Is the number of Lemmy users increasing?
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It is the same set of considerations that govern Lemmy instances: the admins are irl people who have whatever ideas they like to see happen in the world, and it's their personal machines and effort that they are putting into administering the instance, so they get to do whatever they please. If you like those philosophies (which they tend to say in their sidebars), then you can make an account on them - FOR FREE - and if not, then you are free to go elsewhere.
Fwiw, piefed.zip avoids defederation as much as possible iirc and has an affinity for gaming topics, piefed.social is one of the oldest but note that it tests deployment of all the newest features, so it can break more readily than a more stable instance, piefed.ca is located in Canada and geared towards people who live there but like the Lemmy version, all are welcomed, and piefed.world is run by the same admins who handle lemmy.world, with all that that entails - some people love that fact, others will hate it, and again it's all fine and good bc there is room for us all to coexist peacefully across the Threadiverse:-).
~/s~
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Piefed was also designed to be better at serving more people, especially outside of North America and Europe. It does more with less data, so people on slower internet in large parts of the world can participate just as easily.
I just mentioned this in another comment but I'll add it here so you can see it more easily:
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
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PieFed, like Mbin, was written from the ground up, and in a totally different language than Lemmy.
But it interoperates with Lemmy, so yeah it's very similar. Except the LARGE list of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks, and a handful of features that Lemmy still does better on.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
But also, PieFed is written in Python that is a heck of a lot easier to code in than Rust, so the fact that PieFed not only caught up to Lemmy but has already surpassed it in SO MANY ways is a strong indicator of its future success.
But aside from the tankies building in tankie philosophy right into the core of the Lemmy software, it depends on whether someone wants those additional features or not. Like polls, flairs (both user and post), categories of communities, which btw are user customizable and shareable, combining all comments across all cross-posts (helping to reverse the fragmentation effect inherent in federated platforms), and so much more.
I bet that if you tried out PieFed for a day, you'd fall in love with it. You can also do entirely different workflows with it, like trigger notifications to be sent to you that really helps you to stay on top of posts from communities that are very low-volume (and so have trouble making it into your Subscribed feed, like poetry rather than politics or worshipping Arch Linux), but those are likely to take more than a day to figure out - there's definitely a learning curve. Also note that ymmv with regard to the different apps not (yet!) fully utilizing all the features offered by the PieFed back-end.
I like Piefed much better.
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Previous thread on the same topic 4 days ago: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/238765
Also, OP, as a general request, could you please consider posting to
- [email protected] rather than [email protected]
- [email protected] rather than whatever other privacy community you are using
Those two communities have several active members posting, and are trying to gather enough activity to become sustainable. [email protected] was barely active before you started posting it to it, and now provides people with https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload when they want to post about movies.
Feel also free to join [email protected] where we discuss growing communities
I get the ick from piefed. it feels like "bluesky".
I would not "fit in" on any piefed instance, so I have blocked any piefed instances.
when lemmy dies because everyone is on piefed I'll just go back to what I was doing before Reddit.
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python?!Reddit is written in Python. It was originally written is Common Lisp, but they rewrote it in Python since it is easier to find developers.
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I like Piefed much better.
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all "good", but yeah, me too
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python?!
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I’m curious what you think makes email easy enough to understand for the general population, but lemmy to hard.
That email comparison annoys the fuck out of me. How is any of this like email?
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python?!
Yep and its pretty easy to read when looking at the source code.
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No, the MAU (which is what I assume you meant) seems to be going down very slowly. Though it probably will start going up once again someday. Possibly when the new digg is released to the public or when Reddit pulls another shit that not even the current Redditors will be able to tolerate.
I personally don't have a problem with the current state. I like it here. I recognize lots of people every day comment and post. It feels cozy.
Yep its nice to see you all
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I get the ick from piefed. it feels like "bluesky".
I would not "fit in" on any piefed instance, so I have blocked any piefed instances.
when lemmy dies because everyone is on piefed I'll just go back to what I was doing before Reddit.
Lol its just Lemmy with more features. And less funding if we are being honest. Rimu is an awesome Dev.
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piefed is its own category there, but kbin/mbin might be included in "lemmy" - I didn't dive deeper.
piefed is growing recently but it's not in the millions
Mbin has <1k monthly active users. Kbin has <100 total, and if you dig deeper, only one server (in Poland) self-reports as using Kbin.
No PieFed is not included in "Lemmy" in this software b/c it looks at the software that the instance reports as using.
Even Lemmy is not in the millions, its peak was ~55k MAUs somewhere in Spring of 2024. Well, the "posts" counts could be in the millions (according to the Lemmy stats page it was 12.2 million a couple months ago), but those stats can be fairly misleading, so I typically only ever go by monthly active users that seems verifiably closer to what people actually see happening. e.g. so very MANY people have alt accounts all across the Fediverse so the total number of accounts is highly misleading, but the number of "active" ones seems more reliable? (even then it could be an over-counting, especially if bots are active and being counted as well)
40k MAUs is barely even a highly active sub over on Reddit.
Even Mastodon only reports ~700k MAUs, and falling, though at its peak it was closer to 2 million. They really dropped the ball on making the software easier to use - unlike Lemmy (and Mbin and PieFed), each Mastodon instance does NOT show posts from other Mastodon instances, by default - or at least that was true for an exceedingly long time though I thought it was going to change this summer iirc? Maybe that change only affected "searching" for posts though? I don't use Mastodon so don't really care - but I understand why people prefer BlueSky, b/c for them centralization is the point, if that is what it takes to make the software actually work.
A LOT of the criticisms that people on Reddit have about Lemmy actually pertain to Mastodon rather than Lemmy in particular.
The entire federated concept really was not ready for mainstream deployment, at the time of the Rexodus. We here are those with the "early adopter" mindset, which is very much different than the mainstream normie one.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
Unless they went to PieFed - which many did - and then it would look like a net decrease on those charts for Lemmy.
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I get the ick from piefed. it feels like "bluesky".
I would not "fit in" on any piefed instance, so I have blocked any piefed instances.
when lemmy dies because everyone is on piefed I'll just go back to what I was doing before Reddit.
The fuck are you on about, Piefed is just a different software. We're the same user base.
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I was worried at first that Lemmy would be basically dead compared to Reddit. But holy hell, its active enough and its qualitatively better than Reddit could ever be. I never realized how shit it was until I actually decided to leave permanently.
Many of us stopped actually "engaging" on Reddit long before we finally left it - the amount of trolls just waiting to pounce on anything at all that was said just got too damn high!
There are (so MANY!) trolls here too, but you can block them all and then breathe an enormous sigh of relief and finally enjoy the rest - I am saying that here that is at least possible, whereas on Reddit it just simply was not.
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The fuck are you on about, Piefed is just a different software. We're the same user base.
wrote last edited by [email protected]like ml is the same user base?
edit: or maybe hexbear?
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Lol its just Lemmy with more features. And less funding if we are being honest. Rimu is an awesome Dev.
less funding plus more features isn't selling it. just means it's not maintainable long term.
besides my ick is more from the user base not the software. any if the piefed users I've ran across are trying to hard sell piefed. I don't like car salesmen, so it just gives me the ick.
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Yep its nice to see you all
Nice to meet you too!
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Slowly going down. The learning curve is too steep for the general population (personal opinion, happy to debate).
I believe that is more valid for Mastodon instances than for Lemmy ones.
Except that you are still correct in the operational sense that most will not bother. See e.g. the migration to BlueSky rather than Mastodon.
PieFed really might make for a qualitative shift though, in offering so many options such as categories of communities (akin to multi-Reddits), and polling, and flairs (both user and post) that Reddit users were used to and it makes them feel really like they are "slumming it" coming over to Lemmy that lacks all of that. The categories of communities and user-customizable and shareable feeds in particular really help with "content discovery", as too does PieFed's wizard that walks a first-time user through the process of setting up and joining what the user indicates that they are interested in.
In contrast, Lemmy users are supposed to go... (somewhere? but where? where are these "somewhere"s ever mentioned? on a side-bar somewhere? extremely rarely I would believe they might be, but the vast majority of the time usually not) to find the content that they want to see. Often they end up browsing All rather than Subscribed, and get so frustrated with that that they simply leave Lemmy altogether, and then report their complaints over in r/RedditAlternatives. PieFed solved that particular problem though, as well as several others, so at this point I think any discussion about "the learning curve" needs to be split into one for Lemmy, where it really does remain too complicated for the average Reddit non-technical normie, vs. PieFed where it does not anymore.
And I need to be careful or else this will turn into a HUGE tangent, but also the political extremism and bOtH sIdEs SaMe-ism on "Lemmy" is an enormous turn-off for people as well. Yes they can block each troll on an individual basis, or the same with communities, no they can't TRULY block an entire instance (that horribly mis-named function would have been better termed a "community muting" rather than "instance blocking", which still allows comments from users on that instance to appear everywhere else, plus able to reply and even trigger notifications, etc. - IT IS NOT A BLOCK). Anyway, how this relates is that mainstream non-technical normies just get overwhelmed, and don't enjoy the political extremism having to be an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, with most of the ways presented by the software to opt-out not TRULY opting "out" rather than merely claiming to do so. In contrast, one of the first things that PieFed does is to set up a block-list of keywords, offering the options All, None, and even a third one Some to allow the content at a lower frequency. I have never put any words into it... but I appreciate that the feature exists, for the sake of those who want / need it to be able to enjoy their social media of choice.
I predict that for all these reasons plus a few others, Lemmy will continue to die off. The die-hard userbase seems not to care actually, even being oddly proud of this? While PieFed - which just increased its userbase +400% - will continue to grow, and maybe PieFed will actually be the thing that captures more of the Reddit users. Lemmy certainly will not be, nor Mbin, and I cannot say for certain that PieFed will, just that it seems to me to be the only thing that possibly could (Sublinks seems dead in the water atm, due to the primary - only? - dev having a baby).
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It took me a while to get my head round, but I'm in my 40s and shit with tech
What harms people is not the lack of knowledge but unwillingness to learn.
That said, there is only so much attention span to go around:-).
