Pixelfed user count has gone vertical.
Pixelfed user count has gone vertical.
You're viewing part of a thread.
I don't think anyone here is arguing that the entire world will be using pixelfed by the end of the year, and that its usage will expand to other galaxies by the end of the decade.
It's a comment about the current growth curve, and it is both accurate and interesting.
Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.
Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you've seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.
I don't think that either Mastodon or Lemmy slid back anywhere near as far as back to baseline? Sure, usage went down, perhaps even significantly compared to the peaks, but I think that both retained a lot more users than they had before their respective spikes. I'm an example of someone who came into Mastodon with the Twitter exodus and into Lemmy with the Reddit exodus, and I've stayed for both.
I don't mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.
Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg's meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.
@[email protected] tbh we shouldn't expect the adoption curve of any Fediverse software to be somewhat similar to the ones of centralised social networks, since Fediverse completely misses the commercial aspect that encourage key users to stay in the platform easing communities to stick to it as well. My guess is that without the action of commercial dynamics, the situation wouldn't be so different from the jumps-and-losses moments we're used to
ok, that's a fair point. But then this whole talk about "going vertical" and "exponential growth" is useless, and the only thing that we could (perhaps) try to take out of these mass migration events is to ask ourselves "would we able to reduce churn in the Fediverse without compromising on any principles?"
In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks? Does this mean that leaving Instagram and coming to PixelFed is the same as quitting unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and realizing that when you switch to a healthy diet you simply don't eat as much at all?
And if any of this is true, shouldn´t we change the effort from "leave Instagram and come to PixelFed" to "Leave Instagram and quit all social media"?
Got it, thanks.
The fact that you believe these platforms were the same before and after these events makes it sound like you were not, in fact, there to see it happen. In my experience, it permanently changed both platforms, transforming them from weird niche sites to genuine alternatives.
That said, what you find interesting or not is not any of my business.
This thread (and others in that post) might interest you: https://communick.news/post/2320430/4138857
Yeah, I know I shouldn't bother. I am just annoyed by the misconception that all graphs should always start in 0 on the Y axis, as if it was some law of nature. Shouldn't allow myself to get dragged in further. :)
Good mindset :)
I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had
1M575k something before Elon, hit up close to2M1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem "a lot". However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.
Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that.
So it increased by 200%
Oh, wow, very impressive! Did you have to use a calculator to get to this challenging result?
Communick's revenue grew 1800% in 2024, compared to 2023. Do you think that makes it successful in any way?
Successful or not, it isn't back to baseline
Again: "back to baseline" is not meant in absolute numbers, but trend-wise.
It's not "again" for anything you've written in this comment thread.
And you specifically suggested that these numbers can't be extrapolated, i.e. that they are not a trend. If it's indeed a trend for Lemmy to have 200% yoy growth then yeah, I'd think that'd be pretty successful.
It’s not “again” for anything you’ve written in this comment thread.
Try the sibling: https://communick.news/comment/4203442
If it’s indeed a trend for Lemmy to have 200% yoy growth then yeah, I’d think that’d be pretty successful.
You got it exactly backwards. There is a decline trend (monthly users go down month after after a spike) while the "200% growth" is not determined by any curve and can not be measured by any specific interval, because it was driven by one stochastic event that brought 100k people out of a sudden (the Reddit migration)
To go back to my original comment: let's see how the numbers are going to be in the next month. If the first derivative is still positive, then we can talk about "trends", until then we are just senseless cheering and extrapolating out of one data point.
The expression "back to baseline" comes from Science and Engineering and literally means that something has gone back to the previous
averageflat level (for example: "the power line noise level spiked when your turned the machine on but is now back to baseline")Edit: not average, but actually specifically the original flat level below which things would not fall. Sorry, it's kinda hard to explain in words but very easy to point out in a graph or a scope were it's just this flat line to which things always return.
That expression makes sense if you're talking about the rate of growth itself (i.e. the Lemmy rate of growth spiked at the time of the Reddit changes and eventually went back to baseline, since Lemmy is not growing any faster now than before the Reddit changes) but it doesn't make sense if you're talking about user numbers since the number of Lemmy users grew a lot with the Reddit changes and never went back to the average before them, not even close.
Your original post is not clear on which of those things you're talking about when you wrote "back to baseline" and your subsequent posts are mainly talking about user numbers, giving the idea that that's what your "back to baseline" is refering to, in which case you're using that expression incorrectly.
Oh, wow, very impressive! Did you have to use a calculator to get to this challenging result?
That's unnecessarily agressive
Mastodon had 1M something before Elon, hit up close to 2M and now is sitting around 800k.
This stat is really surprising. Do you by any chance have a link where I can see this data?
I'm sorry, I think I was looking at overall numbers and not just Mastodon. According to https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48, it seems Mastodon was at ~575k MAU before Musk, shot up to ~1.5M early 2023 and is now sitting around 800k.
No worries, thanks for the link to the data, I appreciate it!
Cool. You... don't have to engage in discussions that bore you. Why waste your time?