You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.
- The official Pixelfed app just has a nicer looking UI
- There’s not really a competing app for people leaving Insta like there is Bluesky vs Mastodon
- Pixelfed’s content is mostly visual so it’s easily digestible to casual users and you don’t have to scroll past dry Fedi arguments
- Better discover features so users don’t have to do a bunch of legwork to find who to follow
Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time
This.
Discovery and user abstraction are Lemmy’s biggest issues and we are not addressing them to the degree we should.
I know there’s some stuff on all those centralized platforms that’s way over the top, but most of it is actually pretty helpful. And you’ll miss it once you switch here.
What do you mean by user abstraction? First I’ve seen this mentioned, or put this way.
Relates to what server an account is on and how it affects the experience. Most people don’t want to know/care
Discovery? Interesting thought.
I tried out pixelfed and the pixelix app for the past couple weeks.
The “discovery” page on the official app is worse than useless. It shows almost nobody with over 10 followers, highlighting one person with 50-100 followers, then shows “popular on the fediverse” which are thumbnails of posts of the people it just recommended. It always recommends at least 5 of the same people day after day, week after week, even people you already follow.
The official app can’t even show a global feed so it is literally impossible to discover new people unless you know their name and specifically search for them, or they are recommended by luck on the discover page (of which there are multiple repeats per day, so not likely)
Pixelix at least allows you to view a global feed though. Definitely a better experience, but Lemmy discovery is not any worse than that.
yup… (at least in the stable channel)
what’s most infuriating is that it used to have it but at some point they redesigned the app and made it worse…?
you don’t have to imitate instagram that much, dansup
I think it was more that he wanted to open source the app but had built it while he was learning so it was pretty messy and he felt insecure about it. So he rebuilt the app from scratch and open-sourced it. It just isn’t quite at feature parity to the old app yet. Pretty sure dark mode is coming in the next update though.
The tide lifts all the boats… there is also a noticeable uptick in Lemmy registrations, at least here on our instance.
The tide lifts all the boats…
Exactly. I do not care much for Pixelfed. Or Mastodon. Or Friendica. Or really much of anything other than Lemmy. But I just stood up my own PixelFed server, so if someone wants to get away from Meta, I will happily support their decision (and pixelfed.social’s server by offloading resources) and they can find me there.
Yup, I spotted a few Lemmy accounts that were less than a week old recently. Very nice.
My script may or may not have picked up the data correctly. I thought I had it working but during writing down the data I noticed that the new 196 blahaj community wasn’t showing up in communities from this month and was categorised as 2023.06. After tinkering with the script a bit and rerunning the script it’s now correctly categorised as from this month but who knows if there are any other errors. And due to writing this down manually I could have made some mistakes myself too. :p
New communities by month:
2025.01 - 313
2024.12 - 267
2024.11 - 311
2024.10 - 264
2024.09 - 249
2024.08 - 321
2024.07 - 344
2024.06 - 411
2024.05 - 449
2024.04 - 484
2024.03 - 704
2024.02 - 500
2024.01 - 422
New communities this month by instance: (potential typos) (I just pasted it into the lemmy ui only to realise it doesn’t have a monofont ;-; (Edit: it seems to actually get rid of additional spaces anyway.))
lemmy.world - sixty-nice
lemm.ee - 27
lemmynsfw.com - 23
lemmy.org - 21
lemmy.blahaj.zone - 18
lemmy.dbzer0.com - 12
sh.itjust.works - 10
realbitcoin.cash - 9
lemmy.ml - 8
lemmy.sdf.org - 6
lemmy.zip - 6
discuss.tchncs.de - 5
literature.cafe - 5
ani.social - 4
feddit.org - 4
jlai.lu - 4
lemmy.ca - 4
lemmy.lqx.net - 4
redlemmy.com - 4
slrpnk.net - 4
sopuli.xyz - 4
discuss.online - 3
lemmy.today - 3
dubvee.org - 2
feddit.it - 2
feddit.uk - 2
lemmy.cafe - 2
lemmy.spronkus.xyz - 2
lemmyusa.com - 2
szmer.info - 2
zerobytes.monster - 2
discuss.jacen.moe - 1
fasheng.ing - 1
feddit.dk - 1
feddit.nl - 1
g00n.cloud - 1
hackertalks.com - 1
hexbear.net - 1
info.prou.be - 1
lemmings.world - 1
lemmy.amxl.com - 1
lemmy.chrisco.me - 1
lemmy.eco.br - 1
lemmy.studio - 1
lemmy.wtf - 1
lemmygrad.ml - 1
lemuria.es - 1
mander.xyz - 1
midwest.social - 1
monero.town - 1
pawb.social - 1
ponder.cat - 1
programming.dev - 1
r.nf - 1
real.lemmy.fan - 1
reddthat.com - 1
thelemmy.club - 1
ttrpg.network - 1
vegantheoryclub.org - 1
walledgarden.xyz - 1
0xdd.org.ru - 1
Top 15 most popular (subscribers) new communities created this month: (excluding nsfw ofc)
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 1.77k
!keeptrack@lemmy.world - 544
!actually_infuriating@lemmy.world - 346
!sideoftheroad@lemmy.today - 265
!youtubeclassics@sh.itjust.works - 229
!Football@lemm.ee - 193
!quityourbullshit@lemmy.world - 184
!growthefediverse@slrpnk.net - 183
!webrevival@lemm.ee - 151
!shitprop@quokk.au - 124
!Autism@lemmy.dbzer0.com - 123
!19684@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 121
!latin@lemm.ee - 119
!lesbians@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 118
!buyeuropean@feddit.uk - 112
Oh wow, thanks for putting it into perspective! Those are very interesting stats:)
(Also lol, apparently not that many more communities are being created)
This makes sense to me.
All these people had to pick an instance and now probably understand how to do that.
That’s the biggest hurdle to signing up for lemmy or mastodon.
Me in 2024: “Which one is the main one?”
“There is no main one”
“Which one is the biggest?”
“Lemmy.World”
“Thats the one for me!”
“THATS NOT HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT!!!”
“…but that’s what I did.”
Some people care, most don’t. Lemmy.world is the vanilla ice cream of the fediverse. Thanks for being part of the community!
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Yeah, we usually tick along at 1 or 2 sign-ups a day, 7 days ago that went to 10 and has settled back to 3 or 4.
I don’t know if they are coming directly from Pixelfed but there were a few high profile posts about the Fediverse over at The Bad Place, so, following the example of @Blaze@feddit.org, a few of us jumped in to do some missionary work/help man the lifeboats.
Pixelfed’s monthly userbase has gone from 15k to almost 300k in the past month. Absolutely massive for the fediverse.
I’ll probably try it out eventuallyTM
We can’t want the Fediverse to get bigger but be scared of normies when it does. I say welcome in! We should be mindful to listen to the new recruits, because their feedback is the most unbiased.
No; “We can’t want X but be Y” is well-formed, like with any other verbs (eg. “We can’t swim but stay dry.”). It does sound more confusing, but the structure is the same. It means we can’t “want X” and “be Y” at the same time. I hope that explanation makes sense.
So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:
The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It’s kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it’s felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I’ll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.
People don’t seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I’ve literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being “too complicated” to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see “this place is great and all, but…” posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I’d estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they’re unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether…
Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.
I’ve seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as “Global Switch Day” so hopefully it’ll keep blowing up.
Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.
This was a huge part of why I now spend more time over on pixelfed as opposed to here – I have a few accounts I’ve used here, and every single time I’m in a thread about a woman who’s been sexually assaulted, or about a woman’s shelter, etc, the ‘not all guys’/‘men suffer too’ bros come flooding in. I’ve logged out of accounts for weeks, switched to another one, just to let them scream into the void of my inbox for awhile, and it happens every time. I befriended a woman here when I responded to one of the most sad-to-read replies in one of those threads, that read like: “Women are often abused by men–not all men, just some, and I want to reiterate that this is about those specific men…” and it just went on and on trying to placate the inevitable furious white men in the comments section. As someone who lived as a white man for over forty years, I know just how whiny, sad, and ridiculous they look, and they they still get their way.
Over on pixelfed I haven’t once had an interaction even close to that. It’s extremely pleasant, people helping each other learn the platform, people asking for help in bad home situations, and it’s a community. People have messaged me when I made mistakes linking things in extremely pleasant ways, and two people debated alt-text (is it helpful to those who use audio captions, or is it training AI?) without once insulting each other. Lemmy was very briefly that, yet there’s a lot of tribalism that is not only unnecessary, and frankly, childish. I’m quite often embarrassed of my fellow men here.
(Well, non-binary now, yet I still feel the experiences of 40+ years of being a man are helpful.)
So anyway, I agree pixelfed is a lot more inviting, and a lot more diverse.
and it just went on and on trying to placate the inevitable furious white men in the comments section.
I think that’s, usually, not necessary. The “going on at length” part, that is. People want to know you’re not literally Andrea Dworkin, trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF “women are always victims, men are always perpetrators” narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.
Complications might arise when you’re trying to simultaneously assuage hurt men and misandrists. I fear it’s either “‘kill all men’ is toxic” or “‘kill all men’ is a valid expression of your anger, let it all out”, there’s no real space for compromise, there.
That all said your post and this reply probably wouldn’t have happened on pixelfed so your point stands. Disengagement is perfectly valid.
People want to know you’re not literally … trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF “women are always victims, men are always perpetrators” narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.
…
/face in hands
Okay I took a minute and I have to go through this with you.
People want to know you’re not literally Andrea Dworkin, trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF “women are always victims, men are always perpetrators” narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.
So just so I’m clear, all women have to make clear they don’t think what Andrea Dworkin does (sigh), because all men aren’t responsible for men as a group being, statistically, the perpetrators of rape, partner violence, etc?
