PixelFed has increased the Fediverse's monthly active users by over 40% in the last few weeks, how do we feel?

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The tide lifts all the boats...

Exactly. I do not care much for Pixelfed. Or Mastodon. Or Friendica. Or really much of anything other than Lemmy. But I just stood up my own PixelFed server, so if someone wants to get away from Meta, I will happily support their decision (and pixelfed.social's server by offloading resources) and they can find me there.

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I never vibed with Twitter or Instagram, so I struggled with both Mastodon and Pixelfed. It wasn't until I started looking for content based around my hobbies that Pixelfed really started becoming interesting to me. That, and having the ability to be absolutely deluged in pictures of cats if I need a morale boost. Mastodon is still something that I'm having trouble getting value out of. I may just end up being a Lemmy and Pixelfed user.

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It's barely news worthy. Small mostly unknown service gains 400,000 new accounts. Ok. 400k.

Instagram apperently has 4 BILLION accounts, with 143 MILLION monthly users.

400K sounds great, until you compare it to the pie. It went from less then 1% to less than 1%.

Growth is great and all, but since it's January, I'd rather see a retrospective of where they stood on Jan 1st 2024, and where they stood on Jan 1st 2025. With a detailed analysis on all the fluctuations (which at this point I would assume to be nothing but upwards) but also, what caused each event.

But hearing a single month, with an influx of 400k seems like a non-story, and won't be interesting until Jan 2026 when we get the 2025 retrospective. And we put into context that this was when meta decided to go all political, and ban searches for "democrats", and the whole drama with tiktok.

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Me in 2024: "Which one is the main one?"

"There is no main one"

"Which one is the biggest?"

"Lemmy.World"

"Thats the one for me!"

"THATS NOT HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT!!!"

".....but that's what I did."

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We can't want the Fediverse to get bigger but be scared of normies when it does. I say welcome in! We should be mindful to listen to the new recruits, because their feedback is the most unbiased.

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Yeah, I have also seen an increase in registrations on my instance as well.

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Is the iPhone app still missing darkmode?

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"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
https://vger.app/ if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions"

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IG was always much bigger than Reddit.

Good to see people moving to Pixelfed though.

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What about Android? I don't see dark mode in options.

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Don't wanna throw cold water on what should be a celebration, but are these all distinct active users? I have separate accounts on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, and Loops--do I still count as one active user, or am I four? If the latter, I think it's plenty likely that others like me have simply gotten used to the first fedi platform they chose and are branching out as they learn about more. Maybe doesn't account for all the growth, but would explain away some of the meteoric rise.

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So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:

The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It's kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it's felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I'll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.

People don't seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I've literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being "too complicated" to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see "this place is great and all, but..." posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I'd estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they're unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether...

Pixelfed is easily the most diverse "corner" of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren't. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.

I've seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as "Global Switch Day" so hopefully it'll keep blowing up.

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Agreed, tho if they grew too fast the pixelfed infrastructure would just die...

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Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.

This was a huge part of why I now spend more time over on pixelfed as opposed to here -- I have a few accounts I've used here, and every single time I'm in a thread about a woman who's been sexually assaulted, or about a woman's shelter, etc, the 'not all guys'/'men suffer too' bros come flooding in. I've logged out of accounts for weeks, switched to another one, just to let them scream into the void of my inbox for awhile, and it happens every time. I befriended a woman here when I responded to one of the most sad-to-read replies in one of those threads, that read like: "Women are often abused by men--not all men, just some, and I want to reiterate that this is about those specific men..." and it just went on and on trying to placate the inevitable furious white men in the comments section. As someone who lived as a white man for over forty years, I know just how whiny, sad, and ridiculous they look, and they they still get their way.

Over on pixelfed I haven't once had an interaction even close to that. It's extremely pleasant, people helping each other learn the platform, people asking for help in bad home situations, and it's a community. People have messaged me when I made mistakes linking things in extremely pleasant ways, and two people debated alt-text (is it helpful to those who use audio captions, or is it training AI?) without once insulting each other. Lemmy was very briefly that, yet there's a lot of tribalism that is not only unnecessary, and frankly, childish. I'm quite often embarrassed of my fellow men here.

(Well, non-binary now, yet I still feel the experiences of 40+ years of being a man are helpful.)

So anyway, I agree pixelfed is a lot more inviting, and a lot more diverse.

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Would the infrastructure die? Or would it just cap at a certain limit and lose potential sign ups?

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How do I feel?

I was following my Lemmy rule and hunting out smaller instances rather than pile into the biggest one.
tried 4 separate smaller instance sign ups and never got a single one of them to work and send me a verification email, so I kinda gave up....

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Excited. Anyone know if/when their gonna add dark mode?

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Some people care, most don't. Lemmy.world is the vanilla ice cream of the fediverse. Thanks for being part of the community!

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This.

Discovery and convenience are Lemmy's biggest issues and we are not addressing them to the degree we should.

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Great question. Ideally someone trying to sign up for pixelfed.social say would be automatically shunted over to another instance...

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PixelFed has increased the Fediverse's monthly active users by over 40% in the last few weeks, how do we feel?