Pixelfed is growing at a rate of 20,000 active users per day. (source).
Mastodon has recently been growing at 5,000 to 10,000 active users per day. (source)
Those are active users, i.e. actually posting or liking/favoriting. Since yesterday pixelfed.social had to turn off its global feed. Mastodon.social still has its global feed but it doesn't seem to be getting pixelfed posts and isn't updating automatically. Maybe it's good that the press is ignoring them. If they grew any faster they'd become unusable.
Why did they have to turn off their global feed? And will it be back?
No idea. Over the weekend pixelfed.social was getting laggy, so my completely ignorant speculation is it's a temporary thing to manage the influx of new users. It's also possible my setup is wrong somehow bc I'm not really familiar with either platform.
I just wish PixelFed was actually usable. It’s incredibly slow and clunky in the just released app. The biggest barrier to entry for an Instagram alternative is convincing your friends and family to join. Twitter and Reddit alternatives are mostly anonymous and don’t necessitate following people you know.
The slowness is probably due to the sudden growth. The web interface of pixelfed.social was pretty slow for a couple days over the last weekend and is still occasionally unreachable. I think the expectation is that it will peak soon and stabilize at some percentage of the peak, with performance improving.
Lemmy is cozy. I think it could be better if it were larger but not like, huge. But its also okay now. Not everything needs the grow at all costs mentality
The only thing I'm missing is a more diverse range of active communities
That requires more people
IMO things are way better than they were 6 months ago.
I like how small it is too, but it's so annoying watching people IRL continuously go to billionaire after billionaire
I think Lemmy should be huge. Think about how many subreddits exist for every niche. It would be great if those places could exist free of corporate influence.
Federated platforms are significantly more effective than centralized ones at mitigating the influence of bad actors.
I didn't choose mbin/lemmy because it was popular, so I'm fine with this.
Yeah this was kind of a similar story with Reddit at one point too. When I first looked into Reddit, it was because I had seen it included with the 'share' buttons on various websites and wanted to see what it was. I don't think it was as small as Lemmy when I joined but it was definitely never on the same plateau as Facebook and Twitter.
Mbin is the goat but it would not work on its own so thank god I can roam on Lemmy servers.
It would love it if NPR did a deep dive into alternate social media platforms.
Swap Mastodon for Xitter and it feels spot on.
Not sure you'd show how well Pixelfed is doing at the moment but that might be for another meme.
Xitter goes in the trashcan 👌
I like to think Threads went straight in the trash, Xitter at least made it into the pool but is now drowning.
i thought mastodon was part of the fediverse
It is... ...
It's better this way. Reddit went to shit when it started getting media attention.
Did something new happen with bluesky? Or is this just joking about the continued state of things?
People leaving X after Trump's inauguration
We all know there's a barrier, albeit fairly low, to the fediverse proper, but on the other hand, I remember seeing a video once about how people's attention span is so fucked by Instagram and all that that they comment with questions already answered in the post, for example (obviously I can't find it now in the sea of opinion-piece video essays about it). In a way the barrier to entry is a boon to the fediverse proper in all arenas bar financing.
[The Barrier]
[The Users]
If anything, this is how the Internet used to be: there is a small technical barrier to entry, but if you can't be bothered to learn you'll struggle.
And the Internet certainly used to be better.
Personally, I blame the tankies. The hoard of people dedicated to harassment on Hexbear is a big part of why I'm considering other platforms.
Have you tried using an instance that defederates hexbear? There are quite a few: https://sopuli.xyz, https://discuss.online/
Even Reddit is super niche compared to Xitter or Bluesky. Hardly surprising that its Fediverse-equivalent is a lot less popular than Twitter's equivalent.
Well, at least they're going to something better than Muskrat and Suckerburg offerings
Who knows, maybe they'll even implement the AT proto <-> ActivityPub bridge and then it won't matter lol
