The honest answer is that we’re still trying to get The Agora running, and a backlog developed in the process. We are working on it, it’s just going to take some time to sort through the old votes. We’ve been focused on cleaning up the process so we don’t have this problem moving forward.

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don’t love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone’s attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn’t caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I’m sure it’s something we’ll need to address internally, but it’s just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

So far, we have a captcha on account creation now and it seems to be working (from what I’ve seen, anyway)

It’ll be a tough balancing act though. Relatively frictionless sign-up has been great for us, and anything that deals with bots will also affect that. Whatever else we may end up doing will need to be carefully considered.

I don’t even really think about it, I just comment if I have something to say. At worst, nobody reads it and I was shouting into the void for a minute.

But the Lemmy userbase isn’t massive yet, so those week+ old posts still see more engagement than you’d think.

And to make matters annoying, restarting the service that causes the sorting bug can trigger some other bugs (federation errors iirc). So there isn’t a “right” answer until the real fix comes.

Because of federation, I just didn’t think about it too hard. I clicked on Sh.itjust.works because the name made me giggle when I saw it, and signed up immediately because the first post I saw was the boss sharing server stats and being totally transparent about operations and intentions. At the time, it was one of the smaller instances that might not last.

Choosing “wrong” never seemed like a big deal, it’s not hard to start fresh somewhere else if needed.

While true, we already have tools to work around it here. Accounts can be flagged as bots, and you can auto-hide posts from bot accounts.

I’m assuming an auto-mod would bypass that by design, but it’ll work against the flood of student projects that Reddit threads were full of.

There are situations where it can be helpful, but in general I don’t think intentional cross-posting is going to help. It could just as easily homogenize the communities and stifle what momentum we do have.

Communities will establish themselves organically over time, as we’ve seen with every platform before this. Trying to force it, or really influence the process at all, is just as likely to rub some folks the wrong way and lead to more fragmentation.

Until things settle, it seems like a more effective tactic is to choose where you want to focus your attention and add to the content in a natural way. Instead of cross-posting, just decide on a “main” community for any given topic for yourself and contribute there in a meaningful way. If another community in the same space looks like it’s taking over, reevaluate where you want to place your focus. Help build somewhere for the sake of building, but not for the sake of the numbers.

Alternatively, just ignore the “problem” completely and trust the process. Post in the first relevant community that springs to mind. Engage with posts as they come through your feed without paying any mind to the size of the source. The most important thing is increasing total user count across the Fediverse, and diverse activity can be a huge drive for that.

Lemmings is fun, but it also has decades of being used as an insult to contend with. I do hope it catches on, but I’m trying to stick to the boring/generic “users” until then.

You’d think that, but we’re solidly in the “second tier” of popularity. Last I looked we were something like 5th most active users, 8th most total users among instances that are making that data available.

Play store already had that behavior from at least the previous version, and just got the changed inbox behavior this morning. They’re keeping parity between them pretty well.

It’s crazy that there are so any users already, but not a surprise. This kind of transparency is exactly what a lot of us were looking for, and it’s the recipe for a thriving community going forward.

The “no porn” thing may upset some folks, but it makes sense. Porn can be a moderation (and liability) minefield, especially opening the floodgates right away. It could be a net-benefit at some point in the future, but until then it’s easy enough to create an account on another instance that wants to take the heat.

And for what it’s worth regarding the financial side, donations feel like the way to go. With everything Reddit is doing right now, and other platforms have done in the past, “outside money” is becoming the harbinger of doom for online communities. Plenty of us would be happy to pitch in to keep it in house, especially when you post those sexy resource graphs that would show exactly where our money is going.