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.
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.