Fediverse

According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people's apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there's a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it's grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can't say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it's federated in pretense only, there isn't another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn't stopped growing. It hasn't exploded but we're not complaining about where we are, are we.

I definitely get burnt out on it faster when half my front page is meta posts. I don't have time to curate, I just want to see content that isn't about itself.

Just from a quick look at https://fediverse.observer/, it looks like the Fediverse is mostly steady at 1-1.25 million monthly users (give or take) over the past two years with a slight decreasing trend. I think there are some reasons for this that are not entirely in our control.

There seems to be a global sentiment of disconnecting from social media and the internet in general. So, I wouldn't be surprised if ever platform is seeing a decaying user base. Anecdotally, among the people I see in real life, there is a general sense of exhaustion with online spaces. Whether it's from corporate-own, enshittified platforms to even places on the Fediverse, the people with whom I interact tend to find the entire thing hollow. They've trimmed down to one or two platforms (if that). In fact, I've even started to get that way. In the past, if someone were wrong and arguing against a point I made, I'd engage, especially if it's in something that I have expertise. Now, why bother? There's no use arguing; people have little interest in admitting fault or engaging in good faith (again anecdotally). That said, I'll concede that the Fediverse is a bit better on that front, but not by much.

Then there's the alternative nature of the Fediverse. It's been rehashed over and over about how "difficult" it is to get on and use. It's not actually that hard, but the barrier to entry is an extra step. That small extra step frightens people away from even joining. The only time that barrier gets broken is when a "legacy" social media platform does something anti-user. Then there is a refugee wave that comes in and goes out leading to a modest durable increase in users. Recently, there just hasn't been a major controversy on a major platform that leads people here.

Now, my final thought on this is to ask: Is a small and steady-ish population (despite modest decay) actually bad? In my view, I don't think it is. Being smaller and with a smallish barrier to entry means that we exclude a sizable number of the low-effort population. So, there's less (no zero) slop here. Plus, discussions, when had in good faith, can be much deeper and less filled with stupid low-effort jokes. Overall, I'm not too concerned with the number of people on the Fediverse. Growth isn't necessarily the best thing. Even so, with the way most mainstream platforms are going, it's inevitable that they will do something stupid that drives more people to the Fediverse at least for a time.

TL;DR: The monthly population is mostly steady with a modest decay. Most social media is likely seeing similar trends. I don't think the smaller userbase is that bad of a thing.

I do generally wish there was more content. So I've decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.

Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.

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:-).