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.
For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.
But as for how much or even whether we’ve dropped within the last year - which the graphs show but as you deservedly are saying that you would like confirmation for - I suspect that the answer is that nobody knows, really.
Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic “go”? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?
While that situation was over a year ago now, it does illustrate that I personally at least have no idea how these numbers shown in the graph are being calculated. Nor do I trust them in the slightest - e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs, and maybe more depending on the month examined. Lemmy servers used to be significantly less stable than they are now, so whenever one would become almost entirely unresponsive for a few days, many of us active on the Threadiverse at that time would simply hop over to another alt. Plus some of us like to experience features first-hand like what does PieFed offer, in comparison to Lemmy.
On the other hand, I have no other source of numbers, so I discussed what was presented in front of us. 65K down to 33+/-~7K is already a large enough difference that I believe that we have lost many users. Plus we can see them all over the place talking about how displeased they are with their experience while here - over on Reddit, and Bluesky, and I’m not going to look but presumably also X, Facebook, Insta, etc.
Whether these numbers are valid over the last single year or not… I cannot truly say. Although that alone seems quite telling, given how horribly Reddit is treating its user base lately - e.g. beginning to (or is it done for everyone already) shut down old reddit, and blocking people that use a VPN, etc. The fact that many more people are not coming here already should be sufficient for us to make inferences about our popularity, separately from precisely how many people are actively leaving the Threadiverse or not.
For example, read the comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. Copying and pasting a few that I had highlighted previously:
Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily religious (Christian, Muslim, Mormon, whatever) centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. That wasn’t natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It’s kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.
I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don’t have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you’re back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.
Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.
Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn’t affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.
Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn’t really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn’t really “get” reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It’s an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also “getting” it is something that helps retain people.
Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It’s nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it’s hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.
On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy’s new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.
But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don’t spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I’ll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.
I’ve said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don’t think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren’t all that interested in growth.