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 are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a "slow web" kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I am broadly in favor of growing the Fediverse, but I am also of the belief that most of the ways that people think that should be done, are potentially more counter productive than productive

For users, most people think of growing Lemmy as evangelizing. Personally I think that's almost always experienced as preachy and antagonistic. The real work of making the fediverse competive is the developers maintainers and hosters, and if we as users want the fediverse to grow I think the biggest thing we can do is be a part of making this a good place to be.

Its by creating a culture that when people show up and try things out on a whim, they decide to stay. It certainly helps for people to hear about the Fediverse, but if that's a accomplished through means that make people frustrated and hostile towards us, I think we've accomplished more harm than good.

I deeply miss the thriving small niche communities of reddit, and us not being able to sustain that is 100% down to not having enough users, but I see participating in a way that makes it worth being here as the biggest thing I can do to support the fediverse

[–] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:

Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and "migrate"
A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the "politics" of each instance
The "Community Ambassador" feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.

These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think "how can we get from 50k to 5 million?"

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can certainly see why that would be frustrating. I'm surprised I'd not heard of your project before- does it have a name or a github? If it does and I see folks talking about how we can improve onboarding or grow the fediverse it'd be nice to be able to mention it to them

I think I'm subbed to fedibridge- have you posted about it there? I feel like admins may be kinda swamped and it might need traction with users who want to see things grow in order to cut through the noise and have it be a significant enough priority for any admins. There may also be an issue of them knowing that making onboarding from reddit significantly easier, if successful might mean putting a lot more strain on themselves and their instance

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 1 day ago

It's Fediverser. Yes, it is on github. Yes, I've posted about it, quite a bit.

I asked prolific users to join, I offered help to admins to set it up. I even offered the topic-specific instances to the wider community. None of these efforts were well received.