It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as that same webpage shows when you filter for Lemmy, currently we have 33K monthly active users, down from 35K in recent months, itself further down from 40K in Dec. 2025, having fallen from 65K at the peak during Rexodus.
See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.
Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit… and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.
I really wonder where they’re going. I can’t find any substitute for this little purgatory. Piefed? I’m not a fan of the UI. Masto? Twitter’s a weird endless conversation space without proper organization and it makes me want to scream. Modern social media? We’d have vastly divergent desires if that’s where they went.
Fwiw, a number of highly popular 3rd-party apps including Voyager now offer support for PieFed. Most do not provide the full range of features as compared to the web interface, though some like Interstellar provide the large majority of them - see fully detailed listing of each app and which features are supported at https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.
Anyway, I confirm first-hand that using Voyager to access a PieFed instance is nearly identical to accessing a Lemmy one, except for the gain in back-end functionality of PieFed doing what Lemmy cannot (e.g. you apply some settings rarely in the web UI - maybe a couple times a year - and then those continue to function as you switch to more daily usage in your app of choice).
So use whatever you like - sh.itjust.works seems to me to be a fine instance - but I’m just saying that for a new person joining the Threadiverse, the web browser UI of PieFed is not the only or even the main way that people can choose to access it.
I used to download an app for everything, but now I can’t talk myself into so much as considering it. Unfortunately, it’s web interface or nothing for me
For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven’t really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.
just block all “US politics” communities and downvote every single post that mentions trump (or the democratic alternative candidate) that appears outside of those comms.
As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.
I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.
There is NO such thing as just blocking when it’s everywhere, and if you can downvote it you’ve already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.
So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y’all in November – or December, if shit gets real.
Fwiw, there are spaces such as https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, and with that being a PieFed instance, can also offer blocking of any text keywords (like “Musk” or “Trump”). Stuff will still manage to come through (e.g. a preponderance of orange clowns with a fairly obvious meaning that nonetheless make it through the filters), but it can cut it down by a ton.
But if you just absolutely need to block it all, then I wish you happiness during your vacation from the bleakness! :-)
Yeah, obviously if I’m on lemmy.world then I have to wait for those improvements. I have looked into moving instances, and I will save your comment; I appreciate the information.
In the meantime, thanks for the well-wishes, and same to you!
i mean, can you blame them?
it sucks. it sucks wading through moutains of dogshit and miserable crazy people to like, get a trickle of good and interesting content, or have exchange comments with reasonable chill people.
for every good interaction i have on here, there are probably 10+ other ones, and everyday I have to systemtically block new communities and users that are nothing but bot spam or straight up malicious users who are pushing a delusional and angry political agenda. and it works… those types of accounts/posts get lots of engagement, way more than organic stuff.
and you can go to their comment history and see account is less than a month old, and has 100s of posts and 1000s of comments and they are all… the same thing over and over and over.
a year ago i never had to deal with that on fediverse platforms. i’m now thinking of leaving myself because it just… increasingly sucks here and I don’t have an interest in being relentlessly negative and angry like most of content here is. i also don’t have a superiority complex being here either.
Fwiw, it gets this way right before every single election in most western nations - especially a USA one.
And you can go to places such as lemmygrad.ml and read how proud they are at creating tools to subvert any and all bans - e.g. the automation of a process to simply cycle through all registered accounts in an app until one is found that is not blocked at the instance, community, or for a comment reply the user level (possibly by now, even including the creation of a new one if necessary?).
NO, to some, means to simply push forward all the harder. It’s Man vs. Bear, and they’ve chosen their side: incel. It is intentional and even purposeful - strategic in fact, a “winning” approach, if the goal is to convey a message regardless of your interest in receiving it.
Yeah, and everybody is saying block communities/users whatever. But there’s barely any engagement outside of those that you want to block! So yeah, what’s the point of being here then.
Yeah, you’re right.
All you can do is try to contribute to more chill spaces, but the majority of the activity is going to be nutty people with crazy beliefs endlessly repeating themselves in a circlejerk, because well, they have vastly different priorities in life than more moderate and well-adjusted folks.
Worth noting, on FediDB, Lemmy+Piefed+Mbin is sitting at 54.8k MAU. Lemmy itself is at 46.4k. Though I don’t know the historical situation there.
Not that I care about PieFed… But all of those graphs are going up.
Absolutely, but not as much as Lemmy is going down, so the Threadiverse overall is decreasing its MAUs - not merely shifting from Lemmy to PieFed.
i think we need better federation with mastodon. at least, mastodon users should be able to see lemmy content and interact with it. (i can understand that the reverse, i.e. seeing mastodon content from lemmy is technically challenging)
that would give more exposure and interaction.
also not federating with mastodon would mean to break the promise of the fediverse, that it’s all (somewhat) compatible.
PieFed is working on that. Seeing the pace of development of Lemmy, I highly doubt that it ever will.
There are quite a number of challenges to overcome though. e.g. if you suddenly had tend to hundreds of people “following” you, how would that make you feel?
On the Threadiverse we tend to prefer to remain anonymous - as a quick glance at usernames can attest - while on the Fediverse the set of expectations are different.
Why not just count the two together? At 40k across lemmy + piefed, that’s not bad.
The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.
Note that the numbers then are still shrinking.
I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely not additional people, or rather only some are but nobody knows how much.
Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don’t know the details there.
I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.