this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

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Editing to let people know that I will be blocking anyone who feels the need to tell me why this graph is inaccurate. I truly don't care, but feel free to chime in with your useless take and land a spot on my block list! ๐Ÿ™‚

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[โ€“] rglullis 343 points 6 months ago (35 children)

Lies, damn lies, and graphs that don't have the Y-axis starting at 0.

10% growth in a day is nice, but far from a revolution. Let's see this trend going for a month.

[โ€“] Blaze@feddit.org 63 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Monthly active users increased by 43% between 13 and 14 January: https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats

[โ€“] rglullis 54 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] aasatru@kbin.earth 46 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't think anyone here is arguing that the entire world will be using pixelfed by the end of the year, and that its usage will expand to other galaxies by the end of the decade.

It's a comment about the current growth curve, and it is both accurate and interesting.

[โ€“] rglullis 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.

Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you've seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.

[โ€“] aasatru@kbin.earth 55 points 6 months ago (15 children)

The fact that you believe these platforms were the same before and after these events makes it sound like you were not, in fact, there to see it happen. In my experience, it permanently changed both platforms, transforming them from weird niche sites to genuine alternatives.

That said, what you find interesting or not is not any of my business.

[โ€“] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)
[โ€“] aasatru@kbin.earth 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I know I shouldn't bother. I am just annoyed by the misconception that all graphs should always start in 0 on the Y axis, as if it was some law of nature. Shouldn't allow myself to get dragged in further. :)

[โ€“] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 6 months ago

Good mindset :)

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[โ€“] xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that either Mastodon or Lemmy slid back anywhere near as far as back to baseline? Sure, usage went down, perhaps even significantly compared to the peaks, but I think that both retained a lot more users than they had before their respective spikes. I'm an example of someone who came into Mastodon with the Twitter exodus and into Lemmy with the Reddit exodus, and I've stayed for both.

[โ€“] rglullis 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I don't mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.

Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg's meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.

[โ€“] fdrc_ff@www.foxyhole.io 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@rglullis@communick.news tbh we shouldn't expect the adoption curve of any Fediverse software to be somewhat similar to the ones of centralised social networks, since Fediverse completely misses the commercial aspect that encourage key users to stay in the platform easing communities to stick to it as well. My guess is that without the action of commercial dynamics, the situation wouldn't be so different from the jumps-and-losses moments we're used to

[โ€“] rglullis 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

ok, that's a fair point. But then this whole talk about "going vertical" and "exponential growth" is useless, and the only thing that we could (perhaps) try to take out of these mass migration events is to ask ourselves "would we able to reduce churn in the Fediverse without compromising on any principles?"

In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks? Does this mean that leaving Instagram and coming to PixelFed is the same as quitting unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and realizing that when you switch to a healthy diet you simply don't eat as much at all?

And if any of this is true, shouldnยดt we change the effort from "leave Instagram and come to PixelFed" to "Leave Instagram and quit all social media"?

[โ€“] fdrc_ff@www.foxyhole.io 1 points 6 months ago

@rglullis@communick.news I think is far more complex than that, but this:

In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks?

may be kinda true. Just think about how much time you spend on Instagram (if you use it) by actually talking/socialising vs how much time you just consume passively contents and ads. Chances are that the Fediverse is where most of your actual interactions take place. In this sense I really liked your comparison with unhealty food, however if quitting bad food habits means usually to improve your life, quitting social networks often means to cut relations to communities you may heavily rely on, especially if you are a memeber of a marginalised community. There is a whole history about black community trying Mastodon during the Twitter migration and mostly ditching it because the platform wasn't so welcoming after all but mostly because the black community sticking to Twitter was just too important. Is only an example that shows that communities tend to stick together and move away mostly for cultural and historical reasons.

So as Gollum loved and hated the ring, communities hate and love their platforms, but most of all they love density. I think the Fediverse have a chance only if we stop using the commercial platforms as a paradigm and even if many users ditch the Fediverse after the first try, the most motivated of them choose to stay because the genuinely like it, and they may be enohght to form a dense enought user base that can motivate communities to form and stick here

[โ€“] xapr@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Got it, thanks.

[โ€“] Kichae@lemmy.ca 8 points 6 months ago

Cool. You... don't have to engage in discussions that bore you. Why waste your time?

[โ€“] morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de 27 points 6 months ago

the head dev Dan Sup mentioned the number of active users jumping from 6k to 30k. we'll see how it holds, but there is strength in numbers, people only stay if other people see what they post there. i have good hopes and really want to ditch instagram

[โ€“] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 17 points 6 months ago

Normalized graph for you:

Not a vertical line, at all. For sure cool, but very exaggerated with a dishonest graph.

[โ€“] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Wake me up in 2 months when 80% of new users churned.

[โ€“] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 7 points 6 months ago

I've never been on IG but I'm strongly considering a pFed account. Am I churn or am I miniscule net-new?

And yeah, it's a hope that the rumoured meta toxicity is somehow magically not on pFed. I wanna see my nephew's designs and art but not the influencerati junk I fear is on the captive platform.

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