Is the Fediverse stalling?
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Why didn't they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)
No idea.
Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?
Yeah, there might be. But it'd have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don't know of any right now.
I don't know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.
No idea.
People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:
- onboarding was difficult
- "Selecting an instance" is a chore
- How to find content
- No algorithmic recommendations
Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about "their space" being invaded, had many displays of "opression olympics", made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn "proper manners" right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.
In other words, people didn't go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.
I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.
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.
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No idea.
People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:
- onboarding was difficult
- "Selecting an instance" is a chore
- How to find content
- No algorithmic recommendations
Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about "their space" being invaded, had many displays of "opression olympics", made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn "proper manners" right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.
In other words, people didn't go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.
I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.
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.
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?
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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:-).
“What the fuck is this paragraph of ranting nonsense?”
“Oh, it’s an ad for piefed “
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I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It's why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting "kill a cop" or "kill fascists" memes, like this is literally an "advocate violence" platform. I don't expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.
Yeah we do have a lot of people who feel it's more important to demonstrate their anger than to figure out what people could do to improve the problems.
Worse still, a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that whatever makes it most clear they're angry and hurts the people they disagree with the most is actually what's most productive. The anger about the state of things, particularly in the US is entirely valid. The self-justification of behaviours that burn bridges and radicalize more people is not.
If you want to implement any kind of solution you do, necessarily have to have a critical mass of people who agree with you, and you cannot build that by antagonizing anyone who doesn't already share your exact flavour of left wing ideology, and acting in a way that reflects poorly on your ideology to everyone except people who already agree with you
Very rarely is anyone willing to confront that violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs, and that employing it just because you're (justifiably) angry, is almost always detrimental to the exact abouts you're mad about
(Sorry, I know I kinda went off track from exactly what you were talking about, this is just a closely related huge frustration of mine)
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That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it's noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of "the same users" than before. There's still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.
That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than "mass exodus users" may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Very well put, thank you for articulating it better than I did
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I am broadly in favor of growing the Fediverse, but I am also of the belief that most of the ways that people think that should be done, are potentially more counter productive than productive
For users, most people think of growing Lemmy as evangelizing. Personally I think that's almost always experienced as preachy and antagonistic. The real work of making the fediverse competive is the developers maintainers and hosters, and if we as users want the fediverse to grow I think the biggest thing we can do is be a part of making this a good place to be.
Its by creating a culture that when people show up and try things out on a whim, they decide to stay. It certainly helps for people to hear about the Fediverse, but if that's a accomplished through means that make people frustrated and hostile towards us, I think we've accomplished more harm than good.
I deeply miss the thriving small niche communities of reddit, and us not being able to sustain that is 100% down to not having enough users, but I see participating in a way that makes it worth being here as the biggest thing I can do to support the fediverse
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?"
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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.
