this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.

I do think we face a real inertia right now where the general public has become convinced corporate social media sucks because people suck not because corporations suck and we need to refute that misconception if we want the fediverse to have a vibrant future.

It is really frustating how evidently unhappy most users of corporate social media are about their social media use, yet they show no signs of stopping and when you start to provide an alternate vision of social media they immediately shortcircuit to "social media is bad, I don't want more".

I do think if we don't start pushing back with an affirmative positive vision of why social media can be good we may see a period of depressed growth but I don't see that happening yet personally.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I don't think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.

Maybe for English and a handful of major European languages, but there's no way I could recommend the Fediverse (at least the Threadverse; I don't hang out on Mastodon) to an Arabic or Japanese speaker. In that area it's still severely lacking.

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[–] magnetosphere@fedia.io 10 points 1 week ago

I rarely post but comment a fair amount. To me, it’s only been recent, but I’ve noticed a decline, too.

[–] lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I'm relatively new here, the only negative thing I notice is mods/creators reposting the same stuff every ~6-24 hours to make it 'seem' like there is more activity, which I think backfires more than not.

[–] 11111one11111@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Are you sure you arent seeing posts of the same community being hosted from other instances? Ive been here a while and havent seen any reposting within the same community of the same instance. (Or atleast not repetitively.)

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[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

Oh, I haven't noticed that.

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[–] PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I've definately noticed it too. I've tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but I dont really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day's all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.

Edit: Is there a way to see monthly posts by instance, or compare percentage of posts? That would be an easy way to prove or disprove my bots theory.

Edit 2: fediverse.observer shows monthly (Or rather, total by month) local posts by instance but not federated, and their overall stats are warped by a few bot instances that you can't filter out. That said, for local posts on a few of the big instances, the rate seems stable. That said, smaller instances are shutting down so I don't know if that has an impact on the overall posting rate.

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[–] AlexisFR@jlai.lu 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are plenty of new posts created, the problem is that most of them stay at 0 comments for ever.

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[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 8 points 1 week ago

Also re:lemmy/piefed - there are quite a few people who are very loud and vocal about things, and a lot of the opinions here lean to the left a lot. Not that it is a bad thing, but some folk appear to have got fed up of this and as a result have migrated elsewhere. I like it here, but it can be far from helpful at times

[–] ComradeMiao@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I’m definitely bored of it.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 7 points 1 week ago

I'm in the UK and I am seeing a decline across virtually everything tinternet related. Years of rising rpices, job security worries and just a shift in attitudes has made people far more wary and less time to post, interact etc. plus the modern fragmented web doesn't help

[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 6 points 1 week ago

I think these things oscillates a lot.

[–] artiman@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I haven't seen activity declining, but I have seen good quality posts declining I have been seeing more low quality posts recently

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[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

The stats say the userbase is increasing, but it also feels like there's been a lot less content being posted recently.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Perhaps the closure of Lemm.ee took away some of the quantity and variety of posts and communities?

[–] Uri@infosec.pub 4 points 1 week ago

I feel the same

[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I don't know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it's growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world

But the fediverse in general doesn't grow too much except when a scandal happens.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (12 children)

Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.

"Total users" is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren't using lemmy anymore.

"Monthly active users" is the only meaningful metric, and it's fluctuating and currently going down.

"Activity growth" doesn't actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you'd expect linear "activity growth" and with growing activity you'd see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.

So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.

But in a way you can be happy that it doesn't grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances' admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.

If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Naa, looks about the same. Im seeing more and more people step outside of lemmy though, this is nice. Theres a whole fediverse out there,go out and explore! And bring back cookies (and links)!

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