PixelFed has increased the Fediverse's monthly active users by over 40% in the last few weeks, how do we feel?
You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?
I feel like I didn't really recognize having different "platforms" like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a "first" impression with people.
Lemmy is full of bad news, hate and toxicity while pixelfed is full of artists and people sharing cool pictures and their passion. Visiting my pixelfed account from 2023 a few days ago set such a contrast with what I see on lemmy that I started using it regularly. It really felt weird to visit such a wholesome place after using lemmy for a long time. Now I use pixelfed to balance out the bad stuff from lemmy for maintaining my mental health and to appreciate the art which is not common on lemmy.
It’s like Reddit and you gotta filter out the bullshit. Adding Elon, Musk, Trump, and RFK to my block list improved my mental health quite a bit. Hopefully if it’s egregious enough it will slip through and I won’t be blind sided by some terrible thing they’re doing. That’s the only downside.
The problem is that Lemmy isn't at the point where I can browse it like I do on Reddit.
After the API thing killed my main reddit app, I just lurk on like 4 1 million+ user sports/video game/military meme subreddits and check on them every 1h/30min to see 10 new posts or any important news that happened. I check r/all maybe like once every few months.
The relevant lemmys just aren't that active or don't have low-effort post rules, so I'm kind of stuck browsing the front page of Lemmy if I want to see more than 10 posts per day
well, i'm against individual workarounds for common problems, there should be common solutions.
otherwise you just start alienating 99% of the users who won't put in the effort to install an extra app just to get that filtering, or if using the web interface on mobile, it's just not possible.
For our instance jlai.lu, we try to balance bad news with the forum libre, where we can share picture, movie, book, some daily game...i think it work pretty well because everyone share what they love.
For News, we separated usa, israel-palestine from world news so it offers a place where anyone can post there or filter. And it let other communities breath.
The political stuff is leaking into any other community though. I've already blocked every politics specific and news specific community and a handful other communities and I still get a lot of that. I'm also blocking a few keywords as well, this stuff just gets through regardless of what you do and in no small amount either.