If despite the plethora of other words, City was the “mode”, then that would make sense. Or it could be adjusted for population, or otherwise biased towards whatever the definition of a “city” is to specifically exclude towns and the like?
In any case it’s kind of a neat graph to think about:-).
Except that they also write the Lemmy sourcecode. Hence you can begin to understand why we cannot receive notifications about being banned or posts/comments removed, nor appeal via a modlog, nor be able to DM a mod bc you can’t even see who to talk to when the modlog simply says “mod”, nor if OP violates a rule somewhere - even on some other instance & community entirely - can others continue their discourse when OP’s post is summarily removed or then banned (on Reddit the link to the post is merely removed from the list of links shown in the community feed, but the post itself remains viable and people can finish their thoughts, unlike Lemmy where even after typing something all out you may literally not be allowed to hit Send), nor was it a priority to allow mods to see reports and thus be able to effectively moderate from another instance, thus freeing them somewhat from the control of a single admin, etc.
It’s not even a bad thing that I am saying - especially on their end: they develop the Lemmy codebase how they want it to be, bc it was their idea and they did practically all of the work. If we want different, then we would need to similarly put in the effort to create it (and before that, open our eyes to see clearly what is going on and where we might rather be heading instead). Many have already started, like K/Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks, Mastodon, Friendica, etc.
Also, while it is indeed the admins that mass ban people from communities that they’ve never even heard of across the entire instance, the mods are not entirely unknown to Lemmy users themselves. There are many famous stories, such as the one who told a user that he wanted to kill them, bc they posted a screenshot of two people kissing in some kind of dating game claiming that it was “triggering”. Those mods are protected by those admins. In turn, nobody else across the Fediverse is protected from either those mods or especially those admins.
This is their software, and we are on their platform, always remember.
It depends how sophisticated the algorithm.:-)
That is the only state that I see a gradient coloration for. If you were in the northern part of Maine, that might explain it? (Assuming the gradient was intended to mean literally north vs. south as opposed to more generically some parts vs. other parts)
Which one(s)? Los Angeles? If so, naw, cause certain individuals don’t know how to read in Mexican (the proper term there is Spanish I know:-).
Edit: I forgot you said The Wetlands.
Who knows. Would NYC even be considered one “city”, rather than a set of burroughs, for this purpose? Or are the names perhaps normalized by population? If so, would they remove outliers as many statistical packages will do for you, but in this case they should leave them in, so if they were removed automatically that would not be great. Or if they just went with one name = one count then is there a minimum cutoff? Or a nearness criteria e.g. places near NYC still get swept up into it? And like how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? So many unanswered questions here…
Probably the names are too diverse? Dallas, Houston, Alamo, but they do have some like San Antonio.
Probably it’s what, ~200 years ago, they hoped would eventually happen!? (like Kansas “City”:-)
Hono, lulu, lola, kona, kaila, kili - fuck it, we ball, just send it out as-is!:-P
For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.
Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what’s coming up in the future, while it’s just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like “searching” for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy… - for early adopters though, it’s almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).
There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)
Other reasons to avoid, besides those already mentioned here, include that you will not be allowed to say things offhand about countries such as Russia or China or North Korea with your same account even in communities located on other instances. You either comply FULLY, even when elsewhere, or else you are banned from the entire instance. You can read more about such practices in communities like !fediverselore@lemmy.ca.
Also a lot of other “not extremists” have blocked that instance altogether, so besides having access to your community able to be yanked out from under you at any time (far more than usual I mean), you also will miss out on interactions with those other people. You will be willfully choosing to remain inside of that echo chamber, which is such to a significantly higher degree than the vast majority of Lemmy overall, and legitimately much higher than even Reddit (no joke, again, read for yourself the stories in that and other communities). Whereas if you choose a community not on Lemmy.ml, then you can still interact with people from that instance, just elsewhere.
Also, you could be told that the mod hopes to kill you someday. Sadly, I’m not joking there either (some selected quotes: "nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripling down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”).
See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/22359447.
Fortunately you will never know what happens when you walk into the likes of !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net (especially from a post appearing in All) and dare to reply to a comment, because that entire instance has been defederated from yours.
It kept happening to so many other people, that eventually the admins simply gave up on it. Which is a good thing imho, bc I for one almost left the Threadiverse entirely based on such interactions - I don’t need that noise in my life:-) - and therefore can guess that many others actually did (plus they say exactly that, over on Reddit).
You can read some of the drama here if you like:-).
I can think of one exception: something that is so cute (how cute is it?), it’s so cute that he can’t bear to keep it locked away:
Chicks dig a confidence confident man!
He… should perhaps have less confidence 😉.
It’s been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It’s a step in the right direction I am saying.
Nothing will ever entirely “solve” anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about “lack of content”. There’s tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for… this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn’t that a “solve”, at least for the issue of content discovery?
Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net are for, so it’s not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).
So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like !tenforward@lemmy.world. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.
And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there’s a !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com and a !lotrmemes@midwest.social, it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn’t that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?
Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.
Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:
Content is King
Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn’t have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).
One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for someone to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from… yet I don’t want to read content from either.
Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.
There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don’t have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.
A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.
There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don’t want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas - which imho is so much better, bc that would also help someone migrating not just from Reddit but from X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or Lemmy, etc. You don’t need an account to see this feature btw - just visit https://piefed.social/ and look at the top.
Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it’s very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).
Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?
No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn’t even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of “remove” vs. “allow” content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. “account <2 weeks old”, “may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments”, “controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes”, etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.
When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it’s going to be so exciting! Right now it’s more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it’s possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It’s very close, I do believe!:-)
Hrm, so now by removing the pronoun, they will make it non-binary:-).