Is the Fediverse stalling?
from 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com to fediverse@lemmy.world on 03 Jul 07:31
https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/post/3597
from 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com to fediverse@lemmy.world on 03 Jul 07:31
https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/post/3597
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)
threaded - newest
Didn't the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn't many servers defederate UK servers as result?
No, lemmy.zip just geo blocked UK IP adresses, but the content is still available from other servers, no instance defederated.
UK and EU are way ahead the US (for example) on online safety - Meta is despised over here by government and they owe billions in fines they just tie it all up in legal complaints that last years
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.
OIDC gives you federated login, but no portable identity…
Oidc is the protocol by which auth can happen its the evolution of oauth. U need to build some kind of decentralised ledger then u set up a server that checks that ledger against the user provided auth then u simply make this server have an oidc endpoint allowing it to be plug and play with existing fediverse services.
I say oidc cos almost all fediverse software is already compatible with it.
My point is: if you have a ledger that the user controls and can use to redirect to different auth endpoints, then you don’t need oauth. You just use the record in the ledger as the authentication mechanism directly.
Yeah exactly. But instead of having to implement that auth process in every different fediverse service in however many different languages u simply write it once with an oidc endpoint and all fediverse services can run it as a container in their stack. It makes implementing such auth system a simple config change and updating a docker compose to add a new service.
It looks like we are talking past one-another.
What I am trying to say is that “getting the user to complete a login” is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.
So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That’s good, but it doesn’t solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.
Ahh I see what ur saying now. Yeah the actor id is hard as it needs to be an actual dereferenceable uri as actors need an inbox and outbox of activities.
I don’t think u can maintain cross instance actor ids. The only issue I see with having multiple actor ids for the same user is that they will have their content and profile split across multiple instances.
I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
Yes, that would be ATProto’s did:plc system.
Ahh I see I’ve never looked into how atproto works might need to look into it and sees if some of its systems can be adapted for Activpub. Thx for the info
If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I’ve done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the “ledger” mechanism.
U got a github in of or me to take a look? I’ll defiantly look into it sounds interesting.
Specific to the DID, I haven’t published yet. But what I am doing is based on my Typescript SDK for ActivityPub, so you can follow that repo for updates.
Bluesky blew itself up? What happened to bluesky?
There usage numbers are dropping alarmingly. And all the famous people on it went back to twitter.
Wow… I wouldn’t have expected that. I much prefer the fediverse but that’s still a real shame
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.
I was going to say. The fediverse isn't an echo chamber. It's a series of echo chambers, some of which even talk to eachother. :P
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.
The definition of UN should be simple enough:
A related reading would be the paradox of tolerance, which goes far in explaining why we do not want this shit anywhere near our communities.
As for anti-Semitism, I've seen some of it in response to Israel's ongoing genocide, and of course the current context makes both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments a very real problem. However, I think people on here mostly seem to be able to distinguish Israel and Judaism, and when they don't it seems moderators are generally doing a better job than on most platforms in my experience. But I doubt you're here in good faith, so I don't see much point in discussing something like this with you.
If you feel discriminated against because people don't want you around, feel free to vote with your feet.
First I always discuss in good faith its a far more rewarding and enjoyable way to engage with the shared human experience. Second the condescending attitude isn’t particularly pleasant I’m not speaking with you in such a way I ask you have the same respect for me.
Sure that’s a fair definition.
I would argue the paradox of tolerance is widely misunderstood the full quote in which it is based is as follows:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.” - Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies 1945)
I think most people ignore the second half of it as its convenient for them to do so.
Ahh yes vote with my feet and leave the fediverse hence why op is asking why the fediverse has stagnated and doesn’t seem to be growing. You have expertly just proven exactly the original point I was trying to make.
Muntedcrocodile: “I believe in the right to spread hatred as long as it’s not calling for violence.”
Lemmy: “Um, okay. Let’s give that a try. We hate hateful right wing views, and call people with those views total assholes.”
muntedcrocodile: “Wait, not like that! You should tolerate us so there’s a diversity of views!”
Ironic.
Nice straw man.
U see I also believe in equality (of opportunity) if you have the right to spread hate against right wing views then said right wingers should have said right to spread hate against your views.
I’m tolerant of your hate speech and combat it with ration argument. Your not tolerant of my speech and combat it with deletions, bans, and personal attacks. We are not the same.
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.
Prove me wrong.
I’ve provided more facts to support my claim than you have for yours. I’ve provided nothing, whereas you have actively lied about the nothing you’ve brought forth. I don’t need to prove anything to you.
Not that I could, conservatives don’t think anyway, and you can’t logic someone out of a position they felt their way into.
Alright I’ll bite: yonkersobserver.com/early-results-show-a-red-shif…
Proof almost all the us moved right in the last election.
statista.com/…/seats-held-by-far-right-parties-in…
Proof of my Europe claim.
Here’s the important charts for ya <img alt="1000007942" src="https://hilariouschaos.com/pictrs/image/87fd21d0-b50f-461c-98fa-f4de5031f925.webp">
<img alt="1000007943" src="https://hilariouschaos.com/pictrs/image/af51ebcb-c90f-437b-af07-ee366653d0c9.webp">
Prove me wrong
See, you don’t read.
Me: I don’t need to prove anything to you.
You: Prove me wrong.
Like, no. You can’t even read and parse one paragraph, and you want me to compile a bunch of research you won’t understand? You want me to explain the difference between a scant majority of the population who decided to and were permitted to vote and a vast majority of all people everywhere to someone who struggles with basic reading? What a laugh.
Shifting the goalposts.
I made 2 claims u said I was wrong because my claims where wrong I proved my claims where true. Now ur refusing to provide evidence to support your claims. Engage in good faith. Stop being a hypocrite. Have some honour lest I lose what little respect I used to have for u.
You seem to be confused. This isn’t a debate.
Ahh so what’s it meant to be?
And if we have fewer people over here because the fascists don't like us, well, cry me a fucking river.
I’ve never felt this was as important as people say, at least here in the Threadiverse I don’t see it being important. Can you explain how this would help Lemmy/PieFed?
Because it would solve the whole issue of people deciding what instance to sign up to. It would make the fediverse better than the mainstream “the one account to rule them all”.
But then who is your admin team? People don’t want to deal with spam and trolls.
Instances still exist its just that u can log into literally any of them with 1 account. I get instance banned from an instance ur still banned from that instance.
So people still have to choose an instance to login to? This is just to save you from creating an account which is like 25 keystrokes and 4 clicks?
I also don’t really want to make things easier for people who get banned often, sounds like it would be easier for trolls to bounce between hundreds of instances with fewer accounts.
If u get banned from somewhere from one instance ur also banned from other instances. Its basically just creating a meta id for user ids.
A lot of right-wing beliefs have become so extreme that I am frankly happy to not be around them, regardless of how important I feel it is to avoid echo chambers (very). Its one thing to want to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with even though it’s challenging, it’s another thing to constantly have to contend with people who would like to debate whether you’re a human and deserve basic human dignity because you’re a minority.
But I would appreciate if we could at least manage not to attack other left wing folks over not being left wing enough, or over what methods are a productive way to solve the problems we’re facing.
It’s kind of just a microcosm of the infighting and purity testing of the left more broadly (at least in America, I have no idea how things are with the culture of leftwing communities or voices in Europe or the rest of the world), but it still sucks and I’d like to hope we can find a way to do better.
Tbh I’m not even sure what the right and left wing means or believes anymore.
Both terms have been so utterly corrupted and coopted that they have become meaningless to the point of simply being a term used to other one group by the other.
Well that’s the problem everyone thinks they are exactly the minimum amount of left and that anyone right of them is a facist. If someone is continuously called a fascist Nazi eventually they will listen.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” - Joseph Goebbels
Australia wasn’t so much on the extreme of Americans but we are getting there. Interestingly both the right wing and the extreme left got fucked in our most recent election. Mind u I’m not happy with the current federal government they are introducing a pre capital gains tax on everyone’s savings.
I can appreciate how twisted and emotionally charged the labels have become. As a queer(-ish, it’s complicated) person in the US, it is not uncommon for right wing spaces on reddit to offhandedly describe me and all the people I care about as groomers. Thats not a good faith discussion of whether the way that I want to see problems solved is productive, it’s just dehumanizing people because they’re minorities.
I don’t want to be around that. I think it is extremely important to have conversations with people you don’t agree with, and I still have very little emotional capacity to engage with people that far away from me in terms of what’s considered an acceptable way to engage with other humans.
I don’t wish them death and dismemberment or for them to face violent retribution (and before people take issue with that, that would radicalize people and harm every single cause I care about, making every problem I’m facing worse. Even just purely pragmatically that’s a horrible way to solve our problems like 99% of the time), but I don’t wish to share space with them, I don’t have that in me.
The left does absolutely have an issue with calling anyone we dont like a Nazi, which is a painful problem to confront due to the fact that our government is descending into outright fascism, and it is now infinitely harder to have a conversation about the fact that this is what fascism looks like now that the word has been so diluted as to be almost meaningless. It essentially just conveys “I really really really don’t like that person” at this point, which is a big difference from “this person is framing minorities as responsible for all that ails society to gain power while stripping us of our freedoms and amassing personal power and currying favor with billionaires by selling them our institutions at all or our expense”
I’m curious, how did both the left and right get fucked in the recent election? I’m pretty much entirely unfamiliar with Australian politics save for a couple friendly jordies videos
The issue is the worst of both sides are the ones defining each other. I won’t deny that I disagree with some of the things being pushed as part of education for young children. But I wouldn’t say that that’s grooming let alone define an entire group of people by that. Its defiantly not good faith.
I think the beautiful part of the internet is if u don’t want to be around a particular person u can block them and they simply disappear. They have a right to speech but nobody has the right to force you to listen.
I don’t think engaging with people emotionally is the correct way to engage especially over a text medium. I think the only real productive discussion that can be had without devolving into a screaming and name calling is rational and logical. I find that emotional arguments and weaponised empathy get deployed on mass instead of rational discussion.
I’m not saying that you should be forced to share a space with such people I simply think that others should not be restricted from having such spaces and engaging freely with people in those spaces.
This is what I’m saying people have been called fascist so long they have become the fascists. Its both sides stripping us of our freedoms and making our lives shit. Its a choice between get fucked or get fucked lite. We are all to distracted fighting a bullshit culture war to realise its just a distraction from the real issues. Funny how the whole culture war thing kicked off just after occupy wall street.
In Australia we have preferential voting so we don’t have a 2 party system. We have the liberals who are centre right, we have labor who are centre left, we have the greens who are communists and we have the nationals who are fascists. The nationals never get any seats, liberal and labor trade places as the government every couple years and the greens get a couple seats. This time the greens lost almost all their seats same as the liberals.
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?
The horrors persist, but so should we
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.
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)
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 😅
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.
How about more marketing efforts? Buying ads?
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Who is going to pay for those ads? With what money? There is no single entity here with enough interest in growing the Fediverse, and any grassroots movements that we do have are strictly against commerce.
The Lemmy devs would be making more money if they went to work for Uber Eats than as software developers, and I barely manage to convince people to pay $2.50/month to offer a professional hosting service.
We don’t really need to “buy ads” to grow. We just need to get more people willing to invest in it.
I run bespoke hosting and services and people are spending less and less each month. Been doing it for 30 years in various ways and forms and 2025 is by far the hardest year to get anyone to part with money. Everybody thinks they should setup something ad laden it to death, make a fortune and retire at 30. Here in the UK you should visit a loc(ish) new website and see the content disappear behind a torrent of ads, clickbait articles, AI videos etc.
That tells us something about where our culture has gone and is going. I feel what you are seeing reflects this. There’s a herd mentality driving a lot of norms.
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.
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
This is not an “advantage”. This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
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.
The “most others” here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don’t want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it’s fine if you say “Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do”. The problem is that you’re arguing “We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)”, as if “being small” was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That’s the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it’s just that you don’t want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
Of course I don't want to compromise my values in order to see growth of a platform that I use precisely because it aligns with my values.
When I say “compromise”, I am not saying “sacrifice them completely”. I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.
As explained by the user below
Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!
We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again
Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
ngl same :|
For me Mastodon and Lemmy have shown that the general population have absolutely zero interest in decentalisation, they just don’t care
Like a hive mind they simply go where other people are, if there are two crowds of people, one with 5 people and the other with 50, they will go to the one with 50, regardless if the 50 users are mingling with people like Musk and they hate Musk and don’t want to support him in any way
Just posting that made me think, if people simply go to where people are, having lots of small servers instead of one large one is actually a turn off for most people
Better UX I think would help slightly, not easy when we have such good decentralization. Maybe PieFed will end up hooking people better?
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.
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).
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.
But why are you comparing Bluesky’s numbers with Lemmy’s. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we’ve gone down since then.
<img alt="We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we’ve gone down since then" src="https://communick.news/pictrs/image/8ec32c6f-8ee6-40f4-a1a0-0ca8da25b77b.webp">
You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by "Lemmy" I did mean the wider Fediverse.
In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn’t see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.
When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?
The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.
The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.
It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.
Why didn’t they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)
Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?
No idea.
Yeah, there might be. But it'd have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don't know of any right now.
I don't know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.
People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:
Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about “their space” being invaded, had many displays of “opression olympics”, made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn “proper manners” right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.
In other words, people didn’t go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.
For the reasons above. It’s not that they are “afraid of growth”, but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.
What changes are people afraid of? What "different people" is the Fediverse afraid of?
"Normies"? How?
What's stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?
What reporters?
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:
There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.
Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?
People don't really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.
So here do you just mean "people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists"?
Oh, well I don't know enough about Peertubes success here. I don't really use that.
Oh for goodness sake. I simply don't believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.
Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.
I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the “Closed” social networks vs the wider Fediverse.
The comparison is not to Reddit. It’s Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it’s a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.
First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about “anti-corporate”. I’m talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I’d guess your worldview is quite skewed.
This is a strawman: I’m saying “We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going”, which is not the same as “all instances should be paywalled”.
I think if we didn’t have as many open instances, we’d end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.
Again, it’s not just about reddit. Also, it’s about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.
Sorry, I'm thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don't really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.
If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that's fine.
That's on people needing to do that. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm doing it with music and TV. People have to be the change they want to see. But there's not really anything anyone can do about that with regards to how the audience here interact, or how much interest they have in things outside of politics.
From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).
Instead of thinking “Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit” or “Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter” or “PeerTube vs Youtube”, think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man’s version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.
First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.
Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it’s easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.
I don't really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.
We don't have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That's the only major one i can think of.
I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.
One of the fundamental issues with the current implementations in the Fediverse is that the server owns the keys and can do anything on behalf of the user.
again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.
but if you want to talk threadverse only: feddit.de. The original kbin, fmhy, one for writers that I forgot the name…
Then we're at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That's the answer.
Because I don't really care or know that much about Mastodon.
That’s a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.
People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.
I don't think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they "own" it, to be honest.
Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.
If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.
For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you’d be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?
Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.
I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.
No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.
I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.
But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.
If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.
You see, this is why it’s important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of “Reddit, but federated”.
In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that “retweets” a message. You may not even have realized, but it’s quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.
What I just described to you is this “communities following communities” idea. It’s not about “giving the impression” of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.
Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It’s Piefed’s implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a “reposting actor”. Just like the “private voting” feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it’s bad for the overall Fediverse.
All of your arguments in this discussion have been totally on-point. Great posts. I may have to rethink joining your instance! I’ll send DM since I’ll probably be banned from this comm for the exact reasons you have been stating.
That’s a great chart. It’s nice to definitive proof of what I “feel” has been happening.
I see more hateful attacks on here than I ever seen on Reddit. I like the idea of Lemmy, but Reddit seems to be more well-behaved than Lemmy.
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.
Always cool to see you around!
Always lovely to see you too blaze, hope you’re doing well ☺️
Doing well, thanks!
Ya love to hear it :)
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:
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?”
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
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.
That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.
That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.
Very well put, thank you for articulating it better than I did
We had some nice steady growth up until some months back, probably partially driven by dissatisfaction with Reddit rallying behind Trump and further enshittification of it. But predictably the lions share of users just accepted the new normal as the inertia of leaving is just too high to overcome. For another exodus event there needs to be a bigger shock to the system, probably something like turning off old.reddit.
I’ve spent the a good part of last year working on Fediverser. The tools to lower the barrier of migration and to get people out of Reddit were built. To me, it feels like it’s the users and admins here that were not interested in pushing that as a goal.
One day…
It definitely will happen. I’ve already noticed I’m sometimes getting weird “your IP is blocked” warnings when using old.reddit. They go away after a refresh but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re trying to get people to stop using it.
There needs to be a community tasked with advertising Lemmy on Reddit.
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
I left substack - terrible platform that just seems unnecessary
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.
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.
Uk subs are too fragmented and I never see anything from them.
Hopefully voyager implements piefeds topics functionality.
Aren’t most of them on feddit.uk/communities ?
What. I see so much !uk_politics@feddit.uk !casualuk@feddit.uk !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk etc.
And I wouldn’t call them fragmented, all on the same instance.
!scotland@lemmy.world, !unitedkingdom@lemmy.ml, !UKCasual@lemmy.world
Last post then 10 days ago, !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk has 2 from today
Last post 1 month ago, !casualuk@feddit.uk has 2 posts from today
@blackn1ght@feddit.uk @Flax_vert@feddit.uk @GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk @frankPodmore@slrpnk.net do you maybe want to try to reach out to the .ml and LW communities to see if they could redirect to your communities?
I’m not a mod of the feddit.uk equivalent so it’s not up to me, but I’d be cautious about doing so. I have lemmy.ml blocked so I can’t see their posts or comments, but I’m a bit wary about their users, it would be like redirecting a unitedkingdom community from hexbear or grad.
Yeah we can reach out to the mods there and see if they’d want to redirect to us.
Thanks!
Part of me also thinks that fediverse doesn’t need growth for the sake of growth.
That it’s primary function is to be an alternative if people want to use it.
IMO there hasn’t been enough marketing of Fediverse / Lemmy / etc.
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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:
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/239a31a7-121e-4755-a12d-544897838719.png">
At this rate by 2035 the lemmy userbase will be depleted
Maybe we're all just waiting for reddit to pull another... reddit.
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
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/18966220-76c6-4947-bb94-52ee80baef6c.png">
By 2035 we could be under water, or all living in a radioactive hellscape. And the argument of paying people to use a free service breaks logic.
sorry mate that was a joke, not a literal statement
All good! The internet makes it even harder to tell because I can’t “read” anyone over the ether.
What’s nodebb? I thought it was like a deadish lemmy clone but it seems to be the second most popular software here?
It’s old traditional forum software, they recently added ActivityPub support
Interesting. So like federated foss xenforo?
Yeah I think so, although I’m not familiar with Xenforo.
Here’s what it looks like community.nodebb.org/…/general-discussion
!general-discussion@community.nodebb.org
nodebb.fediverse.observer/list
Oh wow this is cool!
I have one last question. How do you see other servers from one nodebb forum. I can’t find lemmy for example when scrolling through a nodebb instance.
Actually I’m not sure that’s possible yet! Seems like you have to use Lemmy or something to browse them in that way.
But pretty much everything else is growing… I am generalising but surely by now there should be way more than 1.1 million. This is what I mean, I see less now than I have before over the Fediverse not more (content, people,reactions)
Have you subscribed to the new Piefed communities following the lemm.ee shutdown?
lemmy.relayeasy.com/post/326
I just tried with !movies@piefed.social and !casualconversation@piefed.social , and it seems like your instance doesn’t federate them, I guess it’s probably the same for the others
Wait a sec, how come that lemmy.relayeasy.com/c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk isn’t federated either?
Edit: what a sec, your instance only has 7 communities federated?!
lemmy.relayeasy.com/communities?listingType=All&s…
Tis brand new community (yes really)
As a general comment, I suggest everyone interested in making the Fediverse grow to join those two communities
Nobody likes to shout into the void. The second one helps finding people to help you grow your communities.
I do generally wish there was more content. So I've decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.
Thank you!
🫡
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.
Same! Never posted or commented much on Reddit before, but now I post small reviews on stuff I own and announce libraries I make for Bevy. It’s not much, but it’s something :)
Highjacking the top comment, but it seems like OP instance only federates 7 communities: lemmy.relayeasy.com/communities?listingType=All&s…
Hey yes, early days with this instance. But seemed the right/correct place to ask generally…
You probably want to register it on lemmy-federate.com
And federate the active communities from feddit.uk/communities
thanks… learning as we go here. Run other instances for people but I have got to say for many of my clients they are seeing a massive drop in the fediverse in general after modest growth. The general consensus is that creators want to earn money rather than have freedom
For creators, it makes sense to favor the commercial platforms.
For Reddit users, the Fediverse is a good enough alternative.
Yeah I’m new to Lemmy, myself and this is really my only complaint. There’s some things that I’m interested in that just don’t really have an active community on here at all
I’m liking it here so far so I’m going to try to do the same and post more actively, I mostly lurked when I was on Reddit
How are you noticing that you're specifically seeing less interaction from UK people?
most say where they are in their bio, easy to track most of em. Plus it is fairly easy to see a UK based person in their language and things they say
I don't see near enough people on lemmy, or look at enough profiles to notice this. And I don't agree that most accounts state their location in their biography.
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
“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.)
Have you tried to suggest then Piefed since then, especially now with Voyager starting to support it?
No - see the other response to my comment. The internet is not a welcoming place, period, and I've ceased recommending this corner of it to people. If they bother to read things then they will find what they seek. Nazi bar and all.
Though you are right, PieFed is just now turning the corner where I feel that I could ethically do so (I still see so many bugs: especially notifications that lead to nowhere, e.g. if the post gets deleted but the notification remains, and the continued lack of a Preview ability, but at the rate things are going those could both be resolved by next month! Or possibly already are in the Voyager app support?).
Thank you for your own continual efforts advocating on behalf of the Fediverse: we need you, and I for one am so glad that you tirelessly devote so much time and love towards that goal!:-)
Are those bugs still around even with the new notification update a few days ago? If yes, could you please report them on codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues ?
Since a week ago yes definitely, since yesterday I am not certain. Here is one notification that seems to go nowhere: https://piefed.social/post/995600, where the notification, received yesterday, said "Jean-Luc Plushcard New Post in tenforward@lemmy.world", yet I see that post neither in the modlog for the community (https://lemmy.world/modlog/526169) nor in the list of actual posts in it, on the original server (https://lemmy.world/c/tenforward). Even if the post changed its title, then (1) it can't be in the modlog bc the last rejection there is 7 days ago iirc, and (2) that should not change the URL link to it if it wasn't rejected. Perhaps then it was removed by the original poster? Also PieFed had that Cloudflare issue, I think it was yesterday? But I don't know if that is related.
Do you think this situation is a good one to report on?
I would say so, worst case scenario it’s a false positive, best case you identified a bug!
Okay, created!
Thank you!
You lost me there. You didn’t even hook me enough for the piefed part!
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:
<img alt="img" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c64eae4d-6c7b-48d8-8523-969f04e6c2ad.jpeg?format=webp">
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.
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.
Haven’t seen anything like that myself, which instance admin are you referring to?
emacs.ch ended like that and fosstodon also had it’s fair share
Ah, not lemmy, you’re talking about the rest of the fediverse. Gotcha
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 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.
Block the meta communities
Or use Piefed where you can create different feeds (a la multireddit): join.piefed.social
They do not want to fix the problem, they want it to fix itself.
Triggering content: People are going back to Reddit.
Come on! I want to see them downvotes!
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 browse lemmy exclusively, as a result of distaste for corporatization. Personally I have no reason to leave and I doubt I will anytime soon. I don’t have any particular niches that I’m a part of, so the only thing that would cause me to leave is if the feed dried up. I usually open lemmy in the morning and scroll All - top 12h. I get an hour or so of scrolling before I reach posts with sub-10 votes. And that’s all I really need. I’ll be here until I can’t do that anymore.
That’s an interesting question. I don’t think the advantages of the fediverse are part of any zeitgeist so are not attracting new and diverse users other than maybe through places like Flipboard and maybe Ghost. The future of social media is certainly going to remain fragmented and the fediverse fragments itself by default anyway. I do think that how people use social media is changing; people are tired of overuse to some extent. Does the fediverse have a future? I think it’ll remain its own niche as corporate offerings come and go. Increased Interest may come from an unexpected growth in a specialism that is federated. I think my idealism for what the fediverse could achieve is now muted as I probably no longer have faith in open networks as the cultures are way too different so I probably now see the fediverse less through the email analogy and more through the linux analogy. If fedi plods on refining itself in its own slow way (volunteers and no money make for slow progress) then who know the next time a corp offering destroys itself and people search for a less awful and exploitative environment then it might just win out in the long term though I’m not entirely convinced about that. Does that mean i’m off to corporate networks. Not really. I’d rather just stop altogether than fall down that rabbit hole again.
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)
feddit.uk has 400 monthly active users and is as British as you can get
Aye it is… but 400 users seems really small compared to others
2500 monthly active users on !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
feddit.uk/communities
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: 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 ?
All the meta products, reddit, old fashioned forums… plenty of things. Discourse (pah) tik tok. Different but have way more users. I’m genuinely curious how they get so little traffic in this day and age against other methods. And yes, I know I’m asking on Lemmy, but I’m new here, and I still cannot fathom why they are so quiet
Aren’t all of those US focused?
Network effect. !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want to help spread the word
nope they have plenty of UK focused things. Run by a US corp of course, but plenty of local content. I welcome the debate, but for the majority of people not in the fediverse ecosystem, the numbers just look awful and that is a massive reason they don’t either look here, or stay. Herd mentality is strong. Most of them are in no way shape or form techy either
If they’re OK on corporate social media, there’s not a lot of reason to switch here indeed
I think most of us are based on different instances too, the main UK community is showing more than double that per day.
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.
Yes, it’s nice to see German, Canadian, Australian, French and all the other instances blossom
Yay I was included in a list!
It’s an interesting perspective. Historically the fediverse was more European; Mastodon is based in Germany and initially got a lot of traction in France, NLNet has contributed a lot of the funding, and there’s historically more adoption by European governmental organizations than US. But these days a lot of the energy is being driven by corporate interests (Flipboard, Wordpress, Meta, Ghost) which are primarily American (Ghost being the only exception), so that’s leading to a change of dynamics. Distressing, especially given what’s going on here in the US!
Feddit.UK is kinda nice as there’s the little british bubble in Local
I think because Emperor has vanished, might be a factor
Who?
A very active britposter
Kiwi here, originally European so I get content in two languages and from people with some interests in similar. Good percentage of local and international stuff generally keeps me happy. (Not too concerned/glad about overall numbers - there’s no continuous growth on a finite planet)
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
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.
It could be a reducing interest in posting totally public stuff. Perhaps people want to just use group chats in Signal instead?