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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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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I like vanilla ice cream. It's a great base. Maybe today you throw some butterscotch and peacans on it! But tomorrow it's caramel and fudge, and the next day it's chocolate chip cookie dough, and yhe day after that it's whipped cream and strawberry syrup. And the day after that it's chocolate sauce with peanuts.

Meanwhile, the guy who got chocolate just ate the same bowl of ice cream for 5 days.

See it's kind of like sex, too. Some people just do the same thing over and over. But what I do, is I take some handcuffs, and chains, and baby oil, and some.... trails off

And that kids, is how I met your Mother!

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Pixelfed is really easy to engage with and get a feed started. I think that's let to its popularity growth. I've added mastedon and peertube and neither has made it as easy to onboard.

I still remember the curve with Lemmy. Pixelfed is clearly the easiest to get started with, and then it's just pictures!

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What do you mean by user abstraction? First I've seen this mentioned, or put this way.

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Dang for some reason I thought Android had it.

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Its' pretty great.

As with the time I joined Mastodon, it takes a couple of weeks to find what you like and build up a good feed, but once you do that, it's useful and fun. I wish it had more curation tools, but I enjoy it.

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Lemmy can't federate with pixelfed yet can it? I know we have some integration with mastodon, but I'm guessing we can't connect to pixelfed directly yet?

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I created a mastodon account a few years ago and I log in every once in a while but I really have no idea how to use it haha, it just keeps updating a bunch of posts and I don't know how to make it stop

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This is a good point. I'm pretty sure that if you're active on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, or even have multiple active accounts on multiple instances of each of those (like a lot of people do), each single one of those would count as a separate active user. I really can't think of any way that this wouldn't be the case, because how would the statistics servers know that your the same person?

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That's probably the global feed, which yes, moves super-fast. I found that annoying at first too.

There's a checkbox to turn off auto-scroll in settings, and it's got an appropriate name: Slow Mode.

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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?