Can confirm that when choosing a Mastodon account, .social wasn't taking new users at the time. So I looked at the list and chose vmst.io because "Oh, I'm a nerd too."

I'll say that while the number of connections is far lower, so far I haven't noticed that as a problem in the limited capacity that I use Mastodon.

Any reasons for choosing discuss.tchncs.de over feddit.de?

Edit: Oh wait, is feddit.de down? Have they been having issues recently?

Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it's immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it's not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an "official" Lemmy app doesn't even have "Lemmy" in the name, and doesn't pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.

Definitely, but I guess the amount of sysadmins wanting to operate a lemmy instance is limited. Add to that the CSAM and other nasty stuff that happened at the beginning, and only a few people would be okay to manage their own instance.

Also, even a topic-focused instance would suffer from the lack of population. How many interesting topic can you find for a population of 50k? That can't be too precise, because you are talking to a very small population. Well, I guess that's why db0 and slrpnk are doing well, piracy and solarpunk are popular among Lemmy users (as well as whatever the political stance of lemmy.ml is)

I would prefer we didn’t give up on federation, but until the tools are in place to mechanically support it, I don’t see it as strictly beneficial.

A post a day in a community is a bot, more often than not, and trying to create discussion on bot posts often just falls on deaf ears.

I don’t see a reason to push for fragmentation at this time, but rather organically support active communities wherever they’re found.

I’d love for there to be a mechanical solution to fragmentation, so you don’t see so many duplicate posts in your feed and all those individual discussions are instead in one place.

Should we just give up with federation, and just aggregate all communities on LW?

No. Half the point of federation is that not only communities (instances) can carry their own content but also their own culture. Posting or commenting about a soccer personality in, say, !spain@soccer.xyz is vastly different from doing it in, say, !soccerdrugs@news.world, even if the originating link to the discussion is the same.

they are certainly stretched thin, which i would categorize more as an attackable problem than an excuse for poor performance.

i do have a few examples off the top of my head tho

• !unpopularopinion was left uterly unmoderated for months. rage bait and even some downright nazi shit was almost constant on there. any community in that situation should have been immediately shut down by admins but was not.
• !world mods have a nasty habit of butting in with mod flared comments on user reports without taking action. they defend this as “adding context” when the “context” involved is highly subjective, partisan, and verging on defense of harrassment, and not at all fitting the diversity of content that constitutes a “world news” community.
• this might be more of a general lemmy problem but there doesn’t seem to be auto-flagging going on for common sense harrasment language? like i see slurs against races, ethnicities, and the mentally disabled almost daily and they don’t get removed for hours until a user reports it sometimes.

i don’t think compounding problems imply a single compound solution.

instead, tackle each problem directly.

• encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
• encourage installment of more mods to combat ineffectual moderation
• call for transparency in moderator selection to combat cronyism

Heyo! Hello to you.

I mean, I get it. I saw the announcement that bad-faith posts from lemmy.world were creating so much moderation load that it was simply impossible for them to federate with LW and have the kind of community they wanted to have. And I thought, well that's kind of surprising to me, IDK what that's about. And then I started participating more heavily on lemmy.world and then I thought, oooooohh, that's what they were talking about. It all makes sense now.

Alright, good to know! I see if I can find stuff to post there, but usually I post to !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee as there is some overlap, and the community got some traction a few days ago