Certainly. Don’t know how large and when, but a significant (relative to our size) bunch of people would likely show up. That plus people who dabble in both would increase their activity here. The threadiverse is more or less guaranteed to grow and form a solid contrubutor base. We don’t seek to increase profits YoY so our services are only going to get better over time. For-profit socials have to grow profits over time, so they are going to get worse. Increase in service quality for for-profit platforms is a temporary stage of their development. The threadiverse will be around in 5-10 years time, in some shape or form and it’ll be larger and better than it is today. This is why I keep pushing the vote buttons and type words every day. Deliberately spending more time than I’d like. 😄
This is simply not true.
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nothing in life is ever fully “guaranteed”
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our numbers have been actively decreasing since the Rexodus - from 60k at our peak down to ~35k now
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PieFed now shadow-censors all votes with a daily vote quota, thereby limiting such interactions
Not everything always moves in a positive line. We might improve here, especially if we put in the efforts to do so, but it is not assured, especially without having put in such efforts.
Would you mind elaborating on PieFed vote quotas? I haven’t heard about that.
Good question. There is a lot of active disinformation circulating about PieFed - like it supposedly “hard-coded” certain filters into it, which btw it does the precise opposite of that, not only not hard-coding those but actually making them opt-in, the absolute most friendly and non-mandatory that a code option could be. The main author Rimu argues back against such in his blog post at https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/14/open-source-runs-on-good-faith/.
All that said, the daily vote quota criticism unfortunately is for real. Unlike all the false criticism before that, this one is opt-out rather than opt-in, forcing admins to be aware that it even exists and then figure out a calculation to determine a value that would effectively disable it (which tbf is not hard at all, if someone is aware of its existence). Instance admins were apparently given no notice, expressing surprise at the behavior of their instances after an update that barely mentioned it and rhen buried it deeply in a long list as if it were nothing. Also this anti-feature was rammed through despite somewhat strong criticism, for reasons that seem to make sense to the author and at least one other person but make little sense to the rest of us (i.e. no attempt at reaching consensus or striving for buy-in among stakeholders, at least least not a successful one, and at least as far as I have been able to ascertain).
Briefly, PieFed has decided that by default, unless an instance admin goes out of their way to request otherwise, voting now is limited. Which is arguably fine if it were internal, except this applies to votes received by accounts across the entire wide Fediverse - from Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, little to no indication of that fact is provided - votes simply are discarded, leaving people to wonder why, and Rimu’s response was to get creative in finding alternatives to voting. Votes are (according to him) not meant to make people feel good, but strictly to influence the visibility of an item of content (which ofc makes a LOT of sense, at least in pure theoretical terms) hence it was decided - AGAINST a large outcry from the community - that it was “unfair” that people who use the platform a lot can cause more influence than others.
Many counterexamples were put forth - e.g. a doctor or nurse working days as 12+ hr rather than 8 hr shifts, then wanting to relax and consume Threadiverse content on their rest day, but being blocked from doing so by the quota being strictly a daily one. PieFed thus now imposes restrictions on the style that people use the platform by. Numerous alternatives could have been done - e.g. banning people who purely vote thousands of times yet never write comments, or conversely allow people who do write posts and comments and not merely moderate but put in enormous efforts to actively grow up communities to have a higher limit than those who do not. But instead… everyone has the same (daily) restriction on votes allowed to be received by a community on an instance that implements this restriction.
And again, as evidenced partly by the fact that you are not familiar with this aspect of PieFed: the discoverability of this anti-feature is exceedingly poor. PieFed is currently shadow-censoring votes coming in from other platforms (e.g. Lemmy) without telling them why.
Here is PugJesus’ goodbye message citing his reason to leave the Threadiverse as the implementation of this vote quota along with prior hints that the PieFed software is becoming quite opinionated, in a manner that is accepting of serious discussions but high critical of meme and shitposting styles, i.e. the more “social media” style. So it’s not that PieFed is “bad” here, but it is opinionated and pushing its own agenda, more and more lately, which can still be mitigated by instance admins but with features being opt-out rather than opt-in, PieFed is becoming increasingly less friendly towards the traditional “social media” style of conversation, and is imposing its own vision of what might be better. And again, without really disclosing that fact much where people can see an acknowledgement that it is currently happening.
Here is a post directly from Rimu about the bias underlying the change to implement the vote quota. And here is the OG release announcement, showing this feature buried in the list. Here is a community push-back that lead to what I consider a fascinating technical exploration of the topic, and another one.
If this has been released as merely another opt-in feature, and affected merely votes internally to a PieFed instance, then everything would be different. But instead, people are still sore at Huffman trying to tell us that we are landed gentry, and this change smacks of a similar situation whereby despite the lack of corporate enshittification, nonetheless the people in charge are telling others what they can and cannot do, for opaque reasons that don’t resonate with seemingly much of anyone.
forcing admins to be aware that it even exists and then figure out a calculation to determine a value that would effectively disable it
at retrofed.com we carefully calculated this number, if anyone else wants to steal our research, we’re using…
VOTE_QUOTA=999999999
(1 less than a billion, we’re sorry to all the people casting a billion votes per day lol)
Haha good point, no need to overthink the calculation. :-P
Though the discovery that this anti-feature was even implemented in the first place is a much higher concern. This “feature” itself is one thing, but the lack of transparency surrounding it is a whole other matter on top.
Thanks for the explanation. That’s informative and unfortunate.
I am particularly disappointed bc I put literally all of my hopes for the entire future of the Threadiverse itself into PieFed. Lemmy is developed by tankies, and as much as we here don’t care (software, particularly FOSS, is software), people on Reddit care greatly and eschew coming here as a result.
But now they won’t come here to merely a different, inferior version of Reddit, where one person in charge is replaced by another person.
This is all waaaay too simplistic ofc, as PieFed is still amazing software, and Rimu is truly nothing at all like Huffman. But… how much do facts actually matter, to most people?
This is going to harm our ability to draw people from Reddit to here. They are currently pissed about the shadow-banning there, and I don’t think that they will take kindly to the shadow-censoring here, even if it is limited to voting (but not posting or commenting). This place truly is better than here… but this decision opens up PieFed to that MAJOR criticism of the instance admins being landed gentry.
Fortunately - regardless of whether PieFed, Lemmy, or something else like Mbin is used - instance admins still are the arbitrators of what experience their users will encounter. And PieFed offers enormous benefits to spinning up a personal instance, plus under leadership that remains friendly to the social media style, PieFed still has enormous benefits to offer. Plus, obviously, some people even want the serious-content-only style, and will even welcome those changes (I would still argue that the transparency needs to be improved there… but otherwise the changes themselves are not so much “bad” as more surprising, being different than what people are used to, and therefore if not disclosed properly even dismaying?).
So yes, unfortunate, but we move forward regardless. Rimu still works hard at modifying the code as he sees fit, and like the Lemmy devs, offers it as FOSS - and I could ask for little more than that!:-)
History memes just hasn’t been the same since the piefed nonsense 🙁
I’ve noticed a drop off in several communities on PieFed.social since, and people saying that they wanted to migrate their community or account but now have not.
Tbf if that’s what the instance admin wants it be - mainly for serious content rather than an open and welcoming space - that’s absolutely fine, it’s just a transparency issue where there seems a mismatch between what is said vs. the actual direction it is headed towards.
And I would have hoped that such an unpopular anti-feature would have been made as opt-in rather than opt-out.
https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2190040/who-decides-what-you-see-on-the-fediverse-a-look-at-voting-patterns
PieFed instance admins can set a limit to how many votes each account can cast each day. I set the default value for this at a level that 99% of us will never reach.
This pissed off some of the 1% (or people who thought they were the 1% but weren’t) so they spent weeks spreading FUD about it.
mostly because people keep trying to go to smaller and smaller platforms. ee, was one of the large instances to disappear and almost everyone scattered so theres less people overall even contributing to lemmy,.
- That’s my bet for the reasons I outlined. It’s not a bet in vacuum. I think it’s strong enough to consider it “certain,” colloquially speaking. Is it certain in mathematical terms? No, as you said - nothing is certain.
- That’s not inconsitent with my bet. We can get into why but probablt don’t need to.
- No idea what that’s about, not using PieFed. They limit what? Why do they do that?
E: BTW I’m not unaware of the ability of for-profits to sift people away from existing corporate platforms into new corporate or corporate-adjacent platforms, for example. E.g. Twitter -> Bluesky. I think that would be insufficient in the long run to halt the fediverse growth because every time this cycle occurs, some people fall off into the fediverse and that’s usually the more aware people. They tend to create more content.
Most people either seem to be happy with the way things are and don’t even want to grow at all - certainly not “at all costs” - or else they naively think that we will grow merely bc Reddit sucks, with zero effort required beyond that. I am glad that you are aiming at a blend of optimistic realism.
Though in that case, #2 is where the heart of the issue lies: so very MANY people overcame all the hurdles, figured out how to use this place, created an account, even posted here for multiple years, only to leave and now bad-mouth us over on Reddit. Overwhelmingly the sentiment there whenever a community decides to migrate and people ask where should they go, and Lemmy is suggested, the response is “oh HELL NO!!!”
And ofc many more people don’t even make it as far as that - but people are willing to put in a lot of effort, when they see that there is VALUE in doing so. Hence, our reputation being so poor, deprives us in many more ways than just the one, if the goal was to grow.
And I honestly don’t think that we will actually. Maybe in 10 years yes, but not in 1-2. And I, like so many others, have made my peace with that. Especially bc we aren’t really willing to lift a finger to do anything about the main problem that plagues us here - again, our reputation on Reddit. So, we shall remain small (the direct and immediate consequence of that), since collectively that’s what we have decided to do, whether consciously or no.
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I hope so
Hopefully. I am already on both sites (though on reddit I hardly ever start new threads and only use it on desktop) and would love getting opportunities to talk about all the topics here that I currently talk about only on reddit.
It is so incredible. I used to think the main threat to a free and open Internet was copyright. Then in the mid-2010s the talking points against it shifted to misinformation and hate speech.
Now it’s age verification? How did we get here?
I think the biggest threat is all the billionaires who don’t want working class people getting together and agreeing with each other on the internet.
Everything you mentioned - misinformation, hate speech, age verification - works towards that same goal.
We have a winner
Old.Reddit is getting sign ins required too for “safety” reasons. So even my limited desktop browsing is going to be limited now.
wierdly i couldnt get around it on ironfox, it wont let me use old reddit at all. firefox with (old reddit, and sinkit, or yesterredit add on still works, and it blocks the login requirement still). the alternative is people using the alternative apps like redlib, or continuum.
Don’t call the fediverse threadiverse…
Didn’t realize you made the rules
Here is an interesting post on the topic. The TLDR is that the term Threadiverse predated the shitty attempt by Threads to do whatever, and some of the biggest names in the Threadiverse including the software developers underpinning it decided not to allow Meta to steal it from us.
Besides, Threads is more or less fully dead now, isn’t it? And anyway it’s preemptively defederated by pretty much literally every instance out there, including those that famously defederate from virtually anything else - including even CSAM spammers.
Regardless, long live the Threadiverse! Other terms like Forumverse or just Verse may have worked better but… meh, people got used to calling it the Threadiverse and it just kinda stuck, or rather they did not want to change it. Feel free to advocate for something better, but the matter feels kinda settled now, so you would be going against what everyone else does routinely now.
In that post I included links to older comments proving usage of that term prior to Meta announcing its naming of Threads. We truly had it first, so using the term now is not in homage to them, but rather in spite of them.
Also, at this point I usually add an obligatory fuck spez… except I realize that I haven’t done so for months now, because at some point it’s okay to simply move on and forget him. That’s the real way to dispose of trolls: just forget they ever existed in the first place! :-P
I was specifically talking about the subsection of the Fediverse that structures itself similarly to reddit (e.g. Lemmy, piefed, mbim, etc).
But that isn’t really Threadiverse now, is it?
Given Thread itself is more akin to Twitter, so Threadiverse would rather be thr Mastodon style microblogging rather than the community-oriented approach of Lemmy/Piefed/mbin/kbin.
The Threadiverse is not named after Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc. The term “Threadiverse” is older than Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc.
It is named after Lemmy’s and /kbin’s and Mbin’s and PieFed’s “killer feature” of enclosed threaded conversations, with exactly one post followed any number of comments, where everyone always receives all of the comments. Something that was (and often still is) considered exclusive to these four applications.
In stark contrast to the de-facto Fediverse default, Mastodon. Where everything in a thread is a post. Where the concept of comments doesn’t exist. Where conversations are a filthy hack because it’s social media, and replies to replies aren’t part of the concept.
Where timelines always only consist of single posts with seemingly no context, and only a small variation in a small icon tells you that there is a context in the first place. Where seeing even only the branch of a conversation that any given post is in takes some effort, and seeing the whole conversation with all branches takes even more effort, not to mention the knowledge that this can be done in the first place, much less how it can be done.
Where you have to be mentioned to know that someone has replied to you. Like, where I would have to mention everyone in this branch of this conversation (@fonix232@fedia.io @speedythefirst@lemmy.zip @OpenStars@discuss.online @ceiphas@feddit.org) so that even only they receive my reply (everyone else in the conversation doesn’t). Where whoever will reply to me will automatically mention these four participants plus me.
The “Thread” in “Threadiverse” doesn’t stand for Meta Threads. It stands for “we can do proper threads, as in enclosed threaded conversations, something that Mastodon can’t, something that most Mastodon users believe the whole Fediverse can’t!”
I know it isn’t named after Threads, but your average person won’t. Especially when you capitalise it so it’s Threadiverse instead of threadiverse.
Well said.
I think nodeBB also is included as part of the Threadiverse, although it seems not a full-fledged member, and I am not well-versed enough to know why (perhaps connection via the ActivityPub Protocol is still being rolled out to all the instances?).
Meta’s Threads is indeed entirely irrelevant to any of this, except that they wanted to horn in on our fun, but they killed themselves before they could begin, though not before we had already preemptively blocked it all! 🤣
Oh, and also they stole our name. Or rather tried to, but fuck that noise - we took it right back!!
Technically speaking, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte ought to be parts of the Threadiverse, too. They’ve always had enclosed threaded conversations and even discussion groups built in. Except for Friendica, they support FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.
But look at how few people on Lemmy have even only heard of Mastodon. Friendica is much more unknown there. Those who know Hubzilla are a subset of those who know Friendica. And (streams) and Forte are next to completely unknown beyond Hubzilla’s actual users.
Tbf if you are interested in topics rather than people, then Mastodon is simply inferior to the Threadiverse - as you gave the best description I’ve ever seen on that point.
Friendica is inferior as well, but more on the technical side. It is struggling and instances shutting down due to lack of stability and efficiency, with costs rising far too high along with number of users. They’ve put out calls for programming aid to help fix those issues. As a non-user, I thought their main focus was on people rather than topics of conversation though?
The Threadiverse has quite the reputation for having such solid products - whether written in Rust with custom front-end or in Python with flask front-end (and Postgresql back-end), or Mbin is in PHP, and nodeBB uses Node.js.
My guess is that Friendica’s issues lie in its various federation connectors. They seem like leftovers from Friendica’s early days or derived from such.
Part of Friendica’s concept is to be able to connect to just about everything and then some. Friendica itself is based on a combination of its own DFRN protocol and ActivityPub. It connects via ActivityPub. It connects via the diaspora* protocol. It can crosspost to WordPress, any other XML-RPC-based blog, LiveJournal, Libertree and Dreamwidth. It can integrate accounts from Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky. It can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. It can “federate” via e-mail.
Sound fine and dandy. The actual issue is two-fold: Friendica’s federation code is terribly inefficient. As I’ve said, it seems to be Mike Macgirvin’s first shot at building such stuff, either untouched since ca. 2010/2011 or derived from similarly old code. Besides, if I remember Friendica right, none of this is really optional. If the server admin activates it, it’s permanently on for all accounts, regardless of whether they actually use it or not.
Sure, it worked well under lab conditions when there were only few connectors. And it worked well while Friendica was just a few very early adopters playing and tinkering around with it. But when these became a few thousand people actually daily-driving it, and the number of connectors gradually grew, shit got real.
I remember Friendica nodes closing their registration at not even 150 users back in the day because they were full. Granted, these were mostly nodes that had the Facebook connector on (which worked like the Bluesky connector nowadays), and people would mirror their entire Facebook timelines with hundreds of “friends” into Friendica. Still, nodes without the Facebook connector didn’t fare that much better.
And yes, there were public Friendica nodes disappearing spontaneously all the time. That’s why Mike invented nomadic identity and created Hubzilla in the long run.
One of the first steps on the way was in 2012 when he took Red, the fork of a fork of Friendica that would eventually become Hubzilla, and re-wrote the entire backend against his new Zot protocol. In the course of doing that, he must have redone all the federation stuff. In addition, he made all protocols that aren’t Zot, RSS and Atom optional and turned them off by default on each newly created channel.
I have no other explanation as to why hub.netzgemeinde.eu is working that well with 3.5K channels (only a bit over 220 of which have recently been active, but the inactive ones cause their share of load, too), including cloned channels as well as clones, with a whole lot of add-ons activated, on an ARM-based server, operated by a guy who pays for the server himself and refuses to accept donations.
Having attempted to use Lemmy communities via NodeBB, it’s a pain. No surprise we rarely see posts or comments from NodeBB users.
Ah, thank you for sharing your experience there. So it’s possible but difficult, like Mastodon (where behavior is also inconsistent) - good to know! I should probably stop listing nodeBB as a major player in the Threadiverse then.
The inverse (using Lemmy to follow NodeBB boards) seems to work fine, but I haven’t been able to find any that interest me
People have been using Threadiverse to refer to the link-aggregating community based Fediverse platforms with threaded discussion topics for way longer than Threads has existed as a website.
If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn’t really roll off the tongue.
If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn’t really roll off the tongue.
its also reductionist. its not like we are just hoarding links here for hoarding’s sake. discussions. and many non-link posts too.
Feddiverse?
It literally is called the Threadiverse. The terminology predates Threads as a platform.
this may be the one, mastodon is mature and lemmy 1.0 is almost out… but I fear we may need lemmy 1.1 for it to actually be a good experience, since 1.0 is such a big breaking change.
Imbrace fo the impact !
Source? Does it ?
reddit has been forcing login popups, and app downloads on most peoples browsers. not all of them though.
reddit is killing anonymous access to old.reddit. users from certain countries were asked to verify their identity.
I think most who would leave have already left.
I can get out of lemmy what I got out of reddit a long time ago. It only takes a few hundred smart/funny people to make a chat board good. We’re here now. Hopefully some of the niche communities get ported over soon enough, but the real greatness of reddit was that it was mostly uncensored and intelligent opinion. That’s mostly dead.
Only in some communities it was…
And, the lack of censorship wasn’t a good thing. It allowed absolute shtshow’s like thedonald or fatpeoplehate to exist way too long. There were also numerous pedo subreddits too which were allowed to exist apparently.
I’d argue that Reddit is at least partially responsible for a lot of f’ed up shit that many countries are now facing, by empowering those weirdos
i think FB has reddit beat, FB resulted in more conflicts than reddit ever did.
The problem with reddit very specifically is that it was, in many ways, internet counterculture. It grabbed a very specific demographic which is much less likely to be active on Facebook - young men stepping out from their edgy teenager “it’s not a stage mom” stage, and into the throes of early adulthood. So now you have this very strange thing where “youth counterculture” is sometimes (often enough to be a problem) this unholy marriage between fascist nihilism and Christian nationalism.
Absolutely true
In fact, here in Australia, someone has now introduced legislation in parliament to force social media companies to provide a feed without the algorithm / only posts by people you subscribe to
Of course the right wing nut jobs don’t like the legislation, because they rely on scare mongering and rage bait to exist
That’s why you know it’s great legislation
And some of them upon arriving here, noped out (either immediately or waiting a few years first) and went back:-(.
That type definitely will not be so eager to return.
It does not help that people here can be INSANELY aggressive against each other.
Especially from hexbear, which not every instance defederates from.
Though I’ve also seen more than a few people so proud at their choice to flaunt pushing past consent, from Lemmy.ml.
Wait, people on Lemmy.ml do what!?!
When hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml are defederated, then nearly 100% of the time the most batshit insane replies I see are from Lemmy.ml.
Echo chambers do horrible things to people:-(.
i think there are more lemmy.ml users than the other 2 tankie instances.
Am just glad I blocked them all…
The fuck you on about, scum?
Brother, early reddit was a fucking war zone lol. I swear, I learned more grammar from outright shame than I ever did in school.
Same. Kongregate essentialy shammed me one comment at a time into having a somewhat decent grammar.
Shamed*
I can’t wait for another wave of posters who refer to “this administration” and numbered amendments regardless of topic or international context.
Fr murricans can’t fathom being in an international space.
Oh ya well, go back to your country. Oh you already live there? Well…keep doing that!
There will always be one more thing.
Every time it happens, the stream of people becomes less … pleasant on average. Not to say there aren’t still good people that might come over, but the people that come at this point are pretty accepting of toxicity and are more likely to spread it.
Lemmy has already hit critical mass. More people means more bots, state actors, and trolls. But it also means more memes and small subs.
we could use more niche community/games, but we’re self sustaining for sure
Reddit is doing age verification now?? lmao
thats what facebook does, reddit wants face scan and ID verification eventually.
Im going to lift my shaft and take a front shot photo of my nutsack to send to Spez Reddit before i give in to age verification
They’re doing the double whammy. Mandatory sign-in (even on old.reddit) and any account they can’t estimate as belonging to an adult through their use of invasive spy metrics and AI will be forced to do age verification.
I mean, they’re required by the law in certain countries. With their size, there’s no way around that.
which is pushed by the same companies that wanted it in the first place, Meta is one of the oens behind the push for age verification
Yes, it’s no coincidence these laws started popping up globally since the trump administration entered office
Spez allowed a subreddit for child pedofiles to defend their actions and advocate for no age limits for statutory rape or porn. It didnt get removed until the fat people hate banning created outrage. Pretty sure the laws about not fucking children didnt dictate how he ran his platform and theyve been around a tad bit longer than age verification laws. Just sayin, dont confuse investor appeasement with choosing to follow the law. Plus i wouldnt put it past them if i found out they lobbied to have these laws past so they font have to track every click and person underneath their front end. This just made it their front door.
child pedofiles
Isn’t that… just called being normal? It’s the adult pedophiles that are the problem.
Feels like I’ve been here forever but however old my lemmy account is is how long I’ve been off reddit.
I wonder if accounts that are 18 years old will also be required to be verified.
Google did it so I assume they will
google’s login requirement conincides with reddits login popups, (reddit depends on google). one of thier current method is limiting the amount of accounts per device.
wait so google already implemented age verification? wtf?
Why should we care what people that are still using Reddit do or don’t do do?
Sorry, but anybody still there deserves whatever shit they get.
Because if they decide to come here it will affect us?
Ultimately, whatever will be will be.
It’ll be both good and bad if it happens.
While it’ll be great for the threadiverse to have more growth it will inevitably put us in the crosshairs of bot farms and AI data farmers.
I plan on going to smaller fediverse graphs if it ever gets too mainstream around here.
The moment I see a fuckin brand I am out. Joining whatever network has a zero tolerance policy for that corporate fuckery.
well I have some bad news for you. https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/21/networking-traffic/threads-has-entered-the-fediverse/
