It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as that same webpage shows when you filter for Lemmy, currently we have 33K monthly active users, down from 35K in recent months, itself further down from 40K in Dec. 2025, having fallen from 65K at the peak during Rexodus.
See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.
Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit… and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.
Why not just count the two together? At 40k across lemmy + piefed, that’s not bad.
The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.
Note that the numbers then are still shrinking.
I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely not additional people, or rather only some are but nobody knows how much.
Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don’t know the details there.
I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.
Worth noting, on FediDB, Lemmy+Piefed+Mbin is sitting at 54.8k MAU. Lemmy itself is at 46.4k. Though I don’t know the historical situation there.
That’s highly odd. Hopefully someone looks into that more - perhaps there’s a difference in what instances are allowed to be counted (like pure bot-spam and CSAM ones filtered by one site but not the other? I have no idea).
Personally I think with ai crawlers, instances are coming up with their own ways of combatting the issue and the trackers are getting stuck in the crossfire. I have a few fediverse servers so some show up, some dont depending on the tracker.
Thank you for sharing, especially your first-hand perspective.
Its kinda hard to extrapolate either way honestly. Its easy for me to say that 90+% of the traffic to my tiny home server is AI crawlers now. I have NO idea definitively for the others. When I made a python fix, it jailed quite a few IPs and now its not too much of an issue. But I did notice a couple of status servers like fedidb get incorrectly jailed.
So yeah. Fun times for admins.
For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven’t really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.
just block all “US politics” communities and downvote every single post that mentions trump (or the democratic alternative candidate) that appears outside of those comms.
As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.
I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.
There is NO such thing as just blocking when it’s everywhere, and if you can downvote it you’ve already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.
So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y’all in November – or December, if shit gets real.
Looking at the PieFed graph, and all-time peak usage seems to be for last month, and the dip for this month could be explained by the month not being over yet (and even if not, it’s not an indicator of decline).
Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit… and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.
Right: people are not so much leaving PieFed as they are leaving the Threadiverse overall, and Lemmy in particular.
Since the amount of growth in PieFed does not offset the decrease in MAUs in Lemmy (especially over the long term, from the 65K), people are still leaving “the Threadiverse” overall, even despite PieFed’s recent growth.
I wanted to avoid commenting on the goodness or badness of these trends, but yes PieFed’s recent growth is somewhat encouraging, though tiny.
I found Lemmy through grapheneos! That’s my story. Love it.
If I hadn’t smashed my iPhone in a work related accident I would never know the joy of ditching reddit and joining you folks.
Hazzah for happenstance! Life is great!
Reddit is working hard on fediverese success
They’ve really managed to enshittify the site beyond even what I expected back when the API changes went live. I guess it was expected. First Digg shot itself, now Reddit…
Reddit is an AI dumpster fire. There are still decent communities, but the glory days are behind it (the 20teens). Reddit circa 2012-15’ was peak. Now it’s an AI slop infested milquetoast facebook alternative. Damn shame. Hopefully the user base will finally realize the ship has sailed straight up it’s own corporate butthole, and seek alternatives, such as this one.
I checked just now and it’s still the same slop as when I abandoned it.
- Eating disorder family dinner rage bait
- Office food stealing rage bait
- “Karen” screaming at a fast food joint employees (food theme today it seems)
- E-bike driving badly rage bait
- Would you take $5 million for a minor inconvenience
- Peter explain this simple but controversial joke I already understand but want to post as a question for more engagement
- Ex lover rage bait
- Thinly veiled normal activity misrepresented as creepy rage bait
- Family drama rage bait
- Petrol prices rant
- What’s a job that seems x but is actually y
Feels like I haven’t missed anything at all
Fwiw this is mainly the most popular subs. The niche subs are much more chill, though still Reddit hence full of bot spam, influencers trying to pretend to offer organic content that was not bought and paid for, and people who overall are just spoiling for a fight (which if we are honest, the latter category used to include most of us here?:-).
Not that I am advocating for Reddit, mind you, just saying that you either have to go to where the content is - Facebook, Insta, Reddit, Xhitter/Bluesky, Tiktok - or else give up on knowing stuff altogether. Which if you are talking about like events in your local town, then at least Reddit seems preferable to the others?
Obligatory fuck spez, I’m just acknowledging that the network effect is real, yo.
Fuck all that, idk it’s good for kids to find stuff because they were literally born a few years ago, but if you’re an adult you should know those sites really exist to mine you for data and you can just reach out to someone directly if you’re interested in what they’re working on.
Yeah agreed. Honestly my main issue with Reddit is the algorithm and “doomscroll” effect. I don’t like how I felt after using Reddit and how addicting it was. I found myself feeling anxious, stressed, and tense after using it; it wasn’t good for my mental health. I used to use the third party apps because I could control my experience better, but we all know what happened there.
At least here I can add keyword filters and such to Voyager. And my favourite feature of Lemmy is that it ends. I can read all there is to read in the last 24 hours. I don’t get a repeating loop of content algorithmically selected to maximise my engagement. I don’t see anything outside my bubble by default unless I’m feeling like exploring in “all”.
Maybe if the “ability to turn off algorithm” law passes in Australia, I might return for some of the niche communities. But I honestly feel mentally healthier since quitting Reddit. Deleted my 15 year old account, no regrets.
Same. I noticed that I had become argumentative, even combative, and I got to where I would write out whole responses and then just delete them rather than send, knowing what replies I was almost certain to receive. It’s not a place for good faith discussions… at least, not anymore, and that was true even by the time of the Rexodus/APIcalypse.
Any social media - including the Threadiverse - can be addictive. Fortunately there is no real incentive here to do so, and many blocks in place to prevent it actually - like as you noted, limiting scrolling to pages rather than allow infinite.
Extremely unfortunately, niche communities don’t exist here and so you have to go to wherever those are. But I find myself lurking with no desire to engage, most of the time even in the form of voting. I like the OC but the system that presents it is distasteful to me, to put it mildly, and I find that extremely off-putting.
Endless nostaglia, “remember this?” posts
2014-2015, when r/conservative was pushed to the front page on the regular despite r/conservative banning over half of all people that post in r/conservative?
You couldn’t have certain reddit subreddits here. For example, I follow r/Sverige which is the political right’s Sweden channel. And they talk about immigration as a major problem. How open would Lemmy be to discussions like that? It can’t even handle different opinions without defederation, downvoting and blocking.
No, i think Lemmy is good for memes and stuff but it can’t handle discussions that adults wants to have.
and when they come here they will bring all their miserable drama-seeking nonsense behaviors with them.
Are you ready to get banned? Because that kind of talk will get you banned once they hold the reins.
You’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned!
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Yeah, you can tell, way more conservative liberals on here than there used to be.
Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can you be both conservative and liberal?
Person below is using an incorrect understanding of liberalism too (economic).
When I say liberal, I’m referring to the political philosophy of liberalism, which is rooted in individualism and capital, and emerged through the cisheteropatriarchal and white supremacist system of settler-colonialism. People perceive of this as meaning “progressive” or “freedom” because much of the early rhetoric surrounding liberalism (such as the early republican era in the Americas) involved a claim to moral righteousness under the guise of individual freedoms. Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism as an economic system (which the other commenter here misidentified as liberalism), but it would be distortive to not recognize the specificities of either respectively.
Since liberalism has been the proponent of capitalism and EuroAmerican imperialism for the past couple centuries, it has developed a durability through the appropriation and subsequent assimilation of potentially challenging political movements; such as those based in social justice. Consequently, liberals have effectively coopted the language of equality and progress as natural elements of its politics, despite it consistently disarming and presently continues its genocidal campaign against vulnerable groups.
Conservatism is less a cohesive set of politics than it is the rhetoric of liberals with grievances about the failure of the system to deliver the privilege they feel entitled to, and which this system does assure them. So, a conservative liberal may vaugely subscribe to the notion of “anti-racism” but will inevitably subscribe to racist values that are more consistent with the imperatives of a white supremacist system than they are challenging of it.
Most people in Europe and North America subscribe to liberalism. Most liberals lack a level of political literacy to identify how they subscribe to it, and many mistake themselves as “leftists” or non-liberal “conservatives,” even though their values are actually closely aligned. Since I genuinely do not subscribe to liberalism, many liberals on Lemmy self-report when they take issue with some genuine anti-racism, or any anti-bigotry in general when it doesn’t align with their comfort level (most of which have been Canadians or Euros who feel free to openly express these views with the confidence that they’re “better than Americans”).
Conservatives are a subset of liberals.
So are almost all progressives.
Sure, at least those that call themselves progressives. The left begins at anticapitalism, which is a hard break from liberalism.
