It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
I really wonder where they're going. I can't find any substitute for this little purgatory. Piefed? I'm not a fan of the UI. Masto? Twitter's a weird endless conversation space without proper organization and it makes me want to scream. Modern social media? We'd have vastly divergent desires if that's where they went.
Maybe they aren't going anywhere. Just dumping social media. I find Lemmy a lot less toxic than reddit but it's still basically a reddit hive mind.
Hacker news has been a nice place to browse. Yes a lot of the people are the most AI silicon valley brained ghouls but its offset by the entertainment of seeing them earnestly say the quiet part out loud. and because the forum has rules about sincerity thoughtful engagement you can open a thread and actually read a good discussion with intelligent comments.
Hacker news generally flags and shuts down posts critical of tech bros, capitalism, or the right wing.
Lobste.rs is a better alternative to HN.
There is a no politics rule but I see plenty of anti right wing, critical of tech bro and capitalism posts. The posts getting flagged are generally pretty low effort garbage.
I wonder what it says about social media that a news aggregator started in 2007 whose minimalist interface hasn't changed much since then and which is operated by a venture capital firm to shovel ads for their own investments is literally peak social media for a certain demographic. Like, maybe that's all that's really needed. There should be a news aggregator for people who like cars or for people who like knitting or whatever and they should all look and behave just like Hacker News. A car company just needs to start one of these and do good moderation. Bingo. Social media is solved. Go home. It's over. All the ideas since then? Microblogging? ActivityPub? Subreddits/communities? Apps? It's all unneeded.
Fwiw, a number of highly popular 3rd-party apps including Voyager now offer support for PieFed. Most do not provide the full range of features as compared to the web interface, though some like Interstellar provide the large majority of them - see fully detailed listing of each app and which features are supported at https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.
Anyway, I confirm first-hand that using Voyager to access a PieFed instance is nearly identical to accessing a Lemmy one, except for the gain in back-end functionality of PieFed doing what Lemmy cannot (e.g. you apply some settings rarely in the web UI - maybe a couple times a year - and then those continue to function as you switch to more daily usage in your app of choice).
So use whatever you like - sh.itjust.works seems to me to be a fine instance - but I'm just saying that for a new person joining the Threadiverse, the web browser UI of PieFed is not the only or even the main way that people can choose to access it.
I used to download an app for everything, but now I can't talk myself into so much as considering it. Unfortunately, it's web interface or nothing for me
If it's privacy you are worried about, note that several alternatives like Voyager are FOSS.
But otherwise, yeah then that leaves you with the web UI, or at most a pinned webapp, which constrains you to the standard web UI.
Unless the PyLova fork of PieFed begins offering more tweaks to the UI that you want to see. The developer team is actively soliciting suggestions and have implemented a couple of mine already - like adding downvotes next to upvote counts - so you might voice your preferences to them to see if they can address your concerns.
It started out about security before it turned into tool fixation. I prefer to have a robust catch-all for every situation, and web browsers fill that niche incredibly well. 99% of the time, I won't even consider anything besides hopping onto Firefox. The 1% is bullshit banking apps.
And I'm currently super busy, but I will absolutely check out pylova this weekend. If it is to pieced as mbin is to kbin, there's plenty for me to be excited about!
Pretty much, yeah. Except PieFed still exists whereas Kbin died off, though originally the two existed side-by-side. Rimu has even grabbed code from PyLova before, so I presume they will end up sharing back and forth despite the personal contention.