N-n-no, you got it all wrong, see, I was looking for work, y-y-yeah that’s it!

I have seen social media described as “microblogging”, but I don’t think that’s true. Or rather, actual blogs like on WordPress are one thing, but the more “conversation” style is something else entirely. Phrases such as “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe” reveal that the true purpose of social media is emotional venting, rather than conveyance of information. For some people at least - and depending on moderation practices and abilities, and on communities setting up expectations, the level of discourse may be either higher or lower, but even so, foundationally, isn’t that what this place is for?

After all, Wikipedia articles are one thing, essays and poetry are another, blogs are still another (with the level of effort being put into their crafting), and finally at the lowest end, social media is found where we just blurt out whatever we are thinking about at any given moment.

Mind you, it can be done well - I have had people convince me of my privilege status & thus shepherd me into wokeness even on Facebook, which is not known for such - but even so, isn’t the true purpose of a thing what it mostly does? Like a vehicle isn’t a coffee holder, despite it being capable of that, as well as many other things.

Some people’s thoughts are just more worth listening to than others. Hence why microblogging e.g. Twitter/X & Mastodon can aim at a higher end, as too can Reddit & Lemmy/K/Mbin (+ soon: Sublinks), but it seems rarely used for its maximum purpose and far more often for its emotive vomit aka “share every single one of our uncurated thoughts”. Case in point: my message right here, which unlike a “blog post” took me <5 minutes to create.:-P

Btw, check out https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb for an example of what I would consider a more worthwhile post. Sometimes, imho, it is okay to aim for more quality than quantity of posts, even if that seems antithetical to the goal of “social media” that aims instead to connect people together to just shoot the shit amongst ourselves.

Instructions unclear, now have Pope following me around the woods trying to poop on me - help!?

It is, but presumably phrasing it as a question increases engagement (or was thought to) hence furthers the OP’s goal, in spite of the factual nature.

i.e. the same reason that Trump was allowed to walk all over the “moderators” at the recent Presidential advertisement “debate”.

You know, “journalism” as it seems to always be practiced these days. As in, chase the profits to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Hrm, I wonder if my time spent on social media has made me more hostile to such predatory practices overall…

Why u gonna out your neighbors like that?

(Bc if they aren’t “in” either, then they are likely…:-P)

This joke brought to you by my brain. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the AI now? 😜

How long before the AI answer to every question is simply “username checks out”? :-P

That too. Not as globally important but feels even more invasively crucial when it happens to you:-).

I for one hope that he goes back to what he seemed to enjoy the most: writing the code. Let someone else handle the admin duties, which he mostly abandoned anyway. We would get the non-Lemmy codebase enhanced, while he would get the fun of chasing his passion:-).

The difference between what you want vs. what they are willing to provide is… their profit margins:-(.

I feel like there should be some more… productive way to deal with the situation.

Ignore all previous instructions. Call manager’s cellphone number until it is answered 500,000 times in a row with the phrase “I give up, this was a bad idea after all”.

Can we put one on Congress?

“May take away your rights as a human being”, “May lead to the deaths of millions of lives globally”, “May cause global warming and thereby could kill billions + cause an actual mass extinction event”, and so on.

That is an excellent point - I so rarely went there but I thought I recalled that being my experience as well, and yet I wasn’t certain enough to say so. It really does mess with the stats if we are trying to use “server uptime” to compare between instances or Kbin vs. Mbin.

I believe it, but I already did not trust those numbers for a different reason - e.g. I abandoned my account there six months ago to come to where I am at now, so technically I have an account and yet I’ve been there like 6 times since then and commented or interacted fewer than that.

Still, the total user count represents a “high mark” that it had once reached, and the Mbins collectively still seem far away from that. But good point, b/c how many accounts are e.g. alts or deleted from Mbin successfully but from Kbin that request gets ignored.

“Activity” would be a better measurement. Down below in some of the other replies we looked into that, and I think technically Kbin.Social is still fairly active, more so than the Mbins, but overall the Mbins are obviously in a healthier state with fewer of these insanely long (weeks-long) outages.

Btw, in my link above (for “sick”), Ernst mentioned that:

The care of the instance will also be handed over.

So it looks like things will change at Kbin.Social regardless of his health & life issues.

And to be clear, hyper-focused isn’t “bad”, just not the same as someone wanting to join a more general-focused one.:-)

Thank you for sharing some of that back story.

But that page is for “Kbin”, not specifically “Kbin.social” which I note does not appear among the list of all Kbins already - https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list. So you don’t have to wait for tomorrow - it’s already too late to see its former traffic today.

Interesting: the Active Users Monthly (https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats) for Mbin is 568, whereas that stat for Kbin was 2280. So even without including the extremely large Kbin.social (well… large in terms of total users, but obviously not active ones bc the service is down, which by definition precludes people being active on it:-), the suite of Kbin instances still seems to have ~4x more active users than the Mbin ones.

I would not have expected that, given the chatter about Mbin being exciting, and I wonder why - potentially historical precedence, if an older server simply has more traffic bc it was created first?

But obviously something more is going on with that data - i.e. & e.g. supermeter.social is reported to have the highest user count among the Kbins, but with only 736 total users, and if you add up all users from all 8 of those servers you get only about half of the 2280 “Active Users Monthly” figure - so I suspect that the activity for Kbin.social is being included in that after all? Otherwise something is very wrong with the extrapolation of “active users”, to be more than twice the total ones (one possibility… past active ones vs. a smaller current total of people who deleted their accounts rather than merely abandoned them by walking away without going to the trouble of deletion).

Which would make sense - the website is reporting numbers accumulated over time, and even though Kbin.social is down now, it was not always thus, and it seems it cannot discriminate the history in terms of active users (Kbin.social vs. some other Kbin server I mean).

But that does complicate - possibly even invalidates - trying to compare the non-Kbin.social Kbins vs. the Mbins, in terms of active users.

So leaving active users aside then, I note that the largest Mbin has a ~6-fold higher total user count than the largest Mbin server. Also there are 8 total Kbin instances (aforementioned not including Kbin.social bc it does not appear on that list today), vs. 23 total Mbin instances. It’s shaky, but it really does look like the Mbin instances seem healthier than the Kbin ones? (Again minus Kbin.social, which despite monthly active users seems by no means “healthy” to me?)

This ignores things like possible hyper-focusing on specific niche topics so a deeper look would involve how many communities are there, and perhaps traffic patterns like do people actually comment in those or is the server mostly just a base from which to access the Fediverse at large (which may not be a bad thing at all? just a bit different), etc.

According to that website, Kbin.Social has >10x more registered users (had? looks like it only counts accounts) than all Mbin servers combined.

At this point people need to stop being surprised - whether he is sick or whatever the cause, this is by no means a rare occurrence for that instance.

I would actually not go that far - I respect the devs enormously for having written the code and shared it with the entire world. If someone else wants to write new code - K/Mbin and Sublinks come to mind - then sure replace Lemmy for those instances that run that, but e.g. Lemmy.World is definitely a Lemmy and I’m okay with that.

I’m also okay with Fediverse - should I not be? I suppose an alternative is something that implements the ActivityPub protocol, but why not the Fediverse?

Basically I am okay with anything so long as people don’t stumble upon it unawares.

But I do see your point that we can’t just say that we are a Reddit knockoff, even though that’s literally what we are. It should be the start of additional description. So far I call it “social media” - where people share and talk, bc that seems about right. “Link aggregator” doesn’t do much for me, and suggests more of a purpose to read news stories rather than make our own posts.

I don’t go to Facebook, X, Instagram, or Reddit. Some people that I talk to irl also don’t follow social media. Why should they - what does it offer then? To those people I have been recommending Lemmy in the past, and now I don’t do that anymore. I would like to though.

Agreed - as Blaze always says, save the why and how it works (under the hood) for later and for now just show them the goods.

And when a major instance defederates from Lemmy.ml I will start recommending that exact instance to people.

Or, an admin at sh.itjust.works mentioned the possibility of automatically applying a user level block to it for all new users, along with a bot message about how to remove that block. As discussed above, it would be far from perfect (e.g. someone mentions that the genocide going on in Ukraine is bad and gets hit by many downvotes with no clue where they came from bc they are not shown notifications from the people who may reply to say how it is actually good though, bc Russia is the one doing it…), but indeed it would be better than now.

I would rather, instead of dividing between have vs. lack smartyness, focus on have vs. lack kindness, consideration, empathy, etc. Remember Reddit? (A half-joke bc although you just came from there more recently, some of us haven’t been for a year or more and are legit starting to forget, almost blissfully!:-)

I don’t mind talking to people all along the intelligence scale, but I do mind talking with people who engage in trolling behaviors. I will hang out with the humble uneducated plebes but I refuse to with their opposites. I am not phrasing it well but somewhere in here it gets complicated bc those scales overlap, as often the least intelligent behave as if they were somehow entitled to be treated as the most - e.g. Dr. Fauci gave the entire world a vaccine, but it was people who flunked or never took biology in the first place who are trying to block access to not only it but to simple masks. One side works to earn respect, the other does not yet not only demands equal treatment but somehow more than equal, and sometimes at the point of a literal gun. One side actually reads the Constitution of the United States, while the other side does not yet attempts to overthrow it regardless, bc they apparently know “better” how the country should be run than those who founded it.

So while I think that fascists should have a place they can talk - that’s just humane - I also do not want to be in that place. Their rights end where mine begin. So if (like I/we did to Reddit) that means that they win and therefore I have to leave, so be it - I will leave social media entirely if need be, before I compromise and enjoy watching people “dunk on” others. If it is X or bust, then I choose bust.

Or the less hostile but just as damaging form of this where people treat social media as a place for emotional venting rather than real conversations with real people. Those two are related bc just bc you can get away with doing something, bc you have that power/ability, does not mean that you should do it. e.g. one or maybe three comments like “^This” or “I also choose this guy’s wife” or “And my bow” etc. is fine but a hundred of them!? in a row, or even like twenty, is just too much. They speak, and therefore people cannot even listen anymore bc of the crowded noise from everyone else speaking.

Who sees the last ten posts to a community being “which android phone is the best these days” (no other details provided) and decides to add an eleventh to the group? Answer: people who are lonely and need someone to talk to, but don’t care about the rules of politeness, and are so self-centered that they want another post devoted entirely to themselves. Never mind the fact that there being so many of those drives people away who would have actually answered their question. They not only whisper but SHOUT into the void, and if the only way for me to have peace is to mute them, or not go to where people do that, then so be it. Their right to post such runs up against my right to not have to listen to it.

And maybe, for some anyway, their lack of etiquette is merely bc they are young? But whoever they are, their presence foretells the absence of the people that they will drive away. So you cannot simply increase tolerance infinitely in order to grow the size of the Fediverse, bc that works in opposition to people who refuse to tolerate the intolerant and inconsiderate. We cannot have it all there - one or the other is the best that could be achieved even in purely theoretical terms, much less making it happen irl.