Happy 2nd birthday! o(≧∇≦o)

It's June 21 which means Ani.Social turns another year older! Thanks to everyone who has stuck around and to all the newcomers this month! Unfortunately, I never really tracked our stats but the last birthday post mentioned that we were just a bit under 1000 users and now we're at 1600 with 180+ active users per month! But this is a federated platform, so we have users from all over the Fediverse participating in our communities!

I partially started Ani.Social as a kind of personal research project. Learning about the Fediverse as a practical approach toward a democratic social media is really interesting. For the past four years of my life, I have also been generally obsessed with thinking about and consuming Japanese media more analytically and theoretically. So combining that and the Fediverse, Ani.Social was born!

It's been really interesting to learn about how different people consume this so-called "Japanese media" and what kinds of discourse are produced, especially from people who willingly spend time on alternative spaces like the Fediverse.

With that said...

PieFed announcement!

For the past month, I have been testing PieFed, another Reddit-like Fediverse platform. I think it has a lot of potential and its been receiving a lot of development efforts from the Lemmy community lately. Compared to Lemmy, it's both ahead and behind depending on which areas you look. What I particularly like about PieFed is how experimental it is, and that's sort of what I need to further my research.

Right now, PieFed has flairs, spoilers, polls, topics, feeds (like multireddits), better mod and reporting tools.

You can test the future Piefed instance at https://pt.nyaa.social/. The tentative instance domain is Nyaa.Social and will likely share themes with Ani.Social but hopefully it'll be broader than just "anime and its related industries".

I would like to know what other people think, and what kind of ideas we can explore in Nyaa.Social. I don't think it should simply be "an alternative to Lemmy" or "an alternative to Ani.Social." It's a great opportunity to do things differently, and see what works and what doesn't.

There's no official launch date for the new PieFed instance but the earliest you can expect it is July 7. In the meantime, I would like to gather as much feedback on what kind of platform this new instance could be.

Here are a few screenshots of what the place looks like at the moment:

I should mention that Ani.Social is not going anywhere! It will continue to run and it will still be my top priority to make it a stable and easy experience for everybody even after the PieFed instance launches.

Thanks again mods, posters, commenters, donors, lurkers, and everyone else! If you have questions, feel free to ask! Enjoy the summer season! (^o^)/

~~I have unpaid internship to do... (T＿T)~~