Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025

Mike

Woo we staying!

Also anyone know how to use their API? https://api.fediverse.observer/

I would love to make a "treadiverse" combo line. Cause its hard to look at when piefed is slowly going up, lemmy is slowly going down, and m/k bin is going all over.

EDIT: Never mind, found it. Theres an icon on the right hand side.

peopleproblems

Ahhhhhh, that's a much more intriguing question. You do have a limit to how many data points you can fit on a chart. Monthly average allows you to go back much further but with less insight.

I would assume you would get a much rounder example if you sampled weekly.

bazell@lemmy.zip

LOL. You have beaten my record, since my comments were, at least, containing phrases that could be classified as threatening violence without the context of a whole comment. But your case is a new level. My applause.

Bonifratz

Hats off to you, then. I see you truly know your lines.

bazell@lemmy.zip

Lemmy is being too political. We don't like it.

Meanwhile Reddit:

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai

I'm curious to know what PieFed's user base would look like.

Most people simply don't know about Lemmy/PieFed.

I think once features mature a bit more, if there is another rexit we could see numbers tripple or more.

Many people didn't stick around with previous rexit's because the UX sucked.

OpenStars

Some additional uplifting community suggestions:

!upliftingnews@lemmy.world
!lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
!aww@lemmy.world
!cats@sh.itjust.works
!dogsincostumes@lemmy.world (not terribly active lately but not dead either)
!piefed_joy@piefed.social (not well-known and specific to PieFed)

OpenStars

String theory says that there are up to 11 so... so there!

homes

It is nice. I would like a way for Mlem to integrate it, but their current solution is still pretty elegant in an of itself, especially because it does not rely on piefed for its functionality. everyone gets this.

OpenStars

That is exactly what happened. https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats shows for instance that the numbers spiked from 352 MAUs (monthly active users) in May 2025 to >1k in June, then again to >1.6k in July, where it has mostly stabilized and we are currently at ~2.0k (half of that on piefed.social itself, half distributed across other instances, see list at https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list, click Active Users a couple times to sort that descending).

PieFed.social alone has 964 MAUs, now making it larger than such well-known instances as programming.dev, discuss.tchncs.de, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net (which announced a decision to migrate over to PieFed by the end of 2026).

Below PieFed.social, most instances have only a hundred or so users, but this too is a sign of healthy federation where many new instances keep spinning up - exactly like Lemmy where e.g. startrek.website has 152 MAUs, ttrpg.network has 127, ani.social has 172, mander.xyz has 196, and so on. Over a thousand users distributed across many instances is much healthier than all of them on a single one.

Note that most 3rd party apps haven't caught up to the PieFed software's latest API changes, so e.g. users of Voyager are mostly getting the same experience on a PieFed instance as they would have on a Lemmy one (iirc no polls, user or post flairs, categories of communities aka Topics and Feeds, etc.) - except even there, back-end changes can still be very impactful to the user experience (such as the ability of a mod to move a post from one community to another, or the ability of an end-user to block all users from a specific instance without needing admin approval to perform defederation).

Blaze (he/him)

!lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world is inactive, we spent a while promoting the !wholesome@reddthat.com to decentralize from LW.

Same for !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and !goodnewseveryone@piefed.social .

OpenStars

The difference, one would assume, is that on the whole, Reddit's political biases influence more what is not shown (much like lemmy.ml banning people for any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, or the echo chamber in hexbear), whereas Lemmy's tankie issue also manifests as people actively sea-lioning (e.g. Cowbee) and (especially from hexbear) overt trolling, which shows up more in people's faces. Both are issues, neither are good.

OpenStars

I saw this post on lemmy.ml just prior to the USA election, seemingly portraying the bOtH sIdEs myth that helped encourage people to not vote and thereby get Donald Trump elected:

Make of that what you will.

OpenStars

Is it not both though? I've noticed several users that joined here only recently - mere days or a few weeks or months - so are we not observing both users leaving and also new ones joining? Although this graph only shows the net traffic differences, so is insufficient to make claims beyond that. You could theoretically make a different one, overlaying the new subscriber numbers on top of this, that could disambiguate those two effects (people leaving vs. new ones joining)?

Cowbee [he/they]

Always claims of sea-lioning, but never any evidence. You've had me blocked for over a year now, why continue this crusade?

atro_city

I wouldn't know I don't use the other site

witty_username@feddit.nl

Yes. Give me one boutique antisocial media with strong political focus please

OpenStars

Here is one such very relevant post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/

A really interesting discussion in particular is below the reply saying:

The issues you brought up are very much on Reddit too. They are just more noticeable on Lemmy because there aren't enough niche subs or fluff to drown them out.

Other replies included "I did end up shutting down my instance.", which continued on with "But, for me, seeing people blindly bash the USA every chance they get, It's a turn off." - like, I get that the USA is unpopular (especially now), and also I am okay with the Threadiverse remaining small, but I did want to push back against this magical type of thinking that we can both have our cake and eat it to, in the form of both bashing people from it and also reaching out to invite people on Reddit (who are primarily from the USA) to join us here. Maybe Lemmy will have more success by marketing itself as more "European" (or at least "non-USA", so maybe European + Global South)? Whatever goal we want to aim for, we should keep our eyes open as we aim directly at it, imho.

I do not think that all or even most Threadiverse instances should defederate from lemmy.ml, but on the other hand it would be extremely nice if just ONE instance would do so, which we could then share to people on Reddit as a nicer entry point for those more centrist-leaning users who are primarily people from the USA. Or else decide that that goal is (collectively) not what we all want. The latter being what ended up happening, whether intentionally or no.

Fwiw, Lemmy has gotten much better over the years in this respect, imho, with many more instances having banned lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net specifically.

Like, look at those contortionist comment replies trying to state that, e.g.:

(if anyone's out of the loop - lemmygrad isn't "lemmy", they are usually defederated by regular instances and their content isn't visible in "lemmy" as it is colloquially understood)

This topic is a MAJOR, oft-repeated reason why people on Reddit refuse to come here and check us out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1jjl8g5/i_tried_lemmy_again_after_a_year_long_hiatus_and/ (the title there gets cut off but continues with "it's still beyond terrible"), and here is that post's concluding paragraph:

If you have a very narrow worldview, politics is your entire personality, and you enjoy dry, charged humor then I guess Lemmy is a good alternative for you, but if you're anybody else it's not worth it. Reddit is not good, everybody here agrees. However, despite it's numerous flaws it's still a product than Lemmy at it's very best. It's simply not a viable alternative imo. Even Instagram and Tiktok are better alternatives than Lemmy.

Note that I do not agree, just stating how these people said that they felt, if that is helpful for a diagnosis of the state of affairs and what we could potentially do to help mitigate those concerns. e.g. I successfully petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from hexbear.net, thinking that could help make Redditors feel more welcomed here. Although now I am placing my hope more in PieFed (which e.g. allows users to perform their own personalized defederations without needing admin approval to block all users from any specific instance), while giving up much hope for Lemmy to keep up with its wondrous pace of adding new features.

bazell@lemmy.zip

By my experience, Reddit has some influence from government that they unofficially confirmed. And Reddit admins(not even talking about moderators) are actively promoting some political ideas in their actions. Like, protecting ICE and mass murders in Gaza. The most interesting thing is that this mostly works in large comunities, because of in small ones you will not see such thing except for rare occasions.
This also affects their filters. In one subreddit your comment will trigger ban, while in some others the same quote will have no effect at all. This is really annoying.

Blaze (he/him)

Those two links are 2 years and 9 months old.

The Threadiverse gets regularly okay feedback on Reddit, as show the several posts on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

The Fedi Forum

Lemmy's active userbase has been stable since September 2025