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.
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.