I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.
🍁⚕️ 💽
Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)
I don’t have an answer for you yet, but do you know/have info on why it was disabled?
Some guesses I have are
I’m not familiar with the feature, but I’d like to use it when I eventually move myself
Taking a look at the current sidebar, it might be nice to reorganize the stats section completely
What I’m thinking is:
By default it will only show some stats, where users can select what stats they want displayed in the settings. This way I can hide the stuff I don’t care about, instead of having to look through the already busy list.
**Statistics:** [✏️edit]
- Monthly Active Users: 4,000
- Total Subscribers: 30,000
[ v see all v ]
Then expanding the box will give the full list of stats:
[ ^ collapse ^ ]
**Statistics:**
Active Users:
- By day: 800
- By week: 1,200
- By month: 4,000
- By year: 24,100
Subscribers:
- Total: 30,000
- Local: 12,000
Comments:
- Total: 81,000
- Today: 510
- This week: 1,315
[... etc]
It opens up the possibility of including more items in that list. We could also replace the expand
option with a link to a full statistics dashboard page.
Creating a bunch of accounts possibly to manipulate votes
Looking from the admin level, doesn’t happen that often. Vote manipulation is already something we keep an eye out for, and usually it’s done to highlight certain content (ex. pushing some political angle) rather than boosting one community over another.
you can stop seeing by adjusting your “Show Bot Accounts” setting
I like some bots, but I only subscribe to a bot-only community if the volume of posts is reasonable.
Alternatively, I think both metrics are helpful in different ways
- Quality over Quantity: MAU counts lurkers equally with active participants. PCM focuses on actual engagement.
- True Reflection of Activity: A community with 1000 MAU but only 10 posts/comments is less vibrant than one with 100 MAU and 500 posts/comments.
I’d say votes are also an important part of engagement. It helps differentiate between good and bad content. I’m more likely to join a community with a few good posts a day (or even a week) than a bot community with many posts a day. Going by how the subscribers counts change over time, I’d say this is a common experience.
- Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.
While any abuse is bad, spam posts and comments are a bigger concern right now. AI generated spam / link spam is obnoxious and we deal with it often (as admins/mods). While someone could make lots of accounts to inflate MAU, it only really affects the community ranking against other communities and not day to day usage. Lemmy is already considering removing the trending section, and admins usually step in if a bunch of similar accounts are created at once.
- Easier to Track: No need for complex user tracking. Just count posts and comments.
I’m not sure I understand this point. Are the vote/comment/post calculations very resource intensive?
All that being said
What ActivityPods effectively provides are automated mechanisms. They constantly check the contents of the Solid pod, and are notified whenever a change gets made.
Let’s say you’ve just made a post with your Fediverse app: a document representing a post is written in the Pod, then a dispatch mechanism acts as the user’s outbox and sends the activity out. Meanwhile, the corresponding inbox mechanism waits for replies.
What this could mean in practice is that editing a Fediverse post may be as simple as editing a corresponding file, while a mechanism pushes out an Update activity through your Outbox to make changes on the network.
I think I need an even more higher level explanation of Solid & Solidpods, but so far that sounds cool!
Would the data still live on your instance’s server or on user devices? If it’s the latter, how would it work if some people have really slow connections, or lose internet all together.
But you’re giving Meta the same selling point, right? Join Threads and see all the same content. There’s no point in going elsewhere then. It kinda goes both ways.
Somewhat yes
We saw a bit of that last July for how some people picked Lemmy instances
This is exactly how Zuckerberg wants you to think.
These conversations we’re having are all speculative, and we won’t know how things play out till we get there. Trying to predict the behaviour of large groups of people is… difficult
What I predict is that defederation will play right into their selling point. We’re going up against a behemoth of evil with enough money to bankroll creators into joining and promoting their platform. Defederating (when the majority of people don’t understand what that means) will end up with people joining Threads.
Threads has a very high (artificially inflated) user count, it’s by a company everyone already knows, and all instagram users already have an account. The strongest selling point we can have is “Join Mastodon, you can see all the same stuff but it’s run by a non-profit instead of Facebook” That doesn’t work if the selling point is “Join Mastodon to see different content”.
For what it’s worth, I’m actively using Mastodon and trying to inform any friends / family that are jumping ship to shift to Mastodon. Best case scenario, Mastodon takes off properly, Threads becomes a failed project by Meta, and we can nail this shut for good.
I agree, and I predict people will eventually pick instances that are doing what you suggested.
My understanding is that the defederation is to prevent MetaFacebook from getting to a point where they control the entire thing and then destroy it.
I don’t think defederating is the right move for that, but it’s a move
I think this comment chain is going in a circle while everyone actually agrees with the underlying point.
I cannot see anything bad here. Blocking an actively malicious actor should be the norm.
It might be true that they aren’t ACTIVELY being malicious currently. It’s also true that they have a horrible history, and they will likely be actively malicious in the future.
(I say ‘might’ because I seem to recall them being malicious towards the fediverse with secret meetings with admins, but I didn’t follow up on that)
imo it doesn’t matter for Lemmy right now one way or another, and maybe not ever. Being federated with Threads doesn’t do anything yet. Defederate or not, the only change (from my understanding) is about making a statement, or standing with other microblog platform instances that made a choice.
On mastodon however, I’ll likely either use a federated instance or run two accounts. It’s very likely that some person I want to follow will be on Threads, and until people can convince them otherwise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What’s nice though is that if Threads is on activitypub, you won’t need to log in to see the content. It’s only if you want to engage with the content, and that can be done from a second Mastodon account.
Super cool, the worry of an instance dying will make people avoid smaller instances and pick the big stable ones. Having this safety net should help balance things out.
I wonder if this could work with threadiverse communities. We’ve seen communities disappear when an instance goes down. Could the communities also be saved like this?
There are a few extensions, but I don’t think there’s one extension to rule them all yet:
Good point, the third guess doesn’t make sense. I’m going to cross it out