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?

FYI, on your web-page, in the “Heros” section, the “R” in Warrior is cut off. Same with the “ER” of sorcerer.

In game, Decard Cain’s “Gossip” has an bug. I think it’s supposed to be a new line but is missing the slash so is just being printed as text.

Overall, kind of fun nostalgia. It really needs optimization though, that was rough a rough play through. I’d say the enemies need to be more challenging, but after fixing the low frame-rates. Otherwise, everyone will just die.

Haha. No worries, it happens. Glad you’re up and running again though :)

I never posted my more complicated version (all instances as of August with at least 50 MAU) since people were already having trouble with the first one …

I’d say post for you. That’s what !fedilytics@piefed.zip is for me. If other people like it, great, but I’m doing the analysis because I’m interested in it.

… if you’d like I can send it to you when I get a chance (I think I DM’ed you a work-in-progress version of it at one point?), or post it myself for you to reference.

I believe we chatted briefly about your next version, but I don’t recall ever seeing it. I’d say post it, so I can link to it easier. I’m not sure how I’d host it in the wiki otherwise (not very familiar with that part of Piefed).

One thing I think including more instances demonstrates better is some of the ‘cliques’, mainly the similar defederation patterns between ‘flotilla’ instances. It also helps to show why the .zip instances are better for people who want less top-down defederation applied to them.

Sounds interesting. I look forward to seeing the new version :)

It’s working for piefed.zip (Voyager: 2.49.1, Android: 16). So may be a version issue. Might be worth updating Voyager to see if that fixes the issue.

It must have just federated when I tapped on the link

Yeah, it’s weird like that. I had that happen with one com I subscribed to, nothing for a month and then no issues since.

thanks again for your dedication!

Thanks and by the way, I’m using your defederation post in the fedigrow’s “Community Building Wiki” (“Visualization of Threadiverse Defederation”).

Appreciate the shout out. There was actually a new post yesterday. If you aren’t seeing it, there may be a federation issue.

Regardless, the most up to date number is 41565 MAU (relatively steady year-over-year, but slightly up).

Edit: I don’t post it, but since OP asked about daily users, there were at least 15444 DAU yesterday (Lemmy: 12864, Piefed: 2580, Mbin: ? (doesn’t report DAU)).

Changed some wording for easier reading/clarity.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve added it to the post body list :)

No worries :)

Also, if you didn’t see my edit, !andfinally@feddit.uk might also work for you.

Hmm. How does !offbeat@lemmy.ca look to you? Doesn’t look too active (~1 post per week), but has 1K Users / 6 Months, so decent reach.

There’s a couple others I found, but they are much smaller and less active:
!onion@piefed.world
!offbeat@lemmy.world

Edit: Looks like the mod of !offbeat@lemmy.ca may be MIA (last activity 6 months ago). The sidebar does link to !andfinally@feddit.uk which seems more active 2-4 posts per week and 970 Users / 6 Months.

My understanding is that Piefed does group the posts together, but that no apps currently implement that feature.

From Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz, it sounds like the Connect app does stack the posts, but that may be through their own feature and not Piefed’s (no idea). I just looked for a site or post that compared app features and couldn’t find one that listed grouping cross-posts.

My recollection is that Lemmy 1.0 may have cross-post grouping, but I don’t see it listed as a feature on 1.0 beta testing post.

The Catodon search is pretty cool. Thanks for the link :)

Yeah, the Lemmy.ml and reddthat.com seem abandoned for the last 3 years (probably unified onto meander.xyz before it died).

I’m the mod of the piefed.zip one. We (die4ever @retrolemmy.com and I) made it in an attempt to save the mander.xyz posts, but it didn’t back fill for new subscribers. So, we decided if the community needed to start over, might as well start it over on a more appropriate instance (slrpnk.net).

Unfortunately, slrpnk.net went down and will be down for a couple months. Given the mander.xyz community was not a very active one, I think just waiting for slrpnk.net to return is fine.

I don’t see a need to keep around an empty/locked community that just links to the alive community. I think it just adds to confusion. So, once the slrpnk.net community is back up and die4ever has cross-posted all the remaining mander.xyz posts, I plan to asks the piefed.zip admins to delete the community.

Thanks for looking out though :)

I think there could be definite overlap between the too, but my recollection of the conversation with squirrel, I suspect “rooftops” community would have a significant difference in type posts (mostly personal camera POVs).

Still good idea and I’ll add it to the post body for cross-post potential. Thanks :)

I think the posts target two different aspects (starting and maintaining communities). So, both have value in my eyes, but ultimately you’re the one posting them and supervising them. If you’re seeing value in them, I’d say keep going. If not, maybe have them go on hiatus for a while.

If you keep them going, it might be worth adding more ‘hooks’ to the post body. Example: asking about any user milestones (subscribers, contributors, posts, etc.), if they had any ‘challenges’ this week (could be posting issues, mod action issues, scheduling, etc.), or things along those lines.

Thank you for those posts

No problem :)

This seems to be unlucky, as slrpnk.net is also down at the moment.

Haha. First, mander.xyz, now slrpnk.net. Between those we tried to move it to piefed.zip, and piefed.zip just had a cryptomining attack stopped. So, obvious conclusion: the Ecospheres community is cursed…

Hmm. I see 3 posts from you. 2 with working video and this one with a link to imgur.

Could be a federation delay (.zip hasn’t gotten the delete request yet).

Edit: Could also be a delay at reddthat.com

Previous post works for me, but going to imgur via this post also worked (android, voyager).

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 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”). I think using the word “dictatorship” at all is unlikely to go well or attract the people you want that would be okay with giving up power, once they have it.

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.

Edit: added an additional sentence to the ml discussion.

Looks like the Threadiverse is ~45k. So, relatively stable and up year-over-year. Peak would have been 2023-07-17 at 76585 MAU (Lemmy + Mbin/Kbin; during the Reddit 3rd party exodus?).

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.