I don't think a community large enough to support lots of niche ones is possible without enshittification taking over.

Normalize labeling all axes.

Well it's just that politics/news are the two main things that most people can talk about. So that's what trends. Many other topics have general interest barriers that naturally have lower ceiling of interests from the roughly 40k active users.

• point people to one instance you like instead of a general website
• on Piefed, when people register, they can either join indeed the instance they're on, or have a look at other options: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser

Tell your friends about fediverse if you haven't done it yet.

And if you still have accounts on other non-fediverse platform consider to post something about the fediverse.

No, its the fact that the same couple of people post across all communitys and drown everything else. I wouldn't be opposed to a daily limit of posts, just to bring the noise down. The only reason i still come here is for the rare, once a week, quality post.

Everyone who compares growth here (here being very relative considering how it works) vs. the idealized Reddit is forgetting something. Age. You don't get peak Reddit by looking at its first years, and yet you're looking at the literal first years for Lemmy and company and saying it's not comparable. No, it's not.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be constant discussion on improving and growing communities for better discussion, but the whole "oh no, the numbers are low" is ridiculous. Aside from being a aggregated discussion format, this is like comparing apples and cars. Reddit shouldn't be a goal or benchmark, discussion flow here should be. I'll be more worried about stagnation when feed numbers for myself drop back to the first few months, where there was concern about if federation would even work well. (and improving federation/defederation is also a great topic to talk about, it isn't perfect, but it's far better than it was)

@MattW03@lemmy.ca @fedimemes@feddit.uk

To which extent does this graph consider non-Lemmy users interacting with other non-Lemmy users through Lemmy communities as "active Lemmy users"?

I mean, I'm right now interacting with Lemmy using Sharkey. Similarly, I notice many Mastodon and Piefed users interacting with Lemmy communities. And that's where my question comes in: would all of us count as "Lemmy users" according to the methodology behind that graph?

That's not logistically possible given each instance has its own rules.

But also, at the same time it seems self-evident to me that most of the 40k people here can talk about politics. Most are from the Anglosphere and the daily goings-on are relevant to them in some way. It seems also evident to me that less people here can talk about fishing, or baking because it's of less interest to them. Reddit, by comparison, has a much larger population.

I'm also looking at /all/ and seeing a variety of names.

Just FYI, the number may be up a bit more than we are seeing due to how the website pulls its numbers.

There's a lot of instances that put anti ai/ crawling tech in front of their instances. As well as instances that are no longer sharing stats due to ai activity.

And piefed/mbin/kbin ect...

Stamets, byteonbikes, mtz, lady butterfly, track_shovel.

When you start seeing it, you can't unsee it.

Yeah I see them. I also see some other names too. Small places need active 'power posters'.

Last I checked, Piefed had only a fraction of the users Lemmy had.

I have an account in a Piefed instance and it's awesome (especially if they add image galleries before Lemmy does), but I don't think it would meaningfully move the graph.

Yes, it does - but you have to account for the users on there if you're measuring the fediverse activity in general. And Mbin. Combined they'd add about 2.2k extra users this month.

Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion. This idea wouldn't be to remove the normal sign up process, it would be a way to side step it entirely for those who don't care about the technology aspect of it and just want to be part of the community.

If you want to pick your own instance or suggest one, that would still exist. This would just be an alternative. It would also help to avoid everyone gravitating towards the largest instance, because it would try to load balance people automatically.

Anecdotally, it doesn't feel like the experience is contracting, or part of a shrinking community. It's worth asking what the data means, and whether it's bad, but there are definitely other reasonable factors too. Users from interoperable platforms like mastodon and piefed, individual people using fewer accounts, or even fewer lurkers, could be responsible for a good chunk of the data.

Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion.

I don't, nowadays, I just point to piefed.zip

This would just be an alternative

The issue is that there aren't really instances that are similar enough to be considered interchangeable. They all have their specificity, be it admin style, defederation, downvotes enabled or disabled, front-ends available, etc.

absolute win tho?

I mean with how many instances have launched a piefed server the last few months and with how small Lemmy is in the first place even a thousand or so users switching would explain some of that slight downward slope at the end.