Is the Fediverse stalling?
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I disagree it's fun, at this rate by 2035 we'll need to pay users to use lemmy
Extrapolating is also a hobby of mine
By 2035 we could be under water, or all living in a radioactive hellscape. And the argument of paying people to use a free service breaks logic.
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Last post then 10 days ago, [email protected] has 2 from today
Last post 1 month ago, [email protected] has 2 posts from today
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] do you maybe want to try to reach out to the .ml and LW communities to see if they could redirect to your communities?
I'm not a mod of the feddit.uk equivalent so it's not up to me, but I'd be cautious about doing so. I have lemmy.ml blocked so I can't see their posts or comments, but I'm a bit wary about their users, it would be like redirecting a unitedkingdom community from hexbear or grad.
Yeah we can reach out to the mods there and see if they'd want to redirect to us.
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I'm not a mod of the feddit.uk equivalent so it's not up to me, but I'd be cautious about doing so. I have lemmy.ml blocked so I can't see their posts or comments, but I'm a bit wary about their users, it would be like redirecting a unitedkingdom community from hexbear or grad.
Yeah we can reach out to the mods there and see if they'd want to redirect to us.
Yeah we can reach out to the mods there and see if they’d want to redirect to us.
Thanks!
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But usage is not going downwards. Check these stats out: https://fediverse.observer/stats
MAU has been steady at 1.1 million since this time last year.
Within the fediverse there are some platforms that are losing ground and some that are growing.
But pretty much everything else is growing... I am generalising but surely by now there should be way more than 1.1 million. This is what I mean, I see less now than I have before over the Fediverse not more (content, people,reactions)
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Didn't the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn't many servers defederate UK servers as result?
UK and EU are way ahead the US (for example) on online safety - Meta is despised over here by government and they owe billions in fines they just tie it all up in legal complaints that last years
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Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We're all getting sick of it.
I left substack - terrible platform that just seems unnecessary
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How are you noticing that you're specifically seeing less interaction from UK people?
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
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But pretty much everything else is growing... I am generalising but surely by now there should be way more than 1.1 million. This is what I mean, I see less now than I have before over the Fediverse not more (content, people,reactions)
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
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Who is going to pay for those ads? With what money? There is no single entity here with enough interest in growing the Fediverse, and any grassroots movements that we do have are strictly against commerce.
The Lemmy devs would be making more money if they went to work for Uber Eats than as software developers, and I barely manage to convince people to pay $2.50/month to offer a professional hosting service.
We don't really need to "buy ads" to grow. We just need to get more people willing to invest in it.
I run bespoke hosting and services and people are spending less and less each month. Been doing it for 30 years in various ways and forms and 2025 is by far the hardest year to get anyone to part with money. Everybody thinks they should setup something ad laden it to death, make a fortune and retire at 30. Here in the UK you should visit a loc(ish) new website and see the content disappear behind a torrent of ads, clickbait articles, AI videos etc.
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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.
Highjacking the top comment, but it seems like OP instance only federates 7 communities:
https://lemmy.relayeasy.com/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1 -
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.
