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)
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It could be a reducing interest in posting totally public stuff. Perhaps people want to just use group chats in Signal instead?
There is something in that, plus the internet in general seems to be getting dumbed down a lot. Fedi also seems very much a place full of extreme views which for a lot of people is just a turn off. As a bloke seeing loads of content that is obviously sexual is also something I thought we’d seen the last of…
There is something in that, plus the internet in general seems to be getting dumbed down a lot. Fedi also seems very much a place full of extreme views which for a lot of people is just a turn off. As a bloke seeing loads of content that is obviously sexual is also something I thought we’d seen the last of…
I do generally wish there was more content. So I’ve decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.
I appreciate your effort. I was more of a lurker on Reddit, but realised we all got to actively participate here if we want Lemmy (and the Fediverse at large) to succeed.
Unfortunately, content marketing is a long-term ROI strategy. IMO other marketing means (e.g. ads, influencers) would do a better job of bringing new users onboard in the short term, helping us to tap into the network effect.
Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We’re all getting sick of it.
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.
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
Seven years isn’t a bad halflife for a social-media platform. That’s about how long thefacebook was actually usable, that’s about how long I was active on reddit, that’s about how long I was posting on my blog every day. That’s significantly longer than I was using livejournal or iLike.
Assuming a constant rate of change of anything involving people over a period of ten years is straight up nonsense.
I disagree it’s fun, at this rate by 2035 we’ll need to pay users to use lemmy
Extrapolating is also a hobby of mine
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.
(Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually)
I think rather we’ll see more software popping up and diversifying the ecosystem. Then you can pick whichever you prefer. Which is the whole point of the fediverse. I’m currently working on my own implementation. Might take a long while before any alpha version as I’m super busy but I try to do at least a bit of work on it every day.
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.
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.
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.
“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.)
Triggering content: People are going back to Reddit.
Come on! I want to see them downvotes!
Didn’t the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn’t many servers defederate UK servers as result?
I just wish there wasn’t so much sectarianism on fedi. Or maybe it’s a good thing that this kind of social dynamic is possible in online world. I don’t really know. What I do know is that it’s rather annoying to see the instance admin being labeled as reactionary because someone dug up something from five years ago and decided to start a FUD campaing.
I have enjoyed this discussion but some of my UK peers have added that the fediverse in general (like most social media to be fair) when it is new seems to “american” for them. Bluesky suffers from this criticism as well. This puts a lot of UK users off. Heck even threads is described by many as too us focused right now (see the I’m in the UK is anybody else posts on threads)
That’s really interesting. Australian here, and I’ve remarked several times how the userbase of the fediverse isn’t dominated by American voices like most other social media platforms I’ve used.
https://feddit.uk/ has 400 monthly active users and is as British as you can get
I think most of us are based on different instances too, the main UK community is showing more than double that per day.
Aye it is… but 400 users seems really small compared to others
2500 monthly active users on !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
again - no bias but that seems tiny compared to other “things”
What other things? For the Fediverse, there doesn’t seem to be a large UK mastodon instance: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list
For corporate social media, is there any UK based social media?
Nope… us Brits are a strange lot. Heck it is why I asked the q to start with because brits ARE so strange
Still, what other UK “things” have more than 2500 monthly active users ?
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.
Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform
soooo much! Not only is this becoming an “advocate violence” platform, people are getting pissed if they have a post removed for advocating violence. Lemmy will def end up in the news after some crazy shoots up people and they find out he was all over Lemmy being cheered on to shoot billionaires or something.
Yeap, 100%. The extremists and the terminally online are overrepresented here, and that keeps the masses away.
I’d suggest though to not waste your time arguing with the self-righteous idiots and just focus on bringing more normie-friendly content.
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)
violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs,
The people I’m talking about (the worst ones) don’t even have an “end.” No plan at all. The violence is the end. It’s pure stupidity. I see it as the lust for violence, coming up with some politics to justify itself.
I agree. Its very frustrating, as someone who cares deeply about trying to do anything I can to find a future for myself in the increasingly broken status quo the US is devolving into (and has been in for a long time, albiet to a lesser extreme)
But don’t you worry, they’ll tell themselves the whole while that they’re the righteous one for advocating wanton violence. I want off this ride :(
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.
Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
When do you think Bluesky started?
It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter’s original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).
The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.
I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.
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.
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.
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
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?”
Bluesky blew itself up cos they failed to be sufficiently decentralised and became an echo chamber. Activpub systems are less echo chambery but still have a very strong left lean that is significantly effecting out ability to grow especially among the centre who represents the majority. We need more right wing opinions and allow said right wing opinions if we want the majority of people to adopt it.
The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
God, shut up. There’s the “communist” dumbass instances which is just far right levels of stupid, and then literally the entire rest of this platform is just normal centrist europe views. “Leftist” is a term Americans use to describe giving immigrants healthcare and thinking homeless people should be given homes.
Go say something against trans and see how the fediverse reacts most instances will hand out an instant instance ban. That’s a pretty mainstream right wing belief but its almost completely censored on the fediverse.
Normal centrist European views huh? I don’t think so their are a lot of right ringers Europe who wouldn’t be allowed to say what they want here. Perhaps that’s what some Americans mean when they say leftist but that’s not what most people mean pretty shit straw man imo.
Hate speech has no place here, no matter how comfortable these creeps feel around their fascist politicians and policemen at home.
Hating Jews was “pretty mainstream” in the NSDAP.
Hate speech is hate speech no matter how many bootlicking pieces of shit might agree, and this is not a platform that’s friendly to the miserable fuckers who have nothing better to do with their lives than to spread hate and intolerance. They have Twitter and Truth social to spread their shit.
And here lies my point. A vast majority of people don’t think its hate speech. And a vast majority of people believe free speech supersedes hate speech.
Please define hate speech.
I’ve seen many people defending violence against Jews in the name of Palestine right here on lemmy so I’d say hating Jews is pretty mainstream in the fediverse right now.
I believe the right to free speech grants you the right to express hatred as long as ur not calling for violence u should have the right to say whatever the fuck you want.
That’s a pretty mainstream belief for a lot a people who have been completely ostracised and discriminated against by the fediverse as a whole.
And here lies my point. A vast majority of people don’t think its hate speech. And a vast majority of people believe free speech supersedes hate speech.
Actually, a vast majority of people don’t support being a shitbag to other people. You’re confusing popular sentiment with the whims of the conservative elite. If you don’t just hide in right wing echo chambers all the time you might be surprised to find out how unpopular your terrible views are.
I frequent many forums both digital and physical under a multitude of identities and the only ones who despise free speech are the extreme left. Pretty much everyone likes it. Lemmy is the most echo chambery of all the places I visit.
If your views are so popular how did trump win the election? Why have almost all right wing parties across Europe gotten a larger percentage of the vote? Why did almost every state in the us shift more right in the last election? These are the facts. You are objectively wrong
Those are not facts. You are wrong. Nice try though.
Why does everything need to expand? I’m happy with where we are. It feels cozy.
It doesn’t, but stalling is different than just sitting roughly the same. I am talking about my experience, with my peers and clients… most of whom have just upped and left
