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)

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    23·
    15 days ago

    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.

  • bitjunkie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    14 days ago

    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.

  • Trinsec@piefed.socialEnglish
    27·
    15 days ago

    Didn’t the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn’t many servers defederate UK servers as result?

    • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comOPEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      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

    • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comOPEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      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

  • DeceasedPassenger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    14 days ago

    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.

  • mintiefresh@piefed.socialEnglish
    108·
    15 days ago

    I do generally wish there was more content. So I’ve decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.

  • Em-Squared@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    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.

  • LemUrun@pawb.socialEnglish
    21·
    14 days ago

    Triggering content: People are going back to Reddit.

    Come on! I want to see them downvotes!

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    146·
    14 days ago

    Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.

    It does not help - and I did not know myself at first - that a Google search of “Lemmy” points people to lemmy.ml, which btw to someone without an account does not show “Fediverse” content and instead rather shows exclusively Local (rather than Global). The amount of bOtH sIdEs SaMe political content is always rather extreme, especially there.

    Aside from platforming political extremism, and using Arch Linux (and beans 🫛 🫘), there just isn’t much else to this place. For us here, it is enough… unless we need to actually know about stuff and for that we go back to Reddit or whatever - especially niche topics that are discussed nowhere else -> if you want the content then you have to go to where it is at. The content creators refuse to come here and I don’t blame them: we aren’t a very welcoming bunch.

    Let’s see, so we covered how we are a Nazi bar, how content creators can’t be arsed to bother posting here, oh yeah and there’s also the fact that Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit was. There is a modlog but no modmail, no notification when your content is removed, no ability to appeal or discuss (especially when the modlog merely says that the removal was done by a “mod” - it used to say the name of the mod but then it was changed to merely say “mod”, so note how Lemmy is becoming more rather than less totalitarian as time passes) or again even so much as be told that your stuff is now gone - and unlike Reddit, taking all of the conversations that happened on a post along with it (when Reddit removed a post it merely took away the link from the community, but someone with the URL could still continue to interact with it for a long time, whereas Lemmy does not even acknowledge that a post once used to exist, instead mentioning a server error and - get this - that you should try again later to access it… 🤔🥴 despite knowing full well that the post will never be un-removed; I am not suggesting that this misleading message is intentionally inaccurate, just stating once more how undemocratic this is that a mod can basically wipe out most traces that a post ever existed even in the past).

    But is there a thought that making an alternative Reddit would be super easy and fun and require zero effort? Lemmy is still extremely far behind Reddit in terms of features and will take many more years to catch up, if ever, and it’s hyper-authoritian nature will always remain baked directly in (plus the Nazi bar effect… it’s literally right there in the very name!). Though you might check out PieFed - in terms of features it has already surpassed Reddit in many ways, though it is still early in development (e.g. most days there is no Preview ability for posts or comments - although some days there is so I suspect it is almost ready to remain rolled out as a permanent feature?), and it has some fascinating ideas about democratization of moderation. PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust and so features come out in days to months rather than years. PieFed still shows posts from Lemmy.ml, but unlike lemmy.ml itself, does not do so exclusively, so offers a far more global and democratic platform. I’m placing my hopes in PieFed rather than the dying Lemmy moving forward. I usually get downvoted for saying all this… yet here we are on a post saying how MAUs for Lemmy are decreasing and calling into question whether Lemmy will even survive or not - while btw those numbers for PieFed recently tripled in size - so history has and will continue to prove this point accurate. There is hope for the Fediverse, not specifically for Lemmy I think (there is just too much wrong there and the efforts continue to move in the opposite direction, more towards rather than away from authoritarian control, which trends towards fewer rather than more content, i.e. it intentionally creates “echo chambers”), but for the wider Fediverse, yes. It will take actual effort to build it up though. Each step moves towards that - e.g. apps such as Voyager, Thunder, and Interstellar helped Lemmy (& the latter Mbin) thrive, and now all of those are adding support for PieFed, thus ensuring that none of the previous efforts were wasted, even as they move forward into the future rather than remain stagnant in the past.

    But there are reasons why people don’t like coming here - and those still need to be solved. First among them is that the tools have to get better, which is happening. Second, start posting content, and make it fun to spend time here. I see people doing that constantly, making my time here enjoyable.:-) Third, maybe more will be needed beyond those two steps but I don’t know anything about that, so I just focus on the former two steps and leave the rest to the future:-).

    • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
      15·
      14 days ago

      “What the fuck is this paragraph of ranting nonsense?”

      “Oh, it’s an ad for piefed “

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        5·
        14 days ago

        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.)

    • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      14 days ago

      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.

      Have you tried to suggest then Piefed since then, especially now with Voyager starting to support it?

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        14 days ago

        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!:-)

        • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          14 days ago

          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?).

          Are those bugs still around even with the new notification update a few days ago? If yes, could you please report them on https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues ?

    • Coelacanth@aggregatet.orgEnglish
      5·
      14 days ago

      Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.

      I have a hard time believing that since it implies every single person you proposed Lemmy to was already aware of it. The reaction I personally tend to get is “…what? Huh. Never heard of it”.

      • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        14 days ago

        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.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            3·
            14 days ago

            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

            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.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      14 days ago

      Let’s see, so we covered how we are a Nazi bar

      You lost me there. You didn’t even hook me enough for the piefed part!

  • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comOPEnglish
    6·
    13 days ago

    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)

  • auraithx@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    15 days ago

    Uk subs are too fragmented and I never see anything from them.

    Hopefully voyager implements piefeds topics functionality.

  • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    15 days ago

    How are you noticing that you’re specifically seeing less interaction from UK people?

    • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comOPEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      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

      • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        14 days ago

        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.

  • J52@lemmy.nzEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    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)

    • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      15 days ago

      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 🤷‍♂️

      • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.spaceEnglish
        6·
        14 days ago

        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.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        121·
        15 days ago

        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?

        • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          14 days ago

          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.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            3·
            14 days ago

            I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.

            I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a “slow web” kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.

            • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              14 days ago

              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

              • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                5·
                14 days ago

                My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:

                • Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and “migrate”
                • A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
                • 15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the “politics” of each instance
                • The “Community Ambassador” feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.

                These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think “how can we get from 50k to 5 million?”

                • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  14 days ago

                  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

        • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          9·
          15 days ago

          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.

          • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            14 days ago

            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)

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              14 days ago

              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.

              • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                14 days ago

                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 😅

            • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              4·
              14 days ago

              violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs,

              The people I’m talking about (the worst ones) don’t even have an “end.” No plan at all. The violence is the end. It’s pure stupidity. I see it as the lust for violence, coming up with some politics to justify itself.

              • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                14 days ago

                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 :(

          • I_Snort_Butterflies@lemmy.wtfEnglish
            12·
            10 days ago

            Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform

            soooo much! Not only is this becoming an “advocate violence” platform, people are getting pissed if they have a post removed for advocating violence. Lemmy will def end up in the news after some crazy shoots up people and they find out he was all over Lemmy being cheered on to shoot billionaires or something.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            10·
            15 days ago

            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.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            3·
            15 days ago

            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.

            • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.comOPEnglish
              3·
              14 days ago

              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.

              • Em-Squared@feddit.ukEnglish
                1·
                14 days ago

                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.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          10·
          15 days ago

          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.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            10·
            15 days ago

            Network effects are incredibly strong

            Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us

            We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused

            This is not an “advantage”. This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.

            The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,

            And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny “free as in beer”, VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another “They don’t know” meme.

            • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
              4·
              15 days ago

              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.

              • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                1·
                14 days ago

                When do you think Bluesky started?

                It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter’s original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).

                The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

                It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.

                • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
                  2·
                  14 days ago

                  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.

            • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              7·
              15 days ago

              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.

              • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                31·
                15 days ago

                Me and most others

                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.

                • aasatru@kbin.earth
                  4·
                  14 days ago

                  group of people who don’t want to compromise on any of their values

                  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.

            • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
              21·
              15 days ago

              As explained by the user below

              capitalist growth-focused approach

              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

                • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
                  4·
                  15 days ago

                  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

                • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
                  1·
                  14 days ago

                  Better UX I think would help slightly, not easy when we have such good decentralization. Maybe PieFed will end up hooking people better?

    • Coelacanth@aggregatet.orgEnglish
      4·
      15 days ago

      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.

        • Coelacanth@aggregatet.orgEnglish
          2·
          15 days ago

          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.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        3·
        15 days ago

        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.