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.
I found Lemmy through grapheneos! That’s my story. Love it.
If I hadn’t smashed my iPhone in a work related accident I would never know the joy of ditching reddit and joining you folks.
Hazzah for happenstance! Life is great!
Hell yeah
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.
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.
Continuing, growing and stronging.
Enlonging, embiggening, and stronging.
stronking*
I joined Lemmy, like 3 years ago I think. But I didn’t start being active until this year. I think there is a lot of people like me, especially now that you have to log in to see old reddit. https://old.lemmy.world/ really tipped me over the edge in to being a regular.
Leaving Reddit wasn’t easy. I read the tea leaves and left at apigate.
I had already eschewed Youtube API and was keeping Facebook out of arms length,
I poked around Bluesky for a while, it had a very strong pull.
I do not need machine-fed unlimited social media and news I don’t thrive on it. Doomscrolling is not a good hobby.
numbers go brrrr.
Hoping it’s true, generally when I see posts about how strong and successful something is, it hits like a warning sign that it’s struggling / at risk and someone is trying to project growth for attraction / retention.
I assume I’m not the only one with this kind of mental filter. Maybe there’s a way to go about it that would get the impression across without ringing that alarm?
Maybe a show don’t tell kind of tact? Like “check out all this new content being generated by the influx of users”… or a backhanded thing like “here’s how to protect your insrance against recent traffic surges”?
Idk I’m no expert. Hope it’s helpful but otherwise just ignore me~
I wish there was a website that had like three major aggregators instead of just the one. The issue I come across is these sites all have something missing. For the fediverse observer, they sometimes do retro activity that doesn’t pop up until you look at the graph again.
What I can tell you anecdotally is i am seeing a lot more engagement with content faces are sticking around last couple of months. So I pulled the numbers from the aggregator that I know at least lets you audit the numbers. But its still not perfect.
Idk man, you’re kinda right but also like what do we need cheerleaders for. Im gonna show this people and they’re gonna sign up because lemmy is growing or something?
Idk just useless information as far as i can tell, theres no ceo of the fediverse trying to maximize growth or whatever so who is this for?
I am the CEO of the fediverse but I’m struggling. If you send $7 to my account, I will reimburse you $2m when we succeed. My scam coin wallet address is “0”, please reply quickly… I can not hold long
so who is this for?
for myself, for example. i want to see more diverse content.
Then go make it!
i’m not gonna do it alone
Well im glad this chart helps you find more people
bots. bots everywhere.
edit: hey, look at all the repost content! it’s almost like there’s a bunch of bots swarming the fediverse…
I’m only here because I got IP banned from Reddit for asking when they’re going to launch Margery Taylor Greene into the sun.
it actually takes more energy to launch stuff into the sun, than to launch it out of the solar system. just saying.
Once AI starts stealing from us you’ll know we’ve arrived.
That’s already a massive problem that brings down instances all the time.
web-scraping is. however, ai companies pretending to be yet another instance and getting the data through federation does not cause much of a slow-down, since that’s what happens with other instances already anyways.
The dorks that work at LLM companies are simply too stupid to do that.
Nope. It seems it is a sicker Reddit. No matter the congenitalilty, the engagement is just frankly gross.
Maybe I need to move from lemmy.zip, but the vetting is a pain in the ass.
People are just difficult to even talk to these days.
I am actually a really sweet but sardonic guy. No freedom of speech and no humor. Just an exasperation of the things that killed reddit.
No actual discussion. Fuck this.
…are you ok?
Did you just wake up?
Being well adjusted to a sick society is no measure of good health.
One can be maladjusted and still happy. Jeezy Pete!
Whoosh. I think the point is being missed. I am not focusing on the one.
I am a rather happy guy who has a heart that bleeds for others.
I am a rather happy guy who has a heart that bleeds for others.
you should not be on the internet then.
I like to envision the internet like it was New York City between 1975-1985. trash piled high in front of every building with an oppressive smog swirling down every thoroughfare. A dead hooker in every pile of trash, like some kind of hidden kinder surprise. how she got there, nobody cares, but I can guarantee that it involved enough coke to kill a horse.
piss on the seats, piss in the streets, and Wallstreet standing like some kind of middle finger while the city churns on, grinding babies into paste for the best pizza money can buy.
Yeah, you can tell, way more conservative liberals on here than there used to be.
Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can you be both conservative and liberal?
Person below is using an incorrect understanding of liberalism too (economic).
When I say liberal, I’m referring to the political philosophy of liberalism, which is rooted in individualism and capital, and emerged through the cisheteropatriarchal and white supremacist system of settler-colonialism. People perceive of this as meaning “progressive” or “freedom” because much of the early rhetoric surrounding liberalism (such as the early republican era in the Americas) involved a claim to moral righteousness under the guise of individual freedoms. Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism as an economic system (which the other commenter here misidentified as liberalism), but it would be distortive to not recognize the specificities of either respectively.
Since liberalism has been the proponent of capitalism and EuroAmerican imperialism for the past couple centuries, it has developed a durability through the appropriation and subsequent assimilation of potentially challenging political movements; such as those based in social justice. Consequently, liberals have effectively coopted the language of equality and progress as natural elements of its politics, despite it consistently disarming and presently continues its genocidal campaign against vulnerable groups.
Conservatism is less a cohesive set of politics than it is the rhetoric of liberals with grievances about the failure of the system to deliver the privilege they feel entitled to, and which this system does assure them. So, a conservative liberal may vaugely subscribe to the notion of “anti-racism” but will inevitably subscribe to racist values that are more consistent with the imperatives of a white supremacist system than they are challenging of it.
Most people in Europe and North America subscribe to liberalism. Most liberals lack a level of political literacy to identify how they subscribe to it, and many mistake themselves as “leftists” or non-liberal “conservatives,” even though their values are actually closely aligned. Since I genuinely do not subscribe to liberalism, many liberals on Lemmy self-report when they take issue with some genuine anti-racism, or any anti-bigotry in general when it doesn’t align with their comfort level (most of which have been Canadians or Euros who feel free to openly express these views with the confidence that they’re “better than Americans”).
I really do not get your point of tying liberalism with colonialism. Fact is that colonialism was done by European monarchies which weren’t liberal states at the time. The power structures were feudal. They were only beginning to transition into liberal democracies.
I’m sorry, could you explain how colonialism was confined to, based on what you’re saying here, at latest the eighteenth century? Even then, you’re saying you don’t understand how a political system that emerged in the exact places colonialism benefitted represents a political system that emerged out of colonialism?
Colonialism peaked in 19th century when countries doing it werent liberal democracies. Universal suffrage for men became thing only at the end of century. But widespread demands started in 1848. Before that voting was restricted to income/tax/property.
political system that emerged in the exact places colonialism benefitted represents a political system that emerged out of colonialism
Not all european liberal democracies had colonies. But it is true that those countries that had them, didn’t decolonize after liberalization.
Oh, lying. Well, that makes the most sense, really.
No, liberalism (“liberal democracy” is a bit of a misnomer) did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth century just because you want to pretend it only counts as liberalism when it includes you. As I said in my original comment, liberalism has always used the rhetoric of freedom and equality while enforcing fundamentally unequal and oppressive systems of power. No, it doesn’t start being “real” liberalism when non-property owning men get the right go vote (which, source on thar weirdly specific and inaccurate 1848 date? Go look up Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and -30s, it was something widely demanded from the beginning of the United States). By this merit, there is no such thing as liberalism today, because it isn’t an idealized version of itself yet; literally a rationalizing narrative to construct the violence of liberalism not as an inevitability or necessity of this system, but an unfortunate failure of it to live up to the “real” liberal values.
I could tell this was some Euro pro-imperialism narrative before you got to that second section too. This is the kind of historical revisionism they typically deploy to make this brutal system seem coincidental with rather than emergent from the violence they inflicted on the world. No, liberalism does not only need to exist in states that we associate with colonialism (even if it did, it wouldn’t be accurate to act like borders stopped material interests in a system of colonialism). Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason, which is the same reason why the system of knowledge production on race, gender, ability, ethnicity, and humanity that we are forced to engage with happens to construct human life around the imperatives of that system. Could you explain how you’re conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?
To others who come across this, this user is the exact kind of liberal conservative I’m talking about, and go figure, they’re a Euro like I said they’d be.
Oh, lying.
Why rudeness?
I’m not spreading any pro-imperialism narrative, where did you get that from. Its a fact that european empires colonized world when those states were feudal. Before that during middle ages there were settlers from german lands towards the east. Probably inspired lebensraum ideas. And I bring up 1848 because during spring in that year many revolutions happened with liberal demands. And empires existed before that.
Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason
And the reason is? I don’t quite follow.
Could you explain how you’re conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?
Maybe because I’m from central Europe?
One common idea of birth of liberalism is that it comes from industrialization. But this doesn’t hold because Russia and China are perfect counterexamples. I was more convinced that it comes from evolution of Western Christian philosophy. I read some french author for supportive arguments and an indian anti-colonialist one which also supports this argument but of course from the opposite.
So all in all I would rather examine philosophical currents in Europe when trying to understand liberalism.
As for colonialism. Being product of feudal logic makes great sense to me
I’ve definitely noticed my shitpost comments get a lot more engagement than they used to, so that’s fun
maybe the posts are just getting shitttier?
Shame. I just ran out of toilet paper.
Reddit is an AI dumpster fire. There are still decent communities, but the glory days are behind it (the 20teens). Reddit circa 2012-15’ was peak. Now it’s an AI slop infested milquetoast facebook alternative. Damn shame. Hopefully the user base will finally realize the ship has sailed straight up it’s own corporate butthole, and seek alternatives, such as this one.
You couldn’t have certain reddit subreddits here. For example, I follow r/Sverige which is the political right’s Sweden channel. And they talk about immigration as a major problem. How open would Lemmy be to discussions like that? It can’t even handle different opinions without defederation, downvoting and blocking.
No, i think Lemmy is good for memes and stuff but it can’t handle discussions that adults wants to have.
Nothing is stopping you from making a community and then banning people until it is sufficiently echo-chambered for you. ML or Hexbear might even welcome you.
I personally know several expats living in Sweden. I’m pretty aware of both sides of the discussion. From the outside, it comes off mostly tone-deaf, but with some real points around failing to integrate immigrants. There’s also a significant amount of FUD and interference trolling, riling people up.
For people living in Sweden, it’s a hotbed of controversy as the places you consider safe are changing around you.
Would anti-immigraition accepted in open arms in lemmy general social forums? Absolutely not.
But if you want your own echo chamber, there are places that would allow it.
Was that a response to me? I definently don’t want to own the discussions. I just said people want to discuss it and Lemmy is not a good place for it.
People will discuss it on reddit. It’s fine. :)
About Sweden, yes it’s a “hotbed” to say the least, the same as in Europe overall. Its not popular with massive immigration but since we can’t discuss that here, let’s not.
If you want random people across the world to validate Sweden’s distaste for immigrants, no, you won’t like the outcome here.
Again with the validate. :) Do you get your opinions validated here by random Lemmy users?
About immigration, why can’t people dislike immigration by muslims for example? It’s happening all over Europe and im actually curious why you and others think it’s an opinion people shouldn’t have. Is it because you don’t care about the culture in your own country?
Is it because you don’t think it changes the culture of a country, or that you are fine with the changes?
and when they come here they will bring all their miserable drama-seeking nonsense behaviors with them.
Are you ready to get banned? Because that kind of talk will get you banned once they hold the reins.
You’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned!
Want to read more Lemmy? Download the app and log in!
this made me laugh, from despair, but laugh nonetheless.
at least in real life I have the foresight to leave the premises when those folks show up to the party.
online I’m too optimistic to think people won’t actively misconstrue everything I type into an absurd parody of what I actually said. Only on the internet if I say “i dated a 14 year old when I was 15” am I told that makes me a pedophile and I’m promoting pedophilia, but apparently that’s how people think today.
On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good neighbors.
When we feel like we are forced into platforming every single batshit insane ideology - like hexbears to name one, though your instance at least had the foresight to defederate from it early on - then we expose people to all the dregs that social media can offer to people.
Like, how can two adults converse with one another, when surrounded by children screaming their heads off - which is not “wrong”, but like… can’t there even be so much as one room where that level of noise is prevented?
Anyway, I agree that Lemmy’s blocking tools are vastly inferior to the task of trying to deal with the situation that you mentioned. The upcoming release of Lemmy 1.0 will help somewhat, by allowing mods to receive remote reports from other instances, but it still would need a LONG way to go - like e.g. implement a true instance blocking capability.
yeah well, that’s why the internet was better when it was mostly people of similar dispositions and beliefs.
I would argue that the Internet with all its glorious diversity (including e.g. both kids and the olds) is far better today, yet still the Intolerance Paradox is real.
When no means “push forward harder” that will simply never be okay. People will find ways to avoid it, e.g. by leaving the Threadiverse entirely, which already offers next to no OC so what then do we offer to someone? A hexbear tankie screaming “death to the Western World”, apparently (note the extremist “death to”, not the calmer “fall of”, let’s say capitalism, but violent “death”, plus the refusal to limit the target to an economic system and instead leaving open the ambiguity of whether that includes every single person living in a nation that practices it).
I don’t blame Redditors for noping right out of that…
And fortunately some progress has been made, just not quite enough if someone can be randomly assigned to go to hilariouschaos or hexbear, rather than sent to an instance that is more in line with the recipient’s preferences.
which is why being able to block entire instances is necessary… because some of them overwhelmingly populated by mentally ill nutcases who feel entitled to harass everyone who doesn’t believe their insanity.
and who think any tepid disagreement with them, is akin to physical violence against their person.
Is there anyway to compare bots to real users?
Piefed auto-flags users it it thinks is bots and allows users to flag other users as potential AI bots. Its an interesting system. I like it so far but its on a system with less than 10k users. So not sure how the scale is going to work. Still its a step!
Reddit ban people -> people look for alternatives
Fuck reddits mods
