• @[email protected]
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    5713 days ago

    Pixelfed is growing at a rate of 20,000 active users per day. (source).

    Mastodon has recently been growing at 5,000 to 10,000 active users per day. (source)

    Those are active users, i.e. actually posting or liking/favoriting. Since yesterday pixelfed.social had to turn off its global feed. Mastodon.social still has its global feed but it doesn’t seem to be getting pixelfed posts and isn’t updating automatically. Maybe it’s good that the press is ignoring them. If they grew any faster they’d become unusable.

    • ekZeppOP
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      5313 days ago

      Pixelfed

      ok

      • @[email protected]
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        512 days ago

        No idea. Over the weekend pixelfed.social was getting laggy, so my completely ignorant speculation is it’s a temporary thing to manage the influx of new users. It’s also possible my setup is wrong somehow bc I’m not really familiar with either platform.

    • @Hafty
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      311 days ago

      I just wish PixelFed was actually usable. It’s incredibly slow and clunky in the just released app. The biggest barrier to entry for an Instagram alternative is convincing your friends and family to join. Twitter and Reddit alternatives are mostly anonymous and don’t necessitate following people you know.

      • @[email protected]
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        211 days ago

        The slowness is probably due to the sudden growth. The web interface of pixelfed.social was pretty slow for a couple days over the last weekend and is still occasionally unreachable. I think the expectation is that it will peak soon and stabilize at some percentage of the peak, with performance improving.

  • @[email protected]
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    4112 days ago

    Lemmy is cozy. I think it could be better if it were larger but not like, huge. But its also okay now. Not everything needs the grow at all costs mentality

    • Corgana
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      12 days ago

      I think Lemmy should be huge. Think about how many subreddits exist for every niche. It would be great if those places could exist free of corporate influence.

      Federated platforms are significantly more effective than centralized ones at mitigating the influence of bad actors.

      • @Cornelius_Wangenheim
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        612 days ago

        Lemmy’s design is fundamentally unable to deal with bad actors. The only reason it’s tolerable now is that it’s too small to be worth their time. It would completely go to shit if it ever got huge.

        • @[email protected]
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          512 days ago

          Is that the case? Isn’t the federated structure good to leave an instance once it got bad? And bans and stuff exist just like everywhere else

          • Corgana
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            812 days ago

            Lemmy’s design is fundamentally excellent to deal with bad actors, the whole point of ActivityPub/Federation is that moderation is much more effective while also preserving free speech. I’m not sure what that person on about.

          • Blaze (he/him)
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            412 days ago

            It’s good to leave a bad instance. It’s not the best to deal with trolls avoiding ban evasions by creating alt on every instance.

            • Corgana
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              12 days ago

              Eh, if an instance allows trolls, then that instance typically gets defederated from very quickly (at least it does on my instance). The only reason it is an issue now is that two of the big three instances (.world and .ml) have very lax moderation standards. If the lemmy-verse grows to the size of Reddit, then two lax instances won’t be as big of an issue.

                • @[email protected]
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                  212 days ago

                  Wait, I know 196 moved to .world but reddit is there too now??? This is going too far!

                  Jokes aside, I see your point. Guess they have an authentication system or something. Most lemmy instances have a “tell us why you want to join” field and I think some require emails. Sure, this isn’t perfect but it’s not systemically important to prevent evil doers.

          • @Cornelius_Wangenheim
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            012 days ago

            The problem is the federated nature gives a limited view of user behavior to everyone except the home instance, which means identifying spammers, bots and influence ops and effectively banning them is much harder, assuming the mostly volunteer admins even have the time and desire to do so. Federation also introduces the possibility of malicious instance owners.

            • @[email protected]
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              110 days ago

              I’d argue that it actually makes it much easier not harder. If an instance refuses to moderate itself, it gets kicked out of the network.

              • @Cornelius_Wangenheim
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                110 days ago

                The problem is it takes time to identify them and kick them out. At a large scale, there will be a constant churn of poorly managed and malicious instances getting access to the network and then not getting booted until weeks or months later.

    • @[email protected]
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      1412 days ago

      I like how small it is too, but it’s so annoying watching people IRL continuously go to billionaire after billionaire

    • @[email protected]
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      1312 days ago

      Yeah this was kind of a similar story with Reddit at one point too. When I first looked into Reddit, it was because I had seen it included with the ‘share’ buttons on various websites and wanted to see what it was. I don’t think it was as small as Lemmy when I joined but it was definitely never on the same plateau as Facebook and Twitter.

    • sunzu2
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      312 days ago

      Mbin is the goat but it would not work on its own so thank god I can roam on Lemmy servers.

  • Xanthrax
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    1213 days ago

    It would love it if NPR did a deep dive into alternate social media platforms.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝M
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    1213 days ago

    Swap Mastodon for Xitter and it feels spot on.

    Not sure you’d show how well Pixelfed is doing at the moment but that might be for another meme.

    • ekZeppOP
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      2013 days ago

      Xitter goes in the trashcan 👌

      • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝M
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        1013 days ago

        I like to think Threads went straight in the trash, Xitter at least made it into the pool but is now drowning.

    • ekZeppOP
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      611 days ago

      It is… …

  • Cris
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    912 days ago

    Did something new happen with bluesky? Or is this just joking about the continued state of things?

  • Bob
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    811 days ago

    We all know there’s a barrier, albeit fairly low, to the fediverse proper, but on the other hand, I remember seeing a video once about how people’s attention span is so fucked by Instagram and all that that they comment with questions already answered in the post, for example (obviously I can’t find it now in the sea of opinion-piece video essays about it). In a way the barrier to entry is a boon to the fediverse proper in all arenas bar financing.

    • ekZeppOP
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      1211 days ago

      [The Barrier]

      [The Users]

    • @[email protected]
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      411 days ago

      If anything, this is how the Internet used to be: there is a small technical barrier to entry, but if you can’t be bothered to learn you’ll struggle.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 days ago

      Personally, I blame the tankies. The hoard of people dedicated to harassment on Hexbear is a big part of why I’m considering other platforms.

        • @[email protected]
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          10 days ago

          I’ll look into migration when I’m sure I want to stay. I’m p.emotionally unstable ATM and don’t want to try something new and not know if I hate it because it’s a bad fit or if it’s because my head meat got fucked by the world.

          Edit: I appreciate it though. You’re a good person that does good work.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 days ago

    Even Reddit is super niche compared to Xitter or Bluesky. Hardly surprising that its Fediverse-equivalent is a lot less popular than Twitter’s equivalent.

  • @cm0002
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    413 days ago

    Well, at least they’re going to something better than Muskrat and Suckerburg offerings

    Who knows, maybe they’ll even implement the AT proto <-> ActivityPub bridge and then it won’t matter lol