I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.

Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.

I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S

The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.

If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.

Again, I think there’s a certain crowd of internet users who are familiar with fun domain names and enjoy playing in that space. My example is particularly innocuous (a club of people who love stone megaliths in the UK). I also think the fun and playful names aren’t difficult to tell from phishing sites, but maybe I have a gut instinct developed from exposure to the folks who do use playful domains.

My point is that thinking these quirky links look dangerous is specific to a certain social or generational group, and it wouldn’t hurt for them to keep an open mind about TLDs.

(Adding an icon to remote fediverse instance links is a nice idea too.)

I went back yesterday night to check out the Starfield sub and was surprised at how little interest I felt in even skimming the comments in case there were interesting theories. I grabbed the Imgur albums for screenshots I wanted to look at and left. the fediverse is my place now. :)

It’s funny; I know the usual advice is to stick to com/net/org, but I think there’s a certain crowd online that’s all about the wacky TLDs. I’ve definitely seen devs and artists with TLDs like .pizza and .rocks (not a portfolio, but https://stoneclub.rocks as example). I’ve seen enough of these sites that something like https://sh.itjust.works doesn’t make me blink and I trust I’d be able to tell a phishing site from folks playing with TLDs, but I can totally understand how that could be off-putting without that sort of background.

@gkd@lemmy.world is working on an iOS app as well; sounds like it’ll be on TestFlight relatively soon. It targets iOS 15 vs. Mlem’s 16, so a bit more compatible with older devices.

Ahhh, I see. I had read that they were rolling the change out based on account age but must have missed the bit about the username auto-reservation. thanks!

The note at the end about the new system working as a URL system for user profiles is interesting, because around the time the change was announced I saw some people theorizing that the change is rolling out because Discord wants to implement some kind of profile page. pure speculation, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do when the rollout is complete.

on that note, someone I know got the pop-up to change their username about a day before I did, and they weren’t able to choose my username – and when I got the pop-up, it auto-suggested my previous username. so it seems there is a pre-reservation system that does a reasonable job of letting people with already-unique usernames keep those.

I like the threadiverse well enough for general scrolling and chatting, but given the smaller user group right now, I think tumblr will be my replacement for fandom things like Dragon Age, TES, Zelda, and probably Starfield (haven’t checked the tags over there to see if people are posting fan stuff about it yet or not).

Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦