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
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Niche hobbies and small communities (that are active) is what is needed
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.
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.
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:
- !woodworking@lemmy.ca
- !leathercraft@lemmy.ca
- !artshare@lemmy.world
- !gardening@sh.itjust.works !Houseplants@lemmy.ca !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !baking@sh.itjust.works
- !sewingrepairing@sh.itjust.works or !sewing@lemmy.world
- !television@piefed.social
- !movies@piefed.social !movies@lemmy.ca !movies@lemmy.world
- !jigsaw_puzzles@lemmy.world
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
What we REALLY need is more posts about Linux.
Do you use Arch btw
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.
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.
Thanks for the links🙂
I don’t disagree that we need more positive and high quality hobby content. Sure.
But personally I’m so sick of dudes complaining about “political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling”, whatever half of that banal nonsense is even supposed to mean…
In fact, I’d go as far to say that people who whine about everything being “political” is a bright fucking red flag to me. My immediate assumption upon reading that is “this person is a Trump supporter who voted for this exact shit to happen because they want it to happen, and they don’t want to be confronted by the fact that other people don’t.” I know exactly what kind of people don’t want to hear about “politics” anymore now that Trump is elected, trampling our institutions, and fucking everything up. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?
The red flag is at least, “they have so much privilege in our society they can ignore politics”, if not what you stated
I agree, I think something that has been lost in conversation about progressive politics and leftism more broadly (in US-centric circles at least) is that as much as people on the left disagree about absolutely everything, in general (with plenty of exceptions) politically left movements and cultural spaces tend to be far better at identifying common values and truths that are universal and holding individuals and communities to those values and truths.
Whereas on the right the endless stumping about valuing freedom of speech turns out to mostly be a mirage when it comes to innocent, vulnerable people being physically murdered on camera by the state, on the left institutions and individuals are much more often held to a standard of values and called out if they fail to reach it.
When people enter a space where progressive and left voices haven’t been systematically silenced and it is a new experience for them, they often react negatively and feel rebuked. I know some of my first encounters when I was younger with actually left spaces initially made me bristle with how willing they were to say no to things that weren’t healthy, to challenge oppressive structures even if they were so normalized they were invisible to me… it can be an uncomfortable process but ultimately more often than not leftist spaces actually try to do it and it that is a good thing.
I entirely agree with people having agency to decide when politics comes up on their feed and when it doesn’t, but the idea that we are all just being a bit too negative and obsessed with the news and we should cheer up is honestly insulting in 2026 given, you know gestures at everything. Everything is political, if you have the capacity to complain about being subject to “too much politics” be thankful for your capacity to experience that state of choice.
Also, and this is on a personal note, talking about politics doesn’t make me depressed, it helps me feel less depressed and anxious because I know other people feel similarly and the more educated I am about what is happening the less scared and confused I feel.
we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we’re angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).
Unfortunately the “political shit” and “ragebait” is important.
The Fediverse is what you make of it. If you subscribe to a bunch of communities posting political shit and ragebait, that’s what you’ll get. That’s not a problem with the threadiverse, that’s a problem with your curation. One that it sounds like you remedied, so I’m not sure why you feel the need to call it out as a problem.
I love piefeds default :)
And as much as I dont like parts of bluesky, they did the onboarding the correct way.
Look at it from a new user’s perspective; someone who has not curated their feed or otherwise “made the fediverse what they want” yet. e.g. They land on Lemmy World or another big instance and their default sort is “active”. Doing that now in an incognito window, and half the front page is rage, same on the second, and the stuff that’s not are some random shitposts and Linux filling in.
Truth be told, looking at that, I probably wouldn’t want to sign up. Especially if I didn’t know that different instances have different cultures, etc.
Assuming they’re a normie (which we desperately fucking need here), I just don’t see that they’d want to stick around. Aside from trolls and spammers, the only people we seem to consistently attract here are the “Wah wah I was banned from Reddit” types and, while there’s certainly a sizable pool to draw from, I wouldn’t exactly consider them the pick of the litter for growing the fediverse.
The point of OPs post is that usage here is declining, and I am simply pointing out that I feel all the rage and politics is not particularly inviting.
Edit: And you know what? I’m just going to fucking say it. There’s too many armchair activists here who won’t let you enjoy a single moment without reminding you that something bad is happening somewhere in the world and that you have some kind of moral obligation to be angry all the time about it. And if you’re not angry all the time then you’re somehow part of the problem.
We really need better onboarding for new users, maybe ask them about their interests to give them a default set of subscriptions (it would probably just be a tweaked version of the community search page). And default to the subscribed feed, not the All feed
Isn’t that how Piefed onboarding works?
yea I think so lol
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.
Out of curiosity, which instance?
The instance is called lemmit.online, and the most upvoted post on the whole instance is “This bot is bad for lemmy”.
Yes.
Do we want Reddit amounts of users? No.
But there’s a lot of growth between here and there.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
We can see a globally slowly downward trend, probably not good but I’m definitely not equipped to analyze that
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.
Is there a way to analyze the same data with bot users excluded? That would be a more useful indicator of actual activity.
Need to gain slighty more than we lose every year to stay healthy.
Why?
I just went to “All” and sorted by “Top: Today”.
90% is memes.
I did that and it was evenly split between news, memes, reposted Tumblr and X posts and comics.
I guess I considered the Tumblr and Twitter posts as memes since they are just screenshots.
Ok, what content stream in what medium when viewed in a bulk popularity view like that isn’t 90% memes or equivalent?
we need more variety
Is this accounting for bots that are essentially RSS feeds?
No, I’m taking the data as it exists on the API …
I like it here. I go to all and I filter out as much anime as I can. I like the memes, I am a long time Linux user, and I am into politics.
More users would not necessarily improve things imo. It might but it also mightn’t
