You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.
Excited. Anyone know if/when their gonna add dark mode?
I’m excited. I’m one of those users, but I haven’t used it much because 8 can’t find followers. To be fair, I never used Instagram. I like the fediverse, I see about the same article get sent through other centralized communities other than reddit (tildes, hacker news, etc), but I enjoy the community discussion the best around here.
Go back to the absolute fundamentals of social media. Identify a few hashtags that have things you care about, for instance I browse a lot of #filmphotography posts.
Yeah, I never used Instagram or Twitter so getting started on Pixelfed or Mastodon seems a bit daughnting for me. But I assume it you like platforms like that, you just search out a few people you enjoy and then add more from their content and others do the same and eventually it’ll all click into what people had in those corporate owned and controlled products.
I had kind of the opposite. Never used instagram but for some reason pixelfed just felt right and I started posting there when I joined the fediverse.
Awesome, glad to have you here future friend. If you know of people that may be of interest to add for mastodon/loops/Pixelfed please let me know and don’t be shy, I am always open but haven’t found time to search
Me too. I can’t find you on pixelfed?
I’ll have to figure out how to link you, I don’t have anything much there yet. Just a few pictures. My name was lifeinmultiplec there as it chopped the name. I assume I need to give you an instance to find me though .
Edit: maybe this will help: https://breeze.pictures/p/lifeinmultiplec/786636194842492930
Thanks, cool! I was able to start following you by searching for lifeinmultiplec@breeze.pictures in my instance. For some reason your pictures aren’t showing up for me yet but maybe it will populate soon.
P.s I’m liv@pixelfed.nz
More users isn’t necessarily good.
Every time there’s an influx from whatever shit storm we retain about 20%.
? Why’s that not good?
There’s a lot of gatekeepers here who actively sabotage the project to keep it niche.
Some examples of active sabotage?
You can just scroll through the comments here, and see some examples.
Well on Lemmy the quality of content dropped. Low effort posts started becoming normalized. Lots of people entered who dont know what the Downvote button is for.
“when there were 0 users, the site was perfect”
Well, I’m glad you like it some much you want to preserve it. Best of luck.
Is there a way to peruse pixelfed feeds from Lemmy or Mastodon? Or do I have to make yet another account?
You can just open the Pixelfed links using your Mastodon instance:
Open URL in Mastodon
You can sign into Pixelfed with your mastodon account.
Wut. That doesn’t sound secure
Yes, you can follow a pixelfed account from your mastodon account and see their posts in your feed. Paste the url of their page into your mastodon search to bring up their profile, then you can view their posts and/or follow them.
That’s one thing that should be upgraded. There has to be a way to link your accounts in Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, … so “follow” becomes “follow with” and choose the service.
Yeah, but that’s not browsing; that’s targeting a specific account you want to view more of.
Oh, to browse all the posts rather than just one account’s, go to https://pixelfed.social/web/explore which should show pretty much everything. (that’s the main server with the most users by far, and any other PF servers are federated with it so most of theirs should show up there as well)
The mood and anger here is starting to feel like Reddit recently and now I know why
Well it doesn’t seem like there’s been another Reddit exodus, especially from looking at the user numbers for Lemmy. There hasn’t been a big screwup lately like with Meta or Twitter (but I think Bluesky is absorbing the Twitter refugees currently).
Need better flagship app tbh. Pixelix is better imo but its 5bucks on playstore and sideloading on my current main phone is a hassle :/
Pixelix is on FDroid for free
There’s an official app now.
Lemmy once had a massive influx of new users, a lot left again and monthly active users has remained somewhat constant for a long time now. Let’s wait and see how many people actually stay on PixelFed.
It’s quite good, in my opinion. If we had some bridge to lemmy’s posts, it would be even better. Also I’ve checked and if you like or comment a mastodon post from Pixelfed you’ll receive the notification, so, it’s something🤷♂️.
You can post from PixelFed into Lemmy but you won’t see replies and that’s too bad.
Still no funny content so disappointed
Try #meme #memes
Most of them are political memes or simply are not funny
If it brings more diversity, I’m all for it. If it makes it even more super left psycho Echo chamber-y then it will just be annoying.
As we’ve proven, actual leftists can’t really create an echo chamber because we vehemently disagree with each other on everything.
Have we proven this?
Haven’t really gotten around to checking it out yet. TBH I can read a lot faster than most videos explain concepts.
Tbh I feel a little queasy about the change of tone but thats how it goes with influx of people. I‘ll keep my strict anti tech bro stance and will rapidly block any bigots as I always have. People can of course say and do what they please here and I‘m not gonna stop them. But i also am not forced to listen to it. Thats very incompatible to the outside world so clash is inevitable imho.
Lemmy is full of bad news, hate and toxicity while pixelfed is full of artists and people sharing cool pictures and their passion. Visiting my pixelfed account from 2023 a few days ago set such a contrast with what I see on lemmy that I started using it regularly. It really felt weird to visit such a wholesome place after using lemmy for a long time. Now I use pixelfed to balance out the bad stuff from lemmy for maintaining my mental health and to appreciate the art which is not common on lemmy.
Many groups of lemmy are full of political content but you can block them and still have a decent amount of contents.
The political stuff is leaking into any other community though. I’ve already blocked every politics specific and news specific community and a handful other communities and I still get a lot of that. I’m also blocking a few keywords as well, this stuff just gets through regardless of what you do and in no small amount either.
I hear you. I’m getting tired of the massive amount of posts about trump and elon and politics. I don’t see almost any new content about other stuff.
Same problem with Mastodon tbh
Maybe you could try banning words like “elon” or “trump” if you feel overwhelmed. Some apps have this feature
Gonna try that thanks!
well, i’m against individual workarounds for common problems, there should be common solutions.
otherwise you just start alienating 99% of the users who won’t put in the effort to install an extra app just to get that filtering, or if using the web interface on mobile, it’s just not possible.
It’s like Reddit and you gotta filter out the bullshit. Adding Elon, Musk, Trump, and RFK to my block list improved my mental health quite a bit. Hopefully if it’s egregious enough it will slip through and I won’t be blind sided by some terrible thing they’re doing. That’s the only downside.
The problem is that Lemmy isn’t at the point where I can browse it like I do on Reddit.
After the API thing killed my main reddit app, I just lurk on like 4 1 million+ user sports/video game/military meme subreddits and check on them every 1h/30min to see 10 new posts or any important news that happened. I check r/all maybe like once every few months.
The relevant lemmys just aren’t that active or don’t have low-effort post rules, so I’m kind of stuck browsing the front page of Lemmy if I want to see more than 10 posts per day
This is very true unfortunately. Maybe eventually but my fear is that when Lemmy gets that big it turns into Reddit
@Martineski @koncertejo
Interesting, thank for your feedback.For our instance jlai.lu, we try to balance bad news with the forum libre, where we can share picture, movie, book, some daily game…i think it work pretty well because everyone share what they love.
For News, we separated usa, israel-palestine from
world newsso it offers a place where anyone can post there or filter. And it let other communities breath.
- The official Pixelfed app just has a nicer looking UI
- There’s not really a competing app for people leaving Insta like there is Bluesky vs Mastodon
- Pixelfed’s content is mostly visual so it’s easily digestible to casual users and you don’t have to scroll past dry Fedi arguments
- Better discover features so users don’t have to do a bunch of legwork to find who to follow
Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time
This.
Discovery and user abstraction are Lemmy’s biggest issues and we are not addressing them to the degree we should.
I know there’s some stuff on all those centralized platforms that’s way over the top, but most of it is actually pretty helpful. And you’ll miss it once you switch here.
Discovery? Interesting thought.
I tried out pixelfed and the pixelix app for the past couple weeks.
The “discovery” page on the official app is worse than useless. It shows almost nobody with over 10 followers, highlighting one person with 50-100 followers, then shows “popular on the fediverse” which are thumbnails of posts of the people it just recommended. It always recommends at least 5 of the same people day after day, week after week, even people you already follow.
The official app can’t even show a global feed so it is literally impossible to discover new people unless you know their name and specifically search for them, or they are recommended by luck on the discover page (of which there are multiple repeats per day, so not likely)
Pixelix at least allows you to view a global feed though. Definitely a better experience, but Lemmy discovery is not any worse than that.
The Discovery section in Pixelfed definitely needs work, but the ability to follow hashtags offsets that somewhat. I’ve found loads of great photographers to follow off the back of following hashtags that I’m interested in.
Absolutely agree with this.
It’s hard to discover something new, sometimes.
What do you mean by user abstraction? First I’ve seen this mentioned, or put this way.
Relates to what server an account is on and how it affects the experience. Most people don’t want to know/care
Oh thanks for giving me a proper term to use when pointing at my biggest problem with the Fediverse.
Has it ever been discussed by any developers? Is it technically possible for ActivityPub? Would the costs be exorbitant?
There are different options to solve this. The current “solve” is to dump everyone on one big server. Mastodon.social, lemmy.world, etc.
Another solution might be a button that sends you to a random top10 instance. Might work for mastodon but lemmy servers defederate like hell and some of the biggest instances are .ml, hexbear, etc.
XMPP has this tiered list https://providers.xmpp.net/ but it’s the same problem of expecting users to care what a server is
I don’t have solution, and if you do then I’m not the person you should be telling :)
An ‘ideal’ solution might require a complete redesign on how federation works.
Something like a more decentralised network where you don’t have a ‘home’ instance.
An instance would be more like a relay into a ‘core’ network, and you could swap between them at any time.It’d probably require your account info to be public though, so passwords wouldn’t be possible to implement in a foolproof way.
Instead of signing in, your device could generate a public/private keypair on signup.
The whole network would have your public key, and only content/actions that your device signs would be propagated on the network.Sorry, you probably don’t care about my ideas lol. Just thinking out loud I guess.
fastest reply in tghe west 😎
they tried that and without the centralised moderation it became racist very quickly https://aether.app/
e: also nostr
I don’t think Mastodon was really competing with Bluesky. Bluesky is way ahead while Fediverse fanboys thought people would somehow just learn to use Mastodon. (while they wouldn’t shut up about Bluesky)
Is the iPhone app still missing darkmode?
What about Android? I don’t see dark mode in options.
Dang for some reason I thought Android had it.
yup… (at least in the stable channel)
what’s most infuriating is that it used to have it but at some point they redesigned the app and made it worse…?
you don’t have to imitate instagram that much, dansup
I think it was more that he wanted to open source the app but had built it while he was learning so it was pretty messy and he felt insecure about it. So he rebuilt the app from scratch and open-sourced it. It just isn’t quite at feature parity to the old app yet. Pretty sure dark mode is coming in the next update though.
oooh, yea that’s a good point
and, I mean, the app was in beta, sudden changes are to be expected
but still, I feel like the app was so much better before… its kinda frustrating
Agreed. It immediately went from being maybe the best app in the Fediverse to the 3rd best for its own service. I stopped using Pixelfed altogether until Pixelix got good enough to be a replacement.
I honestly don’t understand how getting the new app to feature parity with the old wasn’t maximum priority. It at least seems like it’s going to get there pretty soon.
The tide lifts all the boats… there is also a noticeable uptick in Lemmy registrations, at least here on our instance.
This makes sense to me.
All these people had to pick an instance and now probably understand how to do that.
That’s the biggest hurdle to signing up for lemmy or mastodon.
Me in 2024: “Which one is the main one?”
“There is no main one”
“Which one is the biggest?”
“Lemmy.World”
“Thats the one for me!”
“THATS NOT HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT!!!”
“…but that’s what I did.”
Here, the issue. People don’t feel like small instances would live for long and migrating do not transfer the old posts so people feel more safe subscribing to the large instances
Some people care, most don’t. Lemmy.world is the vanilla ice cream of the fediverse. Thanks for being part of the community!
I like vanilla ice cream. It’s a great base. Maybe today you throw some butterscotch and peacans on it! But tomorrow it’s caramel and fudge, and the next day it’s chocolate chip cookie dough, and yhe day after that it’s whipped cream and strawberry syrup. And the day after that it’s chocolate sauce with peanuts.
Meanwhile, the guy who got chocolate just ate the same bowl of ice cream for 5 days.
See it’s kind of like sex, too. Some people just do the same thing over and over. But what I do, is I take some handcuffs, and chains, and baby oil, and some… trails off
And that kids, is how I met your Mother!
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
You too? I’ve had more users sign up this month than for many past months!
Yeah, we usually tick along at 1 or 2 sign-ups a day, 7 days ago that went to 10 and has settled back to 3 or 4.
I don’t know if they are coming directly from Pixelfed but there were a few high profile posts about the Fediverse over at The Bad Place, so, following the example of @Blaze@feddit.org, a few of us jumped in to do some missionary work/help man the lifeboats.
I think I’ve also seen new communities being created too
Oooh, I will need to look into the lemmyverse json file to find out what they are. :D
My script may or may not have picked up the data correctly. I thought I had it working but during writing down the data I noticed that the new 196 blahaj community wasn’t showing up in communities from this month and was categorised as 2023.06. After tinkering with the script a bit and rerunning the script it’s now correctly categorised as from this month but who knows if there are any other errors. And due to writing this down manually I could have made some mistakes myself too. :p
New communities by month:
2025.01 - 313
2024.12 - 267
2024.11 - 311
2024.10 - 264
2024.09 - 249
2024.08 - 321
2024.07 - 344
2024.06 - 411
2024.05 - 449
2024.04 - 484
2024.03 - 704
2024.02 - 500
2024.01 - 422New communities this month by instance: (potential typos) (I just pasted it into the lemmy ui only to realise it doesn’t have a monofont ;-;)
lemmy.world - sixy-nice
lemm.ee - 27
lemmynsfw.com - 23
lemmy.org - 21
lemmy.blahaj.zone - 18
lemmy.dbzer0.com - 12
sh.itjust.works - 10
realbitcoin.cash - 9
lemmy.ml - 8
lemmy.sdf.org - 6
lemmy.zip - 6
discuss.tchncs.de - 5
literature.cafe - 5
ani.social - 4
feddit.org - 4
jlai.lu - 4
lemmy.ca - 4
lemmy.lqx.net - 4
redlemmy.com - 4
slrpnk.net - 4
sopuli.xyz - 4
discuss.online - 3
lemmy.today - 3
dubvee.org - 2
feddit.it - 2
feddit.uk - 2
lemmy.cafe - 2
lemmy.spronkus.xyz - 2
lemmyusa.com - 2
szmer.info - 2
zerobytes.monster - 2
discuss.jacen.moe - 1
fasheng.ing - 1
feddit.dk - 1
feddit.nl - 1
g00n.cloud - 1
hackertalks.com - 1
hexbear.net - 1
info.prou.be - 1
lemmings.world - 1
lemmy.amxl.com - 1
lemmy.chrisco.me - 1
lemmy.eco.br - 1
lemmy.studio - 1
lemmy.wtf - 1
lemmygrad.ml - 1
lemuria.es - 1
mander.xyz - 1
midwest.social - 1
monero.town - 1
pawb.social - 1
ponder.cat - 1
programming.dev - 1
r.nf - 1
real.lemmy.fan - 1
reddthat.com - 1
thelemmy.club - 1
ttrpg.network - 1
vegantheoryclub.org - 1
walledgarden.xyz - 1
0xdd.org.ru - 1Top 15 most popular (subscribers) new communities created this month: (excluding nsfw ofc)
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 1.77k
!keeptrack@lemmy.world - 544
!actually_infuriating@lemmy.world - 346
!sideoftheroad@lemmy.today - 265
!youtubeclassics@sh.itjust.works - 229
!Football@lemm.ee - 193
!quityourbullshit@lemmy.world - 184
!growthefediverse@slrpnk.net - 183
!webrevival@lemm.ee - 151
!shitprop@quokk.au - 124
!Autism@lemmy.dbzer0.com - 123
!19684@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 121
!latin@lemm.ee - 119
!lesbians@lemmy.blahaj.zone - 118
!buyeuropean@feddit.uk - 112Oh wow, thanks for putting it into perspective! Those are very interesting stats:)
(Also lol, apparently not that many more communities are being created)
My script had batch processing of the data with the batch sizes being set to 200. With that the result of communities for this month I was getting was 125. After setting the batch size to 1 making it process each community separately it changed to 313 so who knows if there are any other problems with the script. :p
Yup, I spotted a few Lemmy accounts that were less than a week old recently. Very nice.
The tide lifts all the boats…
Exactly. I do not care much for Pixelfed. Or Mastodon. Or Friendica. Or really much of anything other than Lemmy. But I just stood up my own PixelFed server, so if someone wants to get away from Meta, I will happily support their decision (and pixelfed.social’s server by offloading resources) and they can find me there.
