this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
258 points (95.1% liked)

Fediverse

39355 readers
565 users here now

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

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I'm not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.

The data

I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:

query {  
  monthlystats {  
    date_checked  
    softwarename  
    total_posts  
    total_users  
    total_comments  
  }  
}  

Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:

jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'  

(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I'll put the graph for that in comments)

Then did a good old' chart

What to think of it

I don't know. Users' activity is on the rise and I find it nice

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 125 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (37 children)

Just my two cents, but there's just no reason for people to come here when it's 80+% political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling. Hell, I've got 80% of the content here filtered out as it is, and I want to be here.

Find your nearest non-political hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see and maybe we might see some growth or people sticking around. My current hyperfixation/hobby is Meshtastic, so I've been pretty active there lately. If that's not your thing, then there's:

If you're like me and not good at any of that, tell us about cleaning your gutters or doing your laundry over in !Dullsters@dullsters.net

The point is, we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we're angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 42 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I agree with everything that you've said. I would also add:

Find your nearest non-political non-tech hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see

Because if we're going to cast the same net reddit does, people with a more varied set of interests need to come here. Can't be all linux, politics, and news. We're going to need people who like baking. We're going to need sports fans. We're going to need music.

I could type new communities we need to be active all day. Humans are surprisingly a diverse set of creatures. You have one set of interests, I have another. Different set of interests. And both are totally valid.

The thing people here don't seem to grasp is that OTHER interests and OTHER people using the fediverse isn't a bad thing. If a bunch of boomers come here, and make their own communities to talk about Taylor Swift, and whatever else they talk about on facebook. That's good that it would be here! Not bad!

They could talk about gardening, and model trains, and whatever else. It wouldn't appeal to you, and thats ok.

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

We had the same thought. Right before I saw your reply, I added some hobby communities to my comment as examples.

This place is so flooded with politics and raging over the news that I'm about to choose a random hobby community that's active and pick up said hobby just to be able to have something besides Star Trek and Linux to talk about here lol.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Orrrrr.......pick a non-active community. Or both. And start posting in your local community. By that, I mean I live in Cleveland. There are 3 Cleveland communities. All dead. I'm the only one posting in one. I still get replies and upvotes. So people are there. They just all lurk until I post.

Do that. And post in a dead community. And post in an active community. We need activity basically everywhere besides tech/politics/news.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] zerozaku@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

We're going to need sports fans.

This. We are in huge lack of sports discussion here on lemmy. I'm looking at other places for sports content because it's just not here. I miss live threads.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 22 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

What we REALLY need is more posts about Linux.

[–] karashta@piefed.social 11 points 2 weeks ago

Do you use Arch btw

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] maxy@piefed.social 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Yes. I'm here for the long tail, the niche communities. And what do I see? Not enough photos of houseplants! Come on, you must have some too. And to add to the list, !books@lemmy.world looks nice.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] sol@feddit.uk 9 points 2 weeks ago

My experience is that Lemmy is decent for tech-related stuff but outside of that, it can be difficult to find active communities depending on the hobby. I just went looking for a good Spanish learning or general language learning community and the few that I found have been inactive for months. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right place (I searched in Communities > All).

I don't think maximum growth should be a goal for Lemmy, I just think it needs a critical mass of activity to keep it interesting. Currently I think we just about have that for many tech/FOSS related topics but not so much outside it. The problem, I think, is that a lot of people who aren't into tech/FOSS issues don't know about Lemmy and don't see why they wouldn't just use Reddit or Discord.

[–] Hanrahan@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Just my two cents, but there's just no reason for people to come here when it's 80+% political shit a

As a contra point, I'm glad that its like this, a lack of politcal debate is toxic to democracy and that way be dragons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal originally used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.

That doesn't mean there shouldn't be more other stuff as well though.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Ghyste@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

It would be a huge improvement if politics were corralled into the political communities.

There are accounts that double post in both politics and news as well as other communities, I assume because people who have politics filtered actually secretly want to see politics... (/S)

load more comments (31 replies)
[–] Skavau@piefed.social 46 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yes.

Do we want Reddit amounts of users? No.

But there's a lot of growth between here and there.

[–] logicbomb@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

100% agreed. A Reddit clone with Reddit amounts of users will end up almost as bad as Reddit. The thing that makes Reddit worse in that situation is that they are a public company.

This platform would have to evolve a lot before it can deal with so many users. There has to be some significant innovation and improvement in moderation and administration, or more users would inevitably lead to endemic misinformation and power tripping and all of that shit you see on Reddit.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean the intent here is for moderating capacity and tools to increase with user increases. Reddit grew but grew before its own moderator capacity allowed for it. Now I would argue its overall activity levels are inflated by AI, trolls and spammers. I'm on Piefed and in terms of the discussion about growth, I think about new instance admin tools can mitigate and prevent bad behaviour, trolling, AI and spamming from (usually) new accounts that otherwise would cement themselves on as regular spammers and trolls.

It's one thing to grow, but you need to grow the ability to deal with the problems that can derive from that.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

One of the benefits of our "own" system is like you said, we can build the tools as they come.

Reddit and other platforms, we were always beholden to what they gave us.

With the fedi, you want something better? Build it! Or support those who are doing so. Its much more productive than just complaining all the time.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 40 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

Niche hobbies and small communities (that are active) is what is needed

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

For that we need a LOT more users. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation.

Hopefully we can capitalise on the next Rexit.

In the past lots of people moved over but left because of the terrible UX. I think PieFed has solved most of the UX issues.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I'll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven't been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.

[–] Sharkticon@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Comes with numbers. Not before.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] cron@feddit.org 30 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

One thing that annoys me about each statistic about posts is that I don't know how many of these posts are actually interesting and engaged with.

For example, there is a specific instance that just mirrors reddit content and has barely any engagement. The bot posts mulitple posts per hour, mostly without any comments or upvotes.

It seems rather irrelevant to compare these posts to actually interesting posts with a nice discussion and a couple of upvotes.

My suggestion would be to count and plot the number of posts that have at least a few interactions.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I do feel we need more users, but not just users. It’s “niche” users we need. There’s a lot of techies on the threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin), but not enough people who care about other stuff.

So communities outside that, struggle to thrive.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

But we are not going to get "niche" users if we don't get large numbers of users. Niche interests will only come up here when the population is so large that even the long tail ends up with critical masses.

Those defending "quality over quantity" miss this exact point.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 18 points 1 week ago

We need active users, not just users that post something once then disappear. The MAU is more important than the user count.

[–] rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The stats with all softwares

We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I'm definitely not equipped to analyze that

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 9 points 2 weeks ago

Makes me wonder if it's specific softwares that are pulling the statistics downward, or in general. Also the last 6 months seem rather stable on the graph.

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Maybe its a question of organization. Perhaps we shouldn't have generic instances just instances around topics. That way niches can form without being too fractured and if said topic goes away it does not take several other coms with it.

[–] artifex@piefed.social 21 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I’d rather see better discovery tools and better community/account migration tools. Id be worried about topic-specific instances potentially backfiring by concentrating too much influence for a given set of subjects on the “preferred” instances

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

Good discovery tools are essential on a federated platform. An important part of twitter, facebook, and reddit success is/was that that they were the place for their particular style of content. You had a pretty good chance of being able to discover your old high school friends, because they were on the one platform. Then the (early) algorithm started discovering for you all the obscure content similar to your history.

Discovery has to work differently in a federated system. You can search for communities on Lemmy, but if your instance doesn't already have someone subscribed to a community, then you're not going to find it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Xanthobilly@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago

This defeats the purpose of the platform being distributed. For example if all political threads are on one instance it would be a ripe target for the authoritarian regimes popping up right now. I know there are dominant instances, but at least if one drops, people can migrate.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 week ago

Needing more users is fine. Sure, we could always use more friends (or enemies, I guess)

But, ultimately, just having people come here first and then whatever hellhole corpo-media second is at least a step in the right direction. I feel like user activity increasing is a good sign that there's a lot of people out there investing time in the fediverse instead of the corporate hell-loop social media.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 11 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Let's keep it just under critical mass for Eternal September to not happen.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago
[–] frog_brawler@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (9 children)
load more comments (9 replies)
[–] 1984@lemmy.today 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

I dont think more users is very important. Its not going to make Lemmy change from mostly memes anyway.

The mentality of the largest Lemmy instances is still to moderate away opinions they dont agree with, so this place is never going to be good for any discussions where people disagree strongly.

Most users downvote what they dont agree with. Its a circle jerk echo chamber where we all agree or get downvoted.

But we can all enjoy memes together. :) Its kind of nice. Lemmy is chill and easy. Even kid friendly.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] zerozaku@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

The post the other day about lemmy needing more users and engagement gave a little nudge to me commenting more. I guess same thing happened with many users and you can see the spike in the graph.

[–] Stupendous@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Edit: One thing I notice that is annoying are whatever conflicts between moderators and instances and seeing communities close with a message saying to join some new community on another instance. We're too small to be restarting communities because of whatever arguments mods have with instance admins. Most people do not care what instance they are on. I'll see people stereotype others based on what instance their account is based on and I'm at a loss that some people have already tribalized themselves based on fediverse instance they made their account on

The best stuff on social media is random hobbies. That needs to grow a lot. We want the people that are really into random stuff. Like maybe they're just really into fallen tree branches and for some reason there's a community out in the world all about fallen tree branches, we should want that. Over on reddit I enjoy the treelaw community. Get to learn about peculiarities of trees and property

As a start, fediverse would be nerdy. Going to be tech and privacy nerds. Gamers. Great, grow that. Be active. Get the food communities growing. Get the gardening communities growing. Bird watching. Whale watching. Train watching.

I remember earlier reddit. Like 2007-2010 for me. Back then it was nerdy as hell with a growing gaming and professional sports watching communities. A lot more comedy that wasn't global politics centric.

Lots of science, tech papers got big discussion and were the foundation for the community to grow. They had hobbies. They watched sports. Played video games. Gardening. Cooking. They'd talk about that too. Fun/educational communities

We have to be a lot more than just politics and grouches. If I just went by the grouches opinions TikTok would just be propaganda and then I see friend's on it and it's mostly cooking and comedy skits. Lots of anime memes. -- Growing the anime/manga community would be pretty big for the fediverse. Anime/manga fandoms are hyperactive posters

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›