Theres a lot of websites that claim to track the fediverse in its totality. But the numbers are all over the place.
So…hows the Fedi vibe lately?
Nothing is ever ideal but I think Lemmy is rising. Mastodon has a well established footprint in FOSS ecosystem and posts there are often referenced as source material in tech news.
Its more active, though i also have seen an influx of jerks
For what I can perceive is a stable flow of new posts, maybe a little bit more comments than before. Overall alive and kicking.
Yeah I agree. Seems like people are actively using their platforms. Its fun to see like startreck website person talking to a lemmy.world person arguing with a piefed person. All getting confused about a post on the sdf funhole community or something.
Im seeing a bit more comments on some niche communities I frequent. Its still a bit of a stop and go but thats how early websites/early reddit/etc… all felt and worked.
Not great, IMO.
Lemmy seems to have stabilized, if not stagnated. There are a few active political and tech communities, but they’re not particularly diverse in their viewpoints. Most of the other communities I used to follow on Reddit (local/regional discussion, US sports, cycling, etc) never really reached critical mass here and are basically ghost towns.
Mastodon is similar. I’ve observed a number of moderately high profile accounts move back to X/Twitter in recent weeks/months. I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017 or so. I think 2023 or 2024 were probably the high-water mark for activity. Things may look different from other perspectives.
I’m still here, and have no intention of going back to X/Twitter or Reddit any time soon, but the fediverse increasingly feels like usenet. Still inhabited by a few diehard lifers, but generally irrelevant to the broader population.
Unlike usenet, it seems like all it would take is another big exodus, though. Or, so one hopes. And it’s not like anything about the world is really stable right now.
but they’re not particularly diverse in their viewpoints.
Much like the Borg. Even as a part of it, damn, there really isn’t a lot of divergence, lol.
there really isn’t a lot of divergence
There’s plenty of divergence, for example we have everything from Debian to NixOS users, and heck even the odd BSD user. And they don’t even agree on which text editor is the best for programming, so there’s plenty to discuss.
You had me going for a while there.
Speaking for Lemmy, I feel like political and meme communities are alive and well, but smaller specialized niche communities still haven’t been able to get a foothold.
The collective user base is pretty small, so only the broader interest communities get engagement and or survive c/all.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about this lately. I’m starting to think that the platform itself requires too much tech literacy to use and understand to ever be appealing to anyone other than highly tech-literate individuals. While I’d like to believe there’s enough of us out there to build rhobust communities around non-tech topics if this is true, I’m starting to worry that there just aren’t.
For all it’s flaws, Reddit was always very simple to understand and interact with, and it seems like the fediverse is just inherently more complex. Even if that’s not true, it’s going to FEEL true to anybody new since virtually all the active communities are peopled by the tech-literacy 1%
With the smaller and more specialised communities, often if you have a question or post something you do get engagement, there are people interested in them but often just not much volume there
Depends on the topic.
Since traffic is low, most eyeballs come from feeds like /all, and that can be good for some niche communities and bad for others.
For example, I’ve seen certain software / hardware user group communities really struggle. Weird example - if people try to start user groups or developer communities for Microsoft or Apple products, their questions and or news posts can get downvoted and shredded with unconstructive comments. Basically, all of those communities get their new posts screened by a bunch of OSS evangelist, because that’s most of us here. Those posts get murdered in the crib.
Yeah, people (including me at the time of APIpocalypse) thought a lift and shift of many communities from reddit made sense, when what we needed was general communities that would eventually poop out niche ones when their posts started to become distracting in the general community’s feed.
I’ve been here about 3 years in total and think that things seem to be getting stale lately. All the top discussions are about US politics and often my “front page” is showing posts that are days old.
Previously it only used to be like that on the weekends, but it could be a summertime thing with people spending less time behind a screen. I know reddit used to have “summer reddit” where the place got flooded with kids each June-September. This place doesn’t have the draw for kids, which is fine with me, but I do wish the discussions were more varied.
I like the Fedi right now. It feels like early Reddit before it went to shit.
Feels like early internet before it went to shit.
Not bad, but I would love to see more active niche communities!
Shameless plug !AlbumArtworkHeaven@lemmy.world
Pretty good.
coo.
it’s only enjoyable because my block list is massive and i completely block 4 instances now. fedi has a large concentration of bad faith people concentrated in few spaces.
there are still some really good threads and interesting commentary, but it’s really hard to find it because 95% of the content here is people being angry and ragebaiting over politics like all the time.
this place really needs more niche hobbies communities that aren’t loaded with bitter political people who need to politicize everything into a conspiracy trying to rob them of all their joy in life… but chances of that are low. the most embittered insane people are the most prolific by far.
I’m alreay getting nostalgic for fedi of like 2-3 years ago which was far more optimistic and the commentary was generally less bitter and nasty and cruel. i miss the optimisim of kbin and the early fedi projects, many of which are died, and it seems the new ones are ever more hellbent on control of the users, just like reddit became.
I am definately in the blocking makes it good camp. I don’t view blocking as a bad thing. I view all and block communities that im not intersted in. There is nothing bad about them but its something I have just zero interest in. I keep a lot around that I have very little interest even.
it just gets overwhelming when every single day you have to block block block.
like so many things are flooded in my feed when i want to discover new stuff, but i don’t care about how aggreieved linux using trans furries are about something trump did, but that’s so much of what is ‘popular’ on fedi. a extremist minority who have way too much influence and airtime. i care about a lot of those things, but i don’t want to be around folks whose purpose in life is being aggreived because of ‘who they are’ when ‘who they are’ is a operating system.
its just a dropdown. The largest ones for me are meme, sports, and non english communities. Once you have the communities filtered out then you will only get new ones once in awhile.
Personally:
Im liking the new mastodon integration work being done between piefed/mastodon. Ive been seeing better stuff coming out of lemmy. Mastodon seems to be using up less resources recently. And im seeing more and more people on the fedi just…around.
Screenshots on traditional media is starting to have screenshots of fedi resources like a mastodon post. So thats how you know when things are picking up…when they start stealing from you haha.
From my limited outsider’s perspective, things are tough right now. There’s a lot of momentum behind ATProto, the biggest competitor to ActivityPub, and a lot of the people who are thinking about decentralized social media have moved over to working in the Atmosphere. We’re also seeing a lot of pushback from existing users about improvements the social web foundation have been trying to implement, making them more wary and circumspect than they had been in the past. I’m somewhat anxious we’ll get lapped.
Aside from Bluesky, is there anything that actually has a big community of active users? What’s worth checking out? Every project I pop into still feels early and has pretty low engagement.
I’m referring here to protocol development, rather than community development. It was on my mind because of the announcement of the spaces alpha a few days ago. The canonical example of a community that exists outside of Bluesky is Blacksky, and I think the fact that it was built on ATProto rather than AcivityPub is the single greatest failure of the fediverse — our inability to create a space in which Black folks feel safe is our greatest shame.
I didn’t follow Blue/Black sky evolution but I really fail to understand how existence of one additional active instance is seen as a success and such a loss for the other camp?
Bluesky is only a success if you measure it by active users. They folded to requests of governments for censorship (there was a case with Turkish opposition) and are therefore utter failure when it comes to freedom in the social media space.
The existence of BlackSky doesn’t say anything Fediverse’s failure in itself but it, in combination with Mastodon’s whiteness (it’s obvious if you spend some time there), does paint a very unpleasant narrative about how black people felt on Mastodon.
Ahh. Make sense.
Im one of those who are not necessarily looking for the federation to be the meta for social media. Im pretty fine if it stays cozy.
I kinda like it — you wouldn’t have seen my comment and I wouldn’t have seen your reply otherwise, as we’re on different instances that only communicate via federation.
I mostly stick to non-politics, non-tech communities:
There’s plenty to read each day.
