It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Doesn’t matter how open ‘the fediverse’ is or not to a point of view if the admin of your server are happy to have it, it will exist here. Especially when we’re talking raw numbers like this, they should all be piling into the same bucket, if we’re measuring fediverse. But as I say this I wonder what the definitions they’re using are.
For instance very different views are expressed on Truth Social, which I’m led to believe could connect to the fediverse, but choose not to. So I wonder if those numbers are included, i expect not because they’d not be connected as a fediverse participant by my understanding.
The point is, other people don’t have to put up with it in their corners of the fediverse if they don’t. This is the freedom of choice benefit that a network like the fediverse has over a centralised platform like fb, reddit, or even BlueSky. This is a fundamental difference in levels of control that makes the fediverse such an exciting project.
Its not necessarily the case that each individual user has full control of these settings, although they mostly do, and if they set up and maintain their own instance they absolutely will. But it is the case that a user has greater control to a point where its practically individualised, and if there were a case where some greater disconnection is warranted the admins aren’t some amorphous presence that travel between dimensions unseen, they have a presence in their servers and have a level of accessibility thats unheard of in previous forms of social media. Theres also a community of admins, who can learn and build off each other, which is beneficial in a cooperative-competition kind of way.
Anyway, you probably already knew all this. I ended up finding typing this out was a fun exercise to appreciate for a moment what this network is actually delivering to a couple million people.
it’s fine to allow users to block what they want, or downvote it, or block other users.
the issue is when admins and mods basically want use their own to systematically remove anything they don’t like, and then claim they are the arbiters of truth justice and all that. it’s the hypocrisy.
it’s also when non-hostile ideas are expressed, and viewed as hostile and violent by the damaged people who are emotionally allergic to anything that isn’t already in their comfort zone.
You’re talking about behaviours, i’m talking about structures. The structure of the fediverse, gives users the option to disengage, find their own spaces.
No one admin has control over this thing, no one mod controls a whole subject. They at best can control a popular community on that subject. They piss people off, people can find another server, another mod very easily. They can even import all their old data with fedibridge, i’ve bever tried that though.
Take world news as the subject.
The fragmetation of multiple world news communities across multiple servers is good. Think of each of those world news communities and their mods as bringing a certain framing to the subject, their own biases even. Then you can equate them to the world news sections of different newspapers.
In the old days you had The Atlantic, The Tribune, The Sun, The New York Times, etc. Now we have c/worldnews.beehaw, c/worldnews.lemmyworld, c/worldnews.aussiezone, and a plethora of others, with comparatively low barriers to entry than news papers.
Yes the base articles are often the same, but the comment threads are different, and the base articles selected are different. So the articles being the same is not really too different from The Atlantic buying in from a news provider like Reuters.