this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Fediverse

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A post from 2 days ago presented a graph that showed an important variation in the active userbase: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52565659

Using the daily rather than monthly view on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 shows a much stable line (especially if you take into account Piefed's growth: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 )

Going through the comments in the other posts, a few recommendations that can help with the overall experience

Finally, a few communities recommendations for lighthearted communities

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[–] Quacksalber@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

If the userbase has held steady, the AI scraping must be astronomical. Shitjust works stops working every evening.

[–] wioum@lemmy.world 179 points 1 week ago (6 children)
[–] FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 49 points 1 week ago (2 children)

inb4 "FUCK SPEZ" spamming in every comment section

[–] desmosthenes@lemmy.world 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] hector@lemmy.today 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Reddit just claimed I threatened violence by calling joe rogan a cynical tool playing his flock. Nothing even close to violence or harm calling. I tried to give him a chance as he was a bernie supporter, and could not stomach his bad faith lies on everything from the president to him castigating environmental protesters.

I think it was in bad faith, for other reasons. Their link to the offense does not even show the offending comment to you anymore either.

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago

LOL. You have beaten my record, since my comments were, at least, containing phrases that could be classified as threatening violence without the context of a whole comment. But your case is a new level. My applause.

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[–] FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Spez here. Hey, come on, man.

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[–] wioum@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago
[–] hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

spez learned from the last one. the ecosystem gets more closed down every day and automod's trigger finger just gets jumpier.

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[–] Vegan_Joe@piefed.world 108 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I honestly like the small, eclectic vibe better.

I don't know what the number is, but I'll arbitrarily say, anywhere under a quarter million is perfect.

I know the federation model provides a strength against the cascading list negatives that plague popular platforms, but I don't doubt that with a large enough user base, exploits would certainly seep in, particularly with ease of AI bot manipulation and astroturfing.

It reminds me of the Linux saying "security through obscurity".

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's very difficult for a set of volunteers to combat people being paid to manipulate their platform, so I'm happy with this platform remaining small enough to not be worth spending money on to manipulate.

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[–] null@piefed.nullspace.lol 47 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Another top quality blazepost. Thanks for those community recos

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Some additional uplifting community suggestions:

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

!lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world is inactive, we spent a while promoting the !wholesome@reddthat.com to decentralize from LW.

Same for !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and !goodnewseveryone@piefed.social .

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

People seem to still be posting to them though? Like Lady Butterfly made 6 posts to the latter one just today alone. And much of that content does not look to be reposted anywhere else, like this post in the former community:

img

You might want to shut those old ones down then if people are not supposed to be using them anymore?

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[–] shiroininja@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Lemmy is the only Corporate social media replacement I've stuck to for years. I've never gone back to reddit. I don't need it. I like the vibes here and it's just busy enough to suit my needs without allowing me to doomscroll nonstop new content.

[–] 7101334@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

I like Pixelfed too, for all its bugs. I would like to drop Instagram for it, but I've managed to convince exactly zero of my friends to join PF lol

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 36 points 1 week ago (3 children)

So what's going on here, most likely, is that the intake of new users is declining as opposed to people specifically being driven off the platform (as some users allege).

[–] Dagnet@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's stabilising so either we are down to the really stubborn user base or it's the start of a steady growth

[–] hector@lemmy.today 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Who is being driven off lemmy by who and why?

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 17 points 1 week ago (23 children)

Oh people making the claim that Lemmy being too political or too hard-left drives users off and is responsible for the user malaise. I'm sure that's true, but not to an appreciable level.

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 week ago (19 children)

Lemmy is being too political. We don't like it.

Meanwhile Reddit:

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[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In the repost on the Chile community, also saw one or other comment about Lemmy being toxic. I do notice a certain "toxicity", though from certain corners and which seems to stems more often from what I call "misery posting", which would be posts whose main focus seems to be to make the given topic appear like a lost cause to the reader (even some "meme" communities seem to fall on this).

Since some communities seem specially prone for such posts, I second blocking those as you notice the patterns to try to make your feed healthier, and to hopefully make such places shrink into a healthier size. Or at least, if you got the patience and resistance to mass downvoting and mobbing, to post in those communities and within their rules what to you is positive. Alternatively/Parallel to that, one could make sure to react accordingly to posts, instead of uninterestedly hide everything in feed as the user scrolls.

Otherwise, a given environment shrinking or tanking in growth could also mean people that use it are growing apathetic or anomic to popularizing it, to which I repeat my suggestion in the Chile community, change starts by small steps. So for example, if someone is on a platform compatible by extension but without an ActivityPub bridge or function active (e.g. Threads and Bluesky), to explain to them they could activate it, and e.g. Fedi Brdigy is working on Lemmy compatibility, so more potential users going around. Also, if you see a funny meme or the sort, you could share the link, provided it has a decent blurb preview on the platform to be sent.

Also spikes happen anywhere when competing platforms have issues, so current retention might just be its natural one.

And even on a Lemmy account I have (thus little noise from microblogging) and while highly curating my feeds there, the amount of posts is almost too much for me to be able to go through. So by observation, the "threadiverse" as a whole seems rather healthy in numbers.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 9 points 1 week ago

Thank you for your comment, nice insight

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 24 points 1 week ago

maybe the real problem is Nicole left us

[–] QuiteQuickQum@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There are dozens of dozens of dozens of dozens of us! Dozenses!

[–] kali_fornication@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i'm no line expert but i see a teeny tiny downward trend

[–] FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

Line expert here. It's technically not a line. It's many data points that may seem to look like a line, but it's not. You see a line is the shortest distance between 2 points. By definition they are straight. This dataset is not a line.

Here's a list of my credentials:

Certified Linear Affairs Specialist (CLAS)

Advanced Parallel Line Coordination Certified

Doctor of Perpendicular Studies

International Straight Line Compliance Officer

Certified Angle Management Professional (CAMP)

Applied Theoretical Line Engineer

[–] chisel@piefed.social 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Is a line really the shortest distance between two points if I can fold the paper and punch a pencil through it?

[–] FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (3 children)

SHUT UP! STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!

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[–] ShadowRam@fedia.io 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My problem right now is I'm on Fedia.io and I'm liking the interface, but more and more, what used to be other instances popping up in my feed, are disappearing, and I feel like I'm missing 1/2 the content that lemmy has to offer.

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need to include places like piefed and mbin in this too; reddit is just reddit but here you can be either lemmy, piefed, or mbin and talk to one another.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Is the shitposting helping?

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[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm curious to know what PieFed's user base would look like.

Most people simply don't know about Lemmy/PieFed.

I think once features mature a bit more, if there is another rexit we could see numbers tripple or more.

Many people didn't stick around with previous rexit's because the UX sucked.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago

That is exactly what happened. https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats shows for instance that the numbers spiked from 352 MAUs (monthly active users) in May 2025 to >1k in June, then again to >1.6k in July, where it has mostly stabilized and we are currently at ~2.0k (half of that on piefed.social itself, half distributed across other instances, see list at https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list, click Active Users a couple times to sort that descending).

PieFed.social alone has 964 MAUs, now making it larger than such well-known instances as programming.dev, discuss.tchncs.de, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net (which announced a decision to migrate over to PieFed by the end of 2026).

Below PieFed.social, most instances have only a hundred or so users, but this too is a sign of healthy federation where many new instances keep spinning up - exactly like Lemmy where e.g. startrek.website has 152 MAUs, ttrpg.network has 127, ani.social has 172, mander.xyz has 196, and so on. Over a thousand users distributed across many instances is much healthier than all of them on a single one.

Note that most 3rd party apps haven't caught up to the PieFed software's latest API changes, so e.g. users of Voyager are mostly getting the same experience on a PieFed instance as they would have on a Lemmy one (iirc no polls, user or post flairs, categories of communities aka Topics and Feeds, etc.) - except even there, back-end changes can still be very impactful to the user experience (such as the ability of a mod to move a post from one community to another, or the ability of an end-user to block all users from a specific instance without needing admin approval to perform defederation).

[–] michael@piefed.chrisco.me 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Woo we staying!

Also anyone know how to use their API? https://api.fediverse.observer/

I would love to make a "treadiverse" combo line. Cause its hard to look at when piefed is slowly going up, lemmy is slowly going down, and m/k bin is going all over.

EDIT: Never mind, found it. Theres an icon on the right hand side.

[–] homes@piefed.world 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Mlem (iOS) doesn’t exactly consolidate comments across crossposts, but it does list, at the top, all of the crossposts, how many upvotes/comments each one has, and links directly to them. It also works across Lemmy, piefed, and Mbin accounts/instances.

[–] null@piefed.nullspace.lol 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Combined comments between cross-posts is such an elegant feature.

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[–] Ragallos@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago
[–] DimiK@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I'm completely new to Lemmy and fediverse in general. I wonder if there have been any initiatives to promote Lemmy more and help it attain the critical mass of people.

For exampe, having a Lemmy or Fediverse month, when the community attempts to advertise to friends that don't know about it yet. If a few of the main instances participate in this, I'm sure the community could come up with some great ideas for spreading the word.

[–] termaxima@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Personally I still relate to the other graph. Lemmy posts can sometimes be much too focused on negative things, so I sometimes take pretty long breaks before coming back when it gets too depressing.

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[–] daannii@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Any spike or steady sharp increase would just be a sign of bot infiltration.

So steady numbers are better.

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