Had to look it up, sounds like an interesting game!

Kaid Ali (literally Ali the Boss)

from now on I demand to be known as Kaid Sergio.

the Genoese Republic entrusted its coastline defense to a local captain, the nobleman Andrea Doria

FUN FACT: the Italian football team Sampdoria is (partially) named after Andrea Doria.

Anyone up for a treat needs to see this painting of Andra Doria as Neptune (mildly NSFW): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Angelo_Bronzino_-_Portrait_of_Andrea_Doria_as_Neptune_-_WGA3261.jpg

Hanging with the homies, chewing on khat…

I use firefox to log into pixelfed, dark mode works on that. (Dark Mode Reader extension fwiw). haven’t tried it on firefox android tho.

I seem to remember Lemmy had a harder crash

iirc during the r$ddit API debacle, Lemmy went from 1000 MAUs (40 MAU for kbin) to a peak of around 70k then down to around 38k MAUs (lemmy + kbin). However I think this was only counting posts and comments as “activity”, I think it was around March 2024 they started counting up/downvotes as well and the MAUs stabilized in the lower 40ks for the rest of the year and is now slowly rising.

Yeah this is looking to be a really good growth period. Pixelfed went from 15K in late December to a peak of 300K plus, and if it levels out at 150K that’s decent. I don’t think you want to suddenly grow too fast on a fediverse platform with a single part-time developer who’s also (singlehandedly?) running the main instance.

One thing I wonder is: how many of those people were already active on other fediverse platforms…

As expected, after growing and plateauing, pixelfed’s number of Monthly Active Users is now ebbing. If I understand the MAU stat correctly, this is because

• users who posted/liked/commented over a month ago haven’t done so since (retention)
• new users haven’t been checking it out as much – a month ago this was driven by external events (mostly Zuck turning pro-Trump, I think.)

As far as retention, I’m rooting for 200K+ but it looks like it might be around 150K. If I understand the Monthly Active User stat correctly, the line’s going down because (a) new users have stopped joining as much and (b) people who posted/liked/commented over a month ago haven’t done so since. I’m guessing that people who do this professionally have some kind of data-driven model that compares the ebb rate with the earlier decline growth rate, and has sample curves from previous social media growth periods. Just by eyeballing it, looks like over the last week pixelfed has lost like 10-20k users per day, whereas the month before the growth rate was around 40k per day.

As far as external events, John Oliver briefly flashed the Pixelfed logo on screen this Sunday, maybe that’s why the ebb was only 7k yesterday (a day or two to download and check things out before interacting?) Hey, people like 50501 are promoting boycotts of Amazon, Target, etc. maybe we should suggest boycotts of corporate social media? 50501 is organizing on r$ddit so I doubt they’d go for a complete boycott, but maybe it could be an “explore alternatives” or “bug out plan for social media” day or something.

Dunno, I like the fact that people here are tech-savvy. My HS guidance counselor said I should always hang out with people that are smarter than I am. That’s why I like it here, everypony seems so knowledgable.

Maybe Britain never invaded Guatemala, but arguably they did steal Belize from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belizean–Guatemalan_territorial_dispute

I recognize your name and appreciate your efforts, fam!

Say, are you saying that it’s possible to take an existing Mastodon post, and post it into Lemmy? If so can you pliz point me to someplace that says how to do that? So far I’ve only seen this guide: https://anonsys.net/display/bf69967c-1467-8270-7e3d-48d984455929 and it only says how to crosspost a new Mastodon post, not an existing Mastodon post.

The article seems well-written, except that:

the fediverse — the open social web powered by the protocol ActivityPub also used by Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, and others.

Seriously? Flipboard has like one thousand Monthly Active Users and we have like 50 times that, but we’re like “and others” lel… I guess they didn’t mention Pixelfed either tho and it’s a lot “hotter”…

the more popular places on the Fediverse seem to be stagnating right now

Dunno, from Fediverse Observer, it looks like lemmy and mastodon are growing slowly over the last couple weeks. (the mastodon stats look a little weird tho – there’s a plummet on Jan 30th that looks like a data collection artifact.)

I dunno… it’s like the difference between a chain restaurant and your favorite local cafe/pub/diner. The chain restaurant has its benefits, but you have the best interactions with your buddies at your local cafe/pub/diner.

I can’t imagine the soldiers would be too motivated to be the first ones at the top

iirc they said of Frederick the Great’s army that the soldiers were more afraid of the officers behind them than the enemy in front of them.

That’s an interesting challenge. Given a board and a set of pieces like that, let a bunch of gamers play with it adjusting the rules as they see fit. Eventually you would get something either like the rules they used back then, or even better.

Mel Gibson is problematic, but we need more movies like Apocalypto. (Maya not Aztec I know…)

“confronts” lel

They’re still in the first stage of enshittification: gaining market share. In fact, this is probably all just a marketing scheme. “Hi! I’m Crazy Sam Altman and my prices are SO LOW that I’m LOSING MONEY!! Tell your friends and subscribe now!”

Yeah, the mainstream is pretty crappy, but it’s always been that way from music to food to style. The mainstream internet was briefly interesting while it was based on the foundation of nerds, until the CEOs figured out how to make money on it and turned it to garbage. But the nerds are still here and the tools are still here.