I agree, I think Lemmy should add an option to fetch all the historical posts from a remote community. Right now it just starts federating from when the first person subscribes to that community, but it would be better if it was retroactive.

Wow, TIL.

I based that off fedidb but it seems to be very inaccurate. Obviously it wasn’t tracking until a certain point in Lemmy development.

I’ll make a list of the major instances from before the APIcalpyse of June 2023 that are still active. For the Lemmy historians 🧐. I’m mostly basing this by the top admin account on each server, because the admins are listed in order of seniority in the sidebar.

• lemmy.ml - Apr 2019
• lemmygrad - Aug 2019
• hexbear/chapo - July 2020
• szmer.info - Aug 2020
• lemmy.ca - Dec 2020
• sopuli.xyz - Feb 2021
• midwest.social - Aug 2021
• mander.xyz - Dec 2021
• beehaw.org - Jan 2022
• slrpnk.net - April 2022
• feddit.it - May 2022
• lemmy.blahaj.zone - Jan 2023
• infosec.pub - May 2023

Honorable mention to feddit.de which was an early instance too IIRC and now lives on in feddit.org

This is largely just an interesting piece of trivia, but also somewhat notable because servers generally don’t federate content from before they were founded. So the older servers will have local copies of posts and comments from the early days of Lemmy.

For instance @[email protected] actually has 2.37k posts and 1.73k comments. But sh.itjust.works only caches about 850/800 posts/comments from that account, because we only joined the network in June 2023.

Surely has to be https://sopuli.xyz/

The admin is a Finn, although the servers are technically in Germany.

Also it’s extra cool because it’s one of the true OG Lemmy servers, founded in June 2021.

All centralized services. The fediverse is theoretically resistant to that kind of process.

Also you forgot Limewire, the GOAT

Finally, I have been waiting for this.

Lemm.ee over 4,000 MAUs. Lemmy.ca and lemmy.dbzer0.com up to 1.5k after hovering around 1k for most of 2024. All of the major servers seeing solid growth. Good work lemmings, keep it up

Wow this guide is really good and easy to read on mobile, amazing work!

Once you’ve read the Silmarillion, there’s also The Children of Húrin. If you start from the Hobbit > LOTR > Silmarillion > CoH, it’s basically a steady progression of increasing epicness and tragedy.

I suppose the Silmarillion is the most epic, but Children of Húrin is the most intensely tragic.

Yes this is good to know, I wasn’t aware of the background with some of the fediverse projects.

I don’t understand the question. Pretty much all fediverse software was built with federation in mind from the start. They all started from scratch afaik, nothing was built on top of a centralized design.

They also happen to perform similar functions as earlier centralized websites, but that’s simply because those are the ways that people commonly prefer to use the internet. People use it to share photos, stream videos, connect with friends, microblog, blog, browse content aggregators, etc.

There could definitely be new paradigms of internet usage waiting to be discovered, but if the fediverse can’t even replace the existing functionality of the web first, it’d be very ambitious to start building brand new types of sites already.

In my experience most internet spaces that specifically cater to teenagers also tend to attract a lot of creeps. I think it’s probably for the best to nominally limit Lemmy to adults only, especially at this early stage.

You’re assuming that a centenarian couldn’t set up a Lemmy server? That’s ageism 😅

That’s true, originally only users that posted or commented were counted as active. Then they changed it to count users who had voted as active, even if they didn’t post or comment.

But I believe that change occured almost one year ago, in March 2024. You can see a big spike of active users at that time. Starting this January we’ve seen some really nice organic growth, although it’s not nearly to the level of the API exodus. We still need more users, but it’s really encouraging to see some solid growth after over a year of stagnation/slow decline.

Wow. Absolute legend

https://discuit.net/

One of the more commonly recommended reddit alternatives aside from Lemmy. Goes to show how far ahead we are of any other alternative, they all have virtually no activity.

Also note that we bottomed out around 37k in October 2024, so we have seen pretty significant growth since then, and it seems to be accelerating.

Lol for real?

The main thing I heard about Bluesky is that it costs like $100 mill to run your own instance or something like that, so they only have one main instance for now. They technically have federation, but for all intents and purposes, it’s just another centralized corporate service waiting to be enshittified.

The irony 🫠

Austria, Ireland, Denmark, and Finland are all DAC members and aren’t included in the graph. The graph is unequivocally misleading, which is my original point.

The article itself does have a more comprehensive table, but it uses outdated figures from several years ago. The title of the article is “List of development aid sovereign state donors” and yet it excludes major ODA donors such as Saudi Arabia, not only from the DAC list but also from the second list.

I don’t understand why people keep defending this when I outlined like 10 separate errors already. Are you even reading my comments or am I responding to bots?

It isn’t titled “foreign aid per capita among western countries” though. The fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also in the top 20 paints a very different picture of what placing highly on the list actually means.

Furthermore, it doesn’t say “among western countries with greater than 8.5m population except for Norway which is much smaller”. The caption says “among countries with large populations”, where a large population is defined as greater than 8.5 million. That’s extremely misleading and arbitrary. And then Austria and Saudi Arabia are omitted anyway, despite fitting all the above criteria.

So yeah, I would definitely go so far, and in fact I considered going further and calling it outright misinformation.

This graph is extremely misleading.

First of all it states in the caption that it only includes

highest donation rates among countries with large populations

Even of this disclaimer were true, it’s completely arbitrary and makes no sense. Norway (5.5 million) has about 8 times the population of Luxembourg (670,000). Whereas the US (340 million) has about 60 times the population of Norway. If such a size discrepancy is so meaningful that Luxembourg should be excluded, then how can it be relevant to compare Norway with the US despite the vastly larger population discrepancy? Luxembourg should be #3 btw along with Liechtenstein (2) and Monaco (4).

More damningly, they don’t even live up to their disclaimer. Taking the numbers straight from the quoted source. They randomly excluded Denmark (7) and Ireland (8), which are just as populous as Norway and almost equivalent to Sweden in per capita ODA. They also excluded Iceland (11) and Finland (12), which come in above UK/Canada/Belgium/France. And then as the cherry on top they conveniently excluded Qatar (17) and Saudi Arabia (18). The US is #19. And then it’s also missing Austria (20), UAE (21), and New Zealand (23), before you get to Australia, which is actually 24th, not 12th.

Furthermore, ODA is just a small part of the economic picture. As it states in the wikipedia article

by definition, ODA does not include private donations

The US is giving approximately $64.5 billion annually in ODA. In comparison, private charitable donations from American individuals, foundations, and corporations totalled $557 billion in 2023, with 67% of that money coming from individual donations.

Granted, many of those donations are directed towards domestic causes, but even if a relatively small percentage is directed towards foreign causes, it alters the narrative that is told by this graph. For instance, this organization is largely funded by the Gates foundation, which is a private charitable organization, and thus not included as ODA.

The foundation has donated more than $6.6 billion for global health programs, including over $1.3 billion donated as of 2012 on malaria alone, greatly increasing the dollars spent per year on malaria research. Before the Gates efforts on malaria, malaria drugmakers had largely given up on producing drugs to fight the disease, and the foundation is the world’s largest donor to research on diseases of the poor. With the help of Gates-funded vaccination drives, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000.

In conclusion, I feel like that graph helps paint a certain political narrative that isn’t even remotely accurate, partially because it randomly omits about half of the countries in the top 25, and partially because it’s measuring a very limited subset of philanthropic activity.

Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances.

This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.

Lemmy is free and collaborative, reddit is censored and exploitative. The fact that people consistently try to equate two opposite paradigms is just mind-boggling to me.