For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. That wasn't natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It's kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.

Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic “go”? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?

I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don't have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you're back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.

Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.

e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs

Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn't affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.

For example, read the comments

Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn't really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn't really "get" reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It's an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also "getting" it is something that helps retain people.

not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️

Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It's nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it's hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.

On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy's new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.

But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don't spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I'll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.

I've said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don't think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren't all that interested in growth.

Upvoted for Oxford Comma

It started out about security before it turned into tool fixation. I prefer to have a robust catch-all for every situation, and web browsers fill that niche incredibly well. 99% of the time, I won't even consider anything besides hopping onto Firefox. The 1% is bullshit banking apps.

And I'm currently super busy, but I will absolutely check out pylova this weekend. If it is to pieced as mbin is to kbin, there's plenty for me to be excited about!

They've really managed to enshittify the site beyond even what I expected back when the API changes went live. I guess it was expected. First Digg shot itself, now Reddit...

Nope. It seems it is a sicker Reddit. No matter the congenitalilty, the engagement is just frankly gross.

Maybe I need to move from lemmy.zip, but the vetting is a pain in the ass.

People are just difficult to even talk to these days.

I am actually a really sweet but sardonic guy. No freedom of speech and no humor. Just an exasperation of the things that killed reddit.

No actual discussion. Fuck this.

You can't. He's trying to use liberal as an epithet when he means neoliberal. If we're being pedantic, liberal refers to the full gamut of people who think there should be an open and free society, which usually includes a market and certain property rights. The conservatives use liberal as an epithet to decry the left and now the left is using it to decry the middle.

It would be funny if it wasn't being used to convince naive progressives to sit out elections and let fascists seize power because the center left "only" wants 85% of what they want. You're seeing it really ramp up because the US is closing in on a big election, and convincing dipshits to sit out elections is easier than convincing anyone the right can govern.

So are almost all progressives.

...are you ok?

This is basically it. Classic liberalism is everything from Margaret Thatcher to Bernie Sanders. The MAGA movement has regressed to fascism--a form of corporate authoritatianism.

Again with the validate. :) Do you get your opinions validated here by random Lemmy users?

About immigration, why can't people dislike immigration by muslims for example? It's happening all over Europe and im actually curious why you and others think it's an opinion people shouldn't have. Is it because you don't care about the culture in your own country?

Is it because you don't think it changes the culture of a country, or that you are fine with the changes?

Did you just wake up?

Being well adjusted to a sick society is no measure of good health.

Fine, sure, let's set aside the 65K then, as an outlier.

But see the stats yourself at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats. Now Lemmy shows 33K, last month it was 35K, a few months before that was 36K, before that 37K, at the turn of last year in Dec. 2025 there were 40K, and so on. This isn't "growth", this is "shrinking".

And since I am certain that there is a way to massage the stats (somehow) to get it to show a pattern of "growth", I will preemptively state that even if we were growing over this period in the past year, it's definitely not very much. So let's just agree that in the absolute very best point of view, Lemmy seems at most stagnant (or even actively shrinking) - even despite all of Reddit's abuses in the last year.

Everyone said to wait until Reddit got rid of old-reddit, and then more people would come here. Well, here we are, and they are not flocking here in droves, it's more like they are trickling in, but at less then the rate of attrition where more people leave than stay (or again, at the absolute very best, break even).

The multiple accounts thing was more about why don't we simply lump together Lemmy + PieFed to get a combined count for the entire Threadiverse at once (Mbin has <1K MAUs). I don't see as much point in making multiple Lemmy alts these days, when the major instances are more stable, but I do think that especially as PieFed continues to add such fantastic new features, that people are more likely to have both a Lemmy and a PieFed account.

So a lot of people making new PieFed accounts could be them migrating from Lemmy to PieFed... or they could simply be trying it out. i.e. like me, having two accounts, neither both on Lemmy nor both on PieFed, but rather one Lemmy and one PieFed. I see this very often especially among the most prolific posters, e.g. someone with a Lemmy.World account testing out or even stably maintaining also a PieFed.World one. Community moderation demands such behavior, though regardless of the reason, it makes cross comparisons between Lemmy and PieFed complicated. And we could get into even deeper scenarios, like someone who greatly prefers Lemmy, but since lemmynsfw.com migrated to fedinwfw.app, now maintains a separate PieFed account as well.

Moreover, I see shrinking rather than growth over the past year, but setting that aside, note that you can also adjust how far back the stats will show for, to see earlier trends. e.g. you can observe how in most of 2024 Lemmy had 45-55K MAUs. So even if we did manage to grow (rather than shrink) by like 1-2K, the background context is that would have occurred after having lost 20K MAUs over the past couple of years. This is entirely independent of the 65K peak, a year before that in July of 2023.

So wherever you consider the "high mark" to be - 65K, 55K, 45K, or even just 40K - we are below that now.

If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow.

Sure, absolutely - but the "if" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Where are you seeing evidence of "growth" here? Even if you point to a specific month where that might be true, relatively speaking in comparison to the month before it, I am saying that in the long run, the overall trend that I see is downwards. Yes with some slight upswings along the way, but inexorably ever downwards. Not for Mastodon obviously, but for the Threadiverse/Lemmy

And perhaps that's okay? Or perhaps we could take the challenge to do better - e.g. find a way to avoid recommending places such as hexbear and hilariouschaos, because otherwise we are a Nazi/tankie/troll bar, indistinguishable from those others who we claim are "not" us, yet we do exceeding little to nothing at all to separate or even distinguish ourselves from such. Lemmy is the "we use Arch (Linux) btw" of the Fediverse - we here know about e.g. hilariouschaos, and take steps to avoid it, but we do next to nothing to help others not be recommended to outright join it over and above all other Threadiverse instances.

I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth

I think most of us here would be okay with that, with most likely massive differences in how people define "slow"😉. However, that's just not what I am seeing playing out, as it seems that year by year, we are in decline. Even at the time when bc of what is happening in Reddit you would have rather expected a significant increase.

Maybe something else will happen that will turn this around, but I don't know what. Instead, I think effort is going to be required, e.g. to find a way that hilariouschaos and hexbear do not get recommended to random people looking to escape Reddit, and will likely neither enjoy their time there nor be likely to stick around long enough to figure out how to do better. As you said, we need non-technical normal folks here, if we are to thrive.

Except that we keep turning them away.

I don't agree with your vision. I agree with the fact that some European countries stole resources from Africa, but Italy in particular didn't rake pretty much anything: Italy didn't have big colonies until Mussolini tried to build his own empire after 1930, without much success anyway; they only made some mess in Libya and in the Horn of Africa, which are not even the places all those immigrants are coming from.

Plus, the real problem is that there's somebody else currently raking Africa: it's China.

Since China is coming out of poverty, they need somebody to take advantage of, and they decided to "colonize" Africa. Not real colonization like Europe did in previous centuries, but a silent control of their economy, slowly buying their politicians and their natural resources extraction companies.

I don't think that the right reparations for what Europe did in the past is welcoming all kinds of immigrants with no control whatsoever.

First, indiscriminate immigration leads to ghettos and poverty, and a lack of integration.

Second, so many immigrants is the perfect way for far right wing parties to win elections, by appealing to the base instincts of people. Even worse now, because Russia is directly financing both far right wing parties and misinformation campaigns in general.

Welcome

Are you sure? I didn't notice that.

Fuck me if it's true though, I abandoned reddit because of the bots.

lemmy.zip imo is notoriously shit. It was one of the first communities I blocked when I joined the fediverse.

bots. bots everywhere.

edit: hey, look at all the repost content! it's almost like there's a bunch of bots swarming the fediverse...

Yeah, and everybody is saying block communities/users whatever. But there's barely any engagement outside of those that you want to block! So yeah, what's the point of being here then.

If you're not a socialist then you may often find yourself lost and unwelcome here, and I'm absolutely not talking about the ml grounds because they lowkey welcome fascists

Yes, we have admin approval on our instance and get a few such registrations per week these days. Luckily right now the registrations openly say that it is an LLM agent that operates the account, but that is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

not even lowkey at this point, it's a full-on fascist supporting community.

Sure, at least those that call themselves progressives. The left begins at anticapitalism, which is a hard break from liberalism.

Welcome!

You make a lot of good points, and I think I agree with your overarching theme - we don't really know.

Piefed does a lot better job of not recommending the weird instances, and I do hope it overtakes Lemmy because ultimately Lemmy is built by a fringe group so they aren't going to stop recommending fringe groups.

I think that people are unlikely to keep using both Lemmy and Piefed long term. Piefed is new and exciting, in another year we should see people settling into an account and hopefully we'll have a better idea at whether the threadiverse is growing or shrinking.

I'm fairly new myself and in the last week I've noticed quite a few new users. Not a ton but a lot more than when I joined months ago.

Newbie checking in. Hi.

It's not about socialism. Most people on Reddit and crybabies and the Fediverse seems to have inherited that culture.

This isn't really accurate. Liberalism and private property rights are fundamentally tied, that was how it historically emerged. Neoliberalism is a subset of liberalism that emphasized privatizing the welfare states that emerged throughout the 20th century as these states ran into crisis of profitability.

The left has opposed liberalism as soon as socialism began to truly take form, especially around the time of Karl Marx and the first international. Saying that the left and progressive liberals want "85% of the same things" is not true at all, the left wants to fundamentally change the entire base of society into a socialist one, not merely expand the welfare state in capitalism, because the main critique from the left is that capitalism itself is unsustainable and incapable of fulfilling the needs of the working class.

Leftists also support revolution over reformism, and do so year-round, every year. It's not that the left gets louder around election season, it's that those that see voting as their sole means of political action tend to notice the left more around election season. This in turn leads to more conversations around reformism vs. revolution, the nature of the capitalist system, and the role of the DNC and GOP in protecting imperialism and capitalism. The US is run by billionaires, it has never been run by the people, because the base structure of society is one where a tiny number of people own and control the means of production and distribution.

Whenever I feel bad about my lot in life, I always remember that at least I'm not a reddit mod.

I found Lemmy through grapheneos! That's my story. Love it.

If I hadn't smashed my iPhone in a work related accident I would never know the joy of ditching reddit and joining you folks.

Hazzah for happenstance! Life is great!

I'm a new user! Pl3ased to meet you. Still getting used to not having my text autocorrectes to the level of iphon3. It feels more organic 5ho.

Me too! And not a bot! Woohoo!

Not me. I just get drunk at work and reply to every string of text that I feel like!

One can be maladjusted and still happy. Jeezy Pete!

Is that why I feel so at home here? Am I a socialist!? Did Lemmy make me a socialist! Oh no, what am I going to tell my mother when sh3 finds out.

But in all seriousness... Tho the text above was not made in jest, Would you consider yourself to be described in that way? A socialist? If not a socialist, how do you find the wherewithal to stick around?

Yeah the leftists war against liberalism started recently [checks date] oh I didn't know we are living in 1845.

It definitly isn't easy going. Just write whats on your mind and be careful to not doxx yourself.

I really do not get your point of tying liberalism with colonialism. Fact is that colonialism was done by European monarchies which weren't liberal states at the time. The power structures were feudal. They were only beginning to transition into liberal democracies.

take your meds

numbers go brrrr.

And not a bot!

Wonderful! We love human flesh around here!

EDIT: Ok, I'm reading that back and I see how it sounds. Just editing to say we are not cannibals.

EDIT 2: Ok, I know that denying that we are cannibals makes it look even more like we are cannibals, but I promise you we are not

Everything listed under ideological liberalism is something "conservatives" used to claim as their values.

I don't think that means that conservatives are liberals, I think that means that they're liberals who changed their minds or abandoned their values.

Even if you were cannibals, you have to remember I'm coming from reddit! Cannibals are preferential to being at the bottom of that poisonous swamp!

I drink mine, FYI 🤪

*ETA

& tyvm

Hell yeah

Check this guy's fridge.

Thanks! And yeah it sucks! Locally me and a couple of individuals are trying to create a real meshnet. Its going well and got DNS/speeds above 20mbps now haha. But its truely all human traffic.

It doesn't solve this particular issue for anyone else but it is fun to just....throw something up without bot traffic.

Or fuck this.

Whoosh. I think the point is being missed. I am not focusing on the one.

I am a rather happy guy who has a heart that bleeds for others.