In recent weeks, I have posted an absolutely staggering amount of content on Lemmy.
My goal is simply to support the platform. I hate huge corporations.
Now I’m taking a break. I won’t post anything or I’ll post very little (I still feel a little guilty!! Who will post new content 😢?)
But I need to focus on improving my own life and relax.
However… I’m just curious.
Is the number of Lemmy users actually increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Is that data even available?
Edit: I will still post stuff. I’ll just post a lot less!
Lemmy will never really grow beyond what it is now. Even if there was another influx of users, the retention rate is going to be low and the amount of active users is going to be even lower. It will forever remain a niche platform for 3 reasons:
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It’s made by and for people on the far left, tech/privacy nerds, and people who have been kicked out of Reddit. Because of this, the actual active users on here tend to fall into of these 3 groups, and they define Lemmy’s culture, and this includes the developers. Because of this, much of content on here revolve around niche topics and so there isn’t much here to appeal to the mainstream.
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It is fundamentally flawed by design. There are bunch of different communities on different instances about the same topic, and there is no way to consolidate them. Because of this, you have a bunch of dead communities that operate as independent nodes, instead of having centralized communities that are big and active. This issue would’ve been solved if Lemmy was designed to have each instance be a community in of itself (AskLemmy has its own instance and so does tech, gaming, and so on), but instead we have the current implementation.
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Lemmy has many of the problems that drive people away from Reddit. Sure, Lemmy isn’t a greedy corporation, which is nice, but it still has terminally online powermods with little to no accountability, a hostile and negative community, weird/extreme echo chambers that make most people cringe, and so on. If you sign up for Lemmy, you’re going to get the same problems but with a worse experience because it’s way smaller and has less content, so why would you come to Lemmy instead of making another Reddit account?
I just don’t see Lemmy every becoming mainstream or overtaking Reddit. It’s already been 6 years since the start of Lemmy’s development, and 2 years since the big influx of users from Reddit’s API fiasco, and it STILL has to rely on the same dozen or so people spamming the platform to keep it barely active. Lemmy won’t collapse, but it also won’t be more than what it is now, at least not any time soon.
About #2: you have any suggestion on how you could achieve that and still be federated?
It seem like you would need a central “oficial” instance that defines who is the “real” AskLemmy, etc…
But yeah, I really want to hear if you have ideas on how achieve this and maintain it as a federation.
I feel like part of it also is that Lemmy isn’t designed for anywhere near the traffic that Reddit gets. For instance, Lemmy maintained Reddit’s mod power structure based on mod service length.
Also Lemmy hasn’t really done a lot to build spam fighting measures. If the user base grows 10x the current size, I can see spam becoming a bigger problem which could affect usability.
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I do feel it’s increasing, and not to mention, I love scrolling through Lemmy more than Reddit these past few days, I noticed.
One thing I’ve noticed is that on reddit, if I post a comment it’ll get either zero votes or a thousand, with next to no correlation between the number and how useful or well thought-out the comment was. On Lemmy it seems a lot more consistent, as though people here are actually paying attention? That and/or The Dreaded Algorithm hits a lot harder on Reddit.
Its the perfect size right now. Big enough to have a good variety of content and discussions while still small enough and niche to not be plagued by bots or targeted by corpos
the perfect size would be bigger than reddit.
Nah. The same ten people that post content have just upped their game. Never stop you beautiful people!
I would agree. And I’m spreading the word. We need to break our dependency on huge corporations. It’s just laziness.
not really, since the great purges in the spring thats where we had a huge boost, the shadowbans and sitewide ban seemed to have died down for now, although the SB are increasing in the background, we might see another increase if reddit does another major purge. although instances dying ive seen less content overall(especially with ee gone)
One of the main things that drove me away from Reddit was the sense that they’re really pushing the buttons to hone it into a pure content creation service for AI bros and advertisers.
That is to say, most subs do not want you just hanging out and chatting to people like they’re your friends. You have to generate content, and you have to do it in the approved sub format, and if you don’t like it you can fuck off. So, I fucked off.
Been here since November. Seeing a lot more upvotes and comments on posts than when I got here.
According to Voyager, I have upvoted your content 34 times.
Hope this helps.
Oh yeah, well my Voyager says I’ve upvoted them 42 times!
So that’s what that number means! I always wondered
I gotta say, it causes me to pre-judge a comment when I see the number (green or red).
How do you get this information from Voyager?
Go into Settings > User Tags and enable the “track votes” option
Thank you! ❤️
I have OP at +227 :x
It appears that Twitter users are migrating to Bluesky, while simultaneously engaging with Reddit and Discord. Meanwhile, Reddit users are making their way to Lemmy or maybe not I exacly don’t how but LEMMY IS GOING UPP.
Appearently the algorithm of Reddit has become shit this last days
That + I have begun to loathe the average “user” there + the Admin AI bot decided my comment making commentary on Reddit’s generally poor culture through very thick ironic language constituted “harassment” and perma-banned me. My 14 year old account - 2 “offenses” (one was valid) and it’s gone. I’ve appealed but it has been 8 days with no action.
It’s also just “people” parroting the same cold take like it’s hot over and over to farm karma. Yes Trump sucks, yes Epstein files need to be released, yes progressive policy, but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys? IRL is miserable enough lmao.
Ban-happy power tripping mods, recycled low-effort content, a generally discouraging attitude toward nuanced takes and critical thinning, and an absurd amount of bots and propaganda has really made me want to migrate. Anyways I’m here now, and I hope to contribute to this platform in a constructive and positive way! I welcome any pointers or advice!
Welcome!
There are good Lemmy apps if you don’t have one yet. You can search “for Lemmy” to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.
but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?
You might want to block some keywords then, as there’s also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.
Well, I myself still use Reddit for my hobby since on lemmy there’s like 4 of us FPV pilots.
But generally: spread the word, if there’s a community you’d like that doesn’t exist - make it yourself
Thank you for your service.
Also, thank you for asking. Yes, I’m increasing, and I’m eating more salads now to help prevent it, OK?
Its been at a pretty consistent 50k which means we retained 25% of the users from our peak. Its 37.5k at the moment with 1.8k on piefed. There is another 18k users once NodeBB federations integrates.
Its a decent little community, enough to be self sufficient and enough for new users to feel like they arent joining a ghost town.
How can one obtain these numbers? Is there like a statistics website?
fedidb.com is what I used. The UI used to be better its kinda ass now.
Small enough to see the same few people on multiple threads and posts, large enough for a sense of activeness
This is the sweet spot. After the initial teething pains but before the bigots and nazis take over.
The bigots and nazis are already quarantined at exploding heads thankfully
Nobody is recording long-term stats yet AFAIK, so you have to find a workaround. It seems the rest of Lemmy is growing relative to Hexbear, at least.Edit: Nevermind, there are sites being linked here. It looks like by MAU it’s more or less holding steady. Which maybe means Hexbear is dying from toxicity and infighting?
I salute you. And please take care of yourself first.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Currently trending down. And it’s all your fault for taking a break. 😔
Honestly, I’m not complaining about it going from 2 mil at its peak (2023!) to 1.25 mil now. That’s way more people than I thought!
wow piefed is kinda taking off :) Thats awesome.
Its not like we cant all get what we want. Some will want lemmy, some will want piefed, some will want mastodon/kbin/mbin/etc…etc… Posts/comments show up in all. Its nice to have options.
Yeah, but look at the scale involved. That being said, I do expect it to stick around and become a major part of the ecosystem.
I don’t even know what is fundamentally different between Lemmy and Piefed aside from Piefed’s web interface. AFAIK, they’re basically the same thing but Lemmy is primarily developed by a harmful douche. 🫤
Is there any reason beside that to choose one or the other?
I put together this short list of benefits Piefed offers to regular users in response to one of our members at slrpnk asking about our future migration to it.
PieFed, like Mbin, was written from the ground up, and in a totally different language than Lemmy.
But it interoperates with Lemmy, so yeah it’s very similar. Except the LARGE list of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks, and a handful of features that Lemmy still does better on.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
But also, PieFed is written in Python that is a heck of a lot easier to code in than Rust, so the fact that PieFed not only caught up to Lemmy but has already surpassed it in SO MANY ways is a strong indicator of its future success.
But aside from the tankies building in tankie philosophy right into the core of the Lemmy software, it depends on whether someone wants those additional features or not. Like polls, flairs (both user and post), categories of communities, which btw are user customizable and shareable, combining all comments across all cross-posts (helping to reverse the fragmentation effect inherent in federated platforms), and so much more.
I bet that if you tried out PieFed for a day, you’d fall in love with it. You can also do entirely different workflows with it, like trigger notifications to be sent to you that really helps you to stay on top of posts from communities that are very low-volume (and so have trouble making it into your Subscribed feed, like poetry rather than politics or worshipping Arch Linux), but those are likely to take more than a day to figure out - there’s definitely a learning curve. Also note that ymmv with regard to the different apps not (yet!) fully utilizing all the features offered by the PieFed back-end.
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
Hey, to be fair it’s all public in the modlog. They have weird geopolitical ideas, but I don’t see a lot of ways it’s influenced the design of the platform.
combining all comments across all cross-posts
Okay, that does sound dope. How is it implemented? Does it only work if the commenter is on PieFed?
Ditto for more priority going to niche communities. Way too often those posts just slip past in the waterfall of AskLemmy and Tech-related comment.
Hey, to be fair it’s all public in the modlog. They have weird geopolitical ideas, but I don’t see a lot of ways it’s influenced the design of the platform.
It’s not though. You not only do not receive a notification, unlike Reddit btw, but you also can’t message the person who did it, also unlike Reddit btw, and on top of that, the modlog simply says that it was done by a “mod”, so you can’t DM them either unless you DM every single mod in the entire community (tbf Reddit does NOT show which mod did something, but in that case you still have the shared modmail so there was no actual need to have it).
Even weirder, I remember when this feature was added: it used to always show the account of the mod, but over time it has become even more authoritian than it used to be. I am saying that Lemmy is somehow even more authoritian than Reddit itself. Instance admins and to a lesser degree mods have tremendous freedoms, whereas the end users not so much. The devs left Reddit, but how Reddit operated still seems very much prominent in their minds, except when they choose to do differently and yes, enormous kudos that there is a modlog, but without notifications of an event or a modmail it still on balance ends up being MORE authoritian than Reddit.
Whereas PieFed offers numerous features aimed at the democratization of moderation, allowing mods to be more hands-off and leave the end-user to decide what they want to see, possibly enlisting the aid of the entire community. e.g. one of the first things PieFed does with a new account is a sign-up wizard asking what their interests are and subscribing to communities based on the answers, and as part of that asking if the user would like to block All, Some, or None of any keywords the user would like, such as “Trump” or “Musk”. This allows mods to have additional options beyond simply remove that content vs. allow it: now, they can more readily allow it knowing that the users that are super tired of seeing it all the time have a means to see less of it, provided by the automated software (which also reduces the burden of manual moderation tasks too).
Sorry this is getting long and you had other questions but I wanted to point out that the pro-democracy stance of PieFed’s democratization of moderation and the pro-authoritarian stance (not from the perspective of an instance admin but to the end-users themselves) is very much baked into the code and a large part of the overall experiences, as it shapes what content is allowed to show up on the respective platforms.
Okay, that does sound dope. How is it implemented? Does it only work if the commenter is on PieFed?
It brings all comments together across all communities, both PieFed and Lemmy - it is one of PieFed’s most popular features! Here is an example showing 9 cross-posts where the comments are all brought together: https://piefed.social/post/1189671 (except I have Lemmy.ml blocked so those comments properly don’t show up for my account:-) - note clicking the horizontal lines shows the community sidebar with explanation and rules for each one.
As you said, it really helps posts to smaller communities maintain traction rather than get ignored by the masses of Lemmings, with that automated software feature allowing Pie-heads to be more connected across the Fediverse.:-)
Yeah…I’ve had to do a LOT of work client-side in Tesseract to give Lemmy half the features Piefed has. Eventually I’m gonna start targeting Piefed, but there’s some under the hood stuff I’m waiting to be resolved before I embark on that voyage. Mainly, I’ve heard that the main Piefed experience and the API are not 1:1 and not everything is exposed in the API. :(
It’s great to see you still posting on the Threadiverse! Okay so you’ve been doing it for awhile I guess but I’ve been sick myself so not staying up with things, anyway it’s still great to see!! 😜
You may want to think about it from the ground up: a lot of the need for Tesseract was due to things like the strict authoritian stance of the tankie devs - e.g. not providing a means to truly block all users from an instance, or not showing alternative image text, or not embedding video playbacks - forcing you to find creative solutions to that problem (note PieFed does all of those things mentioned, usually not as comprehensively implemented as well as Tesseract does it but at least to some degree, e.g. Peer tube and YouTube videos can embedd but not Loops ones). Maybe now Tesseract would not have to be an entire alternative UI front-end - especially when the development pace of PieFed is so rapid in comparison to Lemmy that would increase your difficulty of keeping up - but instead rather a “theme”, combined with changes to the underlying codebase that would affect all of the users of PieFed instead of only some of them? These devs I believe would be much more friendly and receptive to your ideas:-).
Although I am not a developer like you so too far away from the problem to see it anywhere close to clearly like you will, as you get into it, but wanted to throw out that oddball idea from left field in case it helps jar your thinking along creative lines. Remember to do six impossible things before breakfast each day!
But most important of all, if I can add, would be for you to enjoy it!!!
Good points.
I don’t have a full plan yet (just the general idea of a plan), but when I start the journey to Piefed, it’ll probably be from the ground up or very close to that. I already need to update the codebase from Svelte 4 to Svelte 5 which is a pretty big job due to the fundamental and breaking changes between those two versions.
The components that make up Tesseract (posts, comments, sidebars, everything) are also all heavily tied to Lemmy’s type definitions. To support Piefed, I’d have to de-couple the components in the code from Lemmy’s type def and add in an abstraction layer (both for future-proofing and to make it possible to support both if I wanted to).
Moreover, Lemmy will likely not ever catch up to PieFed. One reason being that certain features are incompatible with the authoritarian mindset - e.g. when a moderator removes your content, why should you as the poster be notified of that fact?
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Don’t even need to acknowledge the flairs and polls; sign me the fuck up.
when a lemmy instance, community bans you, it doesnt notify you of it
So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?
Honestly I do not know - Notifications on PieFed, along with searching, are both features that are still a bit wonky and behind everything else. Side-note: you will legit want to keep your old Lemmy account, and use it especially for searching for content, and also if you choose piefed.social whenever that goes down for upgrades, which it does far more often than a normal instance (it literally says that btw, it deploys new features sooner than other instances so it is the “test bed” to try them out:-D but if that bothers you then use one of the other ones like piefed.zip, piefed.world, etc.).
So that one may be a bad example for me to use… but on the other hand, Lemmy has been out for YEARS and that feature requested for YEARS, whereas PieFed is still being built and new features are added WEEKLY. So I would expect to see that feature “soon” on PieFed, whereas on Lemmy I would expect to see it “never” (b/c of the authoritarian mindset precluding them even wanting to do it). Just like so many other of the continually growing set of features offered by PieFed.
Not to get too deep into the tankie bashing, but nevertheless it does seem worth pointing out that the philosophies of the Lemmy devs have gotten them into some financial trouble, as people do not want to interact with them, e.g. to first learn the super-difficult (even compared to C++!!) Rust coding language and then try to contribute code. In contrast, pretty much every programmer already knows Python and so a lot of people can - and do - contribute to PieFed.
TLDR: PieFed is so much newer than Lemmy and honestly it is a bit behind in some ways, but even so PieFed is already running circles around Lemmy in not only the pace of development but also the raw set of features already developed.
And if I can add: even Reddit stopped adding features YEARS ago, unless you count things like those Doge coins that generate profit for the company but do not add anything new to the user-base. To see a thread-based forum platform actively adding brand-new features… damn it is so refreshing! (and yes Lemmy does that too, but on the scale of YEARS rather than, again, mere WEEKS)
How is Lemmy’s code actually licensed? If it’s GPL or somesuch, someone can just fork it and add the missing features. There’s some amount of work needed for keeping up to changes in Lemmy’s main branch, but it’s still reasonably easy work. (Assuming you can code, of course 😀)
EDIT: The licence is this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License
Piefed was also designed to be better at serving more people, especially outside of North America and Europe. It does more with less data, so people on slower internet in large parts of the world can participate just as easily.
I just mentioned this in another comment but I’ll add it here so you can see it more easily:
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
I would convert my instance to piefed if there was a migration script, iirc they’re working on it, so I’m looking towards that.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, I’m on the Zulip (https://chat.piefed.social/ ) and Matrix chats and the migration script isn’t really worked on by anyone.
Instances like quokk.au just went nuclear and recreated their instances with Piefed when keeping the domain name.
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/ went the subdomain route.
There’s an open issue for migration script blockers on the codeberg. It looks like there might be more movement on that front now that 1.1 has been released.
Also @lena@gregtech.eu
Instances like quokk.au just went nuclear and recreated their instances with Piefed when keeping the domain name.
Does that even work? Wouldn’t that kinda break federation?
It worked 99.99%, the only issue was PieFed doesn’t allow capitals in community names which meant one community broke as the name didn’t match after being made lowercase.
I don’t rightly know but… to a first degree of approximation, if both are fully compliant with the ActivityPub protocol then why would it? (they are not I would guess, but that is a more nuanced take than I have knowledge of:-D)
The instance and communities federate correctly
You can ask @Deceptichum@quokk.au for details
I read this on Sh.itJust.Works and am now commenting from piefed.social.
I haven’t dug in much but really like it.
Welcome! You are going to absolutely love PieFed:-D.
I like Piefed much better. :)
Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed - they are all “good”, but yeah, me too :-P
Ok I’ll bite. What are some good piefed instances to consider?
What do you like about these?
It is the same set of considerations that govern Lemmy instances: the admins are irl people who have whatever ideas they like to see happen in the world, and it’s their personal machines and effort that they are putting into administering the instance, so they get to do whatever they please. If you like those philosophies (which they tend to say in their sidebars), then you can make an account on them - FOR FREE - and if not, then you are free to go elsewhere.
Fwiw, piefed.zip avoids defederation as much as possible iirc and has an affinity for gaming topics, piefed.social is one of the oldest but note that it tests deployment of all the newest features, so it can break more readily than a more stable instance, piefed.ca is located in Canada and geared towards people who live there but like the Lemmy version, all are welcomed, and piefed.world is run by the same admins who handle lemmy.world, with all that that entails - some people love that fact, others will hate it, and again it’s all fine and good bc there is room for us all to coexist peacefully across the Threadiverse:-).
I like it because it’s a lowkey anarchist server. Administration isn’t as overbearing as some places, and you have a lot of freedom to do what you want. It’s been active for 2 years and I know it’s funded for another 2 at least. Plus smaller servers help spread the load (and hopefully load faster for you).
There’s also anarchist.nexus, but they’re not open for registration.
What level of anarchy are we talking here? (You and I tend to differ on some (not all) of our politics 😉)
A lowkey level :P The admin is a lot less extreme than myself, and pretty accepting for most things outside of hate content.
😳python?!
Yep and its pretty easy to read when looking at the source code.
C is easy as well… For me, even more easy than python, as I read like 100x more C++ rather than python…
I don’t even bother to write python anymore 🤣 I let it generate by AI nowadays
Honestly as long as its a “supported” language and well built, I would argue the language doesn’t matter as much as its execution.
I make my $$ on python, but C/C++ is soooo much better than when I started back a couple of decades ago. both are “fast enough”. Im glad there are people like you that like to work with the Cs of the world :).
Reddit is written in Python. It was originally written is Common Lisp, but they rewrote it in Python since it is easier to find developers.
That was a long time ago, I highly doubt it still is
Damn! How inefficient 🤪 but that explains a lot
Python dev tend to vibe code while C (and other similar programming language) devs tend to plan more prior coding.
As a decision maker, I would let my devs only use python for proof of concepts or for build scripts…
Damn! How inefficient 🤪 but that explains a lot
Although I’m not a big fan of python, or dynamically typed languages in general, I think its DX is a lot better than stuff like C. Unless you really enjoy leaking 40GB of ram per second.
Python dev tend to vibe code
What? Maybe the percentage of vibe coders among python users is higher, but that’s irrelevant. Just hire the real developers…
“Everything I don’t like is tankie” freaks just love shoehorning “tankies” into everything it’s so funny
It’s more tedious than funny, honestly
If you’re using the browser, the Piefed main page is a lot more data efficient, if you care about that sort of thing.
I just switched and there is definitely a noticeable difference in that department. It runs so smooth compared to my lemmy experience.
25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.
Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed
Feature-wise there are some differences, but they both are part of the same fediverse so you’ll have access to the same content.
Personally I am used to the Lemmy UI, and I feel like it’s not as easy to see if a mod report was being taken care of on PieFed vs Lemmy
PieFed is currently at ~1.7k MAU, last month it was 1.6k. I suppose the 400% increase is over and that was just some people from lemm.ee, any significant future increase will most likely come from people switching instead of new users. Lemmy dropped from 54k MAU in April down to 41k.
Yes the lemm.ee switch-over crowd is over so it will be interesting to see the more natural growth after that.
e.g. from January to March PieFed (edit: 's Monthly Active Users) more than doubled in size long before lemm.ee’s troubles were widely announced.
Typically as people hear about the new features and are astonished by how PieFed offers exactly what people have been outright begging to see brought to Lemmy (heck, in some cases even Reddit) but they simply won’t do it. In fairness, perhaps they cannot, given their current pace of development, but also their prioritization may differ from those of the end-users (I have noticed that particularly things that involve federation between instances - e.g. modlog actions - typically receive much lower prioritization than things that will work inside a singular instance, perhaps reflecting the bias that the main Lemmy devs are also the admins of their own personal instance? for good or for ill, it is what is is: this is their platform, and if someone does not like it then they are free to go ahead and make their own from scratch, which both Kbin, before it was forked to Mbin, and now PieFed have done just that:-D).
I finally switched to PieFed now that Voyager has more or less stable support for it. Fuck the Lemmy tankie devs
Everything I personally dislike is tankie! You dorks sound like those conservative idiots who call everything leftist Marxist communist
They are transphobic, tankie assholes though. Here’s a good list of the .ml shit: https://lemmy.world/comment/18997412
i blocked the tankie instances early on, and any stray .ml accounts that catches my attention.
New account, 2 comments, both in this thread defending the tankies over at ml…
they love to larp and not use their ml accounts in the hope that ml avoids being defederated
long overdue
Blocking ml from my feed was one of the better decisions I’ve made on here.
blocking the triad of tankies has been the best
Probably will bump back up in September
yeah
Hmm. The monthly post count keeps going up, though. Assuming it is monthly and not total, which seems likely from the occasional decreases.
Replying to this to make the line go up
Doing the same
wb
Interesting that user counts are lower, but posts and comments are still going up. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean more bot activity 😧
People post and comment from other platforms like Piefed
The posts and comments listed there are locally hosted total values (not per month)
The graphs there for posts and comments are for count of posts on lemmy directly, total, not per month. The posts/month seems stagnant, although its hard to tell as the data shown there is burried by a couple of bot instances that completely hide the overall trend.
Ah, it says “by month”, not “per month”. Well, shit, that’s not good news then.
Unless they went to PieFed - which many did - and then it would look like a net decrease on those charts for Lemmy.
piefed is its own category there, but kbin/mbin might be included in “lemmy” - I didn’t dive deeper.
piefed is growing recently but it’s not in the millions ;)
Mbin has <1k monthly active users. Kbin has <100 total, and if you dig deeper, only one server (in Poland) self-reports as using Kbin.
No PieFed is not included in “Lemmy” in this software b/c it looks at the software that the instance reports as using.
Even Lemmy is not in the millions, its peak was ~55k MAUs somewhere in Spring of 2024. Well, the “posts” counts could be in the millions (according to the Lemmy stats page it was 12.2 million a couple months ago), but those stats can be fairly misleading, so I typically only ever go by monthly active users that seems verifiably closer to what people actually see happening. e.g. so very MANY people have alt accounts all across the Fediverse so the total number of accounts is highly misleading, but the number of “active” ones seems more reliable? (even then it could be an over-counting, especially if bots are active and being counted as well)
40k MAUs is barely even a highly active sub over on Reddit.
Even Mastodon only reports ~700k MAUs, and falling, though at its peak it was closer to 2 million. They really dropped the ball on making the software easier to use - unlike Lemmy (and Mbin and PieFed), each Mastodon instance does NOT show posts from other Mastodon instances, by default - or at least that was true for an exceedingly long time though I thought it was going to change this summer iirc? Maybe that change only affected “searching” for posts though? I don’t use Mastodon so don’t really care - but I understand why people prefer BlueSky, b/c for them centralization is the point, if that is what it takes to make the software actually work.
A LOT of the criticisms that people on Reddit have about Lemmy actually pertain to Mastodon rather than Lemmy in particular.
The entire federated concept really was not ready for mainstream deployment, at the time of the Rexodus. We here are those with the “early adopter” mindset, which is very much different than the mainstream normie one.
Yeah, well, fuck those guys.
