You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.
Tbh I feel a little queasy about the change of tone but thats how it goes with influx of people. I‘ll keep my strict anti tech bro stance and will rapidly block any bigots as I always have. People can of course say and do what they please here and I‘m not gonna stop them. But i also am not forced to listen to it. Thats very incompatible to the outside world so clash is inevitable imho.
I feel like it’s people who want to make money adding another platform to advertise on other platforms.
The tide lifts all the boats… there is also a noticeable uptick in Lemmy registrations, at least here on our instance.
The tide lifts all the boats…
Exactly. I do not care much for Pixelfed. Or Mastodon. Or Friendica. Or really much of anything other than Lemmy. But I just stood up my own PixelFed server, so if someone wants to get away from Meta, I will happily support their decision (and pixelfed.social’s server by offloading resources) and they can find me there.
Yup, I spotted a few Lemmy accounts that were less than a week old recently. Very nice.
I think I’ve also seen new communities being created too
You too? I’ve had more users sign up this month than for many past months!
Yeah, we usually tick along at 1 or 2 sign-ups a day, 7 days ago that went to 10 and has settled back to 3 or 4.
I don’t know if they are coming directly from Pixelfed but there were a few high profile posts about the Fediverse over at The Bad Place, so, following the example of @Blaze@feddit.org, a few of us jumped in to do some missionary work/help man the lifeboats.
Pixelfed’s monthly userbase has gone from 15k to almost 300k in the past month. Absolutely massive for the fediverse.
I’ll probably try it out eventuallyTM
We can’t want the Fediverse to get bigger but be scared of normies when it does. I say welcome in! We should be mindful to listen to the new recruits, because their feedback is the most unbiased.
“We can’t want”? Do you mean “wait”?
No; “We can’t want X but be Y” is well-formed, like with any other verbs (eg. “We can’t swim but stay dry.”). It does sound more confusing, but the structure is the same. It means we can’t “want X” and “be Y” at the same time. I hope that explanation makes sense.
Thank you
No problem :)
Lemmy once had a massive influx of new users, a lot left again and monthly active users has remained somewhat constant for a long time now. Let’s wait and see how many people actually stay on PixelFed.
So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:
The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It’s kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it’s felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I’ll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.
People don’t seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I’ve literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being “too complicated” to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see “this place is great and all, but…” posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I’d estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they’re unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether…
Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.
I’ve seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as “Global Switch Day” so hopefully it’ll keep blowing up.
Glad to see more people introduced to the tech bro free social media.
Yeah! Here we’re not tech brothers, we’re tech gender neutral siblings, or even tech sisters
I thought everyone was dogs using the internet while the humans are at work.
Well then I guess we must sniff butts
Hi James Joyce here, what did you all say you were up to?
“tech bro free social media”
Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
I suspect image browsing is less reliant on specific content creators, so Pixelfed probably has an advantage there compared to something like Mastodon. You’re only going to move to Mastodon if the people you wanna follow are there too, while if you’re for example just looking to browse pictures of food and cats you don’t really care who is posting so you’re not as reluctant to try Pixelfed.
I don’t use either Instagram or Pixelfed though so might be totally off base here.
What? I respectfully disagree. The reason I struggled to stay on Pixelfed, and recently Loops too, is because as a new user all I was seeing was classical art, and landscapes (and the odd weirdo) but nothing actually entertaining. Loops at least has people copying stuff from TikTok. I’m not condoning that behaviour, I’m just saying as a casual new user, that was pretty much the most compelling content.
Maybe I was doing it wrong, but IMHO the content creators are the core of any social media. Pixelfed and Loops will both live or die by the creators they attract
ETA: I love weirdos by the way, that wasn’t meant as a negative. If anything, more please!
I never vibed with Twitter or Instagram, so I struggled with both Mastodon and Pixelfed. It wasn’t until I started looking for content based around my hobbies that Pixelfed really started becoming interesting to me. That, and having the ability to be absolutely deluged in pictures of cats if I need a morale boost. Mastodon is still something that I’m having trouble getting value out of. I may just end up being a Lemmy and Pixelfed user.
I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.
Corporations have learned long ago the importance of properly identifying your audience, and the Fediverse is not exempt from that rule. Lemmy is the Fediverse version of Reddit and Mastodon is the Fediverse version of Twitter, and just like these two giants could live together with each other and also with Instagram without stepping on each other’s toes, so do their Fediverse versions can live with the Fediverse version of Instagram, PixelFed.
Now we’re just missing a Fediverse version of Facebook.
Now we’re just missing a Fediverse version of Facebook.
Friendica?
There is Friendica… yeah the name doesn’t roll of the tongue, and I only remember just for this comment… no shade to it
I actually love the name Friendica.
It’s better than lemmy and mastodon.
Honestly, no arguement here. I can’t think of anything better so I’m unqualified regardless
And Nextdoor
It’s nice to see. I’d compare it to back when Lemmy was in the same situation and tens of thousands of users came from Reddit to Lemmy over night.
that’s cool, what’s the furry instance
I saw instafops.net was an options when I was browsing servers. idk anything else about it or even if it’s popular. Not my kind of server, but figured I’d share since it’s something I saw and you’re looking for.
IG was always much bigger than Reddit.
Good to see people moving to Pixelfed though.
I’m excited. I’m one of those users, but I haven’t used it much because I can’t find followers. To be fair, I never used Instagram. I like the fediverse, I usually see the same articles get sent through other centralized communities other than reddit (tildes, hacker news, etc), but I enjoy the community discussion the best around here.
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Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
Yes. The interface is good and familiar. The majority of the traffic is on one namespace where discoverability is good. Because of the nature of the medium, getting started with no algorithm is a lot easier to stomach than just looking at what your local people have to say.
This is not to bash Mastodon, but they need that algo, which is why Bluesky is hoovering up users. Also, their UI, depending on the server is more tweetdeckish, which might scare off a lot of casuals.
edit: I’ve been informed the bsky has no algo, so somehow they seem to be getting better results in discover, perhaps single name space or perhaps they have something behind the hood.
Also, to start with, all the journalists FLOODED info, Mastodon, without any algo; you just got a hundred wordsmiths screaming past each other and they all immediately followed each other, so you couldn’t just find people like Jeff Jarvis, you got to see everyone he had a professional experience of which is WAY more than anyone is prepared to read :)
Bluesky doesnt have an algorithm for its discover feed (the default), or at least it didn’t used to have one, but provides an API for building your own feeds which lets you do whatever you like.
Bluesky’s big growth was from the fact it was, like PF, easy to use and easy to navigate, and all the content was on one namespace.
Lemmy is an outlier imo. You can interact and repost and find content on different instances easily. Mastodon made following feeds from different instances nearly impossible which turned me off it permanently even if I believe in its value over Bluesky.
Bluesky doesnt have an algorithm for its discover feed
For not having one, my Discover feed was pretty dead on. Maybe just luck or maybe it was the right time for the right facebook influx.
edit: they might have one https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1g9zzca/bluesky_dosent_have_an_algorithm_so_what_is_the/
Lemmy is an outlier
Lemmy is damn close to Reddit’s mental design, but instead of 27 different subs for news on one place, there are 2-3 different places that have a news sub. news@here and news@there isn’t hard to grasp, I think the platform works remarkably well.
The main Mastodon instance with their official app has discoverability. The difference is so much different from what I normally use - a 3rd party app and a 3rd party instance
Looks like pixelfed is just for pictures.
Seems like it’s the instagram to mastadon’s twitter.
It’s probably closer to IG than any other Fediverse app is to its non-Fediverse equivalent. Although introducing Collections and possibly Groups might make it more versatile and give it Flickr features (though not perhaps the comprehensive picture info and ability to download the original).
It federates very well with Masto, it’s just that the latter focuses on text and Pixelfed on pictures.
In fact, most of my Pixelfed feed comes from Mastodon.
