Lemmy.world for instance could put the rest of the Lemmy fediverse between a rock and a hard place if they wanted to

beehaw.org is doing great, and they deferated from.world a while ago. Your point is correct though, Mastodon.social for example has half of all Mastodon users.

That said- there is little incentive to having a large instance, it costs a lot more and requires a lot more work.

"The fediverse" has no rules, if an instance wants to allow vote manipulation they have that power.

The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away

Yes exactly, I try to just simply describe what they are doing "This account is spreading the false narrative _____ for the purposes of ___" then not replying again. They want engagement because the more back-and-forth bickering that goes on, the less likely a third party reader is going to care to read beyond the top comment (the propaganda) and seeing a lot of replies can also give the impression that the debate is legitimate. Getting into a "debate" with someone "debating" in bad faith only helps them flood the zone with shit.

Reddit mods can sniff out astroturfing pretty easily actually, but Reddit inc doesn't do much to stop it. On the Fediverse, admins can simply ban from the instance, and if an instance does a poor job of removing inauthentic content then they can defederate.

(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)

I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.

The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.

With startrek.website we'd hoped creating a Star Trek themed instance might encourage other ex-moderators to start topic-specific instances too, and it would kick off a flourishing of myriad communities run by devoted moderators, a Lemmyverse so diverse and inspiring that not even Reddit could further justify it's own existence in the presence of such an obviously superior system.

Instead it turned out "Star Trek and Linux" was enough to satisfy nearly everyone's tastes (both subtle and gross).

The best cold intro is:

"Counselor Deanna Troi, personal log, stardate 44805.3. My mother is on board."

Empty corridor with Picard peeking around the corner

My gut says that this is probably not appeasement but a subtle rebellious act. They could have edited the article or geoblocked it just in India, but instead they removed it altogether, adding to the story and ultimatley bringing even more attention to it.

I was pleased to see Lemmy get a shout out in the Verge's recent "Case for the Fediverse" article. I wonder if it attracted anyone new.

While I don't think Reddit is going to collapse anytime soon or anything, any moderators that chose to stay after seeing how little Reddit cares about them, are not going to be the sorts of people with a bold vision on what they want to see in a community. What remains of the culture is just going to get more and more generic as evidenced here.

It's up (and fast) for me rn. They have been getting DDOS'd in a way specifically targeted for sites running Lemmy. Lemmy is still beta software so hopefully this can be a growing experience for the greater Fediverse. The .world admins are some of the most capable out there.