It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!

https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50

Total users are huge now.

There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.

Are you certain these are unique accounts?

No idea but you can check here from the official sources and pulls: https://fediverse.observer/history

Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as that same webpage shows when you filter for Lemmy, currently we have 33K monthly active users, down from 35K in recent months, itself further down from 40K in Dec. 2025, having fallen from 65K at the peak during Rexodus.

See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.

Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit... and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.

I really wonder where they're going. I can't find any substitute for this little purgatory. Piefed? I'm not a fan of the UI. Masto? Twitter's a weird endless conversation space without proper organization and it makes me want to scream. Modern social media? We'd have vastly divergent desires if that's where they went.

Why not just count the two together? At 40k across lemmy + piefed, that's not bad.

Hacker news has been a nice place to browse. Yes a lot of the people are the most AI silicon valley brained ghouls but its offset by the entertainment of seeing them earnestly say the quiet part out loud. and because the forum has rules about sincerity thoughtful engagement you can open a thread and actually read a good discussion with intelligent comments.

If you build it, they will come.

Looking at the PieFed graph, and all-time peak usage seems to be for last month, and the dip for this month could be explained by the month not being over yet (and even if not, it's not an indicator of decline).

Worth noting, on FediDB, Lemmy+Piefed+Mbin is sitting at 54.8k MAU. Lemmy itself is at 46.4k. Though I don't know the historical situation there.

Reddit is an AI dumpster fire. There are still decent communities, but the glory days are behind it (the 20teens). Reddit circa 2012-15' was peak. Now it's an AI slop infested milquetoast facebook alternative. Damn shame. Hopefully the user base will finally realize the ship has sailed straight up it's own corporate butthole, and seek alternatives, such as this one.

You couldn't have certain reddit subreddits here. For example, I follow r/Sverige which is the political right's Sweden channel. And they talk about immigration as a major problem. How open would Lemmy be to discussions like that? It can't even handle different opinions without defederation, downvoting and blocking.

No, i think Lemmy is good for memes and stuff but it can't handle discussions that adults wants to have.

I don't think there would be anything stopping them spinning up instances. It would be up to others whether they want to see their posts though.

I'm a leftie but I can handle having a conversation about immigration, as long as it's mature, lucid and respectful.

Well then you're in the minority. I do think it's a problem that you can't post what on most other platforms would be viewed as mainstream viewpoints without being threatened by censorship. And I do not agree with these viewpoints but at the same time, if the average person cannot post here without walking on eggshells, the fediverse will never be mainstream.

And I want it to be mainstream because fuck the tech oligarchs.

There are few instances claiming that they will do less strict moderation and defederations.

However I haven't check those instances myself yet.

It's probably worth remembering that censorship and moderation are two sides of the same coin.

And they're not just used to silence viewpoints (like you're saying about the Fediverse) but also an absence of it is exploited to keep people addicted to ragebait and jealousy (mainstream).

I think it's a fundamental problem of social media as a technology tbh, and we'd be mostly better off without it.

People learning what the overton window is and that it can be very much different depending on the place you are in (i.e. instances in the case of the fediverse, but also to a lesser extend the fediverse itself) is a good thing in my view.

any specific ones for lemmy?

Well, an alternative explanation would be LLM agent accounts, which started to appear on the fediverse around the time the above graph started to go up.

Here on Lemmy they are a bit delayed and only started to sign up in larger quantities in the last 2-3 months.

You can post racist drivel here, it will just be rightfully treated like it is.

What you can’t do on mainstream platforms is post leftist content, which you actually can here. Like Lemmy was pretty much invented because leftists got their comm banned from Reddit. They routinely censor us, like with Meta shutting down countless queer pages and spaces as of late.

Sh.itjust.works is one I think in terms of not defederating.

A big issue with not doing moderation is it pretty much leads you to becoming a Nazi bar and getting defederated by others.

Doesn't matter how open 'the fediverse' is or not to a point of view if the admin of your server are happy to have it, it will exist here. Especially when we're talking raw numbers like this, they should all be piling into the same bucket, if we're measuring fediverse. But as I say this I wonder what the definitions they're using are.

For instance very different views are expressed on Truth Social, which I'm led to believe could connect to the fediverse, but choose not to. So I wonder if those numbers are included, i expect not because they'd not be connected as a fediverse participant by my understanding.

The point is, other people don't have to put up with it in their corners of the fediverse if they don't. This is the freedom of choice benefit that a network like the fediverse has over a centralised platform like fb, reddit, or even BlueSky. This is a fundamental difference in levels of control that makes the fediverse such an exciting project.

Its not necessarily the case that each individual user has full control of these settings, although they mostly do, and if they set up and maintain their own instance they absolutely will. But it is the case that a user has greater control to a point where its practically individualised, and if there were a case where some greater disconnection is warranted the admins aren't some amorphous presence that travel between dimensions unseen, they have a presence in their servers and have a level of accessibility thats unheard of in previous forms of social media. Theres also a community of admins, who can learn and build off each other, which is beneficial in a cooperative-competition kind of way.

Anyway, you probably already knew all this. I ended up finding typing this out was a fun exercise to appreciate for a moment what this network is actually delivering to a couple million people.

You can't just count Lemmy active users. I switched from Lemmy to Piefed for example. So we need to count Lemmy+Piefed.

2014-2015, when r/conservative was pushed to the front page on the regular despite r/conservative banning over half of all people that post in r/conservative?

As others have said, you can make your own instance for wrong beliefs. Perhaps painting a target on your forehead would help with the feelings of being persecuted.

It really sucks how many instances defederate over nothing

People are just generally leaving the threadiverse because... Sorry everyone but its so bleak here.

The world is going to shit and there's nothing any of us can reasonably do about it.

I doubt there's a day that goes by that I don't think about how this place does not "fill my cup with joy".

At the same time I kind of can't look away because I do feel b that I'm better informed because I read about how shit everything is.

If accurate, then good news for all. Congrats!

For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven't really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.

mature, lucid and respectful.

fuck u, u got cooties

(just trying to hit all three points :) )

Yeah, you can tell, way more conservative liberals on here than there used to be.

The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.

Note that the numbers then are still shrinking.

I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely not additional people, or rather only some are but nobody knows how much.

Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don't know the details there.

I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.

Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit... and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.

Right: people are not so much leaving PieFed as they are leaving the Threadiverse overall, and Lemmy in particular.

Since the amount of growth in PieFed does not offset the decrease in MAUs in Lemmy (especially over the long term, from the 65K), people are still leaving "the Threadiverse" overall, even despite PieFed's recent growth.

I wanted to avoid commenting on the goodness or badness of these trends, but yes PieFed's recent growth is somewhat encouraging, though tiny.

That's highly odd. Hopefully someone looks into that more - perhaps there's a difference in what instances are allowed to be counted (like pure bot-spam and CSAM ones filtered by one site but not the other? I have no idea).

That's why I mentioned both. Though I also personally have accounts on both so... I definitely am keenly aware that these are not counts of actual human people, but rather user accounts.

Isn't that an oxymoron? How can you be both conservative and liberal?

I honestly have one account where I just block all news. It's been very helpful

They always count higher, that doesn't mean we're growing. Pretty sure FediDB has shown over 60k Lemmy before.

PieFed's growth doesn't make up for Lemmy's decline

and when they come here they will bring all their miserable drama-seeking nonsense behaviors with them.

the right-wing subs had high engagement, that pushed them to the front page often.

bold of you to assume there are any adults here.

on lemmy it's more the lefties who call you names than the righties.

should be fun when it's both... but by then you will start getting banned because both will report you to mods/admins for 'harassment'

already had a couple of incidents the past few months where someone told me to kill myself, I reported i, and my comments were removed as the 'harassing' ones. blows my mind, but that's how reddit became a few years ago.

disagreement is seen as assault, and legit threats and violence are seen as an appropriate response

yep. you can't believe in pragmatic sensible middle grounds without being told you should die or get PMs about how they are going to rape you.

Like... what if we had limited and legal and sensible immigration policies?

No, that's facism and you're a nazi and you support genocide... lol

and all these dimwits preach how 'tolerant and loving and accepting they are' of other people... except they aren't. they are the nazis they claim to hate so much, and their 'standard' is 'well i'm justified in my violent and rage as long as anyone who is ever right-wing exists' and will tell you how how that isn't an extremist position, how they the 'paradox of tolerance' means they are the 'good guy' fighting the 'bad guys'.

that said i've seen some good discussions of the paradox... but all the good thoughtful takes get down voted and the 'but we have to kill the nazis' takes get upvoted. because on lemmy being thoughtful and debating and trying to understand things makes you a nazi. just like doing so on any right wing only space makes you a mentally ill leftist.

the majority of fediverse content is already ragebait and echo chambers. it's been that way for well over a year IME, and it's escalating day by day.

the problem is people who love ragebait and echo chambers don't see them as such, they see them as the one true reality and are incapable of acknowledging other perspectives on the world exist, and anyone who doesn't share in their raging is evil and bad and tacitly supports the evil bad people.

and i won't even go into the victim complex mentalities that dominate most communities here. the second you suggest anyone has agency over their lives... except a hostile and violent reaction or your comments being reported as hate speech.

No, it’s the worst kind, half in and half out

it's fine to allow users to block what they want, or downvote it, or block other users.

the issue is when admins and mods basically want use their own to systematically remove anything they don't like, and then claim they are the arbiters of truth justice and all that. it's the hypocrisy.

it's also when non-hostile ideas are expressed, and viewed as hostile and violent by the damaged people who are emotionally allergic to anything that isn't already in their comfort zone.

I joined Lemmy, like 3 years ago I think. But I didn't start being active until this year. I think there is a lot of people like me, especially now that you have to log in to see old reddit. https://old.lemmy.world/ really tipped me over the edge in to being a regular.

Fair enough.

i mean, can you blame them?

it sucks. it sucks wading through moutains of dogshit and miserable crazy people to like, get a trickle of good and interesting content, or have exchange comments with reasonable chill people.

for every good interaction i have on here, there are probably 10+ other ones, and everyday I have to systemtically block new communities and users that are nothing but bot spam or straight up malicious users who are pushing a delusional and angry political agenda. and it works... those types of accounts/posts get lots of engagement, way more than organic stuff.

and you can go to their comment history and see account is less than a month old, and has 100s of posts and 1000s of comments and they are all... the same thing over and over and over.

a year ago i never had to deal with that on fediverse platforms. i'm now thinking of leaving myself because it just... increasingly sucks here and I don't have an interest in being relentlessly negative and angry like most of content here is. i also don't have a superiority complex being here either.

Conservatives are a subset of liberals.