Fwiw this is mainly the most popular subs. The niche subs are much more chill, though still Reddit hence full of bot spam, influencers trying to pretend to offer organic content that was not bought and paid for, and people who overall are just spoiling for a fight (which if we are honest, the latter category used to include most of us here?:-).

Not that I am advocating for Reddit, mind you, just saying that you either have to go to where the content is - Facebook, Insta, Reddit, Xhitter/Bluesky, Tiktok - or else give up on knowing stuff altogether. Which if you are talking about like events in your local town, then at least Reddit seems preferable to the others?

Obligatory fuck spez, I’m just acknowledging that the network effect is real, yo.

Endless nostaglia, “remember this?” posts

Are you ready to get banned? Because that kind of talk will get you banned once they hold the reins.

You’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned!

Want to read more Lemmy? Download the app and log in!

The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.

Note that the numbers then are still shrinking.

I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely not additional people, or rather only some are but nobody knows how much.

Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don’t know the details there.

I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.

That’s highly odd. Hopefully someone looks into that more - perhaps there’s a difference in what instances are allowed to be counted (like pure bot-spam and CSAM ones filtered by one site but not the other? I have no idea).

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.

just block all “US politics” communities and downvote every single post that mentions trump (or the democratic alternative candidate) that appears outside of those comms.

Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit… and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.

Right: people are not so much leaving PieFed as they are leaving the Threadiverse overall, and Lemmy in particular.

Since the amount of growth in PieFed does not offset the decrease in MAUs in Lemmy (especially over the long term, from the 65K), people are still leaving “the Threadiverse” overall, even despite PieFed’s recent growth.

I wanted to avoid commenting on the goodness or badness of these trends, but yes PieFed’s recent growth is somewhat encouraging, though tiny.

Person below is using an incorrect understanding of liberalism too (economic).

When I say liberal, I’m referring to the political philosophy of liberalism, which is rooted in individualism and capital, and emerged through the cisheteropatriarchal and white supremacist system of settler-colonialism. People perceive of this as meaning “progressive” or “freedom” because much of the early rhetoric surrounding liberalism (such as the early republican era in the Americas) involved a claim to moral righteousness under the guise of individual freedoms. Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism as an economic system (which the other commenter here misidentified as liberalism), but it would be distortive to not recognize the specificities of either respectively.

Since liberalism has been the proponent of capitalism and EuroAmerican imperialism for the past couple centuries, it has developed a durability through the appropriation and subsequent assimilation of potentially challenging political movements; such as those based in social justice. Consequently, liberals have effectively coopted the language of equality and progress as natural elements of its politics, despite it consistently disarming and presently continues its genocidal campaign against vulnerable groups.

Conservatism is less a cohesive set of politics than it is the rhetoric of liberals with grievances about the failure of the system to deliver the privilege they feel entitled to, and which this system does assure them. So, a conservative liberal may vaugely subscribe to the notion of “anti-racism” but will inevitably subscribe to racist values that are more consistent with the imperatives of a white supremacist system than they are challenging of it.

Most people in Europe and North America subscribe to liberalism. Most liberals lack a level of political literacy to identify how they subscribe to it, and many mistake themselves as “leftists” or non-liberal “conservatives,” even though their values are actually closely aligned. Since I genuinely do not subscribe to liberalism, many liberals on Lemmy self-report when they take issue with some genuine anti-racism, or any anti-bigotry in general when it doesn’t align with their comfort level (most of which have been Canadians or Euros who feel free to openly express these views with the confidence that they’re “better than Americans”).

Conservatives are a subset of liberals.