So, I was thinking that I joined Lemmy.World because Lemmy had more users than MBin. But today I was looking at https://mbin.cocopoops.com/ and started seeing MY posts. I knew Mbin could have different instances. I knew Lemmy could have different instances. And I knew they all federated together.

But I didn't know Mbin could federate with Lemmy. But I'm sure Lemmy/Mbin probably won't federate with Pixelfed, or Peertube.

Mbin, piefed, and Lemmy are essentially reddit replacements. So they should be in a circle. It doesn't matter how many users Mbin has, or piefed has, or Lemmy has. It matters how many the full circle of federated reddit replacements have. Because thats the true circle of users that you can interact with.

So what we need is a website that you enter an instance, and it tells you how big your circle would be on that platform, and a list of federated, and defederated instances with it.

So Lemmy.World would have a pretty high circle. While hexbear would have only itself, if I understand right.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

This would be massively exploitable by anyone who wanted to know the personal networks of someone they wanted to harass (and businesses wanting to scrape and make shadow profiles on consumer connections).

All you need is their email, since you're doing this before you make an account, you can see all their personal connections and start to use that information to aid in your harassment of them.

Good idea in theory, but it needs a lot of work for showtime.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

I think you're kind of misunderstanding what I'm saying.

You wouldn't see where an individual user is. You would see "If I sign up to lemmy.world, I'll have 300,000 people combined across these instances. The people signed up at any of these are counted in that 300,000. They'll see my content, and I'll see their content. But if I sign up to hexbear, my circle will be much lower, because that instance defederates from the majority of users. So my content will only be seen by 50,000 users."

Made up numbers for the sake of proof of concept.