Just say 40,000. Which is a pathetic number, but perfectly fine for the type of niche communities budding up here and there across all the domains connected together here.
The fundamental flaw with microblogging is that people follow other people. Those people then spew a bunch of random posts on all sorts of topics. Very few people are consistently interesting, leading to a timeline / feed of random crap with a few nuggets of goodness scattered through it. This is unavoidable because of the person-follows-person architecture.
There are other pernicious effects that come from centering the individual. The narcissism, defensiveness, dunking are all enflamed, rewarded and promoted. Mastodon avoids some of this by not using a recommendation algorithm but the fundamental mistake of centering of the individual remains.
Also short-form content tends to be brainrot that destroys attention spans and reduces complex issues to bite-sized hand grenades to lob at The Other.
Combine hand grenades with narcissism and news/politics and the result is kinda predictable in hindsight.
Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.
Read some more about it here (don't click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:
Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.
TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn't, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).
Yeah I need to take another look at piefed. Thanks for the read.
But man the best part is the resources it consumes. Let me remind you that Lemmy puts a load of 12 on the server, when I turn off Lemmy the load with the other 13 web services running on the server is 0.5 and when I turn on PieFed the load is 1.
It's a lot easier to complain than it is to make the world a better place. And before you think that that's a complete agreement with your reasoning, note that 1) Your comment is also an easy complaint and 2) Does this mean that people who can't produce quality content shouldn't be allowed to complain when there's a lack of it?
The big irony here is that OP actually went to the effort of creating content, even if it was "only" a complaint.
threaded-discussion server products require far more resources than a simple mastodon, twitter like server. if you want to federate with the threadiverse its going to be resource intensive.
twitter/mastodon is just an old man shouting into the cloud (single to many). the discussion is very limited in scope. forums (many to many) are much more intensive due to the volume of human activity and its nested interactions with said data.
even if you just look at the biggest players thats dozens of servers with 100k users all upvoting/replying/moderating and your instance needs to process that if you want a decent interaction.
First link at least is wildly over-claiming the difference. The data they describe is all cached in the browser and occurs once. PieFed uses ActivityPub, so network differences are moot since the same data transfers.
fediverse@lemmy.world
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.