No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don’t use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren’t shown, and downvotes).

I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.

Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.

But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?

Yeah something is screwy - PieFed.social is most definitely aware of lemy.lol (see this at https://piefed.social/instance/lemy.lol), but the last post it has from your own account seems to be nine months ago, and the second link on that page I linked, to “Posts” yields an error.

Nor does this portion of the conversation appear in this version of the OP (see here, which should have all of these responses below it but they are lacking there).

So apologies, I guess it’s not just the tool, rather the issue is wider than that: either your instance lemy.lol or PieFed.social (or both) are not communicating in the standard manner with one another. Fwiw, PieFed.social seems to have no trouble federating with (any? at least the vast majority?) of other Lemmy instances? But I will leave that to you and rimu to work out:-).

Topicverse sounds kinda nice.

To be fair, people were using Threadiverse before Meta revealed that they were working on their Threads. And now they do not want to switch?

The word itself sounds nice, but is the least inclusive.

That’s like saying that all of these conversations that we all have are on Lemmy.World? Sure, it’s between 50 and 80% true (users and the most active communities, respectively, including this one we are in now), but it misses a ton of nuance and detail there.

PieFed, Mbin, and now nodebb, with others on the way (flarum, perhaps Sublinks) also exist.

So why call this all “Lemmy”, when that’s only a part - granted, by far the majority portion - of the whole?

Tagging @Snoopy@piefed.social.

This is a great summary of the history of the topic, thank you!:-)

Bc a network of forum boards?

I noticed PieFed.social on page 9, and the link is functional, even though next to it the status says “disabled”.

That site doesn’t seem very trustworthy. I wonder if it is measuring how “Lemmy-like” an instance is? Anyway I’ve never heard of that site before, but passing the note to @rimu@piefed.social anyway in case it helps:-).

You are very welcome 😁

Thank you for weighing in, this is quite helpful! 🙏

Yeah, what features? Polls? Community flairs? The ability to restrict downvotes to only members of a community? The ability to combine multiple communities into one overarching category? And then customize that without needing admin support, and then also share that with other users? The ability to personally block every user from an instance, again without requiring admin approval? The ability to automatically label every user that has a brand new account, less than two weeks old? Or that posts 10x more often than they comment, hence might be an unregistered bot account? Or that gives and receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, so is at best a controversial and at worst a highly toxic personality - but again, independent of an admin or moderator, and instead being totally in control of the user? Or the ability to block posts based on keywords, but perhaps not all such posts, and instead having granularity of All vs. None vs. Some? Or offering hashtags for content discoverability beyond communities and categories of communities? Or the ability to follow anything you want - a community, a user, a post, a comment (even not made by you) - and arguably far more importantly, the ability to NOT receive notifications for something that you wrote?

PieFed has all of that, and more. Lemmy has none of it. Do as you please, but now you know. Check it out: https://piefed.social/ .

Edit: even Reddit lacks many of these features. As it enshittified, it kept adding features that attempted to boost its profitability, like various forms of irl coinage, rather than provide stuff that people actually wanted to see.

True, but doesn’t Xhitter and Bluesky and Mastodon also have a type of voting? Even if it is called or functions slightly differently?

I did not explain much of the back story, but the Fediverse is already the term used to describe federated social media, so the term here that we need is to pick one that describes the specific subset of it that focuses on threaded conversions, centered around those topic areas (called posts, and then those topics being further aggregated into higher-level topics, called communities) rather than centered around a user tweeting/X-creting/whatever their shit.

And we also have a focus on much longer-form content than those others, which like Mastodon have smaller character limits imposed upon their thoughts (so that they cannot ramble on as I have done here:-).

I used to prefer “Forumverse” as well. But people don’t seem to want to use it?

While “Threadiverse” seems to predate Meta’s Threads here on Lemmy, see e.g. https://szmer.info/post/349217 and this comment from Ada https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/93840 from 2+ years ago. Tbf I did find a reference to Forumverse from 2 years ago as well, but then virtually nobody uses it again until essentially db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com rediscovers it a handful of months ago.

So “Threadiverse” has some history behind it, except then Meta ruined the association for many people. But… we here on Lemmy were using it first!!?

True true. I think Lemmy.ml tends to be more insular than most instances though? e.g. the default sort is Local rather than All. Like basically for people who already had most of their Fediverse needs met, there was less need to join communities across the wider range?

It is indeed a damn cool name, and yeah I tried to carefully not imply that you did not want to have to solve problems - your asking here is already a sign that you could be a major help to others on that instance that likewise need aid joining communities and such:-). But… “managing” expectations, yeah I would expect to have more issues on the instances running still-beta software (though technically Lemmy itself is all still in beta!?:-P). On the other hand, so many issues running 0.19.8 in particular seems a good sign in general for that version specifically:-).

(1) When you go to the Communities page on your instance and do your search, make absolutely certain that the setting at the top is All, bc the default is Local and therefore it won’t show such communities on another instance.

When I do the search for fallout76 that way, I am able to see it: https://leminal.space/search?q=fallout76&type=Communities&listingType=All . But maybe that’s because you’ve already joined it?

Alternately, you can kinda force the community link by placing c/communityname after https://instancename/

(2) Clicking that link (https://leminal.space/c/fallout76@lemmy.world) will show no posts until someone from your instance joins, and even then it can take a few hours. Or more weirdly you could see only old posts but no newer ones. All of that is normal due to how the federation process works, trying to be efficient and only pull in content that someone on your instance has specifically requested.

But give it a few hours and you should be good to go:-).

(3) Being anonymous shouldn’t have anything to do with anything. I do note though that your instance is running the latest 0.19.8, which is still in beta. Being on the bleeding edge like that, you should expect to encounter more problems than usual on the Fediverse.

As Blaze mentioned, if you want a more seamless experience on the Fediverse, then you may want to switch to one of the top 20 instances (though I see that sopuli.xyz is likewise running 0.19.8). There is no rush though, so make sure to take time to think about what you want. Fwiw, Lemmy.zip is known for gaming (though it is also running 0.19.8!?:-). In the Settings menu is an account Export & Import pair of buttons that will transfer your subscribed communities and block lists, but note that messages to your old account will not follow you over to the new.

Maybe so you don’t have to look at replies?

Sure!

Yes, my whole “spiel” there left out how my blocking lemmy.ml leavs out a whole huge swath of innocent bystanders who, exactly as you said, simply joined a large instance and had no concept of what was going on, plus back then it wasn’t even happening yet to the extent that it is now.

Speaking of, a large number of instances defederated from hexbear.net, and in response it seems that a large number of people - the kind for whom “no means yes” simply created lemmy.ml alts to get around those. Thinking deeper about what that means and extrapolating forward implies then that if lemmy.ml were to ever be defederated from by a large number of instances as well, then those people would simply create alts on lemmy.world (or something) instead.

So it boils down to an ideological POV: must I be exposed to literally everything online with no way to have any filters (some people want this and that’s cool), or am I allowed to curate my experiences? More to the point, some things such as NSFW content are really quite friendly on the Fediverse - so long as it is labelled, the people who want it can get it, while those who do not (for whatever reason - maybe they’d like to have it at home but they are literally at work and don’t want that tension, so they turn it off?). Unfortunately, both (a) toxic people and (b) extremist content (“extremist” from the perspective of people in the western world, particularly USA - which granted is very much skewed wrt the rest of the world, but… it is what it is) are not labelled at all. Therefore new people walk right into it, see things that they do not want - much as if NSFW, or worse yet NSFL, were to not be labelled - and then leave the Fediverse. So I am saying: it would be good if things could be labelled appropriately, for the sake of maximum friendliness and welcoming.

But as it is, things are NOT labelled, or if they are, the labels are buried elsewhere. When I first switched from Kbin to a Lemmy instance, I made the mistake of replying to a content on ChapoTrapHouse on hexbear.net. I had no idea what that community was - it’s whole purpose is to dunk on people!? - and I am not saying that the community should not “exist”, but DAYUM! A warning would indeed have been nice. And now, I do not need such a warning personally - I KNOW - but every person that I tell about Lemmy irl, in the next conversation comes back with negative things to say about it, in how it has such extremist content. So they do not join, and this effect magnified by everyone in the mainstream lowers the overall amount of content across the Fediverse. Thus, this isn’t about any one post, any one community, or even any one instance. Good fences make good neighbors. If people on hexbear.net or occasionally some on lemmy.ml disrespect others boundaries, then it makes sense to block them. Though I am having quite a pleasant conversation with you personally, and have done so with others from lemmy.ml. Overall though, on balance, I find it necessary to block that instance. Which I note barely matters - e.g. you replied to me here, and I got the notification for that, I could see your comment, you can see mine… this is the weakest type of “block”/“ban” that I have ever heard of, so much so that the name is really improper, as it barely blocks anything at all.

And no, they don’t exist on every instance. Or yeah, surely they do, but not in the enormously large numbers that we are talking about here. I will preemptively say that I get a lot of batshit insane replies from lemmy.world too - so yeah, lemmy.ml is not the only one like that. However, the proportion of responses is different, probably b/c I (who lives in the USA) shares more ideologically in common with someone from lemmy.world. So perhaps they would go off on a rant against something that I say, but the “trigger” to make that happen is less likely to happen. I have not done a scientific study, with controls and such - I am just speaking of my personal experience, which I see is shared by a LOT of people across the Fediverse.

It sounds like you are just being counter-cultural, which I have done more than a little of in my life, so I support that. You seem willing to bear the consequences of that, e.g. you risked me not replying to you, although then I did so… hopefully that shows that the “judgement” of the .ml next to your name is not a firm yes-no but merely a slight bias.

So about down-votes: personally I want to receive down-votes, if people do not enjoy receiving my comments. That is helpful feedback, and helps guide me to submit future content more in line with people’s receptivity. The problem comes when the down-votes are from people that I do not respect. An example would help here: let’s say that I submit a youtube video for my favorite hard rock band to a tiny niche community, specifically for hard rock music, and let us further say that people downvote it for these reasons: (1) they do not like the music - fair; (2) they do not like youtube - okay… I guess… still fair; (3) they do not like hard rock music at all, but saw my post while browsing “All” - these people are not Subscribed to this community, and are improperly abusing the system of down-voting away from “this content is not a good match for this community” to “I do not (personally) enjoy this content”. The latter type would be much better handled by blocking that community entirely - but people refuse to abide by the rules, and maybe do not even know what they are, if they are new. Oh and also (4) I managed to piss off a troll, who then goes to my Profile and down-votes literally everything they see, until they get tired of hitting the “Next” page (ironically I don’t think this has happened to me, which I would expect given my instance-bashing behaviors, but I have seen others where it has, mostly those who post in more political communities).

As you said, yes the creation of the hive mind. IF people would use it properly, then it would not be that way, but again, people refuse or are not able to so… here we are.

And one reason for that is that we have so few developers - Rust is a very hard language to learn, and those devs I suspect are prickly to work with (given their moderation practices on lemmy.ml, mass-banning people from communities they’ve never even heard of, so would they similarly reject someone’s actual code, not based on the integrity of the code but rather on some offhand remark that they make even on some other instance, possibly even taken out of context?). I have ENORMOUS respect for the Lemmy codebase that has been developed so far… but I also wish that it could move forward more quickly. Maybe Mbin/Sublinks/Piefed will do so, as they are written in languages that more people already know.

Also there are enormous barriers to running a personal instance - CSAM attacks to name one, hardware and especially network bandwidth to name another - but what it would take would be for someone to spin up their own instance, and try out a new system of voting. Nothing really is stopping anyone from doing so except… it’s hard. Otherwise, beggers cannot be choosers, so we wait for an actual developer to do something. And in the meantime we talk about a subject that we find of interest, but it won’t lead to any changes. Probably. Maybe - though also, maybe not, b/c perhaps one day there will be a poll put out by the developers, and with enough people answering that, we could ask for a change that we would like to see in the code? :-)

Hopefully they’ll work on stuff like this - but I don’t know their prioritization.

Oh absolutely that is correct - once you’ve “blocked” something, you cannot then interact with it later, as it is a rather hard cutoff. I suppose you want to see something like a “remove from my feed” - basically a “hide this community from me until I want it” - rather than an actual, full-on “block”. Which is notable then that e.g. a user block of an instance is even softer than that, allowing you to see and reply and receive replies from people (though you don’t get notifications for those, unless they specifically tag your username). So community blocks are harder than people would like, and instance ones are softer, so they really aren’t hitting the sweet spot in-between.:-)

Yes, I suppose I want that too - a “community hide” option, rather than full community block:-).

And that is all that matters, to them, forever moving forward 🤮.