It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Though the Threadiverse/Lemmy in particular is shrinking - as that same webpage shows when you filter for Lemmy, currently we have 33K monthly active users, down from 35K in recent months, itself further down from 40K in Dec. 2025, having fallen from 65K at the peak during Rexodus.
See also the graph for PieFed, which shows 7K MAUs.
Which I find highly notable, especially given how people are leaving Reddit... and also Lemmy/the Threadiverse as well.
Lemmy makes me use social media considerably less. That's a plus.
People are just generally leaving the threadiverse because... Sorry everyone but its so bleak here.
The world is going to shit and there's nothing any of us can reasonably do about it.
I doubt there's a day that goes by that I don't think about how this place does not "fill my cup with joy".
At the same time I kind of can't look away because I do feel b that I'm better informed because I read about how shit everything is.
Yeah, literally all of the major communities here have politics constantly in them. If you ever need a break, there is e.g. https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, but of course there's not even an hour a day's worth of material there.
Oh well, touching grass is a far better use of our time anyway, r-r-right!?!?
I honestly have one account where I just block all news. It's been very helpful
block all news
post stuff about things that you care about? gardening? horses? wildlife photography?
My comment isn't asking how to improve my own personal experience, but an explanation of why users might be declining.
Why not just count the two together? At 40k across lemmy + piefed, that's not bad.
The website does not provide for that, which is why I mentioned both separately.
Note that the numbers then are still shrinking.
I personally have an account on both, which helps illustrate the difficulties of combining the two number pools - these are absolutely not additional people, or rather only some are but nobody knows how much.
Which reminds me, I think the way this website counts numbers, lemm.ee may not be represented at all, even as a decrease in counts from the past? If true, then the actual number of the drop is much larger than shown. But I don't know the details there.
I was avoiding commenting about the goodness or badness of the situation, just focusing on the direction of the change.
Are the numbers actually shrinking for Lemmy+Piefed?
Lemmy has gone from 36,600 monthly active users to 33,600 users in the last year. A loss of 3,000 monthly active users.
Piefed has gone from 1,600 MAU a year ago to 6,900 MAU now, an increase of 5,300 users.
This means the total has increased by 2,300 MAU in the past year.
Note that this drop in Lemmy and rise in Piefed can be explained by lemmynsfw shutting down and being replaced by fedinsfw, which runs piefed and has 3,600 MAU. Arguably both Lemmy and Piefed are slowly gaining in MAU.
For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.
But as for how much or even whether we've dropped within the last year - which the graphs show but as you deservedly are saying that you would like confirmation for - I suspect that the answer is that nobody knows, really.
Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic "go"? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?
While that situation was over a year ago now, it does illustrate that I personally at least have no idea how these numbers shown in the graph are being calculated. Nor do I trust them in the slightest - e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs, and maybe more depending on the month examined. Lemmy servers used to be significantly less stable than they are now, so whenever one would become almost entirely unresponsive for a few days, many of us active on the Threadiverse at that time would simply hop over to another alt. Plus some of us like to experience features first-hand like what does PieFed offer, in comparison to Lemmy.
On the other hand, I have no other source of numbers, so I discussed what was presented in front of us. 65K down to 33+/-~7K is already a large enough difference that I believe that we have lost many users. Plus we can see them all over the place talking about how displeased they are with their experience while here - over on Reddit, and Bluesky, and I'm not going to look but presumably also X, Facebook, Insta, etc.
Whether these numbers are valid over the last single year or not... I cannot truly say. Although that alone seems quite telling, given how horribly Reddit is treating its user base lately - e.g. beginning to (or is it done for everyone already) shut down old reddit, and blocking people that use a VPN, etc. The fact that many more people are not coming here already should be sufficient for us to make inferences about our popularity, separately from precisely how many people are actively leaving the Threadiverse or not.
For example, read the comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. Copying and pasting a few that I had highlighted previously:
Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily religious (Christian, Muslim, Mormon, whatever) centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but... in truth... they AREN'T ⁉️
I don't think that's a fair comparison. That wasn't natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It's kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.
I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don't have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you're back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.
Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.
Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn't affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.
Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn't really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn't really "get" reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It's an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also "getting" it is something that helps retain people.
Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It's nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it's hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.
On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy's new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.
But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don't spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I'll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.
I've said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don't think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren't all that interested in growth.
Fine, sure, let's set aside the 65K then, as an outlier.
But see the stats yourself at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats. Now Lemmy shows 33K, last month it was 35K, a few months before that was 36K, before that 37K, at the turn of last year in Dec. 2025 there were 40K, and so on. This isn't "growth", this is "shrinking".
And since I am certain that there is a way to massage the stats (somehow) to get it to show a pattern of "growth", I will preemptively state that even if we were growing over this period in the past year, it's definitely not very much. So let's just agree that in the absolute very best point of view, Lemmy seems at most stagnant (or even actively shrinking) - even despite all of Reddit's abuses in the last year.
Everyone said to wait until Reddit got rid of old-reddit, and then more people would come here. Well, here we are, and they are not flocking here in droves, it's more like they are trickling in, but at less then the rate of attrition where more people leave than stay (or again, at the absolute very best, break even).
The multiple accounts thing was more about why don't we simply lump together Lemmy + PieFed to get a combined count for the entire Threadiverse at once (Mbin has <1K MAUs). I don't see as much point in making multiple Lemmy alts these days, when the major instances are more stable, but I do think that especially as PieFed continues to add such fantastic new features, that people are more likely to have both a Lemmy and a PieFed account.
So a lot of people making new PieFed accounts could be them migrating from Lemmy to PieFed... or they could simply be trying it out. i.e. like me, having two accounts, neither both on Lemmy nor both on PieFed, but rather one Lemmy and one PieFed. I see this very often especially among the most prolific posters, e.g. someone with a Lemmy.World account testing out or even stably maintaining also a PieFed.World one. Community moderation demands such behavior, though regardless of the reason, it makes cross comparisons between Lemmy and PieFed complicated. And we could get into even deeper scenarios, like someone who greatly prefers Lemmy, but since lemmynsfw.com migrated to fedinwfw.app, now maintains a separate PieFed account as well.
Moreover, I see shrinking rather than growth over the past year, but setting that aside, note that you can also adjust how far back the stats will show for, to see earlier trends. e.g. you can observe how in most of 2024 Lemmy had 45-55K MAUs. So even if we did manage to grow (rather than shrink) by like 1-2K, the background context is that would have occurred after having lost 20K MAUs over the past couple of years. This is entirely independent of the 65K peak, a year before that in July of 2023.
So wherever you consider the "high mark" to be - 65K, 55K, 45K, or even just 40K - we are below that now.
Sure, absolutely - but the "if" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Where are you seeing evidence of "growth" here? Even if you point to a specific month where that might be true, relatively speaking in comparison to the month before it, I am saying that in the long run, the overall trend that I see is downwards. Yes with some slight upswings along the way, but inexorably ever downwards. Not for Mastodon obviously, but for the Threadiverse/Lemmy
And perhaps that's okay? Or perhaps we could take the challenge to do better - e.g. find a way to avoid recommending places such as hexbear and hilariouschaos, because otherwise we are a Nazi/tankie/troll bar, indistinguishable from those others who we claim are "not" us, yet we do exceeding little to nothing at all to separate or even distinguish ourselves from such. Lemmy is the "we use Arch (Linux) btw" of the Fediverse - we here know about e.g. hilariouschaos, and take steps to avoid it, but we do next to nothing to help others not be recommended to outright join it over and above all other Threadiverse instances.
I think most of us here would be okay with that, with most likely massive differences in how people define "slow"😉. However, that's just not what I am seeing playing out, as it seems that year by year, we are in decline. Even at the time when bc of what is happening in Reddit you would have rather expected a significant increase.
Maybe something else will happen that will turn this around, but I don't know what. Instead, I think effort is going to be required, e.g. to find a way that hilariouschaos and hexbear do not get recommended to random people looking to escape Reddit, and will likely neither enjoy their time there nor be likely to stick around long enough to figure out how to do better. As you said, we need non-technical normal folks here, if we are to thrive.
Except that we keep turning them away.
You make a lot of good points, and I think I agree with your overarching theme - we don't really know.
Piefed does a lot better job of not recommending the weird instances, and I do hope it overtakes Lemmy because ultimately Lemmy is built by a fringe group so they aren't going to stop recommending fringe groups.
I think that people are unlikely to keep using both Lemmy and Piefed long term. Piefed is new and exciting, in another year we should see people settling into an account and hopefully we'll have a better idea at whether the threadiverse is growing or shrinking.
PieFed, as per usual, offers more features than Lemmy, e.g. PieFed.zip places a user-level instance block upon those highly controversial instances (not Lemmy.ml though), but then tells users how to remove that block. This is an ideal scenario, not forcing users hands as defederation would but offering a real choice, as opt-in, to interact with them.
On the other hand, PieFed has a lot of problems that I think are going to preclude a lot of people on Reddit from being excited about it. Most of the criticism has ended up being proven as disinformation... but not all. For instance, the aforementioned user-level blocks end up shadow-banning users without any acknowledgement to them that their content is not being received. That is somewhat Lemmy's fault for not being able to handle such blocks, but in any case PieFed decided to go ahead and do it regardless - which I support that choice btw - but then it does leave PieFed open to a criticism that it implements shadow-banning procedures. Which Lemmy does not, but at the cost of simply doing nothing at all about the situation.
And now PieFed is expanding upon that practice to shadow-censor votes coming in, even from Lemmy or Mbin instances, whenever the user exceeds a daily vote quota. Which is nowhere explained to the users whose votes are being discarded. I've heard multiple communities canceling their plans to migrate from their current location on a Lemmy instance to a PieFed one over this issue. Note that it is theoretically possible for an instance admin to change this behavior - but it is opt-out, not opt-in, and it was barely announced at all, leaving many admins surprised at the new behavior occuring on their machines, plus it went against strong community push-back, citing logic that I think I've only heard one person say that they understood and agreed with.
The primary criticisms of the Threadiverse are lack of content overall and the fact that it is too confusing for people's tastes. PieFed has made MAJOR strides in making things simpler for people, but as I have described above, it is also making things even more complicated in some other ways. And the crux of it seems to be: PieFed wants to become more like Mastodon, a place for "serious discussions", not a place for social media like with memes and where people upvote content in order to make people feel good emotionally. Which, if true, would be 100% fine btw, except that it claims to be the opposite, hence muddying the issue enormously, forcing users to discern the real truth particularly when it is in direct contradiction to the words they are told about it. i.e., this place is too confusing for people to want to figure us out - it is far too much effort, for very little gain, compared to them simply remaining on Reddit, no matter how enshittified it becomes.
I really wonder where they're going. I can't find any substitute for this little purgatory. Piefed? I'm not a fan of the UI. Masto? Twitter's a weird endless conversation space without proper organization and it makes me want to scream. Modern social media? We'd have vastly divergent desires if that's where they went.
Maybe they aren't going anywhere. Just dumping social media. I find Lemmy a lot less toxic than reddit but it's still basically a reddit hive mind.
Hacker news has been a nice place to browse. Yes a lot of the people are the most AI silicon valley brained ghouls but its offset by the entertainment of seeing them earnestly say the quiet part out loud. and because the forum has rules about sincerity thoughtful engagement you can open a thread and actually read a good discussion with intelligent comments.
Hacker news generally flags and shuts down posts critical of tech bros, capitalism, or the right wing.
Lobste.rs is a better alternative to HN.
There is a no politics rule but I see plenty of anti right wing, critical of tech bro and capitalism posts. The posts getting flagged are generally pretty low effort garbage.
I wonder what it says about social media that a news aggregator started in 2007 whose minimalist interface hasn't changed much since then and which is operated by a venture capital firm to shovel ads for their own investments is literally peak social media for a certain demographic. Like, maybe that's all that's really needed. There should be a news aggregator for people who like cars or for people who like knitting or whatever and they should all look and behave just like Hacker News. A car company just needs to start one of these and do good moderation. Bingo. Social media is solved. Go home. It's over. All the ideas since then? Microblogging? ActivityPub? Subreddits/communities? Apps? It's all unneeded.
Fwiw, a number of highly popular 3rd-party apps including Voyager now offer support for PieFed. Most do not provide the full range of features as compared to the web interface, though some like Interstellar provide the large majority of them - see fully detailed listing of each app and which features are supported at https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app.
Anyway, I confirm first-hand that using Voyager to access a PieFed instance is nearly identical to accessing a Lemmy one, except for the gain in back-end functionality of PieFed doing what Lemmy cannot (e.g. you apply some settings rarely in the web UI - maybe a couple times a year - and then those continue to function as you switch to more daily usage in your app of choice).
So use whatever you like - sh.itjust.works seems to me to be a fine instance - but I'm just saying that for a new person joining the Threadiverse, the web browser UI of PieFed is not the only or even the main way that people can choose to access it.
I used to download an app for everything, but now I can't talk myself into so much as considering it. Unfortunately, it's web interface or nothing for me
If it's privacy you are worried about, note that several alternatives like Voyager are FOSS.
But otherwise, yeah then that leaves you with the web UI, or at most a pinned webapp, which constrains you to the standard web UI.
Unless the PyLova fork of PieFed begins offering more tweaks to the UI that you want to see. The developer team is actively soliciting suggestions and have implemented a couple of mine already - like adding downvotes next to upvote counts - so you might voice your preferences to them to see if they can address your concerns.
It started out about security before it turned into tool fixation. I prefer to have a robust catch-all for every situation, and web browsers fill that niche incredibly well. 99% of the time, I won't even consider anything besides hopping onto Firefox. The 1% is bullshit banking apps.
And I'm currently super busy, but I will absolutely check out pylova this weekend. If it is to pieced as mbin is to kbin, there's plenty for me to be excited about!
Pretty much, yeah. Except PieFed still exists whereas Kbin died off, though originally the two existed side-by-side. Rimu has even grabbed code from PyLova before, so I presume they will end up sharing back and forth despite the personal contention.
For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven't really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.
just block all "US politics" communities and downvote every single post that mentions trump (or the democratic alternative candidate) that appears outside of those comms.
As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.
I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.
There is NO such thing as just blocking when it's everywhere, and if you can downvote it you've already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.
So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y'all in November -- or December, if shit gets real.
Fwiw, there are spaces such as https://nord.pub/topic/wholesome, and with that being a PieFed instance, can also offer blocking of any text keywords (like "Musk" or "Trump"). Stuff will still manage to come through (e.g. a preponderance of orange clowns with a fairly obvious meaning that nonetheless make it through the filters), but it can cut it down by a ton.
But if you just absolutely need to block it all, then I wish you happiness during your vacation from the bleakness! :-)
Yeah, obviously if I'm on lemmy.world then I have to wait for those improvements. I have looked into moving instances, and I will save your comment; I appreciate the information.
In the meantime, thanks for the well-wishes, and same to you!
You can't just count Lemmy active users. I switched from Lemmy to Piefed for example. So we need to count Lemmy+Piefed.
PieFed's growth doesn't make up for Lemmy's decline
Worth noting, on FediDB, Lemmy+Piefed+Mbin is sitting at 54.8k MAU. Lemmy itself is at 46.4k. Though I don't know the historical situation there.
Looking at the PieFed graph, and all-time peak usage seems to be for last month, and the dip for this month could be explained by the month not being over yet (and even if not, it's not an indicator of decline).
Right: people are not so much leaving PieFed as they are leaving the Threadiverse overall, and Lemmy in particular.
Since the amount of growth in PieFed does not offset the decrease in MAUs in Lemmy (especially over the long term, from the 65K), people are still leaving "the Threadiverse" overall, even despite PieFed's recent growth.
I wanted to avoid commenting on the goodness or badness of these trends, but yes PieFed's recent growth is somewhat encouraging, though tiny.
i mean, can you blame them?
it sucks. it sucks wading through moutains of dogshit and miserable crazy people to like, get a trickle of good and interesting content, or have exchange comments with reasonable chill people.
for every good interaction i have on here, there are probably 10+ other ones, and everyday I have to systemtically block new communities and users that are nothing but bot spam or straight up malicious users who are pushing a delusional and angry political agenda. and it works... those types of accounts/posts get lots of engagement, way more than organic stuff.
and you can go to their comment history and see account is less than a month old, and has 100s of posts and 1000s of comments and they are all... the same thing over and over and over.
a year ago i never had to deal with that on fediverse platforms. i'm now thinking of leaving myself because it just... increasingly sucks here and I don't have an interest in being relentlessly negative and angry like most of content here is. i also don't have a superiority complex being here either.
Yeah, and everybody is saying block communities/users whatever. But there's barely any engagement outside of those that you want to block! So yeah, what's the point of being here then.
Yeah, you're right.
All you can do is try to contribute to more chill spaces, but the majority of the activity is going to be nutty people with crazy beliefs endlessly repeating themselves in a circlejerk, because well, they have vastly different priorities in life than more moderate and well-adjusted folks.
The problem is that Lemmy is trying to be Reddit instead of being something better. Reddit's model was always flawed: a central feed of endless content where the community is secondary to the algorithm and the upvote chase. That model rewards outrage, spam, and bot farms because those things generate engagement.
The old forums worked differently. A forum was a place you went to for a specific topic or community. The content and the discussion lived together. You knew the regulars. Moderation was local and accountable. There was no algorithm shoving rage bait into your feed because there was no feed in the modern sense.
Lemmy instances should be built like those old forums. Each instance should feel like a real site with its own culture and purpose, not just a node in a Reddit clone. The posts and the community should be the reason people stay, not a firehose of engagement bait.
Splitting the forums away from the content sites was the mistake. We need to put them back together.
Yeah, agree about old forums. Miss that.
But also it did work well on reddit when it was a small niche community of like 10,000 or less users. the problem is growth destroyed most communities on reddit because you can't sustain a niche community with 100,000+ people, it enevitably becomes slop
Fwiw, it gets this way right before every single election in most western nations - especially a USA one.
And you can go to places such as lemmygrad.ml and read how proud they are at creating tools to subvert any and all bans - e.g. the automation of a process to simply cycle through all registered accounts in an app until one is found that is not blocked at the instance, community, or for a comment reply the user level (possibly by now, even including the creation of a new one if necessary?).
NO, to some, means to simply push forward all the harder. It's Man vs. Bear, and they've chosen their side: incel. It is intentional and even purposeful - strategic in fact, a "winning" approach, if the goal is to convey a message regardless of your interest in receiving it.
The big problem is I have no idea what feds are out there since it is all distributed so it feels like you are wandering in a dead mall sometimes.