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.
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.
Corporations have learned long ago the importance of properly identifying your audience, and the Fediverse is not exempt from that rule. Lemmy is the Fediverse version of Reddit and Mastodon is the Fediverse version of Twitter, and just like these two giants could live together with each other and also with Instagram without stepping on each other’s toes, so do their Fediverse versions can live with the Fediverse version of Instagram, PixelFed.
Now we’re just missing a Fediverse version of Facebook.
And Nextdoor
There is Friendica… yeah the name doesn’t roll of the tongue, and I only remember just for this comment… no shade to it
Zuck would sue if they’d called it FediBook.
First time i have posted on anything resembling insta in 111 weeks
Same. It’s been fun! Just posting some of my film photography here and there, checking out other people’s 35mm work. 5-10min a day tops. It’s perfect
I wonder how many of those users are the same person with multiple accounts on different platforms.
It’s strange to me how quickly I get +/- feedback on lemmy compared to actual comments and the replies that I get are almost always zero effort compared to what I get on reddit.
I get the feeling its normal for lemmy users to create multiple accounts and use them to sort of multiply their votes. What’s worse is mods can see who is voting and so should be able to do something about it… so are they as guilty?
Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
Yes. The interface is good and familiar. The majority of the traffic is on one namespace where discoverability is good. Because of the nature of the medium, getting started with no algorithm is a lot easier to stomach than just looking at what your local people have to say.
This is not to bash Mastodon, but they need that algo, which is why Bluesky is hoovering up users. Also, their UI, depending on the server is more tweetdeckish, which might scare off a lot of casuals.
edit: I’ve been informed the bsky has no algo, so somehow they seem to be getting better results in discover, perhaps single name space or perhaps they have something behind the hood.
Also, to start with, all the journalists FLOODED info, Mastodon, without any algo; you just got a hundred wordsmiths screaming past each other and they all immediately followed each other, so you couldn’t just find people like Jeff Jarvis, you got to see everyone he had a professional experience of which is WAY more than anyone is prepared to read :)
The main Mastodon instance with their official app has discoverability. The difference is so much different from what I normally use - a 3rd party app and a 3rd party instance
Bluesky doesnt have an algorithm for its discover feed (the default), or at least it didn’t used to have one, but provides an API for building your own feeds which lets you do whatever you like.
Bluesky’s big growth was from the fact it was, like PF, easy to use and easy to navigate, and all the content was on one namespace.
Lemmy is an outlier imo. You can interact and repost and find content on different instances easily. Mastodon made following feeds from different instances nearly impossible which turned me off it permanently even if I believe in its value over Bluesky.
Bluesky doesnt have an algorithm for its discover feed
For not having one, my Discover feed was pretty dead on. Maybe just luck or maybe it was the right time for the right facebook influx.
edit: they might have one https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1g9zzca/bluesky_dosent_have_an_algorithm_so_what_is_the/
Lemmy is an outlier
Lemmy is damn close to Reddit’s mental design, but instead of 27 different subs for news on one place, there are 2-3 different places that have a news sub. news@here and news@there isn’t hard to grasp, I think the platform works remarkably well.
Looks like pixelfed is just for pictures.
Seems like it’s the instagram to mastadon’s twitter.
It’s probably closer to IG than any other Fediverse app is to its non-Fediverse equivalent. Although introducing Collections and possibly Groups might make it more versatile and give it Flickr features (though not perhaps the comprehensive picture info and ability to download the original).
It federates very well with Masto, it’s just that the latter focuses on text and Pixelfed on pictures.
In fact, most of my Pixelfed feed comes from Mastodon.
I’m excited. I’m one of those users, but I haven’t used it much because I can’t find followers. To be fair, I never used Instagram. I like the fediverse, I usually see the same articles get sent through other centralized communities other than reddit (tildes, hacker news, etc), but I enjoy the community discussion the best around here.
Go back to the absolute fundamentals of social media. Identify a few hashtags that have things you care about, for instance I browse a lot of #filmphotography posts.
Yeah, I never used Instagram or Twitter so getting started on Pixelfed or Mastodon seems a bit daughnting for me. But I assume it you like platforms like that, you just search out a few people you enjoy and then add more from their content and others do the same and eventually it’ll all click into what people had in those corporate owned and controlled products.
I had kind of the opposite. Never used instagram but for some reason pixelfed just felt right and I started posting there when I joined the fediverse.
Awesome, glad to have you here future friend. If you know of people that may be of interest to add for mastodon/loops/Pixelfed please let me know and don’t be shy, I am always open but haven’t found time to search
Gonna check this out. Looks interesting thanks.
I find it sort of shocking that you didn’t think people who use different types of social media would be swayed by non-micro blogging specific platforms. Nobody wants to join the fediverse because it’s the fediverse. They want to join something that’s fun and similar to what they’re used to.
Micro blogging sucks. I hate it. I’ve always hated Twitter and none of that hate has come from anything related to who has owned it or their policies. I’ve just genuinely never felt a desire to communicate with 280 characters (historically 140). The discussion threads are also garbage and all over the place. Why would someone who is used to platforms like Reddit or Instagram want to use Mastodon?
Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
Yes, it’s done “not be a micro blogging platform”.
I’m aware Mastodon doesn’t always have the same character limits that Twitter does, but that’s apart from the point.
I really enjoy Mastodon. Writers create threads to get around character limits. I actively search out others so I don’t need algorithms to chose for me. If you want spoon-fed it’s not for you though.
Lemmy once had a massive influx of new users, a lot left again and monthly active users has remained somewhat constant for a long time now. Let’s wait and see how many people actually stay on PixelFed.
Lemmy is full of bad news, hate and toxicity while pixelfed is full of artists and people sharing cool pictures and their passion. Visiting my pixelfed account from 2023 a few days ago set such a contrast with what I see on lemmy that I started using it regularly. It really felt weird to visit such a wholesome place after using lemmy for a long time. Now I use pixelfed to balance out the bad stuff from lemmy for maintaining my mental health and to appreciate the art which is not common on lemmy.
I hear you. I’m getting tired of the massive amount of posts about trump and elon and politics. I don’t see almost any new content about other stuff.
It’s like Reddit and you gotta filter out the bullshit. Adding Elon, Musk, Trump, and RFK to my block list improved my mental health quite a bit. Hopefully if it’s egregious enough it will slip through and I won’t be blind sided by some terrible thing they’re doing. That’s the only downside.
The problem is that Lemmy isn’t at the point where I can browse it like I do on Reddit.
After the API thing killed my main reddit app, I just lurk on like 4 1 million+ user sports/video game/military meme subreddits and check on them every 1h/30min to see 10 new posts or any important news that happened. I check r/all maybe like once every few months.
The relevant lemmys just aren’t that active or don’t have low-effort post rules, so I’m kind of stuck browsing the front page of Lemmy if I want to see more than 10 posts per day
This is very true unfortunately. Maybe eventually but my fear is that when Lemmy gets that big it turns into Reddit
Maybe you could try banning words like “elon” or “trump” if you feel overwhelmed. Some apps have this feature
well, i’m against individual workarounds for common problems, there should be common solutions.
otherwise you just start alienating 99% of the users who won’t put in the effort to install an extra app just to get that filtering, or if using the web interface on mobile, it’s just not possible.
Gonna try that thanks!
Same problem with Mastodon tbh
@Martineski @koncertejo
Interesting, thank for your feedback.For our instance jlai.lu, we try to balance bad news with the forum libre, where we can share picture, movie, book, some daily game…i think it work pretty well because everyone share what they love.
For News, we separated usa, israel-palestine from
world newsso it offers a place where anyone can post there or filter. And it let other communities breath.Many groups of lemmy are full of political content but you can block them and still have a decent amount of contents.
The political stuff is leaking into any other community though. I’ve already blocked every politics specific and news specific community and a handful other communities and I still get a lot of that. I’m also blocking a few keywords as well, this stuff just gets through regardless of what you do and in no small amount either.
Keep downvoting that shit, let them know they are not welcome
More users isn’t necessarily good.
Every time there’s an influx from whatever shit storm we retain about 20%.
? Why’s that not good?
There’s a lot of gatekeepers here who actively sabotage the project to keep it niche.
Some examples of active sabotage?
You can just scroll through the comments here, and see some examples.
Well on Lemmy the quality of content dropped. Low effort posts started becoming normalized. Lots of people entered who dont know what the Downvote button is for.
“when there were 0 users, the site was perfect”
Well, I’m glad you like it some much you want to preserve it. Best of luck.
2 separate unrelated statements.
- 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.
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.
The Discovery section in Pixelfed definitely needs work, but the ability to follow hashtags offsets that somewhat. I’ve found loads of great photographers to follow off the back of following hashtags that I’m interested in.
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
Oh thanks for giving me a proper term to use when pointing at my biggest problem with the Fediverse.
Has it ever been discussed by any developers? Is it technically possible for ActivityPub? Would the costs be exorbitant?
There are different options to solve this. The current “solve” is to dump everyone on one big server. Mastodon.social, lemmy.world, etc.
Another solution might be a button that sends you to a random top10 instance. Might work for mastodon but lemmy servers defederate like hell and some of the biggest instances are .ml, hexbear, etc.
XMPP has this tiered list https://providers.xmpp.net/ but it’s the same problem of expecting users to care what a server is
I don’t have solution, and if you do then I’m not the person you should be telling :)
Absolutely agree with this.
It’s hard to discover something new, sometimes.
Is the iPhone app still missing darkmode?
What about Android? I don’t see dark mode in options.
Dang for some reason I thought Android had it.
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.
oooh, yea that’s a good point
and, I mean, the app was in beta, sudden changes are to be expected
but still, I feel like the app was so much better before… its kinda frustrating
Agreed. It immediately went from being maybe the best app in the Fediverse to the 3rd best for its own service. I stopped using Pixelfed altogether until Pixelix got good enough to be a replacement.
I honestly don’t understand how getting the new app to feature parity with the old wasn’t maximum priority. It at least seems like it’s going to get there pretty soon.
I don’t think Mastodon was really competing with Bluesky. Bluesky is way ahead while Fediverse fanboys thought people would somehow just learn to use Mastodon. (while they wouldn’t shut up about Bluesky)
We feel good.
The mood and anger here is starting to feel like Reddit recently and now I know why
Well it doesn’t seem like there’s been another Reddit exodus, especially from looking at the user numbers for Lemmy. There hasn’t been a big screwup lately like with Meta or Twitter (but I think Bluesky is absorbing the Twitter refugees currently).
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.
You too? I’ve had more users sign up this month than for many past months!
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.
I think I’ve also seen new communities being created too
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 - 422New 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 - 1Top 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 - 112Oh wow, thanks for putting it into perspective! Those are very interesting stats:)
(Also lol, apparently not that many more communities are being created)
My script had batch processing of the data with the batch sizes being set to 200. With that the result of communities for this month I was getting was 125. After setting the batch size to 1 making it process each community separately it changed to 313 so who knows if there are any other problems with the script. :p
Oooh, I will need to look into the lemmyverse json file to find out what they are. :D
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.”
Here, the issue. People don’t feel like small instances would live for long and migrating do not transfer the old posts so people feel more safe subscribing to the large instances
Some people care, most don’t. Lemmy.world is the vanilla ice cream of the fediverse. Thanks for being part of the community!
I like vanilla ice cream. It’s a great base. Maybe today you throw some butterscotch and peacans on it! But tomorrow it’s caramel and fudge, and the next day it’s chocolate chip cookie dough, and yhe day after that it’s whipped cream and strawberry syrup. And the day after that it’s chocolate sauce with peanuts.
Meanwhile, the guy who got chocolate just ate the same bowl of ice cream for 5 days.
See it’s kind of like sex, too. Some people just do the same thing over and over. But what I do, is I take some handcuffs, and chains, and baby oil, and some… trails off
And that kids, is how I met your Mother!
"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"
that’s cool, what’s the furry instance
I saw instafops.net was an options when I was browsing servers. idk anything else about it or even if it’s popular. Not my kind of server, but figured I’d share since it’s something I saw and you’re looking for.
I miss that era of practical effects so bad.
is this wild wild west and if not why not
