Thank you for your detailed response.

So the “Sum” mentioned at the bottom of each section is only for those shown within the section - the top 20 - and not expanded for all of the category? e.g. Lemmy’s MAU went down from 30817 to recently 29683, and every other metric (even for the most part the other post you mentioned for Fediverse Growth) also shows decline, but you are saying that despite that, the numerical amount is not that much, and we are mostly stable?

That is very good to hear:-).

Here is an example discussion of a community asking its members if it wants to migrate to Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. A few examples that seem representative to me:

I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic

There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier

Here’s another example from one month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/MorpheApp/comments/1wdbscs/we_should_switch_to_something_else/

Almost nobody uses other forum apps like Lemmy. We don’t want to run two forums and scatter discussion across two places. Collectively the mods here already spend about 2 hours every day helping users on this subreddit and we don’t want more.

Or here’s a third example, from 2 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/oldreddit/comments/1vvylak/thoughts_on_lemmy/

Opinions there run the gamut from useless due to no content to tribal politicking scaring them away from the entire federated model, though some people like it, yet don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit (with UBlock Origin tweaks to keeps some of its more insane issues in check).

We here, who have the early adopter mindset, are willing to put in the time and effort to learn how and what to block. But e.g. the most popular 3rd-party app Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account, so a new joiner won’t be able to easily distinguish when e.g. someone from the tankie triad is trolling them vs. someone attempting to converse in good conscience. Wish and hope as we might - without putting in any actual efforts to change anything mind you - we simply cannot get away from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance principle.

We are a tankie / troll bar, and the vast majority of mainstream non-technical normal folks tell other people that they very much do not enjoy visiting here as a result. Admiral Patrick very much had a bad implementation to a somewhat good idea: being forced to view toxic content should be an option that users have some control over, somehow, even if that choice is disabled by default. e.g., it would be nice if at least one singular major instance would defederate from lemmy.ml, or in the case of a PieFed instance apply an instance block by default - but sadly, literally none of them do. Of course, they would simply use their alts to get around any such block, but otherwise we are back to the Paradox of Intolerance again: with next to zero distinction made between trolls vs. non-trolls, why would most people want to come here to discuss things with us in our troll bar?

So wonderful to see so many improvements!

Oof the stats shown in your last post there make the Threadiverse look very unhealthy.

For one, the total Lemmy MAUs falling down to the <30k range (at the high mark during Rexodus it hit ~65K, and we held steady at ~40-45K for a long time it seemed, iirc).

And for another, if I am interpreting the HYAU correctly then literally thousands of people who had accounts here are simply walking away and never coming back (then hundreds for PieFed too, though still net negative). This is crucial bc these are not people who were too daunted by the complexity of learning about the Threadiverse, picking an instance, making an account on it, and joining communities - they were already here, and now they are not here anymore.

Perhaps they are avoiding coming here (even once) during the upcoming season of Western elections, with all the contentious content that is already flooding this place leading up those, but then they might come back later? Given past trends, I doubt it, though anything is possible.

The Threadiverse looks to be slowly shrinking. Perhaps the existing people on it post more often, but with an ever-diminishing pool of recipients for that content. This will lead to a feed-forward cycle where even fewer will want to join.

And to be clear I don’t blame those people who left in the slightest - I find myself visiting here far less often than I used to as well. There’s only so much politics that I want to argue about before I find myself missing the ability to discourse on some other, any other, topic.

The power of branding.