Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.
The data
I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:
query {
monthlystats {
date_checked
softwarename
total_posts
total_users
total_comments
}
}
Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:
jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'
(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments)
Then did a good old’ chart
What to think of it
I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice
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Let’s keep it just under critical mass for Eternal September to not happen.
That was over 30 years ago, longer than I’ve been alive. I just want niche communities to subscribe to (Cities: Skylines, model trains, Madison WI) instead of the constant barrage of generic politics, Linux obsession, and low effort memes.
That was over 30 years ago
It was over 30 years ago that the term was coined. As a concept, it happens all the time. It happened with Reddit multiple times.
Yeah, it’s happened multiple times that a website has reached critical mass such that normal people start joining and posting a variety of interests, rather than just non-stop posting about their super duper hardened non-fingerprintable self hosted LibreWolf instance with VPN to prevent those dirty big tech companies from stealing their precious browsing history data. No one will ever know how much they prefer AMD cards over NVIDIA and that they use Arch BTW! And general news and politics (Capitalism Bad™).
What’s that supposed to mean?
One thing that annoys me about each statistic about posts is that I don’t know how many of these posts are actually interesting and engaged with.
For example, there is a specific instance that just mirrors reddit content and has barely any engagement. The bot posts mulitple posts per hour, mostly without any comments or upvotes.
It seems rather irrelevant to compare these posts to actually interesting posts with a nice discussion and a couple of upvotes.
My suggestion would be to count and plot the number of posts that have at least a few interactions.
Out of curiosity, which instance?
The instance is called lemmit.online, and the most upvoted post on the whole instance is “This bot is bad for lemmy”.
the question is whether the upvotes of that post makes over half of the total upvotes on all posts on that instance, and that i seriously doubt
No? Did I claim this?
The most upvoted post has ~20 upvotes, but there are a lot of posts with 1-5 upvotes.
PieFed labels bots and bot-like accounts, allowing you to choose options like blur or show the content semi-transparently.
I‘m not worried about myself. It’s easy enough to block stuff I don’t like. All I wanted to say is that counting daily posts without excluding bots doesn’t make much sense to me.
Yes.
Do we want Reddit amounts of users? No.
But there’s a lot of growth between here and there.
100% agreed. A Reddit clone with Reddit amounts of users will end up almost as bad as Reddit. The thing that makes Reddit worse in that situation is that they are a public company.
This platform would have to evolve a lot before it can deal with so many users. There has to be some significant innovation and improvement in moderation and administration, or more users would inevitably lead to endemic misinformation and power tripping and all of that shit you see on Reddit.
I mean the intent here is for moderating capacity and tools to increase with user increases. Reddit grew but grew before its own moderator capacity allowed for it. Now I would argue its overall activity levels are inflated by AI, trolls and spammers. I’m on Piefed and in terms of the discussion about growth, I think about new instance admin tools can mitigate and prevent bad behaviour, trolling, AI and spamming from (usually) new accounts that otherwise would cement themselves on as regular spammers and trolls.
It’s one thing to grow, but you need to grow the ability to deal with the problems that can derive from that.
One of the benefits of our “own” system is like you said, we can build the tools as they come.
Reddit and other platforms, we were always beholden to what they gave us.
With the fedi, you want something better? Build it! Or support those who are doing so. Its much more productive than just complaining all the time.
IMHO the internet isn’t for everyone. that might make me sound like an elitarian asshole but i think the internet’s only for people who enjoy going through information and are able to think without being swayed by group-think (tribalism) because otherwise it simply ends up in a bubble of rage bait and propaganda.
Essentially i think that maybe the internet of the future will be much smaller overall (think like 3% of its current user count) but it will probably be better that way.
Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling. Hell, I’ve got 80% of the content here filtered out as it is, and I want to be here.
Find your nearest non-political hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see and maybe we might see some growth or people sticking around. My current hyperfixation/hobby is Meshtastic, so I’ve been pretty active there lately.
100% agree, I can just check once a day, skipping basically everything you mentioned + the non-memes in the meme comms and that’s it, no need to open the threadiverse again until the next day.
We also need artists and creative people on board, yes, even the ones who draw porn, but the threadiverse users seemed kind of hostile towards many things during the reddit exodus they decided it wasn’t a good place.
Wonder if they’d have a different experience now, since most instances have defederated hex, ml and grad, and those were the loudest when it came to brigade and complain about anything sexy.
There are barely any places that defederate from lemmy.ml, including PieFed.ca that you are on. Thankfully PieFed allows us to block all users from an instance, but new users will have to discover on their own that they even should do this, and until then will be exposed to all of their comments and posts.
My experience is that Lemmy is decent for tech-related stuff but outside of that, it can be difficult to find active communities depending on the hobby. I just went looking for a good Spanish learning or general language learning community and the few that I found have been inactive for months. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place (I searched in Communities > All).
I don’t think maximum growth should be a goal for Lemmy, I just think it needs a critical mass of activity to keep it interesting. Currently I think we just about have that for many tech/FOSS related topics but not so much outside it. The problem, I think, is that a lot of people who aren’t into tech/FOSS issues don’t know about Lemmy and don’t see why they wouldn’t just use Reddit or Discord.
Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit a
As a contra point, I’m glad that its like this, a lack of politcal debate is toxic to democracy and that way be dragons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal originally used it to decry the “selfishness” of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population’s erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be more other stuff as well though.
Lemmy doesn’t have quality debates on politics either. The mods in the relevant communities swing the ban hammer liberally against everyone not following their opinion. Mainstream democrat talking points get banned as fascist. Antisemitic stuff is widespread as well.
You mostly get woke to extreme left echo chambers going on.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com is a good place to see this moderation in action.
Yes. I’m here for the long tail, the niche communities. And what do I see? Not enough photos of houseplants! Come on, you must have some too. And to add to the list, !books@lemmy.world looks nice.
You’re the pineapple blossom post! That’s such a nice picture.
I’ve been intentionally trying to be less of a lurker and more active in comments. !books@lemmy.world is one place that I’ve tried to be more active because I love reading, thinking, and talking about books. I was also posting updates about a green lynx spider on my lemmy.world account before I switched to piefed, this is a good reminder for me to post an update on my girl (RIP) and her beautiful little babies.
Lots of us lurkers need to be more active, myself included.
Hearing this from someone that from what I can see has one post and four comments in 3 months is more than a little ironic.
I may have created two accounts when I got here, and I will be baited into replying to snarky comments only from this one! I also like the low-key split-personality feeling, and experimenting with a different set of subscriptions. Anyway, so I’m no content-generation machine. But I’m doing my part to keep up the signal-to-noise ratio!
Thanks for the links🙂
we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we’re angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).
Unfortunately the “political shit” and “ragebait” is important.
The Fediverse is what you make of it. If you subscribe to a bunch of communities posting political shit and ragebait, that’s what you’ll get. That’s not a problem with the threadiverse, that’s a problem with your curation. One that it sounds like you remedied, so I’m not sure why you feel the need to call it out as a problem.
I love piefeds default :)
And as much as I dont like parts of bluesky, they did the onboarding the correct way.
Look at it from a new user’s perspective; someone who has not curated their feed or otherwise “made the fediverse what they want”. e.g. They land on Lemmy World or another big instance and their default sort is “active”. Doing that now in an incognito window, and half the front page is rage, same on the second, and the stuff that’s not are some random shitposts and Linux filling in.
Truth be told, looking at that, I probably wouldn’t want to sign up. Especially if I didn’t know that different instances have different cultures, etc.
Assuming they’re a normie (which we desperately fucking need here), I just don’t see that they’d want to stick around. Aside from trolls and spammers, the only people we seem to consistently attract here are the “Wah wah I was banned from Reddit” types and, while there’s certainly a sizable pool to draw from, I wouldn’t exactly consider them the pick of the litter for growing the fediverse.
The point of OPs post is that usage here is declining, and I am simply pointing out that I feel all the rage and politics is not particularly inviting.
We really need better onboarding for new users, maybe ask them about their interests to give them a default set of subscriptions (it would probably just be a tweaked version of the community search page). And default to the subscribed feed, not the All feed
Isn’t that how Piefed onboarding works?
Yes.
I’ve seen so many discussions like this about what needs to be done. So I did those things.
Very few noticed and I quickly got tired of popping up and saying “oh yeah I fixed that” to everything. Besides it makes me look like a smug asshole.
You should be a proud smug asshole (endearing) for fixing the missing capability of Lemmy poisoned the well.
I wouldn’t have stuck being in the threadiverse if it wasn’t for piefed. It would just be a failed third attempt to join Lemmy since the reddit APIpocalypse.
Same. I almost left Lemmy, until PieFed allowed another option.
yea I think so lol
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Exactly! Well said.
It would be a huge improvement if politics were corralled into the political communities.
There are accounts that double post in both politics and news as well as other communities, I assume because people who have politics filtered actually secretly want to see politics…
I agree with everything that you’ve said. I would also add:
Find your nearest non-political non-tech hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see
Because if we’re going to cast the same net reddit does, people with a more varied set of interests need to come here. Can’t be all linux, politics, and news. We’re going to need people who like baking. We’re going to need sports fans. We’re going to need music.
I could type new communities we need to be active all day. Humans are surprisingly a diverse set of creatures. You have one set of interests, I have another. Different set of interests. And both are totally valid.
The thing people here don’t seem to grasp is that OTHER interests and OTHER people using the fediverse isn’t a bad thing. If a bunch of boomers come here, and make their own communities to talk about Taylor Swift, and whatever else they talk about on facebook. That’s good that it would be here! Not bad!
They could talk about gardening, and model trains, and whatever else. It wouldn’t appeal to you, and thats ok.
We’re going to need sports fans.
This. We are in huge lack of sports discussion here on lemmy. I’m looking at other places for sports content because it’s just not here. I miss live threads.
!football@sopuli.xyz has live threads. The bot supports a few sports.
I agree, Go Guards!
We had the same thought. Right before I saw your reply, I added some hobby communities to my comment as examples.
This place is so flooded with politics and raging over the news that I’m about to choose a random hobby community that’s active and pick up said hobby just to be able to have something besides Star Trek and Linux to talk about here lol.
Orrrrr…pick a non-active community. Or both. And start posting in your local community. By that, I mean I live in Cleveland. There are 3 Cleveland communities. All dead. I’m the only one posting in one. I still get replies and upvotes. So people are there. They just all lurk until I post.
Do that. And post in a dead community. And post in an active community. We need activity basically everywhere besides tech/politics/news.
Consider redirecting people from the two other dead communities to the one you post to
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What we REALLY need is more posts about Linux.
Linux is too mainstream nowadays, I’m moving to FreeBSD
Do you use Arch btw
I don’t disagree that we need more positive and high quality hobby content. Sure.
But personally I’m so sick of dudes complaining about “political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling”, whatever half of that banal nonsense is even supposed to mean…
In fact, I’d go as far to say that people who whine about everything being “political” is a bright fucking red flag to me. My immediate assumption upon reading that is “this person is a Trump supporter who voted for this exact shit to happen because they want it to happen, and they don’t want to be confronted by the fact that other people don’t.” I know exactly what kind of people don’t want to hear about “politics” anymore now that Trump is elected, trampling our institutions, and fucking everything up. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?
We have a lot of non-voters that love to complain about the results they helped achieve.
I agree, I think something that has been lost in conversation about progressive politics and leftism more broadly (in US-centric circles at least) is that as much as people on the left disagree about absolutely everything, in general (with plenty of exceptions) politically left movements and cultural spaces tend to be far better at identifying common values and truths that are universal and holding individuals and communities to those values and truths.
Whereas on the right the endless stumping about valuing freedom of speech turns out to mostly be a mirage when it comes to innocent, vulnerable people being physically murdered on camera by the state, on the left institutions and individuals are much more often held to a standard of values and called out if they fail to reach it.
When people enter a space where progressive and left voices haven’t been systematically silenced and it is a new experience for them, they often react negatively and feel rebuked. I know some of my first encounters when I was younger with actually left spaces initially made me bristle with how willing they were to say no to things that weren’t healthy, to challenge oppressive structures even if they were so normalized they were invisible to me… it can be an uncomfortable process but ultimately more often than not leftist spaces actually try to do it and it that is a good thing.
I entirely agree with people having agency to decide when politics comes up on their feed and when it doesn’t, but the idea that we are all just being a bit too negative and obsessed with the news and we should cheer up is honestly insulting in 2026 given, you know gestures at everything. Everything is political, if you have the capacity to complain about being subject to “too much politics” be thankful for your capacity to experience that state of choice.
Also, and this is on a personal note, talking about politics doesn’t make me depressed, it helps me feel less depressed and anxious because I know other people feel similarly and the more educated I am about what is happening the less scared and confused I feel.
Leftist spaces have changed a lot over the last two decades. Not for the better.
Cancel Culture Culture is real and extremely aggressive among the left.
The red flag is at least, “they have so much privilege in our society they can ignore politics”, if not what you stated
I’m kinda bummed more people from Reddit didn’t come here after the exodus. But I guess it’s a Catch-22 thing cause that could’ve been all kinds of good or all kinds of bad so who knows so he’s starting off fresh and slow. It’s kind of the best way to go maybe
Lemmy wasn’t ready at that time, it’s much better now, but people won’t give it another chance. PieFed is better now anyways and still increasing the gap, but no one knows about it. We need another big exodus somehow, and we need to send them to PieFed over Lemmy.
I have no interest in PieFed, it’s Lemmy or I just go back to reading books. Heck maybe I should just do that anyways…Nah, who are we kidding ha!
Maybe its a question of organization. Perhaps we shouldn’t have generic instances just instances around topics. That way niches can form without being too fractured and if said topic goes away it does not take several other coms with it.
I’d rather see better discovery tools and better community/account migration tools. Id be worried about topic-specific instances potentially backfiring by concentrating too much influence for a given set of subjects on the “preferred” instances
Good discovery tools are essential on a federated platform. An important part of twitter, facebook, and reddit success is/was that that they were the place for their particular style of content. You had a pretty good chance of being able to discover your old high school friends, because they were on the one platform. Then the (early) algorithm started discovering for you all the obscure content similar to your history.
Discovery has to work differently in a federated system. You can search for communities on Lemmy, but if your instance doesn’t already have someone subscribed to a community, then you’re not going to find it.
better discovery tools
i think communities should have links to “related communities” in their sidebar sothat people can find similar communities more easily.
There could even be a “recommended” posts listing, besides the “subscribed”/“local”/“all” as it is today. it would show you posts from linked communities from communities that you already subscribed to too.
One issue is I think Lemmy’s UX means there’s less friction with local communities than remote communities (not sure why) which is why usually the lemmy.world version of communities typically wins without a lot of effort to steer people
Moderation reports are currently not federated (well they are in PieFed, but not in Lemmy) - at some point that will be added, but for all this time after the Rexodus this has been true. This lack of federation has hindered the growth of the Threadiverse.
Lemmy v1.0 has suffered too much scope creep, this update is way late while PieFed runs circles around Lemmy
This defeats the purpose of the platform being distributed. For example if all political threads are on one instance it would be a ripe target for the authoritarian regimes popping up right now. I know there are dominant instances, but at least if one drops, people can migrate.
Niche hobbies and small communities (that are active) is what is needed
Yes! We need more esp32 users to come up with bonkers ideas.
Efi System Partition 32 bit?
i remember writing code for the ESP boot system
For that we need a LOT more users. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation.
Hopefully we can capitalise on the next Rexit.
In the past lots of people moved over but left because of the terrible UX. I think PieFed has solved most of the UX issues.
Reddit had the additional benefit of being found through google… that’s how i learned about the site.
you cant google your way into this place - and that’s a huge limitation, when it comes to expanding the user base with random normal people.
If you Google for “beans no pooping challenge” https://lemmy.eco.br/post/113558?scrollToComments=true at least appears on the first page of results - that’s progress, baby!
This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.
Comes with numbers. Not before.
We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that
Makes me wonder if it’s specific softwares that are pulling the statistics downward, or in general. Also the last 6 months seem rather stable on the graph.
Edit: One thing I notice that is annoying are whatever conflicts between moderators and instances and seeing communities close with a message saying to join some new community on another instance. We’re too small to be restarting communities because of whatever arguments mods have with instance admins. Most people do not care what instance they are on. I’ll see people stereotype others based on what instance their account is based on and I’m at a loss that some people have already tribalized themselves based on fediverse instance they made their account on
The best stuff on social media is random hobbies. That needs to grow a lot. We want the people that are really into random stuff. Like maybe they’re just really into fallen tree branches and for some reason there’s a community out in the world all about fallen tree branches, we should want that. Over on reddit I enjoy the treelaw community. Get to learn about peculiarities of trees and property
As a start, fediverse would be nerdy. Going to be tech and privacy nerds. Gamers. Great, grow that. Be active. Get the food communities growing. Get the gardening communities growing. Bird watching. Whale watching. Train watching.
I remember earlier reddit. Like 2007-2010 for me. Back then it was nerdy as hell with a growing gaming and professional sports watching communities. A lot more comedy that wasn’t global politics centric.
Lots of science, tech papers got big discussion and were the foundation for the community to grow. They had hobbies. They watched sports. Played video games. Gardening. Cooking. They’d talk about that too. Fun/educational communities
We have to be a lot more than just politics and grouches. If I just went by the grouches opinions TikTok would just be propaganda and then I see friend’s on it and it’s mostly cooking and comedy skits. Lots of anime memes. – Growing the anime/manga community would be pretty big for the fediverse. Anime/manga fandoms are hyperactive posters
Is this accounting for bots that are essentially RSS feeds?
No, I’m taking the data as it exists on the API …
Is there a way to analyze the same data with bot users excluded? That would be a more useful indicator of actual activity.
we need more variety
Need to gain slighty more than we lose every year to stay healthy.
Why?
because the alternative is to lose more than we gain each year because the option to “stay exactly the same” is statistically unlikely as it has a probability of around 0%.
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All will always be a dumpster fire.
PieFed has Popular, which is similar except curated to have less memes https://piefed.social/home/top/popular
I did that and it was evenly split between news, memes, reposted Tumblr and X posts and comics.
Ok, what content stream in what medium when viewed in a bulk popularity view like that isn’t 90% memes or equivalent?
I think more isers would be good, though I like how the fediverse is right now. It’s small, but it has enough content to have me coming back, but not so much that I’ll spend the entire day browsing.
The post the other day about lemmy needing more users and engagement gave a little nudge to me commenting more. I guess same thing happened with many users and you can see the spike in the graph.
