Is the Fediverse stalling?
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For the reasons above. It's not that they are "afraid of growth", but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.
What changes are people afraid of? What "different people" is the Fediverse afraid of?
What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?
- Normies.
- Small business who want to have a social media presence.
- Influencers.
- Reporters.
- Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset
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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?"
I can certainly see why that would be frustrating. I'm surprised I'd not heard of your project before- does it have a name or a github? If it does and I see folks talking about how we can improve onboarding or grow the fediverse it'd be nice to be able to mention it to them
I think I'm subbed to fedibridge- have you posted about it there? I feel like admins may be kinda swamped and it might need traction with users who want to see things grow in order to cut through the noise and have it be a significant enough priority for any admins. There may also be an issue of them knowing that making onboarding from reddit significantly easier, if successful might mean putting a lot more strain on themselves and their instance
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What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?
- Normies.
- Small business who want to have a social media presence.
- Influencers.
- Reporters.
- Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset
"Normies"? How?
What's stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?
What reporters?
Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
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Every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.
It does not help - and I did not know myself at first - that a Google search of "Lemmy" points people to lemmy.ml, which btw to someone without an account does not show "Fediverse" content and instead rather shows exclusively Local (rather than Global). The amount of bOtH sIdEs SaMe political content is always rather extreme, especially there.
Aside from platforming political extremism, and using Arch Linux (and beans 🫛 🫘), there just isn't much else to this place. For us here, it is enough... unless we need to actually know about stuff and for that we go back to Reddit or whatever - especially niche topics that are discussed nowhere else -> if you want the content then you have to go to where it is at. The content creators refuse to come here and I don't blame them: we aren't a very welcoming bunch.
Let's see, so we covered how we are a Nazi bar, how content creators can't be arsed to bother posting here, oh yeah and there's also the fact that Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit was. There is a modlog but no modmail, no notification when your content is removed, no ability to appeal or discuss (especially when the modlog merely says that the removal was done by a "mod" - it used to say the name of the mod but then it was changed to merely say "mod", so note how Lemmy is becoming more rather than less totalitarian as time passes) or again even so much as be told that your stuff is now gone - and unlike Reddit, taking all of the conversations that happened on a post along with it (when Reddit removed a post it merely took away the link from the community, but someone with the URL could still continue to interact with it for a long time, whereas Lemmy does not even acknowledge that a post once used to exist, instead mentioning a server error and - get this - that you should try again later to access it...
🥴 despite knowing full well that the post will never be un-removed; I am not suggesting that this misleading message is intentionally inaccurate, just stating once more how undemocratic this is that a mod can basically wipe out most traces that a post ever existed even in the past).But is there a thought that making an alternative Reddit would be super easy and fun and require zero effort? Lemmy is still extremely far behind Reddit in terms of features and will take many more years to catch up, if ever, and it's hyper-authoritian nature will always remain baked directly in (plus the Nazi bar effect... it's literally right there in the very name!). Though you might check out PieFed - in terms of features it has already surpassed Reddit in many ways, though it is still early in development (e.g. most days there is no Preview ability for posts or comments - although some days there is so I suspect it is almost ready to remain rolled out as a permanent feature?), and it has some fascinating ideas about democratization of moderation. PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust and so features come out in days to months rather than years. PieFed still shows posts from Lemmy.ml, but unlike lemmy.ml itself, does not do so exclusively, so offers a far more global and democratic platform. I'm placing my hopes in PieFed rather than the dying Lemmy moving forward. I usually get downvoted for saying all this... yet here we are on a post saying how MAUs for Lemmy are decreasing and calling into question whether Lemmy will even survive or not - while btw those numbers for PieFed recently tripled in size - so history has and will continue to prove this point accurate. There is hope for the Fediverse, not specifically for Lemmy I think (there is just too much wrong there and the efforts continue to move in the opposite direction, more towards rather than away from authoritarian control, which trends towards fewer rather than more content, i.e. it intentionally creates "echo chambers"), but for the wider Fediverse, yes. It will take actual effort to build it up though. Each step moves towards that - e.g. apps such as Voyager, Thunder, and Interstellar helped Lemmy (& the latter Mbin) thrive, and now all of those are adding support for PieFed, thus ensuring that none of the previous efforts were wasted, even as they move forward into the future rather than remain stagnant in the past.
But there are reasons why people don't like coming here - and those still need to be solved. First among them is that the tools have to get better, which is happening. Second, start posting content, and make it fun to spend time here. I see people doing that constantly, making my time here enjoyable.:-) Third, maybe more will be needed beyond those two steps but I don't know anything about that, so I just focus on the former two steps and leave the rest to the future:-).
Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.
Have you tried to suggest then Piefed since then, especially now with Voyager starting to support it?
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If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I've done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the "ledger" mechanism.
U got a github in of or me to take a look? I'll defiantly look into it sounds interesting.
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Always lovely to see you too blaze, hope you're doing well
️Doing well, thanks!
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I do generally wish there was more content. So I've decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.
Same! Never posted or commented much on Reddit before, but now I post small reviews on stuff I own and announce libraries I make for Bevy. It's not much, but it's something
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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]I just wish there wasn't so much sectarianism on fedi. Or maybe it's a good thing that this kind of social dynamic is possible in online world. I don't really know. What I do know is that it's rather annoying to see the instance admin being labeled as reactionary because someone dug up something from five years ago and decided to start a FUD campaing.
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"Normies"? How?
What's stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?
What reporters?
Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
What’s stopping small businesses and influencers
There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:
- 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.
- 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".
- Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of "I don't want my data used by marketers".
- 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.
What reporters?
There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?
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What’s stopping small businesses and influencers
There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:
- 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.
- 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".
- Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of "I don't want my data used by marketers".
- 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.
What reporters?
There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?
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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The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
I've never felt this was as important as people say, at least here in the Threadiverse I don't see it being important. Can you explain how this would help Lemmy/PieFed?
Because it would solve the whole issue of people deciding what instance to sign up to. It would make the fediverse better than the mainstream "the one account to rule them all".
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I can certainly see why that would be frustrating. I'm surprised I'd not heard of your project before- does it have a name or a github? If it does and I see folks talking about how we can improve onboarding or grow the fediverse it'd be nice to be able to mention it to them
I think I'm subbed to fedibridge- have you posted about it there? I feel like admins may be kinda swamped and it might need traction with users who want to see things grow in order to cut through the noise and have it be a significant enough priority for any admins. There may also be an issue of them knowing that making onboarding from reddit significantly easier, if successful might mean putting a lot more strain on themselves and their instance
It's Fediverser. Yes, it is on github. Yes, I've posted about it, quite a bit.
I asked prolific users to join, I offered help to admins to set it up. I even offered the topic-specific instances to the wider community. None of these efforts were well received.
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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.
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.
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Up the top it has software filter, if you select lemmy:
At this rate by 2035 the lemmy userbase will be depleted
Seven years isn't a bad halflife for a social-media platform. That's about how long thefacebook was actually usable, that's about how long I was active on reddit, that's about how long I was posting on my blog every day. That's significantly longer than I was using livejournal or iLike.
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U got a github in of or me to take a look? I'll defiantly look into it sounds interesting.
Specific to the DID, I haven't published yet. But what I am doing is based on my Typescript SDK for ActivityPub, so you can follow that repo for updates.
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And here lies my point. A vast majority of people don't think its hate speech. And a vast majority of people believe free speech supersedes hate speech.
Please define hate speech.
I've seen many people defending violence against Jews in the name of Palestine right here on lemmy so I'd say hating Jews is pretty mainstream in the fediverse right now.
I believe the right to free speech grants you the right to express hatred as long as ur not calling for violence u should have the right to say whatever the fuck you want.
That's a pretty mainstream belief for a lot a people who have been completely ostracised and discriminated against by the fediverse as a whole.
And here lies my point. A vast majority of people don't think its hate speech. And a vast majority of people believe free speech supersedes hate speech.
Actually, a vast majority of people don't support being a shitbag to other people. You're confusing popular sentiment with the whims of the conservative elite. If you don't just hide in right wing echo chambers all the time you might be surprised to find out how unpopular your terrible views are.
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A lot of right-wing beliefs have become so extreme that I am frankly happy to not be around them, regardless of how important I feel it is to avoid echo chambers (very). Its one thing to want to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with even though it's challenging, it's another thing to constantly have to contend with people who would like to debate whether you're a human and deserve basic human dignity because you're a minority.
But I would appreciate if we could at least manage not to attack other left wing folks over not being left wing enough, or over what methods are a productive way to solve the problems we're facing.
It's kind of just a microcosm of the infighting and purity testing of the left more broadly (at least in America, I have no idea how things are with the culture of leftwing communities or voices in Europe or the rest of the world), but it still sucks and I'd like to hope we can find a way to do better.
Tbh I'm not even sure what the right and left wing means or believes anymore.
Both terms have been so utterly corrupted and coopted that they have become meaningless to the point of simply being a term used to other one group by the other.
Well that's the problem everyone thinks they are exactly the minimum amount of left and that anyone right of them is a facist. If someone is continuously called a fascist Nazi eventually they will listen.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" - Joseph Goebbels
Australia wasn't so much on the extreme of Americans but we are getting there. Interestingly both the right wing and the extreme left got fucked in our most recent election. Mind u I'm not happy with the current federal government they are introducing a pre capital gains tax on everyone's savings.
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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)
Just from a quick look at https://fediverse.observer/, it looks like the Fediverse is mostly steady at 1-1.25 million monthly users (give or take) over the past two years with a slight decreasing trend. I think there are some reasons for this that are not entirely in our control.
There seems to be a global sentiment of disconnecting from social media and the internet in general. So, I wouldn't be surprised if ever platform is seeing a decaying user base. Anecdotally, among the people I see in real life, there is a general sense of exhaustion with online spaces. Whether it's from corporate-own, enshittified platforms to even places on the Fediverse, the people with whom I interact tend to find the entire thing hollow. They've trimmed down to one or two platforms (if that). In fact, I've even started to get that way. In the past, if someone were wrong and arguing against a point I made, I'd engage, especially if it's in something that I have expertise. Now, why bother? There's no use arguing; people have little interest in admitting fault or engaging in good faith (again anecdotally). That said, I'll concede that the Fediverse is a bit better on that front, but not by much.
Then there's the alternative nature of the Fediverse. It's been rehashed over and over about how "difficult" it is to get on and use. It's not actually that hard, but the barrier to entry is an extra step. That small extra step frightens people away from even joining. The only time that barrier gets broken is when a "legacy" social media platform does something anti-user. Then there is a refugee wave that comes in and goes out leading to a modest durable increase in users. Recently, there just hasn't been a major controversy on a major platform that leads people here.
Now, my final thought on this is to ask: Is a small and steady-ish population (despite modest decay) actually bad? In my view, I don't think it is. Being smaller and with a smallish barrier to entry means that we exclude a sizable number of the low-effort population. So, there's less (no zero) slop here. Plus, discussions, when had in good faith, can be much deeper and less filled with stupid low-effort jokes. Overall, I'm not too concerned with the number of people on the Fediverse. Growth isn't necessarily the best thing. Even so, with the way most mainstream platforms are going, it's inevitable that they will do something stupid that drives more people to the Fediverse at least for a time.
TL;DR: The monthly population is mostly steady with a modest decay. Most social media is likely seeing similar trends. I don't think the smaller userbase is that bad of a thing.
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Every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.
Have you tried to suggest then Piefed since then, especially now with Voyager starting to support it?
No - see the other response to my comment. The internet is not a welcoming place, period, and I've ceased recommending this corner of it to people. If they bother to read things then they will find what they seek. Nazi bar and all.
Though you are right, PieFed is just now turning the corner where I feel that I could ethically do so (I still see so many bugs: especially notifications that lead to nowhere, e.g. if the post gets deleted but the notification remains, and the continued lack of a Preview ability, but at the rate things are going those could both be resolved by next month! Or possibly already are in the Voyager app support?).
Thank you for your own continual efforts advocating on behalf of the Fediverse: we need you, and I for one am so glad that you tirelessly devote so much time and love towards that goal!:-)
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Up the top it has software filter, if you select lemmy:
At this rate by 2035 the lemmy userbase will be depleted
Assuming a constant rate of change of anything involving people over a period of ten years is straight up nonsense.
