Yeah, I am just speaking as a general principle - not whatever happened here. Mass downvoting isn’t at all observed like that anyway. It’s the behaviour from some individual accounts that repeatedly downvote different threads from a specific community. So you’d be looking at habits across threads.

If in my community (for instance) someone was to come in and just downvote the entire first page, I’d probably ban them because that would just be a crude attempt to target it. And again: downvoting like that is worse for smaller communities trying to grow.

Anyone banning for downvoting is incredibly petty or thin skinned, just my observation. If it wasn’t for the instance shutting down, it would have made a good post on yptb. Reading other comment threads on this post support the thin skinned theory imho. I just happened to be browsing all when I found the post. Looking at my subs, I wasn’t subscribed to any community there.

What about in the context of mass-downvoters? I can’t speak for Dubvee, but mass-downvoters do exist - and they can be corrosive for smaller communities trying to grow, as early downvotes of threads can effectively kill them. These are accounts that seem to primarily downvote and don’t actually interact on-site, and have no real pattern to it. This kind of response has little to do with sensitivity.

He had changed his position after I wrote that comment I believe.

Apparently, reading the details on there - he might not shut it down.

No idea, but it’s not an active instance so idk what happened.

There’s two factors to this. Lemmy has been slow on developing new features. Eventually people give up despite all the promises. This sort of competition was inevitable, and two - and this cannot be changed - there’s a lot of resentment and resistance to using their software for political reasons.

I don’t know the details of all decisions lemmy.world instance admins have made, but it seems to me that the #1 instance will always generate the most animosity because it’s far more likely than any other instance to find itself in situations where they’re pressed to make decisions by their userbase.

Servers with 20% of the users and 10% of the communities, with only like a dozen ‘active’ communities will simply hardly ever be in that position and generate no meaningful pushback so they’ll always look good by comparison. Additionally, even lemmy.world community mods can generate hostility based on decisions they made despite them having nothing to do with the instance management - and since lemmy.world dominates, you’re much more likely to be posting in a lemmy.world community.

“Normies”? How?

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?

What reporters?

Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

For the reasons above. It’s not that they are “afraid of growth”, but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.

What changes are people afraid of? What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?

Why didn’t they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)

No idea.

Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?

Yeah, there might be. But it’d have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don’t know of any right now.

I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.

The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.

The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.

When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.

You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by “Lemmy” I did mean the wider Fediverse.

In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.

When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

Public voting, or at least semi public-voting helps cultivate a high-trust culture on-site in my opinion. And being able to remove repeat offending downvoters who do it nonetheless is very useful.

I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. As that kind of behaviour now is more-or-less confined to non-interacting support/troll accounts, it’s much rarer of a problem. Unlike Reddit when a lot of threads can quickly get downvote buried instantly for seemingly no reason.

And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it’s gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.

It was gaining momentum anyway, but the big reason was the collapse of lemm.ee - which held many medium-sized communities having to find a new home. A lot (not all) chose piefed.

Piefed isn’t a centralised system itself. There isn’t just one Piefed instance.

That’s a strange comparison. I imagine someone who objects to the politics of the lemmy developers would also object to similar political expression said by anyone.

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