Following https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/194717/we-need-more-users I decided to explore data a little bit more. I’m not the biggest fan of growth-as-as-target so I wanted to see how much the people were participating in the discussion.
The data
I took the data from the API explorer in https://api.fediverse.observer/ with this query:
query {
monthlystats {
date_checked
softwarename
total_posts
total_users
total_comments
}
}
Then parsed the json with this https://jqlang.org/ filter:
jq '.data.monthlystats | map(select(.total_users > 0 and (.softwarename == "lemmy" or .softwarename == "mbin" or .softwarename == "kbin" or .softwarename == "piefed"))) | group_by(.date_checked) | map( {date_checked: .[0].date_checked, total_users: ([.[] | .total_users] | add), total_posts: ([.[] | .total_posts] | add), total_comments: ([.[] | .total_comments] | add)}) | map({date_checked, posts: .total_posts/.total_users, comments: .total_comments/.total_users}) | sort_by(.date_checked) | map([.date_checked, (.posts | tostring), (.comments | tostring)]) | .[] | @csv'
(As you see I filtered for the threadiverse. I also did the same with all software, I’ll put the graph for that in comments)
Then did a good old’ chart
What to think of it
I don’t know. Users’ activity is on the rise and I find it nice
Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling. Hell, I’ve got 80% of the content here filtered out as it is, and I want to be here.
Find your nearest non-political hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see and maybe we might see some growth or people sticking around. My current hyperfixation/hobby is Meshtastic, so I’ve been pretty active there lately. If that’s not your thing, then there’s:
If you’re like me and not good at any of that, tell us about cleaning your gutters or doing your laundry over in !Dullsters@dullsters.net
The point is, we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we’re angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).
100% agree, I can just check once a day, skipping basically everything you mentioned + the non-memes in the meme comms and that’s it, no need to open the threadiverse again until the next day.
We also need artists and creative people on board, yes, even the ones who draw porn, but the threadiverse users seemed kind of hostile towards many things during the reddit exodus they decided it wasn’t a good place.
Wonder if they’d have a different experience now, since most instances have defederated hex, ml and grad, and those were the loudest when it came to brigade and complain about anything sexy.
There are barely any places that defederate from lemmy.ml, including PieFed.ca that you are on. Thankfully PieFed allows us to block all users from an instance, but new users will have to discover on their own that they even should do this, and until then will be exposed to all of their comments and posts.
It would be a huge improvement if politics were corralled into the political communities.
There are accounts that double post in both politics and news as well as other communities, I assume because people who have politics filtered actually secretly want to see politics… (/S)
!Nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social!
I agree with everything that you’ve said. I would also add:
Because if we’re going to cast the same net reddit does, people with a more varied set of interests need to come here. Can’t be all linux, politics, and news. We’re going to need people who like baking. We’re going to need sports fans. We’re going to need music.
I could type new communities we need to be active all day. Humans are surprisingly a diverse set of creatures. You have one set of interests, I have another. Different set of interests. And both are totally valid.
The thing people here don’t seem to grasp is that OTHER interests and OTHER people using the fediverse isn’t a bad thing. If a bunch of boomers come here, and make their own communities to talk about Taylor Swift, and whatever else they talk about on facebook. That’s good that it would be here! Not bad!
They could talk about gardening, and model trains, and whatever else. It wouldn’t appeal to you, and thats ok.
This. We are in huge lack of sports discussion here on lemmy. I’m looking at other places for sports content because it’s just not here. I miss live threads.
There’s also !sumo@lemmy.world I have been meaning to check out the current tournament.
!football@sopuli.xyz has live threads. The bot supports a few sports.
I agree, Go Guards!
We had the same thought. Right before I saw your reply, I added some hobby communities to my comment as examples.
This place is so flooded with politics and raging over the news that I’m about to choose a random hobby community that’s active and pick up said hobby just to be able to have something besides Star Trek and Linux to talk about here lol.
What social media isn’t filled with politics and rage when looking at the all category? I don’t know any social media that is broad appeal that doesn’t have that stuff unless you stick only to your subscription feed or use filters.
Only social media I’ve seen that’s been free of that stuff by default have been niche topic focused communities like a video game forum that only allows off tangent stuff in the offtopic section.
Orrrrr…pick a non-active community. Or both. And start posting in your local community. By that, I mean I live in Cleveland. There are 3 Cleveland communities. All dead. I’m the only one posting in one. I still get replies and upvotes. So people are there. They just all lurk until I post.
Do that. And post in a dead community. And post in an active community. We need activity basically everywhere besides tech/politics/news.
Consider redirecting people from the two other dead communities to the one you post to
What we REALLY need is more posts about Linux.
Do you use Arch btw
Yes. I’m here for the long tail, the niche communities. And what do I see? Not enough photos of houseplants! Come on, you must have some too. And to add to the list, !books@lemmy.world looks nice.
You’re the pineapple blossom post! That’s such a nice picture.
I’ve been intentionally trying to be less of a lurker and more active in comments. !books@lemmy.world is one place that I’ve tried to be more active because I love reading, thinking, and talking about books. I was also posting updates about a green lynx spider on my lemmy.world account before I switched to piefed, this is a good reminder for me to post an update on my girl (RIP) and her beautiful little babies.
Lots of us lurkers need to be more active, myself included.
Hearing this from someone that from what I can see has one post and four comments in 3 months is more than a little ironic.
I may have created two accounts when I got here, and I will be baited into replying to snarky comments only from this one! I also like the low-key split-personality feeling, and experimenting with a different set of subscriptions. Anyway, so I’m no content-generation machine. But I’m doing my part to keep up the signal-to-noise ratio!
As a contra point, I’m glad that its like this, a lack of politcal debate is toxic to democracy and that way be dragons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be more other stuff as well though.
My experience is that Lemmy is decent for tech-related stuff but outside of that, it can be difficult to find active communities depending on the hobby. I just went looking for a good Spanish learning or general language learning community and the few that I found have been inactive for months. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place (I searched in Communities > All).
I don’t think maximum growth should be a goal for Lemmy, I just think it needs a critical mass of activity to keep it interesting. Currently I think we just about have that for many tech/FOSS related topics but not so much outside it. The problem, I think, is that a lot of people who aren’t into tech/FOSS issues don’t know about Lemmy and don’t see why they wouldn’t just use Reddit or Discord.
Unfortunately the “political shit” and “ragebait” is important.
The Fediverse is what you make of it. If you subscribe to a bunch of communities posting political shit and ragebait, that’s what you’ll get. That’s not a problem with the threadiverse, that’s a problem with your curation. One that it sounds like you remedied, so I’m not sure why you feel the need to call it out as a problem.
Look at it from a new user’s perspective; someone who has not curated their feed or otherwise “made the fediverse what they want” yet. e.g. They land on Lemmy World or another big instance and their default sort is “active”. Doing that now in an incognito window, and half the front page is rage, same on the second, and the stuff that’s not are some random shitposts and Linux filling in.
Truth be told, looking at that, I probably wouldn’t want to sign up. Especially if I didn’t know that different instances have different cultures, etc.
Assuming they’re a normie (which we desperately fucking need here), I just don’t see that they’d want to stick around. Aside from trolls and spammers, the only people we seem to consistently attract here are the “Wah wah I was banned from Reddit” types and, while there’s certainly a sizable pool to draw from, I wouldn’t exactly consider them the pick of the litter for growing the fediverse.
The point of OPs post is that usage here is declining, and I am simply pointing out that I feel all the rage and politics is not particularly inviting.
Edit: And you know what? I’m just going to fucking say it. There’s too many armchair activists here who won’t let you enjoy a single moment without reminding you that something bad is happening somewhere in the world and that you have some kind of moral obligation to be angry all the time about it. And if you’re not angry all the time then you’re somehow part of the problem.
Rage bait, tiktok/twitter/facebook/Instagram reposts, politics just happen to be what tends to get the most activity across social media. That’s what you see when you view social media without an account whether it is lemmy or popular corporate run sites.
Its why filter tools, avoiding all, and sticking to subscriptions has been a thing for a long time prior to the reddit third party hammer.
I don’t know any social media that isn’t explicitly niche focused that isn’t a terrible default experience. And by niche I mean like some old school forum that only talks allows talks of a specific topic like video games.
Broad appeal talk about whatever topic you want is going to be generally trash by default, since so many different topics and communities are sharing the same space.
We really need better onboarding for new users, maybe ask them about their interests to give them a default set of subscriptions (it would probably just be a tweaked version of the community search page). And default to the subscribed feed, not the All feed
Isn’t that how Piefed onboarding works?
Yes.
I’ve seen so many discussions like this about what needs to be done. So I did those things.
Very few noticed and I quickly got tired of popping up and saying “oh yeah I fixed that” to everything. Besides it makes me look like a smug asshole.
You should be a proud smug asshole (endearing) for fixing the missing capability of Lemmy poisoned the well.
I wouldn’t have stuck being in the threadiverse if it wasn’t for piefed. It would just be a failed third attempt to join Lemmy since the reddit APIpocalypse.
Same. I almost left Lemmy, until PieFed allowed another option.
yea I think so lol
I love piefeds default :)
And as much as I dont like parts of bluesky, they did the onboarding the correct way.
I don’t disagree that we need more positive and high quality hobby content. Sure.
But personally I’m so sick of dudes complaining about “political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling”, whatever half of that banal nonsense is even supposed to mean…
In fact, I’d go as far to say that people who whine about everything being “political” is a bright fucking red flag to me. My immediate assumption upon reading that is “this person is a Trump supporter who voted for this exact shit to happen because they want it to happen, and they don’t want to be confronted by the fact that other people don’t.” I know exactly what kind of people don’t want to hear about “politics” anymore now that Trump is elected, trampling our institutions, and fucking everything up. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?
We have a lot of non-voters that love to complain about the results they helped achieve.
I agree, I think something that has been lost in conversation about progressive politics and leftism more broadly (in US-centric circles at least) is that as much as people on the left disagree about absolutely everything, in general (with plenty of exceptions) politically left movements and cultural spaces tend to be far better at identifying common values and truths that are universal and holding individuals and communities to those values and truths.
Whereas on the right the endless stumping about valuing freedom of speech turns out to mostly be a mirage when it comes to innocent, vulnerable people being physically murdered on camera by the state, on the left institutions and individuals are much more often held to a standard of values and called out if they fail to reach it.
When people enter a space where progressive and left voices haven’t been systematically silenced and it is a new experience for them, they often react negatively and feel rebuked. I know some of my first encounters when I was younger with actually left spaces initially made me bristle with how willing they were to say no to things that weren’t healthy, to challenge oppressive structures even if they were so normalized they were invisible to me… it can be an uncomfortable process but ultimately more often than not leftist spaces actually try to do it and it that is a good thing.
I entirely agree with people having agency to decide when politics comes up on their feed and when it doesn’t, but the idea that we are all just being a bit too negative and obsessed with the news and we should cheer up is honestly insulting in 2026 given, you know gestures at everything. Everything is political, if you have the capacity to complain about being subject to “too much politics” be thankful for your capacity to experience that state of choice.
Also, and this is on a personal note, talking about politics doesn’t make me depressed, it helps me feel less depressed and anxious because I know other people feel similarly and the more educated I am about what is happening the less scared and confused I feel.
The red flag is at least, “they have so much privilege in our society they can ignore politics”, if not what you stated
Thanks for the links🙂