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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 21st, 2025

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  • … demand usage of a 3rd-party app …

    Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that as the answer.

    … I don’t know how PyLova may change the situation still further - it offers even more features than PieFed, though the latter keeps incorporating most of those changes back into its main codebase …

    Didn’t know Piefed was still back copying Pylova’s efforts. I recall the first time they removed attribution, in what I feel was a very dishonest way. Hopefully, if they are still integrating Pylova’s work, they are at the very least giving attribution.

    … Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.

    Yes, I strongly wish that Voyager had far better integration of Piefed features (like grouping cross-posts).

    Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.

    Yep. Difficult to know if you’re in one though. In my experience, someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.

    … I can see from the devs’ perspective that turning on the display of instance names in Voyager is not a feature that is universally good.

    Appreciate the perspective. I can see your point.

    … discovered that programming.dev has a number of community-level blocks put into place to help a new user experience a more drama-free version of the Threadiverse. You can see their full listing at https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/ …

    Did not know that, thanks for sharing. That was interesting to look through.

    … huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like !memes@lemmy.ml …

    That makes sense.

    … though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).

    Not the best for getting people to stick around :(

    … I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation …

    Ah, that would be a nice feature to have throughout the threadiverse. Although, I almost never see the indicator (probably too curated at this point becuase, at this point, I block bad faith actors/trolls immediately).

    … it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have …

    Yeah, quite frustrating, but I do think we are making progress and things are slowly getting better :)

    I’ve been kind of thinking the ideal instance for new users would be something like the programming.dev community hidden list, with a de-federated triad, and run by the .zip admin team. Maybe that’ll be a thing one day.


  • No problem. Happy to provide insight into my workings :)

    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?

    Yes and yes.

    Yeah, the snippets and links you provided match my understanding of the situation. I don’t recall who or where, but I recall someone saying they were having a much easier time recruiting people to Piefed rather than Lemmy, due to Lemmy already having an established reputation. That being said, I expect the Lemmy 1.0 launch will cause a significant bump.

    … don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit …

    I found the user saying that, but they didn’t elaborate on what missing features they wanted. It’s been years since I used Reddit, do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?

    … Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account …

    I recall running into this issue and being confused, before I found the setting. Do you know if this is still the default? If so, and the Dev hasn’t given a specific reason for the decision (I can’t immediately find a post about it), I don’t mind making a post to ask them to switch the default.

    … 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 …

    Agreed.

    … they would simply use their alts to get around any such block …

    Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist. If they did use alts to get around the block, their alt’s instance’s admin could be contacted. My understanding is that the “troll behavior” on .ml is allowed, may be even encouraged, by their admins/devs. So, different admin may not have a tolerant attitude toward it. Along with this, as more communities spread out from the flagship and most popular instances (.ml, .world, .social), I think things will get less toxic too.

    As an aside, over the last 3-months, it looks like most of the “politically” focused instances are the ones on the heavier declining side of the range. The instances declining the least or even growing are on the “unaligned” side of things.


  • I think I can alleviate some of your worries. The instance post only shows the top 20 instances for a software (Lemmy has 287 active, Piefed: 59, Mbin: 16).

    My Fediverse Growth Post is a better indicator for the Threadiverse’s health. From there you can see the Threadiverse is only down 2.1% from a year ago (-847 MAU). From what I’ve seen over the last >6 months, is that the Threadiverse, and most of the fediverse, grow in short spurts and then slowly declines until the next spurt.

    So, unfortunately, we aren’t having continuous positive growth, but I’d say we are stable. I think stable is fine as all the fediverse developers are still adding functionality/interconnected-ness (‘this isn’t our final form’).

    For HYAU (Half-Year Active Users), I think it’s important to remember that lots of times people move instances, so their old account will eventually stop being counted as active (I personally have 2 old accounts). From the Fediverse post, you can see there were 42889 MAU 6-months ago and 42276 MAU 3-months ago (-613 MAU). So, even though you may see >1000 HYAU drop off in a given week, the total number of active users over that next 3 months stayed relatively the same (-1.4%, not -28% (-1000 MAU x 12 weeks)).

    I think the most important information in the instance post is MAU/HYAU (%) (“Stickiness”), which indicates how well an instance holds onto its users (they keep coming back). I think >60% should be the goal of every instance (67% is currently the peak for non-small instances (>30 MAU)).

    It might be worth a study to figure out why there is such a discrepancy across instances. For example, is it correlated to UI issues/customizability, reliability/up-time/longevity, admin/mod behavior, instance rules, federation/de-federation, inter-instance activity (communities/posts/comments), etc.

    Regarding politics, I can’t really say what an average or new user experiences. I’ve curated/blocked massive amounts of political content. It might be worth having an instance that initially auto-blocks all politics communities for a new user. I don’t recall exactly, but I think Tesseract? was like that, but the dev/admin was sketchy about what they were doing and then melted down when called out for hiding things. So, it seems the idea had some popularity, but needs/ed a better implementation.




  • You’d think it’s straightforward and additive. I added up all their listed instances for a couple different softwares. The math was wrong and overestimated the MAU count. I checked it a few times across a couple weeks. Couldn’t quickly figure out a pattern to how the math was wrong each time.

    Maybe they fixed it in the last ~6 months, but I wouldn’t count on it. I believe it’s the same Dev as pixelfed and loops. So, not sure they’ve done any work on fedidb in years (to my knowledge, they’ve focused on Loops and Pixelfed).

    Edit: to clarify, adding the MAU of all their listed instances for a particular software was lower than the total MAU they reported for the software.

    Edit 2: Just checked their Piefed listings and it’s still wrong. Fedidb states: ~7.0k, actual addition: 6858 MAU.


  • Yeah. I saw the dead website earlier today and have been trying to figure out how to keep the posts working.

    The fediverse software post, I could rewrite some code to gather fedidb daily (to my knowledge, they don’t have all time series data available), but their MAU math is suspect. So, not a great option, but my only other thought is basically remaking fediverse-observer and I do not have a server or potentially relevant server skill set beyond cron jobs.

    For the threadiverse instances post, I can keep gathering data from the instances I already have in my database, but don’t really have another way to find new ones. Maybe, I could see if I could scrape it from fedidb (I couldn’t get their API working in the past).

    In conclusion, the posts are not in a good place :(