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Is the Fediverse stalling? (lemmy.relayeasy.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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)

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[–] 14 points 1 year ago (67 children)

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 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (64 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    How about more marketing efforts? Buying ads?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (39 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (38 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year 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

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (29 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (28 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (26 children)

    But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.

    We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (24 children)

    You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by "Lemmy" I did mean the wider Fediverse.

    In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (23 children)

    Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

    Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.

    When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

    People don't really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.

    Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.

    So here do you just mean "people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists"?

    There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them "hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon".

    Oh, well I don't know enough about Peertubes success here. I don't really use that.

    The majority view on "how to best fund the Fediverse" is "set up donations". Whenever I bring up "I think it's more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members", I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

    Oh for goodness sake. I simply don't believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.

    Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

    Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

    Sorry, I'm thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don't really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

    This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".

    If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that's fine.

    Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.

    That's on people needing to do that. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm doing it with music and TV. People have to be the change they want to see. But there's not really anything anyone can do about that with regards to how the audience here interact, or how much interest they have in things outside of politics.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

    Sorry, I’m thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don’t really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

    From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).

    Instead of thinking "Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit" or "Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter" or "PeerTube vs Youtube", think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man's version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.

    Communities can become nomadic, and that’s fine.

    First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

    Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

    I don't really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.

    Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures.

    We don't have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That's the only major one i can think of.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (8 children)

    I don't really care about that.

    I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

    One of the fundamental issues with the current implementations in the Fediverse is that the server owns the keys and can do anything on behalf of the user.

    That's the only major one i can think of.

    again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

    but if you want to talk threadverse only: feddit.de. The original kbin, fmhy, one for writers that I forgot the name...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

    Then we're at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That's the answer.

    again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

    Because I don't really care or know that much about Mastodon.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

    That's the answer.

    That's a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.

    People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I don't think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they "own" it, to be honest.

    Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.

    For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.

    For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

    I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually,

    No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.

    But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.

    If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    You see, this is why it's important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of "Reddit, but federated".

    In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that "retweets" a message. You may not even have realized, but it's quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.

    What I just described to you is this "communities following communities" idea. It's not about "giving the impression" of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.

    Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It's Piefed's implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a "reposting actor". Just like the "private voting" feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it's bad for the overall Fediverse.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Always cool to see you around!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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?"

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year 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 😅

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year 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 :(

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