that’s not at all.

Words are fine, but I’ve found that a picture gets a better reaction. Most well-known quotes have already been formatted like that, but if not, easy webtools are available.

Appreciate the clarity. I think I think I have a quote in mind. I need to see if I can figure out who first said it, to see how it would fit with a picture.

Okay, thanks for explaining, which I think you already did last time. Not sure why I’m going in circles on that, except maybe the formatting of this recurring post doesn’t necessarily reflect your deeper aims upfront. Yet, maybe that’s just the nature of the beast.

If you’re repeatedly running in to the same problem with the post, that’s a signal to me that I need to change somethings. Appreciate the feedback :)

Edit: Never-mind about the quote. It’s a saying not a quote (can’t find an author). I’ll try and look for another.

Also, to your linked comment, abut when you were low and wondering about the lack of community, I think it somewhat has to do with basically everyone in the Fediverse already having been burned by social media before. The majority are now hesitant about “buying in” to any community (i.e. the Fediverse) and hyper aware of even potential red flags.

I think it took me a year after joining (Reddit 3rd party app exodus) before I started commenting with my old account. I think it just takes time and a nurturing/safe environment for people to get out of standoffish mentality and become open to joining/contributing.

Edit 2: Changed the post title and added reworked the post text some to better convey my goals with the posts. Let me know if you check it out and have any feedback :)

I like the idea of your “Pledge Posting”. Perhaps you’d like to create a weekly post in this community (Fedigrow) to highlight communities you’ve identified in need of support.

I tend to avoid flagship and plurality instances (ex. .world) to help diversify the threadiverse, but I could potentially start posting to the !quotes@quokk.au community. Does a poster need to have a picture for the post, or would just words do?

And the point of all this adds on to what I stated last week– that finding ways to keep a sub going are vastly more important than merely creating a community IMO.

Again, I don’t disagree. I see identifying gaps as useful for growing/maintaining the threadiverse as a whole. I’m not trying to advertise to create 1000 new communities to make number go up.

To me, it’s more about grouping people with similar interests to start a project/community together. I think this is similar to your “Pledge Posting”, but to me it gives people ownership of a community, instead of potentially drive-by posting where they don’t stay long-term and it only creates a simulation of an active/real community. I’m not trying to say that “Pledge Posting” won’t have positive long-term effects. I think it very well could cause people to see the activity and stay/build. I think these posts (identifying gaps and grouping people to start communities) are another avenue to your same goal of developing the threadiverse.

Appreciate the better link (switched out all of my links with yours).

I’m not sure how Fediverse-observer sources their list. It may be that they have to be contracted about the software. They are on Mastodon if you want to reach out (https://toot.wales/@alpacasncats).

Alternatively, it may be by their identification in the server info (ex. Quokka.au is “name”:“piefed”).

Edit: punctuation and better fediverse-observer admin/dev mastodon acoount link.

Interesting software. It’s been added to the post.

Let me know if you have see any issues.