I’m genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)
You must log in or # to comment.
Also British, trying (somewhat failing) to avoid more of the political stuff and that seems to be most of the national specific stuff that gets posted.
Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.
It does not help - and I did not know myself at first - that a Google search of “Lemmy” points people to lemmy.ml, which btw to someone without an account does not show “Fediverse” content and instead rather shows exclusively Local (rather than Global). The amount of bOtH sIdEs SaMe political content is always rather extreme, especially there.
Aside from platforming political extremism, and using Arch Linux (and beans 🫛 🫘), there just isn’t much else to this place. For us here, it is enough… unless we need to actually know about stuff and for that we go back to Reddit or whatever - especially niche topics that are discussed nowhere else -> if you want the content then you have to go to where it is at. The content creators refuse to come here and I don’t blame them: we aren’t a very welcoming bunch.
Let’s see, so we covered how we are a Nazi bar, how content creators can’t be arsed to bother posting here, oh yeah and there’s also the fact that Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit was. There is a modlog but no modmail, no notification when your content is removed, no ability to appeal or discuss (especially when the modlog merely says that the removal was done by a “mod” - it used to say the name of the mod but then it was changed to merely say “mod”, so note how Lemmy is becoming more rather than less totalitarian as time passes) or again even so much as be told that your stuff is now gone - and unlike Reddit, taking all of the conversations that happened on a post along with it (when Reddit removed a post it merely took away the link from the community, but someone with the URL could still continue to interact with it for a long time, whereas Lemmy does not even acknowledge that a post once used to exist, instead mentioning a server error and - get this - that you should try again later to access it… 🤔🥴 despite knowing full well that the post will never be un-removed; I am not suggesting that this misleading message is intentionally inaccurate, just stating once more how undemocratic this is that a mod can basically wipe out most traces that a post ever existed even in the past).
But is there a thought that making an alternative Reddit would be super easy and fun and require zero effort? Lemmy is still extremely far behind Reddit in terms of features and will take many more years to catch up, if ever, and it’s hyper-authoritian nature will always remain baked directly in (plus the Nazi bar effect… it’s literally right there in the very name!). Though you might check out PieFed - in terms of features it has already surpassed Reddit in many ways, though it is still early in development (e.g. most days there is no Preview ability for posts or comments - although some days there is so I suspect it is almost ready to remain rolled out as a permanent feature?), and it has some fascinating ideas about democratization of moderation. PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust and so features come out in days to months rather than years. PieFed still shows posts from Lemmy.ml, but unlike lemmy.ml itself, does not do so exclusively, so offers a far more global and democratic platform. I’m placing my hopes in PieFed rather than the dying Lemmy moving forward. I usually get downvoted for saying all this… yet here we are on a post saying how MAUs for Lemmy are decreasing and calling into question whether Lemmy will even survive or not - while btw those numbers for PieFed recently tripled in size - so history has and will continue to prove this point accurate. There is hope for the Fediverse, not specifically for Lemmy I think (there is just too much wrong there and the efforts continue to move in the opposite direction, more towards rather than away from authoritarian control, which trends towards fewer rather than more content, i.e. it intentionally creates “echo chambers”), but for the wider Fediverse, yes. It will take actual effort to build it up though. Each step moves towards that - e.g. apps such as Voyager, Thunder, and Interstellar helped Lemmy (& the latter Mbin) thrive, and now all of those are adding support for PieFed, thus ensuring that none of the previous efforts were wasted, even as they move forward into the future rather than remain stagnant in the past.
But there are reasons why people don’t like coming here - and those still need to be solved. First among them is that the tools have to get better, which is happening. Second, start posting content, and make it fun to spend time here. I see people doing that constantly, making my time here enjoyable.:-) Third, maybe more will be needed beyond those two steps but I don’t know anything about that, so I just focus on the former two steps and leave the rest to the future:-).
Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.
Have you tried to suggest then Piefed since then, especially now with Voyager starting to support it?
No - see the other response to my comment. The internet is not a welcoming place, period, and I’ve ceased recommending this corner of it to people. If they bother to read things then they will find what they seek. Nazi bar and all.
Though you are right, PieFed is just now turning the corner where I feel that I could ethically do so (I still see so many bugs: especially notifications that lead to nowhere, e.g. if the post gets deleted but the notification remains, and the continued lack of a Preview ability, but at the rate things are going those could both be resolved by next month! Or possibly already are in the Voyager app support?).
Thank you for your own continual efforts advocating on behalf of the Fediverse: we need you, and I for one am so glad that you tirelessly devote so much time and love towards that goal!:-)
“What the fuck is this paragraph of ranting nonsense?”
“Oh, it’s an ad for piefed “
I would argue that it is more an anti-ad against Lemmy. 😉😶
(Although I still have a Lemmy account myself, so it’s more like against pinning all of our hopes for the Threadiverse onto one tankie-developed platform, made by people kicked off of Reddit for being too toxic and so deciding to create their own Reddit 2.0 - which btw super kudos to them bc that was not easy! Yet also I don’t feel like pinning all of my hopes on it either. To each their own I suppose - I just dare to be different myself, wherever that may lead me.)
Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.
I have a hard time believing that since it implies every single person you proposed Lemmy to was already aware of it. The reaction I personally tend to get is “…what? Huh. Never heard of it”.
It’s the other way around, OpenStars suggested Lemmy to the people, the people had a look and were not convinced.
They usually have a comment where they explain it, but I can’t find it now.
That makes more sense. His phrasing did not convey that to me but it is probably a me-problem.
Yeah as Blaze said, multiple conversations spaced apart. The first one I mentioned it, the second they told me they didn’t like it, either the second or perhaps now a third they actively chide me for having mentioned it.
I did not realize that a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml. Fwiw, DuckDuckGo pulls up lemmy.world instead, as its top hit. Lemmy.world at the time had 80% of all Threadiverse users on it, but Lemmy.ml has legacy, and Google’s search algorithm prioritized it over lemmy.world or some other webpage, like an explanatory one.
I also did not realize that, when you click the link to go there, lemmy.ml shows only Local rather than Global results by default, to someone without an account on it.
Combined together, a non-technical normal person is going to Google “Lemmy”, and to the extent they don’t find the actor, will see images that mostly portray how people who own stock or even simply store money in a bank account should literally, not figuratively but literally, be killed / beheaded (/ guillotined / Luigi’d, however you want to say it). Usually within the first 2-5 pages of posts too, and especially anytime that there is any election going on in a Western nation, the bOtH sIdEs SaMe campaigns are out in full force. Lemmy is pretty extreme - you can block it all, but when you simply Google Lemmy and see lemmy.ml’s Local rather than Global content, the bOtH sIdEs SaMe content is extremely prevalent.
e.g. this one that just prior to the USA elections, subtly hints that Kamala Harris might not be the best choice to vote for:
Edit: regardless of whether the evidence fully supports their 2nd-hand assertion or not, my own statement is that 100% of the people that I have tried to introduce Lemmy to irl have actively chided me for its “extreme leftist” content. Of course, Reddit is somewhat leftist itself, so I feel that it is not quite a fair comparison, but it is something to be aware of. The definition of a “Nazi bar” is that regardless of whether we ourselves are Nazis, we allow such here and that makes people uncomfortable - although in our case not totalitarian right-wing fascists but totalitarian left-wing fascists instead (who claim to be socialist, seemingly without knowing what that word means). I probably should use less inflammatory language here, but my point is that “Lemmy” makes people uncomfortable. And rightly so, as the very name itself has a history.
But usage is not going downwards. Check these stats out: https://fediverse.observer/stats
MAU has been steady at 1.1 million since this time last year.
Within the fediverse there are some platforms that are losing ground and some that are growing.
Up the top it has software filter, if you select lemmy:
At this rate by 2035 the lemmy userbase will be depleted
Assuming a constant rate of change of anything involving people over a period of ten years is straight up nonsense.
Yeah, both. It’s flatlining globally and down in the UK.
It kinda seems like historically, growth has been driven by exoduses from larger platforms. Right now there’s not any huge things going on on other platforms that piss people off and make them wanna leave but like, twitter, reddit and meta seem really good at finding shitty thing to do, so I’d kinda expect growth to just pick back up whenever the next outrage happens 🤷♂️
Isn’t it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech’s fuckups?
I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It’s why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform. I don’t expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.
Yeah we do have a lot of people who feel it’s more important to demonstrate their anger than to figure out what people could do to improve the problems.
Worse still, a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that whatever makes it most clear they’re angry and hurts the people they disagree with the most is actually what’s most productive. The anger about the state of things, particularly in the US is entirely valid. The self-justification of behaviours that burn bridges and radicalize more people is not.
If you want to implement any kind of solution you do, necessarily have to have a critical mass of people who agree with you, and you cannot build that by antagonizing anyone who doesn’t already share your exact flavour of left wing ideology, and acting in a way that reflects poorly on your ideology to everyone except people who already agree with you
Very rarely is anyone willing to confront that violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs, and that employing it just because you’re (justifiably) angry, is almost always detrimental to the exact abouts you’re mad about
(Sorry, I know I kinda went off track from exactly what you were talking about, this is just a closely related huge frustration of mine)
Enshittification often serves as a driver towards that behavior. However, while this platform has attempted to leave the former behind, it is not always so simple to actually accomplish that lofty goal. i.e. even if the ultimate disease is now cured, the symptoms themselves still persist, feeding forward by influencing others to continue with those old, bad habits.
Yeah, I guess social media has, in effort to build maximum engagement, really shaped a lot of people’s way of engaging with others in deeply toxic ways that will be very hard to untangle and change, now that the social forces that teach us how to act towards one another have been hijacked for monetary gain, and people have spent so much time exposed to that :(
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it gave me some new things to think about, and maybe it will help me set aside my frustration and remember my empathy when dealing with those people, at least more often. Because if I want to enact change I also need to build a critical mass of people who share my perspective.
Sorry for the ludicrous run-on sentence that is the first paragraph lol, I’m to tired to edit more at the moment 😅
Network effects are incredibly strong. Xitter is now a disinformation and fascist hellhole, and yet people who should know better still refuse to leave. We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused, so we can can bide our time. The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually, but there’s no telling when the tipping point will happen.
Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an “advantage”. This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny “free as in beer”, VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another “They don’t know” meme.
As explained by the user below
capitalist growth-focused approach
Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!
We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again
Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
ngl same :|
For me Mastodon and Lemmy have shown that the general population have absolutely zero interest in decentalisation, they just don’t care
Like a hive mind they simply go where other people are, if there are two crowds of people, one with 5 people and the other with 50, they will go to the one with 50, regardless if the 50 users are mingling with people like Musk and they hate Musk and don’t want to support him in any way
Just posting that made me think, if people simply go to where people are, having lots of small servers instead of one large one is actually a turn off for most people
I mean everyone already has platforms they’re largely comfortable with and fediverse platforms are less accessible, smaller, and usually clones of existing formats. The primary place we compete is on not being total dogshit, so when people can forget that their comfortable platforms are dogshit, it doesn’t surprise me that people wouldn’t be going out of their way to venture out into a new unfamiliar thing, with a different culture and much smaller userbase 🤷♂️
I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.
That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.
That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.
