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)
As a general comment, I suggest everyone interested in making the Fediverse grow to join those two communities
- [email protected] is about promoting the Threadiverse on other platforms (usually Reddit)
- [email protected] is about growing communities on the platform
Nobody likes to shout into the void. The second one helps finding people to help you grow your communities.
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Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
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Yeah exactly. But instead of having to implement that auth process in every different fediverse service in however many different languages u simply write it once with an oidc endpoint and all fediverse services can run it as a container in their stack. It makes implementing such auth system a simple config change and updating a docker compose to add a new service.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It looks like we are talking past one-another.
What I am trying to say is that "getting the user to complete a login" is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.
So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That's good, but it doesn't solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.
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Hate speech has no place here, no matter how comfortable these creeps feel around their fascist politicians and policemen at home.
Hating Jews was "pretty mainstream" in the NSDAP.
Hate speech is hate speech no matter how many bootlicking pieces of shot might agree, and this is not a platform that's friendly to the miserable fuckers who have nothing better to do with their lives than to spread hate and intolerance. They have Twitter and Truth social to spread their shit.
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.
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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 do generally wish there was more content. So I've decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.
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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.
Up the top it has software filter, if you select lemmy:
At this rate by 2035 the lemmy userbase will be depleted
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Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
As explained by the user below
capitalist growth-focused approach
Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!
We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again
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Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
Me and most others
The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
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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)
How are you noticing that you're specifically seeing less interaction from UK people?
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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.
The definition of UN should be simple enough:
In common language, “hate speech” refers to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender) and that may threaten social peace.
A related reading would be the paradox of tolerance, which goes far in explaining why we do not want this shit anywhere near our communities.
As for anti-Semitism, I've seen some of it in response to Israel's ongoing genocide, and of course the current context makes both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments a very real problem. However, I think people on here mostly seem to be able to distinguish Israel and Judaism, and when they don't it seems moderators are generally doing a better job than on most platforms in my experience. But I doubt you're here in good faith, so I don't see much point in discussing something like this with you.
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.
If you feel discriminated against because people don't want you around, feel free to vote with your feet.
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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.
Thank you!
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Uk subs are too fragmented and I never see anything from them.
Hopefully voyager implements piefeds topics functionality.
Aren't most of them on https://feddit.uk/communities ?
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Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
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As explained by the user below
capitalist growth-focused approach
Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!
We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again
Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
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It looks like we are talking past one-another.
What I am trying to say is that "getting the user to complete a login" is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.
So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That's good, but it doesn't solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.
Ahh I see what ur saying now. Yeah the actor id is hard as it needs to be an actual dereferenceable uri as actors need an inbox and outbox of activities.
I don't think u can maintain cross instance actor ids. The only issue I see with having multiple actor ids for the same user is that they will have their content and profile split across multiple instances.
I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
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Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
ngl same
For me Mastodon and Lemmy have shown that the general population have absolutely zero interest in decentalisation, they just don't care
Like a hive mind they simply go where other people are, if there are two crowds of people, one with 5 people and the other with 50, they will go to the one with 50, regardless if the 50 users are mingling with people like Musk and they hate Musk and don't want to support him in any way
Just posting that made me think, if people simply go to where people are, having lots of small servers instead of one large one is actually a turn off for most people
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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.
Muntedcrocodile: "I believe in the right to spread hatred as long as it's not calling for violence."
Lemmy: "Um, okay. Let's give that a try. We hate hateful right wing views, and call people with those views total assholes."
muntedcrocodile: "Wait, not like that! You should tolerate us so there's a diversity of views!"
Ironic.
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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.
What’s nodebb? I thought it was like a deadish lemmy clone but it seems to be the second most popular software here?
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Uk subs are too fragmented and I never see anything from them.
Hopefully voyager implements piefeds topics functionality.
What. I see so much [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] etc.
And I wouldn’t call them fragmented, all on the same instance.
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The definition of UN should be simple enough:
In common language, “hate speech” refers to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender) and that may threaten social peace.
A related reading would be the paradox of tolerance, which goes far in explaining why we do not want this shit anywhere near our communities.
As for anti-Semitism, I've seen some of it in response to Israel's ongoing genocide, and of course the current context makes both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments a very real problem. However, I think people on here mostly seem to be able to distinguish Israel and Judaism, and when they don't it seems moderators are generally doing a better job than on most platforms in my experience. But I doubt you're here in good faith, so I don't see much point in discussing something like this with you.
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.
If you feel discriminated against because people don't want you around, feel free to vote with your feet.
First I always discuss in good faith its a far more rewarding and enjoyable way to engage with the shared human experience. Second the condescending attitude isn't particularly pleasant I'm not speaking with you in such a way I ask you have the same respect for me.
Sure that's a fair definition.
I would argue the paradox of tolerance is widely misunderstood the full quote in which it is based is as follows:
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise." - Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies 1945)
I think most people ignore the second half of it as its convenient for them to do so.
If you feel discriminated against because people don't want you around, feel free to vote with your feet.
Ahh yes vote with my feet and leave the fediverse hence why op is asking why the fediverse has stagnated and doesn't seem to be growing. You have expertly just proven exactly the original point I was trying to make.
