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.
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.
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.
That’s highly odd. Hopefully someone looks into that more - perhaps there’s a difference in what instances are allowed to be counted (like pure bot-spam and CSAM ones filtered by one site but not the other? I have no idea).
Personally I think with ai crawlers, instances are coming up with their own ways of combatting the issue and the trackers are getting stuck in the crossfire. I have a few fediverse servers so some show up, some dont depending on the tracker.
Thank you for sharing, especially your first-hand perspective.
Its kinda hard to extrapolate either way honestly. Its easy for me to say that 90+% of the traffic to my tiny home server is AI crawlers now. I have NO idea definitively for the others. When I made a python fix, it jailed quite a few IPs and now its not too much of an issue. But I did notice a couple of status servers like fedidb get incorrectly jailed.
So yeah. Fun times for admins.
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.
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.
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.
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.