Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I barely ever see any such things on my feed. The most problematic users I’ve come across were from lemmy.world.
Fwiw Lemmy.World has >6-fold more users on it than the 2nd-largest Lemmy instance. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
The Fediverse is shrinking https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48.
And people cite how it is our toxicity that pushes them away. https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/.
Many trolls exist on Lemmy.World but also sth like >90% of the most active communities are there too. People can help spread this around by posting, commenting, and voting in communities based elsewhere across the Threadiverse.
Though OP is correct also that in threads such as this one, oftentimes the most acutely aggressive and adversarial responses come from Hexbear (although not possible in this case since the community is located on an instance that has defederated from it) or from Lemmy.ml - the numeric number of trolls is not necessarily higher but the relative level of enrichment is.
What if you bring Piefed numbers into that? I switched from Lemmy to Piefed, so the total value didn’t change in the feddverse, but Lemmy got one less
PieFed is not entirely negligible but is fairly minor, with ~7k monthly active users (https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats), more than half of which are on the porn one fedinsfw.app.
The flagship PieFed.social has 1.6k users - which isn’t nothing, and if it were a Lemmy instance would make it #5, right after Lemmy.ml with 1.8k users. However the rest (besides those two) all have <0.3k each. So Lemmy.World alone is twice the size of the entire PieFed-verse. And all the more so if discounting the porn one that iirc from those recent federation graphs is the #1 instance most often defederated from, even more so than the troll hexbear and extremist Lemmygrad instances (there has been some issues with csam on it, and it seems hard to find moderators willing to work there, making federation with it somewhat dicey - importantly here as it pertains to our discussion, for reasons entirely unrelated to the software being PieFed).
Though PieFed growth may have hit upon a major snag when its main dev quite recently forced an update against everyone’s advice that now shadow-censors user contributions, even those on other platforms like Lemmy or Mbin, crucially without telling them. The software is quite opinionated (meh, though so is Lemmy too, we just don’t talk about it as much), and while it is far too early to see any effects of that in the activity numbers, according to people’s comments is definitely causing them to halt their future plans to migrate to PieFed from Lemmy.
Mbin is barely a blip in comparison, with <1k active users total (https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats). Lemmy.world is >13-fold larger than all instances that use Mbin combined. Mbin is really niche not only in terms of users but of functionality: most people seem to want a client that is optimized for the type of content that they consume, rather than one that tries to combine both user-centric microblogging Fediverse/Mastodon style (with e.g. long titles, perhaps even wrapping for more than an entire line, as in news articles) with the topic-based threaded conversional style of the Threadiverse (which e.g. sometimes has titles as short as a single word, causing much wasted space, plus requiring additional clicks to see the images rather than showing in a sufficient size to facilitate quicker scrolling through larger masses of content). Back when Ernst built Kbin (from which Mbin was forked when he had health issues) the major attraction was it being an alternative to the tankie-lead development of Lemmy, but now PieFed mainly fills that roll (even while introducing issues on its own, so perhaps we could see a revival of interest in Mbin after all?).