Discussion
Fediverse Observer is offline and no longer being developed
The domain https://fediverse.observer redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
https://fedilist.com is a good alternative
There is fedisea.surf From the Pixelix team, and it has way more data than fedidb it seems
With how important Fediverse Observer is, the developer should have made an effort to hand it and its data over to another member of the community before winding the project down.
yup, the volunteer shoulda volunteered more
While we should all be grateful for the work the developer put into the project, it’s also not uncommon for open source projects to use life cycle planning to determine potential redundancies if the original developer steps down. As things stand, their contributions are likely to go to waste, whereas ideally others could have picked up the torch from where they left off, preferably with historical data intact.
Yup, the volunteer shoulda did that.
Neither FediDB nor FediIndex provide filtering or searching instances by language :/
There’s also the FediIndex which, however, isn’t as convenient to use.
Fedidb is so bad though. Maybe im missing something, but to me it looks like you cant even get a historic user count or comment count graph for any specific software. What use is seeing the current number? Thats just kinda useless if you are trying to get any insight into the general development of the fediverse. The thing is that the old fedidb.org literally had this, but when they moved to .com they fucked it up for some reason.
FediDB seems to be opinionated as well. It seems like if Daniel doesn’t like a server app, he won’t add it. AFAIK, he has been notified about the existence of Forte, but he still hasn’t added it.
I remember when he changed the metric on which fediverse software were ranked, just so that pixelfed rises up and rank or two !
Damn. I definitely made good use of that website.
@vicinus@piefed.zip fyi, this will impact !fedilytics@piefed.zip right?
Yeah. I saw the dead website earlier today and have been trying to figure out how to keep the posts working.
The fediverse software post, I could rewrite some code to gather fedidb daily (to my knowledge, they don’t have all time series data available), but their MAU math is suspect. So, not a great option, but my only other thought is basically remaking fediverse-observer and I do not have a server or potentially relevant server skill set beyond cron jobs.
For the threadiverse instances post, I can keep gathering data from the instances I already have in my database, but don’t really have another way to find new ones. Maybe, I could see if I could scrape it from fedidb (I couldn’t get their API working in the past).
In conclusion, the posts are not in a good place :(
Oof the stats shown in your last post there make the Threadiverse look very unhealthy.
For one, the total Lemmy MAUs falling down to the <30k range (at the high mark during Rexodus it hit ~65K, and we held steady at ~45K for a long time it seemed, iirc).
And for another, if I am interpreting the HYAU correctly then literally thousands of people who had accounts here are simply walking away and never coming back. This is crucial bc these are not people who were too daunted by the complexity of learning about the Threadiverse, picking an instance, making an account on it, and joining communities - they were already here, and now they are not here anymore.
Perhaps they are avoiding coming here (even once) during the upcoming season of Western elections, with all the contentious content that is already flooding this place leading up those, but then they might come back later? Given past trends, I doubt it, though anything is possible.
The Threadiverse looks to be slowly shrinking. Perhaps the existing people on it post more often, but with an ever-diminishing pool of recipients for that content. This will lead to a feed-forward cycle where even fewer will want to join.
And to be clear I don’t blame those people who left in the slightest - I find myself visiting here far less often than I used to as well. There’s only so much politics that I want to argue about before I find myself missing the ability to discourse on some other, any other, topic.
I think I can alleviate some of your worries. The instance post only shows the top 20 instances for a software (Lemmy has 287 active, Piefed: 59, Mbin: 16).
My Fediverse Growth Post is a better indicator for the Threadiverse’s health. From there you can see the Threadiverse is only down 2.1% from a year ago (-847 MAU). From what I’ve seen over the last >6 months, is that the Threadiverse, and most of the fediverse, grow in short spurts and then slowly declines until the next spurt.
So, unfortunately, we aren’t having continuous positive growth, but I’d say we are stable. I think stable is fine as all the fediverse developers are still adding functionality/interconnected-ness (’this isn’t our final form’).
For HYAU (Half-Year Active Users), I think it’s important to remember that lots of times people move instances, so their old account will eventually stop being counted as active (I personally have 2 old accounts). From the Fediverse post, you can see there were 42889 MAU 6-months ago and 42276 MAU 3-months ago (-613 MAU). So, even though you may see >1000 HYAU drop off in a given week, the total number of active users over that next 3 months stayed relatively the same (-1.4%, not -28% (-1000 MAU x 12 weeks)).
I think the most important information in the instance post is MAU/HYAU (%) ("Stickiness"), which indicates how well an instance holds onto its users (they keep coming back). I think >60% should be the goal of every instance (67% is currently the peak for non-small instances (>30 MAU)).
It might be worth a study to figure out why there is such a discrepancy across instances. For example, is it correlated to UI issues/customizability, reliability/up-time/longevity, admin/mod behavior, instance rules, federation/de-federation, inter-instance activity (communities/posts/comments), etc.
Regarding politics, I can’t really say what an average or new user experiences. I’ve curated/blocked massive amounts of political content. It might be worth having an instance that initially auto-blocks all politics communities for a new user. I don’t recall exactly, but I think Tesseract? was like that, but the dev/admin was sketchy about what they were doing and then melted down when called out for hiding things. So, it seems the idea had some popularity, but needs/ed a better implementation.
Thank you for your detailed response.
So the “Sum” mentioned at the bottom of each section is only for those shown within the section - the top 20 - and not expanded for all of the category? e.g. Lemmy’s MAU went down from 30817 to recently 29683, and every other metric (even for the most part the other post you mentioned for Fediverse Growth) also shows decline, but you are saying that despite that, the numerical amount is not that much, and we are mostly stable?
That is very good to hear:-).
Here is an example discussion of a community asking its members if it wants to migrate to Lemmy: www.reddit.com/r/…/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. A few examples that seem representative to me:
I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.
There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic
There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit
Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier
Here’s another example from one month ago: reddit.com/…/we_should_switch_to_something_else/
Almost nobody uses other forum apps like Lemmy. We don’t want to run two forums and scatter discussion across two places. Collectively the mods here already spend about 2 hours every day helping users on this subreddit and we don’t want more.
Or here’s a third example, from 2 months ago: www.reddit.com/r/oldreddit/…/thoughts_on_lemmy/
Opinions there run the gamut from useless due to no content to tribal politicking scaring them away from the entire federated model, though some people like it, yet don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit (with UBlock Origin tweaks to keeps some of its more insane issues in check).
We here, who have the early adopter mindset, are willing to put in the time and effort to learn how and what to block. But e.g. the most popular 3rd-party app Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account, so a new joiner won’t be able to easily distinguish when e.g. someone from the tankie triad is trolling them vs. someone attempting to converse in good conscience. Wish and hope as we might - without putting in any actual efforts to change anything mind you - we simply cannot get away from the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance principle.
We are a tankie / troll bar, and the vast majority of mainstream non-technical normal folks tell other people that they very much do not enjoy visiting here as a result. Admiral Patrick very much had a bad implementation to a somewhat good idea: being forced to view toxic content should be an option that users have some control over, somehow, even if that choice is disabled by default. e.g., it would be nice if at least one singular major instance would defederate from lemmy.ml, or in the case of a PieFed instance apply an instance block by default - but sadly, literally none of them do. Of course, they would simply use their alts to get around any such block, but otherwise we are back to the Paradox of Intolerance again: with next to zero distinction made between trolls vs. non-trolls, why would most people want to come here to discuss things with us in our troll bar?
No problem. Happy to provide insight into my workings 😊
So the “Sum” mentioned at the bottom of each section is only for those shown within the section - the top 20 - and not expanded for all of the category? e.g. Lemmy’s MAU went down from 30817 to recently 29683, and every other metric (even for the most part the other post you mentioned for Fediverse Growth) also shows decline, but you are saying that despite that, the numerical amount is not that much, and we are mostly stable?
Yes and yes.
Yeah, the snippets and links you provided match my understanding of the situation. I don’t recall who or where, but I recall someone saying they were having a much easier time recruiting people to Piefed rather than Lemmy, due to Lemmy already having an established reputation. That being said, I expect the Lemmy 1.0 launch will cause a significant bump.
… don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit …
I found the user saying that, but they didn’t elaborate on what missing features they wanted. It’s been years since I used Reddit, do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?
… Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account …
I recall running into this issue and being confused, before I found the setting. Do you know if this is still the default? If so, and the Dev hasn’t given a specific reason for the decision (I can’t immediately find a post about it), I don’t mind making a post to ask them to switch the default.
… it would be nice if at least one singular major instance would defederate from lemmy.ml, or in the case of a PieFed instance apply an instance block by default …
Agreed.
… they would simply use their alts to get around any such block …
Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist. If they did use alts to get around the block, their alt’s instance’s admin could be contacted. My understanding is that the “troll behavior” on .ml is allowed, may be even encouraged, by their admins/devs. So, different admin may not have a tolerant attitude toward it. Along with this, as more communities spread out from the flagship and most popular instances (.ml, .world, .social), I think things will get less toxic too.
As an aside, over the last 3-months, it looks like most of the “politically” focused instances are the ones on the heavier declining side of the range. The instances declining the least or even growing are on the “unaligned” side of things.
do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?
Some people for some reason - particularly younger ones - seem to demand usage of a 3rd-party app. So my guess is that they may have meant things like user and post flairs, polls, emoji reactions, categories of communities (multi-reddits), etc., which PieFed technically offers but most 3rd-party apps have yet to catch up to utilize those capabilities. For example Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.
And I don’t know how PyLova may change the situation still further - it offers even more features than PieFed, though the latter keeps incorporating most of those changes back into its main codebase, so at the moment they are still fairly similar.
Do you know if this is still the default?
Yes, unfortunately. I was trying out several 3rd-party apps like Summit and Voyager to see what all the fuss is about, and unfortunately some of those aspects that I would consider crucial to my own usability - like that one - are buried somewhere in the settings, disabled by default. I can’t tell you how many times I began to craft a response to someone, only to notice that they are on Lemmy.ml at which point I abandoned my endeavor as it seemed futile given that additional information. Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.
I also thought about making such a post, but I can see from the devs’ perspective that turning on the display of instance names in Voyager is not a feature that is universally good. For one thing it doesn’t always work, especially in replies deeper into a chain, and especially dependent upon the length of the actual username itself. And for another, does it really matter? For someone who knows the culture here it can greatly aid, and arguably it helps someone learn about the culture here, but the largest majority of the time the only thing that matters is “belongs to tankie triad” vs. not, after which distinctions such as “is on lemmy.world” vs. let’s say sh.itjust.works are much finer-grained nuances that rarely rise to being necessary. In other words, if there was some major instance (like PieFed.zip) that would place a user-level block onto Lemmy.ml just like it does to hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, then display of instance names following the username is no longer necessary, for new joiners to the Threadiverse. Hence, from their perspective, I could see a resistance to that solution being used to deal with the underlying problem imperfectly.
About instance blocking, I recently discovered that programming.dev has a number of community-level blocks put into place to help a new user experience a more drama-free version of the Threadiverse. You can see their full listing at legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, although I note that while it includes explicitly “political” ones, it misses ones that end up having a huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like !memes@lemmy.ml - which can be quite a turn-off to people, especially those in the Western World, and those undecided whether to join or not, when such content appears and they don’t know yet how to distinguish it from e.g. identically-named communities on different instances (which are also extremely heavily political in those other locations as well, though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).
Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist.
Agreed - solutions need not be perfect to have at least some effect, I guess I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation, as in someone who receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes.
As an aside, over the last 3-months, it looks like most of the “politically” focused instances are the ones on the heavier declining side of the range. The instances declining the least or even growing are on the “unaligned” side of things.
Oh wow, that’s extremely interesting. Though all smaller numbers of course. As the technology continues to improve, the overall experience can get better, it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have where they would come to the Threadiverse using Kbin but not Lemmy, and now it seems like for the most part they simply will not come period. So it’s interesting to see that even countering with only a trickle, that is not universally true:-).
… demand usage of a 3rd-party app …
Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that as the answer.
… I don’t know how PyLova may change the situation still further - it offers even more features than PieFed, though the latter keeps incorporating most of those changes back into its main codebase …
Didn’t know Piefed was still back copying Pylova’s efforts. I recall the first time they removed attribution, in what I feel was a very dishonest way. Hopefully, if they are still integrating Pylova’s work, they are at the very least giving attribution.
… Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.
Yes, I strongly wish that Voyager had far better integration of Piefed features (like grouping cross-posts).
Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.
Yep. Difficult to know if you’re in one though. In my experience, someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.
… I can see from the devs’ perspective that turning on the display of instance names in Voyager is not a feature that is universally good.
Appreciate the perspective. I can see your point.
… discovered that programming.dev has a number of community-level blocks put into place to help a new user experience a more drama-free version of the Threadiverse. You can see their full listing at https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/ …
Did not know that, thanks for sharing. That was interesting to look through.
… huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like !memes@lemmy.ml …
That makes sense.
… though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).
Not the best for getting people to stick around :(
… I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation …
Ah, that would be a nice feature to have throughout the threadiverse. Although, I almost never see the indicator (probably too curated at this point becuase, at this point, I block bad faith actors/trolls immediately).
… it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have …
Yeah, quite frustrating, but I do think we are making progress and things are slowly getting better :)
I’ve been kind of thinking the ideal instance for new users would be something like the programming.dev community hidden list, with a de-federated triad, and run by the .zip admin team. Maybe that’ll be a thing one day.
Yeah I can’t fully explain the total fascination with apps either, but I do see some definite advantages including the ability to separate viewing other web pages separately from the app, like in fast switching or even side by side in like a split screen context when that is possible. And Firefox is horrible at memory management, even on Android - it legit runs down my battery even when minimized unless I force-kill it.
According to the comment at lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28484007, PieFed vs. PyLova are still at odds. If there was attribution this time, I did not dig deep enough to find it, plus I highly doubt it. Although otoh PyLova seems to be included in the PieFed instance picker pages? So different devs seem to have different opinions on the subject.
Yes agreed about Voyager although tbf the vast majority of apps lack the cross-post comment merge feature in particular - according to piefed.social/community/fediverse/…/piefed-app only Interstellar has it now (which has an odd UI that is geared more towards Mbin’s microblogging style than Threadiverse forum-style content)
someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.
Really? I’ve heard it said that all someone has to do is figure out who or what they are not allowed to criticize. But I suppose there are layers, and indeed disinformation is a helluva powerful effect.
There’s always so much more to learn about the Threadiverse - I do find it fascinating:-). Though I also can see why others react as they do whenever it gets mentioned outside of here (Reddit, Bluesky, X, etc.).
I think PieFed.zip is just about as close to ideal as one could want, except for adding a block to Lemmy.ml by default for new users - or perhaps asking via the sign-up wizard, like “Do you want to see extremist content, including calls for murder?” Hey, some people do - sometimes me even for research purposes, and we can all appreciate having the option when that is desired, right? Nobody is wanting to be a “Karen” here and tell others what to do, only offer true choices to people who won’t yet be knowledgeable enough to be able to implement an instance block on their own yet - and again particularly to even become aware that they want one, in order to achieve their goal of avoiding both extremist and also trolling content in one fell swoop.
If you feel like it, you could petition to add such a block, although I’ve actually tried already in the past for a different instance, and there is such enormous resistance to doing so for Lemmy.ml that I doubt it would happen. Somehow even Rimu who has such a contentious relationship with the tankies doesn’t even do that? I do find it so odd that this is one of the most common refrains that I’ve ever heard across the Threadiverse - to be able to help newcomers block the entire tankie triad - yet not one single major instance seems willing to actually do it. We’ve made our choice, collectively: this is a tankie / troll bar. Regardless of the existence of an echo chamber inside of Lemmy.ml, outside of it we are 4chan when it comes to refusing to block the content coming in from it.
Which obviously mainstream non-technical normies nope right out, blocking that content the only way that they know how: by leaving the Threadiverse altogether (which already has exceedingly little OC to begin with, making the cost to benefit ratio simply too high).
… Firefox is horrible at memory management, even on Android - it legit runs down my battery even when minimized unless I force-kill it.
Haha. I’ve never made that connection, but I also force kill everything after I’m done immediately using it. Hopefully we have a Servo (!servo@programming.dev) option before too long.
… PieFed vs. PyLova are still at odds. If there was attribution this time, I did not dig deep enough to find it, plus I highly doubt it. Although otoh PyLova seems to be included in the PieFed instance picker pages?
Yeah, I had a feeling. While Pylova instances are listed in the Piefed instance picker, piefed.social has “Silencing” quokk.au and anarchist.nexus. So, I doubt Mia/quokka is going to be trusting Rimu in the immediate future.
… https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app …
That’s a useful page I didn’t know about before. Thanks for sharing :)
Really? I’ve heard it said that all someone has to do is figure out who or what they are not allowed to criticize. But I suppose there are layers, and indeed disinformation is a helluva powerful effect.
I agree, to an extent, but I think it takes a significant effort to decide to question things to begin with. If everything and everyone you encounter in your life says the Sun revolves around the Earth, in my view, it takes something extra to not just find or notice a discrepancy, but also take the time/effort to go against everything you know, see, and encounter to pull on that thread and see what it reveals. Pulling on that thread could turn your friends/family/neighbors against you, it could threaten your livelihood or safety. In a non-supportive environment, I expect it’s quite scary and it’s much easier for someone to stick their head in the ground and carry on as if they didn’t notice the discrepancy.
… PieFed.zip is just about as close to ideal as one could want, except for adding a block to Lemmy.ml by default for new users …
If you feel like it, you could petition to add such a block …
For clarity, piefed.zip doesn’t block any of the ‘triad’. I believe the .zip instances marketed/known(?) as being open/non-restrictive. So, I don’t think the admins are interested in blocking any instances, unless they are spam or similarly problematic.
Somehow even Rimu who has such a contentious relationship with the tankies doesn’t even do that?
I suspect this has to do with the .ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, and Rimu needing to have a cordial relationship with them to maintain interoperability in the threadiverse.
We’ve made our choice, collectively: this is a tankie / troll bar.
I understand the feeling. It may help you to know that the ‘triad’ has decreased in total % of the threadiverse in the last 3 months. Also, look at the Threadiverse 3 years ago before the Reddit 3rd-party App Exodus, there was really only a few Lemmy instances to choose from (lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, and a couple others). So, while many instances started during the exodus, most of the established communities and instances were part of the ‘triad’ and many new users would have joined the established instances/communities. I suspect if users could easily switch their accounts between instances, you would see a huge change in the distribution of the Threadiverse.
Which obviously mainstream non-technical normies nope right out, blocking that content the only way that they know how: by leaving the Threadiverse altogether …
Perhaps some better on-boarding, about curation, could help improve the ‘stickiness’ of instances. It wouldn’t surprise me, if a change like that caused the slight decrease in users (between growth spikes) to even out, stabilize, and perhaps allow a slight increase in users to develop.
PyLova: agreed, sadly.
Disinformation: yes, exactly like MAGA. They aren’t bad people, just disinformed - as in actively utilized as tools to achieve the objectives of the one(s) pulling the strings. Arguably we should all resist such, but as you say the barriers against such are high, and I think we can agree that some people are simply too preoccupied with the basics of living to have either the time or inclination to become properly informed. One implication then being that it is the very foundational principle of democracy itself that works against its own demise: when unedumacashiated people are allowed to vote, chaos is not nearly as likely to result (from such “random” inputs) as the system being taken over by a malicious actor who may then use it for their own nefarious purposes.
But even so, that explanation neither absolves people of their failures in the absolute necessity to remain curious, nor absolves us of our own failure when we allow the system to propagate, and in fact help it along.
According to this post PieFed.zip uses the same blocking system as Lemmy.zip for new joiners. See also this comment from the admin. Like programming.dev, the .zip instances (like all other instances) can also block particular communities - which unfortunately neither the Lemmy nor PieFed UI offers a mechanism to expose that list publicly to the users, making the transparency of this issue rather horrible, where I have to link to messages from the admins but there is no webpage that will simply show an updated status - like does exist for instance federation vs. defederation. The tools here, again both Lemmy and PieFed, are abysmal at such transparency topics.
This is the kind of stuff that I would love to see added - to Lemmy, to PieFed, or to PyLova - and I feel like the increased transparency would help entice new joiners.
… when unedumacashiated people are allowed to vote, chaos is not nearly as likely to result (from such “random” inputs) as the system being taken over by a malicious actor who may then use it for their own nefarious purposes.
I understand that viewpoint, but my understanding is that there is not a “good” solution. If “education” or “knowledge” requirements are implemented, they are, or at least to my knowledge have been, used to disenfranchise the most vulnerable. An example of this could be the Southern States after the American Civil War. They implemented “literacy tests” biased toward the wealthy and whites to restrict the poor, minorities, and immigrants from voting. The “best” solution I’ve heard to stopping an uninformed populace is to educate the masses to develop critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, that “solution” is generally on generational timescales.
… that explanation neither absolves people of their failures in the absolute necessity to remain curious, nor absolves us of our own failure when we allow the system to propagate, and in fact help it along.
How do they know to “remain curious”? How did you learn to? How did I learn to? From my experience in life and learning from others about their lives, I’ve found I’ve had a quite privileged upbringing with regards to education and emotional support. This leads me to be quite generous in my view of people’s “failings”.
Anytime I run across someone “failing” to understand something I consider basic or common, I try to think back to when did I learn that and from whom. In most cases, the person or situation I learned from didn’t exist for the person “failing”. From that point, I try to, with no judgment of them, explain my reasoning and thought process to them (just as someone did for me). If they want to take in and consider my words, great. If not, that’s alright too. I could always be wrong about the topic, they could not be ready to change, or any other reasoning (you don’t need to force every seed to sprout, just keep providing a nurturing environment and you may soon find yourself surrounded by greenery).
Mostly I just try to be open minded myself (like literally I am open to changing my viewpoint to theirs) and provide an open and safe environment for others to consider alternatives. I find it works quite well.
According to this post PieFed.zip uses the same blocking system as Lemmy.zip for new joiners. See also this comment from the admin.
“This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.”, “… piefed.zip (and lemmy.zip) already blocks hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmynsfw by default, and sends a PM to the user when they sign up to let them know why we do this, and how to remove it.” Huh, TIL. I was going based on the listed instance de-federations (where they aren’t shown).
… which unfortunately neither the Lemmy nor PieFed UI offers a mechanism to expose that list publicly to the users, making the transparency of this issue rather horrible, where I have to link to messages from the admins but there is no webpage that will simply show an updated status - like does exist for instance federation vs. defederation.
Great point. This might be a time to “weaponize” Pylova. Since Piefed has been “back-porting” Pylova’s work, if Mia implemented this transparency addition, it would probably make its way to Piefed. Maybe Lemmy would follow suit, but no idea. I’m thinking worst-case its implemented in Pylova and the Pylovians all benefit. Thoughts?
I was thinking the same, just didn’t want to promise anything in case I could not deliver. The devs are VERY eager for feedback though, so it’s truly doing them a favor to ask, plus as you said most likely also a significantly wider userbase as well. Then again I think I’ve already asked for something vaguely similar in terms of general transparency features, although this is concrete hence much more likely to move forward (otoh there is a distinct possibility that I’ve already asked for precisely this, so I’d have to look it up).
We seem mostly in agreement on other factors as well. Stoicism suggests that we cannot fix the entire world, we can only do what we can in our little corner of it. Personally I would hope that PieFed.zip would automatically apply a user-level block to new joiners for Lemmy.ml, the same way that it already does for hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Bc whatever we personally think about tankies or magats and how much we can stand to put up with their alternative factual argumentation practices, it remains that new people are extremely put off by such, and keep fleeing here when exposed to it, then subsequently complaining about us to anyone who will listen.
i.e., being kind to and/or having empathy with people who enjoy trolling behaviors is not the same thing as offering them a platform. Especially one where their messages are presented identically alongside with all other messages, such that new joiners cannot distinguish between them. A warning label, an icon, a different color highlighting etc. would go a long way. But that’s a ton of effort, which anyone using a 3rd-party app won’t be able to access anyway, hence blocking is all that is left, short of full defederation.
The alternative, which is the current method, is to simply get comfortable being a troll bar. We feature trolls here, we make them feel very comfortable, and offer only confusing methods to people and very little guidance to new joiners to avoid them.
Edit: okay, done - https://discuss.online/post/46939614.
Awesome! Upvoted :)
I would hope that PieFed.zip would automatically apply a user-level block to new joiners for Lemmy.ml, the same way that it already does for hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.
While I agree that would likely help new comers, I suspect the .zip admins have a similar thought process to Rimu (not antagonizing the Lemmy Devs, and keeping the lines of communication open in case there is an software issue).
i.e., being kind to and/or having empathy with people who enjoy trolling behaviors is not the same thing as offering them a platform.
I agree and block trolls immediately ("Don’t Feed Trolls!” is my motto online).
Especially one where their messages are presented identically alongside with all other messages, such that new joiners cannot distinguish between them. A warning label, an icon, a different color highlighting etc. would go a long way. But that’s a ton of effort, which anyone using a 3rd-party app won’t be able to access anyway, hence blocking is all that is left, short of full defederation.
I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level. Users or instance admins could create a list of problematic users and/or communities and any updates automatically feed to the subscribing instances or users. Obviously issue is who gets authority to amend a list, but I think if the list was in a standard format and “forkable” it wouldn’t be too big of an issue for different groups to easily create and maintain their own lists without much issue.
This could be away to block the worst offenders/trolls without risking antagonizing the Lemmy Devs. Thoughts?
The alternative, which is the current method, is to simply get comfortable being a troll bar. We feature trolls here, we make them feel very comfortable, and offer only confusing methods to people and very little guidance to new joiners to avoid them.
I don’t think we are “comfortable being a troll bar”, I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development. With ~80% of the Threadiverse on Lemmy and the Lemmy.ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, I think things have to move slowly (boil the frog slowly). There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin), so all the Lemmy instances are a little bit held hostage. I don’t currently see a way out from the hostage situation, but perhaps one will present itself in the future.
In the meantime, like you are saying, I don’t think that means things can’t improve with on-boarding or initial blocking for new users, to continue moving away from being a “troll bar”.
I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level.
I love this idea. Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists? And while I haven’t read through it yet, see also supersquirrel’s recent post (last day or two) on the topic in the Fediverse community iirc, saying similarly for Mastodon. Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.
Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.
I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development.
It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope, especially now that we are well past the era of Reddit enshittification. We cannot rely on future Redditors to come over anymore, and therefore where else are users likey to arrive - Instagram? Tiktok? Anyway, if anything happens, then I will believe it when I see it, but the likelihood of something happening to change things in a major way seems to me to be decreasing with each year that ticks on by. The time to do something, if we wanted to entice more Redditors, is now long past.
There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin)
No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.
Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas. In the second most recent event, prior to the PyLova code non-attribution one I mean, he decided fairly unilaterally to shadow-censor content even hosted on other instance platforms - restricting people’s ability to vote more than a given allotment per day, even if they use Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. Which is arguably fine, except vaguely like the Admiral Patrick situation, Rimu continues to do so without telling the recipients that they are being thus censored. Like someone presses an upvote button, the color changes, but then the vote count does not change. MANY people disagreed - about the change overall, about its lack of transparency, and also in how it was effectively not communicated to the instance admins, leaving them surprised at the behavior of the code running on their own machines. Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.
So people are - correctly - hesitant now to put their trust into PieFed, when at any moment some similar situation could arise. Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out. Lemmy has a tainted reputation among the general public (for good reason), PieFed people barely know about but since it shadow-censors people’s contributions like Reddit does I can no longer see it becoming popular among the diminishing crowd that wants to flee Reddit’s overzealous censorship practices, all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova. The situation is not entirely untenable but it’s inordinately complex, and in those Reddit threads I shared earlier you can see people simply noping out of everything that we have going on here with all our in-fighting. The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating. Until it does, we remain a troll bar.
Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists?
I never made that connection, but yeah, this could be much easier to implement than I was thinking.
Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.
Yeah, I could see this being a few easy setting/feature addition.
It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope …
Understandable.
Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.
My understanding is that this was set up that way to prevent harassment. I’m not knowledge on the subject so could be wrong.
No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.
My understanding was that it “worked”. As in it was haphazard and a very manual effort to get what did happen to work.
Not the same thing, but die4ever@retrolemmy.com and I tried to save the past posts of ecospheres@mander.xyz to piefed.zip after mander.xyz went down. It didn’t work, I (on piefed.zip) could see the old mander.xyz posts, but no one else on any other instances could. I also had a problem with adding mods to the new piefed.zip community (lemmy mods couldn’t be added, non-piefed.zip mods couldn’t be made owner).
So, while I expect it can be done, I don’t think it’s an easy, straightforward, or automated process to move software or even communities. I know my example was not a 1-to-1 typical move, so if you have any counter-examples please let me know (I can utilize them for the !fedigrow@lemmy.zip wiki).
Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas.
I am quite aware of Rimu’s nature (he and I had discussions in the past).
Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.
Agreed and I would say he’s lost a lot of trust many times at this point (I used to be one of his biggest cheerleaders).
Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out.
I suspect so. I mentioned it to the piefed.zip admins, so they are at least aware of it. But I suspect there won’t be any piefed -> pylova conversions anytime soon, unless Rimu screws up big (again).
… all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova.
I believe their is an official Piefed app coming (https://fedidb.com/software/compare?software=lemmy,mbin,piefed). Assuming it’s open source, presumably the other partially Piefed compatible apps could utilize the “Piefed Official App” ‘s code to improve compatibility within their own apps. I’m certainly going to suggest it to the voyager Dev when the “official app” comes out.
The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating.
Agreed, but not sure we should expect more. FOSS is generally slow moving, due to it being small, part-time teams. I’m in a place where I can help support FOSS financially, but I know that is not an option for everyone, plus it’s a new consideration/viewpoint for people coming from corporate/proprietary software (where they are the product).
That is sad to hear that mander hasn’t come back yet - I guess it’s still waiting to see if something can be resolved, since the backups weren’t recent.
But it is even more sad to hear that Rimu’s community migration tool isn’t working, on other instances without his direct involvement. Some of what you said makes sense to me though, like a community “owner” must be located on the instance where it is housed - if that were not the case then the system would be vulnerable to all sorts of spam where any bot could spin up communities on any instance, so some level of accountability must be maintained.
I suspect the official PieFed app will be Blorp, just from the way that Rimu talked about it iirc. It’s chief competition is Interstellar, although that was designed more for Mbin with PieFed just being thrown into the mix.
The need to support FOSS is partially one reason why we aren’t growing, and I don’t mean the actual funds, but the enormous complexity of figuring out who to send them to. Dessalines & Nutomic? Rimu? PyLova? Voyager? Blorp? Perhaps at the end of the day it does not matter as we had fun in contributing to the development of the Threadiverse overall, but to new joiners it’s definitely very daunting - it’s far easier to pay Reddit and then get Reddit coins back in exchange. Though arguably less profitable when it merely buys you the chance to argue with bots. Yet… an enormous fraction of our own traffic here are reposting bots, often from Reddit, so is this truly “better”, enough to convince some of them to make the switch? That’s the rub - they would be buying into the future, just as Reddit kept telling them, and likely still tells them now (Reddit-trained & integrated AI will be so great…).
That is sad to hear that mander hasn’t come back yet - I guess it’s still waiting to see if something can be resolved, since the backups weren’t recent.
But it is even more sad to hear that Rimu’s community migration tool isn’t working, on other instances without his direct involvement.
Agreed.
Some of what you said makes sense to me though, like a community “owner” must be located on the instance where it is housed - if that were not the case then the system would be vulnerable to all sorts of spam where any bot could spin up communities on any instance, so some level of accountability must be maintained.
Hmm. I see what your saying. I was thinking more someone on the instance would be required to make the community, but could hand it off to a user on another instance. I think you are right though, a user on the instance should be forced to be “owner”, as it doesn’t take much work to create a new account and they can always add their other instance username as a mod and run the community via that (never really needing to log into username of the instance the community is on again). Only issue I see is, people DMing the “owner” username that is not monitored, but I suppose that could just be stated in the sidebar and/or user profile.
I suspect the official PieFed app will be Blorp, just from the way that Rimu talked about it iirc.
I can’t recall any specific source tied to that thought, but that sounds right. Guess we’ll see.
… it’s far easier to pay Reddit and then get Reddit coins back in exchange.
Haha, sadly very true.
… an enormous fraction of our own traffic here are reposting bots, often from Reddit, …
I just saw a post that Reddit changed something to block reposting bots again and Lemmit is tired of trying to figure out a workaround and is going to shut down next year when the domain subscription ends. So, potentially fewer reposts in the future.
As a bit of an aside, JohnnyEnzyme @piefed.social just told me about a posting technique that worked well for him utilizing past Reddit posts with their best comments to create interaction in the threadiverse (his comment). So, we may lose repost bots (no great loss in my mind), but if people start taking more from Reddit and curating it personally, I think that could be a great exchange.
As an update I added a feature request to Pylova’s Codeburg about the subscribable block lists. We’ll see if they’re interested.
Wonderful!
if people start taking more from Reddit and curating it personally, I think that could be a great exchange.
This sounds horrific to me! The question in my mind is not how many ghosts to allow over here, but how to generate authentic interactions between real humans. We don’t need every single niche covered, we just need people to enjoy their time spent here.
90% of that is easily attainable by defederation from hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. I was on multiple instances that did neither, prior to the ability for an admin to (shadow-)block certain communities, and I very nearly quit Lemmy entirely after switching here over from Kbin. In fact, I basically did as I switched over to PieFed for my main, before I began my current campaign to test the experiences on several 3rd-party apps.
A further 90% improvement can be attained by blocking Lemmy.ml (except that no major instance provides this by default, and also the Lemmy platform won’t allow it at all, with the instance block being so horribly misnamed as to represent disinformation - in no way does it block users of the instance from harassing people in other communities, thus missing the entire fucking point). In this very conversation thread there was a particular onerous troll who kept following our conversation and downvoting everything I said, finally speaking up with the most inane bullshit. This was not fun for me so I banned them. New joiners, it seems obvious from the comments they leave (usually on other platforms after already leaving), don’t bother to put in the work to curate their experiences and instead simply flee - to Reddit, or Bluesky, or perhaps nowhere and just touch grass from now on, combined with maybe Instagram or Tiktok or something.
I do not want to have to scroll down reading through tens to hundreds to thousands of comments, none of which represent real humans who would respond if I replied to them - that is the precise opposite of what I want. As I browse through New, often I can be the first responder anyway. And people reply to me, and so on it goes. And I don’t want to be asked to do that for 12 hours a day - just one would be fine for me, if that. But GOOD content, not toxic crap like “c’mon comrades let’s murder everyone in sight, eh?” - I want to see stuff that quite possibly I could even enjoy seeing, and maybe interacting with?
But even if I do see it, the endless array of trolls spoils it. I do not think that the overall lack of content is the problem here - it’s the overall lack of content that is worthwhile to read, and the fact that we get constantly slapped in the face in an unconsensual manner. It’s a cost (far too high) to benefit (with next to no OC, very little) trade-off that results in people fleeing here - even those that stuck with us for multiple years before finally giving up. Admiral Patrick had a horrible solution to it, but he was not wrong in the identification of the problem: people don’t enjoy discourse with incels for whom no means simply to push forward all the harder.
This sounds horrific to me! The question in my mind is not how many ghosts to allow over here, but how to generate authentic interactions between real humans. We don’t need every single niche covered, we just need people to enjoy their time spent here.
I do not want to have to scroll down reading through tens to hundreds to thousands of comments, none of which represent real humans who would respond if I replied to them - that is the precise opposite of what I want.
I do not think that the overall lack of content is the problem here - it’s the overall lack of content that is worthwhile to read, …
I didn’t think I conveyed the idea well. It would not be an automated or bot process (Reddit comments wouldn’t be added as Threadiverse comments). The good/useful comments from Reddit would be utilized by a poster to add to their own threadiverse post to help add more relevant content (Example that got 57 comments).
A further 90% improvement can be attained by blocking Lemmy.ml …
While that may be the fastest solution, the triad haven’t been doing great, in at least the last few months even without major intervention (Post with Data):
Lemmy.ml:
hexbear.net:
Lemmygrad.ml:
Average of the other 16 Instances (of Top 20, excludes lemmy.world who’s similarly crashing):
It looks like hexbear.net is suffocating by itself. Maybe some users move from hexbear.net to lemmy.ml or the declining hexbear.net activity is forcing lemmy.ml users to be more active (I have no evidence of either, but for argument’s sake say they do), even then lemmy.ml is shrinking too.
In this very conversation thread there was a particular onerous troll who kept following our conversation and downvoting everything I said …
I did wonder what happened to that person.
New joiners, it seems obvious from the comments they leave (usually on other platforms after already leaving), don’t bother to put in the work to curate their experiences and instead simply flee …
Seems like some efforts toward better on-boarding could return good results (could include default blocks, etc.). I have some other analytics I need to get working again first, but after, I think I’ll take a stab at looking at decoupling and identifying key instance on-boarding differences that effect retention.
Encouraging people to contribute only goes so far when this place is simultaneously discouraging people’s contributions. It is systemic, not limited to ML, and needs major efforts including enhanced technical capabilities to try to solve. Note that if ML ever were to be defederated, the absolute most toxic trolls would simply switch to using their alts on some other instance such as Lemmy.World, which they have announced they will do in advance, several years ago. They even indicated that they would make apps that automate the process of trying to send messages to someone, cycling through an array of alts until one is found that is not banned on that instance (or by that recipient?) - no truly does mean to simply push forward all the harder, for some.
But making a more firm stance would also send a signal about what is desired vs. not. Are calls for murder of all people in the Western World acceptable? Apparently, judging from their presence, yes.
Most places are defederated from HB - which was not always the case (I was on both StarTrek.Website and Discuss.Online prior to blocking them), but now that it is I don’t worry about them so much as ML that is still sending out content that turns people away.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, I only showed references in support of the fact that the problem lies there in front of us. Or at this point, behind us, since once a reputation is gained (for e.g. nostr, 4chan, etc.) it is exceedingly difficult to change.
On the whole, I think our reputation is closer to nostr and 4chan than it is to Bluesky. Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM. Something must be specifically blocked in order to filter it out (either that, or a new instance can include only trusted existing instances, but that runs into problems where new ones pop up all the time and will get excluded, so this approach seems not to be used by the vast majority of existing instances, at least the major ones).
I’ll take a stab at looking at decoupling and identifying key instance on-boarding differences that effect retention.
Wonderful!
Looks like Pylova likes the subscribable block list idea
That team is so energetic and helpful, it’s a pleasure to see it! 😁
On the whole, I think our reputation is closer to nostr and 4chan than it is to Bluesky.
I don’t go to other social media, so my only knowledge of our reputation is from people repeating things here.
Hopefully “our reputation” can jump to a different comparison scale (I wouldn’t want to be compared to any of those options).
Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM.
Okay, I’m going to push back on this. At no point have I ever heard CSAM being accepted or allowed. The only time I’ve ever heard of it coming up, everyone reacted negatively. The poster was blocked, all the posts were deleted immediately, and new safeguards were put into prevent it happening again.
That team is so energetic and helpful, it’s a pleasure to see it! 😁
Agreed 😊
Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM.
Perhaps this is an exceedingly poor way to describe it - I just meant that federation (like with ML, hexbear, lemmygrad, and any new instance) happens by default. Instances that host CSAM - like extremist far-right content - are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.
Anyway it could still be misleading even if correct, bc this is at the instance level, whereas someone still has to subscribe at the community level in order for content to begin coming in. So the potential for content - good, bad, or whatever - to spread is baked right into the ActivityPub Protocol from the start, by design. Just like what people keep saying about 4chan (though admittedly I never went there personally).
And people must have subscribed to hexbear and lemmygrad and ML communities on all of the major instances, therefore all of that content was already there for me to stumble upon as a new joiner myself, fresh from KBin where it had been severely curtailed. I - like all other new joiners - then bad a decision whether to flee this place permanently (which I almost did, and continue to revisit that thought every year or so as expectations keep not being met, making it all the harder to hold out much hope for the future) or to begin blocking people, one by one, and even making a (successful) petition to defederate discuss.online from hexbear.net.
All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!
Ultimately, it’s arguably fine for places like 4chan and nostr to exist (unless you take the position that the echo chamber then breeds toxic trolls that when they leave it, act to harm others, though keep in mind that in this analogy, the Threadiverse itself is 4chan and nostr, in that we allow anything and everything, especially on ML that we then host on all of our machines too - e.g. if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee), but what’s far less fine is to allow people to stumble upon it unawares, particularly when it is labeled oppositely from what it truly is. A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.
… are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.
I have no source for this, but I think, now, first content/post/comment from a new instance has to be approved by an instance admin (could be wrong and misremembering though). If not, might be worth seeing if that is a option admins would want added. Thoughts?
… or to begin blocking people, one by one …
All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!
On that note, it seems Pylova has finished writing up the block subscription code (yesterday) and it’ll be in the next update (unknown date).
… if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee) …
It could remain forever, but I think most instances (or at least Piefed instance) are set up to delete old content after “x” amount of time. Alternatively, admins could just manually delete the old content, if they wanted.
… A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.
Agreed. I think .zip’s approach where it has the default blocks and explains them is a good approach. If the subscribable blocks also make it into the on-boarding, I think there will be a large swath of new .zip users who almost never encounter the triad issues (assuming Pylova subscribable block list spreads back to Piefed and beyond). If that on boarding spreads throughout the Threadiverse, the triad could be dealt with, without major confrontations, which I think most admins don’t want to deal with.
I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.
However, PieFed made an improvement to not need to do this anymore, and then Lemmy followed suit as well, and now the whole process is much easier. Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done. Technically admins - or again, I think anyone - can always add it the old way, but only if you know that it exists and how to make that happen (which isn’t hard but requires crafting a URL rather than mere clicking on links). Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.
Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!! Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists. It’s okay for him to work on whatever he wants, but it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.
I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.
The PieFed thing was once again another of Rimu’s rants against “unserious” meme content. He is obviously entitled to not feel forced into providing unlimited hosting for images, but I am saying that the limitation built into the PieFed software and enacted on e.g. PieFed.social may not be universally applied. I could well see e.g. lemmynsfw.app choosing differently to retain every image forever. Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.
This is a limitation of all Fediverse software that I’ve seen, including Lemmy and Mbin, so not just PieFed. Though PyLova does have the most transparency of all of them… and yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.
I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists. But… at least the software will support that now, so yes indeed this is the very important, crucial first step!!
I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.
I’m aware of that aspect, and I may be conflating it with on-boarding new instances.
Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done.
Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.
The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL.
Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists.
I don’t want to prescribe motives to his actions, but I feel like some of his positions and efforts are to “dominate” the threadiverse and knock out the competition.
In this case, Mbin. From my understanding, Mbin is pretty far behind in development (lots of bugs and missing features), only have 2 part time developers and they are trying to supplement that with AI/LLMs. I suspect the LLMs will help them for a bit, but the project will die when the code is only manageable by LLMs and prices for vibe-coding go up significantly.
When that happens, all the Mbin users could “easily” migrate to Piefed. Though, I imagine, if Piefed gets Mastodon implementation working properly, that may cause a migration then too (possibly death spiraling Mbin, if the migration is large enough).
Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!!
… it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.
Yeah, they are 😊
I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I’m not sure how wide spread deletion is. I believe I recall one of Rimu’s blog posts mentioned it in some depth, so I assumed at least some instances are taking advantage of it (especially with the price of hardware).
Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.
… yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.
That’s a good point. Maybe worth another Pylova feature request?
I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists.
Hmm. I’m imagining someone will just make a block list as their only blocking measure and anytime they need to block someone, they’ll just add them to the list, and people will subscribe to that list or multiple lists.
The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL
Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0, now that I think about it. Anyway it’s only for convenience of pulling in community names, to help onboard a new instance, while existing instances won’t need it. Also the central authority could be let’s say Lemmy.zip, or sh.itjust.works, or whatever the admin sets it to. If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen. Otherwise, yeah it’s Lemmy.ml that gets the first even if not final say in what communities are suggested to new instances.
It is things like this that prove the lie to people complaining that Rimu is too controlling of PieFed instances, when features like the above exist showing Lemmy.ml the same or even more. The vast majority of Rimu’s features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in, with a graphical wizard even helping guide the set-up process, whereas this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out. The difference is night and day. Go figure, the same people that claim that Ukraine is responsible for Russia invading it somehow claim that PieFed is more authoritarian than Lemmy?
I am not wanting to ascribe motivations behind Rimu’s actions either, though what I mentioned earlier is based on the set of features released recently, planned to come out soon, and his speaking about the situation for the past year and also looking ahead. e.g. he is not interested in the slightest in fiddling with the UI, preferring to leave that to others - ideally third-party apps, although as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.
We seem to be in a downward spiral where we would need to attract more people, in order to improve the experience here, which in turn would attract more people. Previously we had the hopes of a brave new world free of corporate enshittification to bolster at least those of us who came here. But now we see the reality that the grass is only somewhat greener on this other side, and that in particular there are other forms of enshittification that have nothing to do with corporations.
Oh well, we can only do so much, and the outcome will take care of itself.
Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn’t look to see how active they all are especially recently, and it also mentions that it is based on PHP (github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#requirements). I know very little about that language beyond that it is a scripting one, but recent news stories does make me concerned that it is a difficult one especially regarding security.
And of course you know better than most people that there are <1K total Mbin users (without bothering to check I thought it was like 500-600), so even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K. I also suspect that Rimu’s vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand, except the Threadiverse alone barely functions especially if the goal is to attract more people, who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.
Though Rimu proving extremely difficult to work together with is a major distraction from the advancement of the PieFed agenda - as he said himself in his blog post where he decided to step back from administration of his personal instance (although then couldn’t actually manage to stay away, e.g. leaving the admins surprised that the instance was now implementing a daily vote quota and shadow-censoring contributions from other PieFed and even Lemmy or Mbin instances, without disclosure of this fact).
The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it’s a win-win there!:-)
Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It’s not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it’s easy then…? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what’s easy or not:-).
Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0 …
Good to know.
If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen.
The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it’s a win-win there!:-)
On that front, I opened another Pylova Issue for instance settings (user facing and one for admin installs). Hopefully that will bear fruit.
The vast majority of Rimu’s features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in …
My recollection is that they are now opt-in. They didn’t start that way and didn’t become that way until backlash. I think he’s learned his lesson at this point, to make everything opt-in.
… this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out.
Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology. Seems par for the course.
… as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.
Yeah, that’s my read as well. Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.
Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn’t look to see how active they all are especially recently …
My “2 part time developers” (looks like it’s actually 1.5 developers, 1 full, 1 half-time) is from a recent post.
… even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K.
My feeling is it’s less about MAU numbers (best case: +10%) and more about becoming ‘the only game in town’. I think good integration of Mastodon, could significantly increase Piefed MAU over Lemmy and would make Mbin redundant. Making a good Lemmy to Piefed conversion script after that, could knock Lemmy into a death-spiral as well. Piefed would then be the only fediverse Reddit-alternative.
I also suspect that Rimu’s vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand …
Agreed. I think I was sold on the original ‘dream’ of the fediverse all being connected and it was a bit disappointing when I learned that wasn’t really the case.
… who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.
It wouldn’t surprise me, if that were the case.
Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It’s not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it’s easy then…? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what’s easy or not:-).
Yeah, I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it. I suspect, if it needs to be iterated on, it won’t be that onerous to change how it can be utilized.
I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired. #2 already exists though - for PieFed/ PyLova though not for Lemmy afaik - but also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial - I’ve seen many people either outright leave PieFed or stating that they had plans to imminently switch to it that they cancelled as a direct result; that was an extremely poor communication rolling out those anti-features, which along with other similar matters previously essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created).
My recollection is that they are now opt-in
Ah… interesting. I don’t know the full history and it likely depends in part on what features under discussion. There was one set of features that someone on a Lemmy.ml community lied about, stating that a bunch of “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase, and Rimu responded that they were the opposite of hard-coded since they were wrapped inside of an if-statement that was turned OFF by default, so that one was opt-in (fwiw, the original OP there never did acknowledge afaik that they had been in error - the post remained up for at least several months when last I checked and people continued to point to it as evidence of PieFed betraying the principles of the Threadiverse, despite how the entire thing had been debunked). I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in. Rimu in the past has usually been quite friendly and responsive to such, except when he digs his heels in and insists that his way is better even in the face of all opposition (maybe it is even, but it is too much at once and people don’t like having their choices taken away from them, so not the right way to go about making such changes, imho).
Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.
Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology.
Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜. By the same token, MAGA is “against” the government telling people what to do.
Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.
Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw. Other than porn, which Rimu almost but not quite does the opposite of support, PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right? (I’d have to take another look myself to update myself but that was my thought at some point?) Hence this singular change is essentially an outlier that may - or may not - be representative of the situation as a whole. Or you could take the opposite position that the number of these events is simply too hard to be able to say much of anything about, but in that case what is there to learn at all? Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.
And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation. And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.
becoming ‘the only game in town’
That sounds logical. I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well. Barely any third-party apps support it, and its web browser UI assumes that post titles will be very long, so for short ones it wastes a very large amount of space, plus other layout concerns as well. PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).
I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it.
Very exciting indeed!! :-)
I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired.
Looks like they like the idea and it’ll be in v5.1. Looks like they already completed part of it.
… also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial …
Fair point.
… essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created …
Silver linings 😊
… “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase …
Yeah, I remember that ‘argument’. That was annoying to deal with.
I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in.
There was another feature/set of features that were opt-out and poorly communicated before the vote-limiter, maybe a year ago. I don’t remember what it was though. I recall it went over just as poorly as the rate limiter and made me view Rimu in a different light.
Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.
That’s my understanding as well. I had to ask my admins to remove it.
Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜.
Haha. Yeah. I do think their call for a vanguard kind of gives away the game (wiki: “According to Lenin, the purpose of the vanguard party is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat").
Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw.
And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.
Absolutely. According to Fedindex, it looks like Lemmynsfw may have only had 3.6k MAU when it crashed. FediNSFW is now at ~3.6k MAU. So, weirdly it came out to be an even exchange.
PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right?
Looks like Fedindex is putting Fedinsfw creation on 02-18-2026. Fediverse-Observer data, puts Piefed at 4816 MAU on 02-17-2026. Piefed is at 6742 MAU and Fedinsfw only at 3583 MAU, leaves non-Fedinsfw Piefed at 3159 MAU today.
Last time Piefed was below 2k MAU (1990 MAU) was 2026-01-20. So, up ~59% in 10-ish months, not bad, percentage wise.
Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.
Looks like Lemmy has had 63 new instances since 2026-06-08, 20 still active (Piefed: 18 new, 8 still active). So better percentage fro Piefed, better volume for Lemmy.
From 2026-07-28 to 2026-10-27, Lemmy alive servers went from 321 -> 294 (Piefed: 66 -> 59). So, with the increased total threadiverse MAUs, it looks like some consolidation is happening.
And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation.
I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well.
With you there. ‘Whole ass 1 thing, rather than half-assing 2 things’.
PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).
This has legitimately been a huge annoyance for me on web (and a reason I prefer Voyager). I made FR about this too.
I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it.
Very exciting indeed!! 😄
Looks like it’s already live. Looks like it’s only contained to users. I was hoping this could also be an admin feature to help stop scraping (with automation only 1 instance has to be hit by a scraper before the subscribed instances are ‘inoculated’). Added another FR.
I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).
I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy. Which made a lot of sense to me, since that happens a great deal actually. e.g. PieFed offers polls and user and post flairs, all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.
But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard? Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).
The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking. It doesn’t so much involve logic as emotional manipulation. Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen. With perhaps just one or two… “minor” adjustments, which now place them on the outside rather than in, as the enemy rather than beneficiary of all the absolute violence and horror. Like the target rather than the perpetrator of a genocide.
It really helps to realize that sometimes people lie on the internet.
PieFed is growing, agreed, though mainly due to lemmynsfw.com having fallen and chosen PieFed as its replacement. Which is valid but an outlier, skewing the stats heavily by just that singular data point. PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly, if all the decisions about planned migrations that were cancelled as a result of the daily vote quota issue do not get reversed or replaced by others.
I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others. PyLova has already done it though, as you noted, along with so many other things that Rimu was never going to get around to. Gold lining, even Platinum!?:-)
I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).
Yeah, no worries 😊
I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy.
I don’t think that was it but maybe?
… all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.
Agreed.
But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard?
Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.
Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).
Yeah, Snoopy leaving is interesting, in that I’m not sure how much new blood Rimu is going to attract in the future (he’s burned a lot of bridges). The Codeburg commits lists Rimu, Walter Schwenger (wsj018), and wltb as the only developers over the last 3 months. Looks like there were quite a few more other people pushing commits 4 months back. Looks like the Pylova split happened 5 months ago and a couple of the light commiters followed Mia to Pylova.
The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking.
Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.
Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen.
It would be kind of funny, if the effects weren’t terrible 😞
PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly …
Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week (~+750 MAU). Roughly 600 for Lemmy, 170 for Piefed, and -10 for Mbin.
I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others.
I vaguely recall this, so might have seen your post/comment at the time.
PyLova has already done it though …
They did? I just checked their instances and it has the same consolidated total votes UI. It would be great if they already did it, maybe it’s an option and not the default?
On a different note, I ran across a post who deleted there account, because almost no one was voting on their posts. I think it was a federation issue, as in the community hosting instance never received the posts and they only stayed local.
I was thinking maybe a check-mark or something to let a user know their post or comment was successfully received by the target/host instance. I don’t know if hosting instances tell sending instances they successfully retrieved data or not, so could be a significant increase in traffic.
Maybe not that significant though. Piefed only had ~1700 posts and comments over the last week, Lemmy top 20 most populated instances were ~12500 ("Activity" Data). Taking the most “active” instance (lemmy.world), they had ~4700 activities, assume worst case they are all for non-Lemmy.world communities. That would be 670 extra packets per day (28 per hour). That doesn’t seem too terrible. Thoughts?
Someone can make an instance, its code is AGPL gitlab.com/diasporg/poduptime
diasporg / Poduptime · GitLab