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Is the Fediverse stalling?

I'm genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)

212 comments

  • Why does everything need to expand? I’m happy with where we are. It feels cozy.

  • Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.

    • (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually)

      I think rather we'll see more software popping up and diversifying the ecosystem. Then you can pick whichever you prefer. Which is the whole point of the fediverse. I'm currently working on my own implementation. Might take a long while before any alpha version as I'm super busy but I try to do at least a bit of work on it every day.

  • Didn't the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn't many servers defederate UK servers as result?

    • No, lemmy.zip just geo blocked UK IP adresses, but the content is still available from other servers, no instance defederated.

    • UK and EU are way ahead the US (for example) on online safety - Meta is despised over here by government and they owe billions in fines they just tie it all up in legal complaints that last years

  • According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people's apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there's a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it's grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can't say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it's federated in pretense only, there isn't another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn't stopped growing. It hasn't exploded but we're not complaining about where we are, are we.

  • As a general comment, I suggest everyone interested in making the Fediverse grow to join those two communities

    Nobody likes to shout into the void. The second one helps finding people to help you grow your communities.

  • Just from a quick look at https://fediverse.observer/, it looks like the Fediverse is mostly steady at 1-1.25 million monthly users (give or take) over the past two years with a slight decreasing trend. I think there are some reasons for this that are not entirely in our control.

    There seems to be a global sentiment of disconnecting from social media and the internet in general. So, I wouldn't be surprised if ever platform is seeing a decaying user base. Anecdotally, among the people I see in real life, there is a general sense of exhaustion with online spaces. Whether it's from corporate-own, enshittified platforms to even places on the Fediverse, the people with whom I interact tend to find the entire thing hollow. They've trimmed down to one or two platforms (if that). In fact, I've even started to get that way. In the past, if someone were wrong and arguing against a point I made, I'd engage, especially if it's in something that I have expertise. Now, why bother? There's no use arguing; people have little interest in admitting fault or engaging in good faith (again anecdotally). That said, I'll concede that the Fediverse is a bit better on that front, but not by much.

    Then there's the alternative nature of the Fediverse. It's been rehashed over and over about how "difficult" it is to get on and use. It's not actually that hard, but the barrier to entry is an extra step. That small extra step frightens people away from even joining. The only time that barrier gets broken is when a "legacy" social media platform does something anti-user. Then there is a refugee wave that comes in and goes out leading to a modest durable increase in users. Recently, there just hasn't been a major controversy on a major platform that leads people here.

    Now, my final thought on this is to ask: Is a small and steady-ish population (despite modest decay) actually bad? In my view, I don't think it is. Being smaller and with a smallish barrier to entry means that we exclude a sizable number of the low-effort population. So, there's less (no zero) slop here. Plus, discussions, when had in good faith, can be much deeper and less filled with stupid low-effort jokes. Overall, I'm not too concerned with the number of people on the Fediverse. Growth isn't necessarily the best thing. Even so, with the way most mainstream platforms are going, it's inevitable that they will do something stupid that drives more people to the Fediverse at least for a time.

    TL;DR: The monthly population is mostly steady with a modest decay. Most social media is likely seeing similar trends. I don't think the smaller userbase is that bad of a thing.

  • Every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy has not only refused to join, but outright chided me for having recommended it to them. Every. Single. One.

    It does not help - and I did not know myself at first - that a Google search of "Lemmy" points people to lemmy.ml, which btw to someone without an account does not show "Fediverse" content and instead rather shows exclusively Local (rather than Global). The amount of bOtH sIdEs SaMe political content is always rather extreme, especially there.

    Aside from platforming political extremism, and using Arch Linux (and beans 🫛 🫘), there just isn't much else to this place. For us here, it is enough... unless we need to actually know about stuff and for that we go back to Reddit or whatever - especially niche topics that are discussed nowhere else -> if you want the content then you have to go to where it is at. The content creators refuse to come here and I don't blame them: we aren't a very welcoming bunch.

    Let's see, so we covered how we are a Nazi bar, how content creators can't be arsed to bother posting here, oh yeah and there's also the fact that Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit was. There is a modlog but no modmail, no notification when your content is removed, no ability to appeal or discuss (especially when the modlog merely says that the removal was done by a "mod" - it used to say the name of the mod but then it was changed to merely say "mod", so note how Lemmy is becoming more rather than less totalitarian as time passes) or again even so much as be told that your stuff is now gone - and unlike Reddit, taking all of the conversations that happened on a post along with it (when Reddit removed a post it merely took away the link from the community, but someone with the URL could still continue to interact with it for a long time, whereas Lemmy does not even acknowledge that a post once used to exist, instead mentioning a server error and - get this - that you should try again later to access it... 🤔🥴 despite knowing full well that the post will never be un-removed; I am not suggesting that this misleading message is intentionally inaccurate, just stating once more how undemocratic this is that a mod can basically wipe out most traces that a post ever existed even in the past).

    But is there a thought that making an alternative Reddit would be super easy and fun and require zero effort? Lemmy is still extremely far behind Reddit in terms of features and will take many more years to catch up, if ever, and it's hyper-authoritian nature will always remain baked directly in (plus the Nazi bar effect... it's literally right there in the very name!). Though you might check out PieFed - in terms of features it has already surpassed Reddit in many ways, though it is still early in development (e.g. most days there is no Preview ability for posts or comments - although some days there is so I suspect it is almost ready to remain rolled out as a permanent feature?), and it has some fascinating ideas about democratization of moderation. PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust and so features come out in days to months rather than years. PieFed still shows posts from Lemmy.ml, but unlike lemmy.ml itself, does not do so exclusively, so offers a far more global and democratic platform. I'm placing my hopes in PieFed rather than the dying Lemmy moving forward. I usually get downvoted for saying all this... yet here we are on a post saying how MAUs for Lemmy are decreasing and calling into question whether Lemmy will even survive or not - while btw those numbers for PieFed recently tripled in size - so history has and will continue to prove this point accurate. There is hope for the Fediverse, not specifically for Lemmy I think (there is just too much wrong there and the efforts continue to move in the opposite direction, more towards rather than away from authoritarian control, which trends towards fewer rather than more content, i.e. it intentionally creates "echo chambers"), but for the wider Fediverse, yes. It will take actual effort to build it up though. Each step moves towards that - e.g. apps such as Voyager, Thunder, and Interstellar helped Lemmy (& the latter Mbin) thrive, and now all of those are adding support for PieFed, thus ensuring that none of the previous efforts were wasted, even as they move forward into the future rather than remain stagnant in the past.

    But there are reasons why people don't like coming here - and those still need to be solved. First among them is that the tools have to get better, which is happening. Second, start posting content, and make it fun to spend time here. I see people doing that constantly, making my time here enjoyable.:-) Third, maybe more will be needed beyond those two steps but I don't know anything about that, so I just focus on the former two steps and leave the rest to the future:-).

  • Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We're all getting sick of it.

  • That's an interesting question. I don't think the advantages of the fediverse are part of any zeitgeist so are not attracting new and diverse users other than maybe through places like Flipboard and maybe Ghost. The future of social media is certainly going to remain fragmented and the fediverse fragments itself by default anyway. I do think that how people use social media is changing; people are tired of overuse to some extent. Does the fediverse have a future? I think it'll remain its own niche as corporate offerings come and go. Increased Interest may come from an unexpected growth in a specialism that is federated. I think my idealism for what the fediverse could achieve is now muted as I probably no longer have faith in open networks as the cultures are way too different so I probably now see the fediverse less through the email analogy and more through the linux analogy. If fedi plods on refining itself in its own slow way (volunteers and no money make for slow progress) then who know the next time a corp offering destroys itself and people search for a less awful and exploitative environment then it might just win out in the long term though I'm not entirely convinced about that. Does that mean i'm off to corporate networks. Not really. I'd rather just stop altogether than fall down that rabbit hole again.

  • Yeah, both. It's flatlining globally and down in the UK.

    • It kinda seems like historically, growth has been driven by exoduses from larger platforms. Right now there's not any huge things going on on other platforms that piss people off and make them wanna leave but like, twitter, reddit and meta seem really good at finding shitty thing to do, so I'd kinda expect growth to just pick back up whenever the next outrage happens 🤷‍♂️

      • Isn't it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech's fuckups?

      • That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it's noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of "the same users" than before. There's still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.

        That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than "mass exodus users" may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.

    • We had some nice steady growth up until some months back, probably partially driven by dissatisfaction with Reddit rallying behind Trump and further enshittification of it. But predictably the lions share of users just accepted the new normal as the inertia of leaving is just too high to overcome. For another exodus event there needs to be a bigger shock to the system, probably something like turning off old.reddit.

      • something like turning off old.reddit.

        One day...

      • I've spent the a good part of last year working on Fediverser. The tools to lower the barrier of migration and to get people out of Reddit were built. To me, it feels like it's the users and admins here that were not interested in pushing that as a goal.

  • Triggering content: People are going back to Reddit.

    Come on! I want to see them downvotes!

  • Bluesky blew itself up cos they failed to be sufficiently decentralised and became an echo chamber. Activpub systems are less echo chambery but still have a very strong left lean that is significantly effecting out ability to grow especially among the centre who represents the majority. We need more right wing opinions and allow said right wing opinions if we want the majority of people to adopt it.

    The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.

    • God, shut up. There's the "communist" dumbass instances which is just far right levels of stupid, and then literally the entire rest of this platform is just normal centrist europe views. "Leftist" is a term Americans use to describe giving immigrants healthcare and thinking homeless people should be given homes.

      • I was going to say. The fediverse isn't an echo chamber. It's a series of echo chambers, some of which even talk to eachother. :P

      • And if we have fewer people over here because the fascists don't like us, well, cry me a fucking river.

      • Go say something against trans and see how the fediverse reacts most instances will hand out an instant instance ban. That's a pretty mainstream right wing belief but its almost completely censored on the fediverse.

        Normal centrist European views huh? I don't think so their are a lot of right ringers Europe who wouldn't be allowed to say what they want here. Perhaps that's what some Americans mean when they say leftist but that's not what most people mean pretty shit straw man imo.

    • A lot of right-wing beliefs have become so extreme that I am frankly happy to not be around them, regardless of how important I feel it is to avoid echo chambers (very). Its one thing to want to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with even though it's challenging, it's another thing to constantly have to contend with people who would like to debate whether you're a human and deserve basic human dignity because you're a minority.

      But I would appreciate if we could at least manage not to attack other left wing folks over not being left wing enough, or over what methods are a productive way to solve the problems we're facing.

      It's kind of just a microcosm of the infighting and purity testing of the left more broadly (at least in America, I have no idea how things are with the culture of leftwing communities or voices in Europe or the rest of the world), but it still sucks and I'd like to hope we can find a way to do better.

      • Tbh I'm not even sure what the right and left wing means or believes anymore.

        Both terms have been so utterly corrupted and coopted that they have become meaningless to the point of simply being a term used to other one group by the other.

        Well that's the problem everyone thinks they are exactly the minimum amount of left and that anyone right of them is a facist. If someone is continuously called a fascist Nazi eventually they will listen.

        "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" - Joseph Goebbels

        Australia wasn't so much on the extreme of Americans but we are getting there. Interestingly both the right wing and the extreme left got fucked in our most recent election. Mind u I'm not happy with the current federal government they are introducing a pre capital gains tax on everyone's savings.

    • The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.

      I've never felt this was as important as people say, at least here in the Threadiverse I don't see it being important. Can you explain how this would help Lemmy/PieFed?

    • Bluesky blew itself up? What happened to bluesky?

    • OIDC gives you federated login, but no portable identity...

      • Oidc is the protocol by which auth can happen its the evolution of oauth. U need to build some kind of decentralised ledger then u set up a server that checks that ledger against the user provided auth then u simply make this server have an oidc endpoint allowing it to be plug and play with existing fediverse services.

        I say oidc cos almost all fediverse software is already compatible with it.

212 comments