Is the Fediverse stalling?
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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)
wrote last edited by [email protected]According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people's apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there's a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it's grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can't say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it's federated in pretense only, there isn't another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn't stopped growing. It hasn't exploded but we're not complaining about where we are, are we.
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Highjacking the top comment, but it seems like OP instance only federates 7 communities:
https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1Hey yes, early days with this instance. But seemed the right/correct place to ask generally....
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Hey yes, early days with this instance. But seemed the right/correct place to ask generally....
You probably want to register it on https://lemmy-federate.com/
And federate the active communities from https://feddit.uk/communities
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You probably want to register it on https://lemmy-federate.com/
And federate the active communities from https://feddit.uk/communities
thanks.... learning as we go here. Run other instances for people but I have got to say for many of my clients they are seeing a massive drop in the fediverse in general after modest growth. The general consensus is that creators want to earn money rather than have freedom
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Have you subscribed to the new Piefed communities following the lemm.ee shutdown?
https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/post/326
I just tried with [email protected] and [email protected] , and it seems like your instance doesn't federate them, I guess it's probably the same for the others
Wait a sec, how come that https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/c/[email protected] isn't federated either?
Edit: what a sec, your instance only has 7 communities federated?!
https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1
Tis brand new community (yes really)
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You seem to be confused. This isn't a debate.
Ahh so what's it meant to be?
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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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I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the "Closed" social networks vs the wider Fediverse.
People don’t really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.
The comparison is not to Reddit. It's Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it's a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.
people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists”?
First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about "anti-corporate". I'm talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I'd guess your worldview is quite skewed.
I simply don’t believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.
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".
I think if we didn't have as many open instances, we'd end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.
are major reddit subreddits in many cases.
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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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most say where they are in their bio, easy to track most of em. Plus it is fairly easy to see a UK based person in their language and things they say
I don't see near enough people on lemmy, or look at enough profiles to notice this. And I don't agree that most accounts state their location in their biography.
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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)
I browse lemmy exclusively, as a result of distaste for corporatization. Personally I have no reason to leave and I doubt I will anytime soon. I don't have any particular niches that I'm a part of, so the only thing that would cause me to leave is if the feed dried up. I usually open lemmy in the morning and scroll All - top 12h. I get an hour or so of scrolling before I reach posts with sub-10 votes. And that's all I really need. I'll be here until I can't do that anymore.
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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.
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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I can appreciate how twisted and emotionally charged the labels have become. As a queer(-ish, it's complicated) person in the US, it is not uncommon for right wing spaces on reddit to offhandedly describe me and all the people I care about as groomers. Thats not a good faith discussion of whether the way that I want to see problems solved is productive, it's just dehumanizing people because they're minorities.
I don't want to be around that. I think it is extremely important to have conversations with people you don't agree with, and I still have very little emotional capacity to engage with people that far away from me in terms of what's considered an acceptable way to engage with other humans.
I don't wish them death and dismemberment or for them to face violent retribution (and before people take issue with that, that would radicalize people and harm every single cause I care about, making every problem I'm facing worse. Even just purely pragmatically that's a horrible way to solve our problems like 99% of the time), but I don't wish to share space with them, I don't have that in me.
The left does absolutely have an issue with calling anyone we dont like a Nazi, which is a painful problem to confront due to the fact that our government is descending into outright fascism, and it is now infinitely harder to have a conversation about the fact that this is what fascism looks like now that the word has been so diluted as to be almost meaningless. It essentially just conveys "I really really really don't like that person" at this point, which is a big difference from "this person is framing minorities as responsible for all that ails society to gain power while stripping us of our freedoms and amassing personal power and currying favor with billionaires by selling them our institutions at all or our expense"
I'm curious, how did both the left and right get fucked in the recent election? I'm pretty much entirely unfamiliar with Australian politics save for a couple friendly jordies videos
The issue is the worst of both sides are the ones defining each other. I won't deny that I disagree with some of the things being pushed as part of education for young children. But I wouldn't say that that's grooming let alone define an entire group of people by that. Its defiantly not good faith.
I think the beautiful part of the internet is if u don't want to be around a particular person u can block them and they simply disappear. They have a right to speech but nobody has the right to force you to listen.
I don't think engaging with people emotionally is the correct way to engage especially over a text medium. I think the only real productive discussion that can be had without devolving into a screaming and name calling is rational and logical. I find that emotional arguments and weaponised empathy get deployed on mass instead of rational discussion.
I'm not saying that you should be forced to share a space with such people I simply think that others should not be restricted from having such spaces and engaging freely with people in those spaces.
This is what I'm saying people have been called fascist so long they have become the fascists. Its both sides stripping us of our freedoms and making our lives shit. Its a choice between get fucked or get fucked lite. We are all to distracted fighting a bullshit culture war to realise its just a distraction from the real issues. Funny how the whole culture war thing kicked off just after occupy wall street.
In Australia we have preferential voting so we don't have a 2 party system. We have the liberals who are centre right, we have labor who are centre left, we have the greens who are communists and we have the nationals who are fascists. The nationals never get any seats, liberal and labor trade places as the government every couple years and the greens get a couple seats. This time the greens lost almost all their seats same as the liberals.
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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.
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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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.
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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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...
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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Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.
(Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually)
I think rather we'll see more software popping up and diversifying the ecosystem. Then you can pick whichever you prefer. Which is the whole point of the fediverse. I'm currently working on my own implementation. Might take a long while before any alpha version as I'm super busy but I try to do at least a bit of work on it every day.
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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.
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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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)
That's an interesting question. I don't think the advantages of the fediverse are part of any zeitgeist so are not attracting new and diverse users other than maybe through places like Flipboard and maybe Ghost. The future of social media is certainly going to remain fragmented and the fediverse fragments itself by default anyway. I do think that how people use social media is changing; people are tired of overuse to some extent.
Does the fediverse have a future? I think it'll remain its own niche as corporate offerings come and go. Increased Interest may come from an unexpected growth in a specialism that is federated.
I think my idealism for what the fediverse could achieve is now muted as I probably no longer have faith in open networks as the cultures are way too different so I probably now see the fediverse less through the email analogy and more through the linux analogy. If fedi plods on refining itself in its own slow way (volunteers and no money make for slow progress) then who know the next time a corp offering destroys itself and people search for a less awful and exploitative environment then it might just win out in the long term though I'm not entirely convinced about that. Does that mean i'm off to corporate networks. Not really. I'd rather just stop altogether than fall down that rabbit hole again. -
Haven't seen anything like that myself, which instance admin are you referring to?
emacs.ch ended like that and fosstodon also had it's fair share
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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.
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.
