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Fediverse @lemmy.world
Riley @lemmy.ml

PixelFed has increased the Fediverse's monthly active users by over 40% in the last few weeks, how do we feel?

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.

111 comments
    1. The official Pixelfed app just has a nicer looking UI
    2. There's not really a competing app for people leaving Insta like there is Bluesky vs Mastodon
    3. Pixelfed's content is mostly visual so it's easily digestible to casual users and you don't have to scroll past dry Fedi arguments
    4. Better discover features so users don't have to do a bunch of legwork to find who to follow

    Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time

    • This.

      Discovery and user abstraction are Lemmy's biggest issues and we are not addressing them to the degree we should.

      I know there's some stuff on all those centralized platforms that's way over the top, but most of it is actually pretty helpful. And you'll miss it once you switch here.

      • Discovery? Interesting thought.

        I tried out pixelfed and the pixelix app for the past couple weeks.

        The "discovery" page on the official app is worse than useless. It shows almost nobody with over 10 followers, highlighting one person with 50-100 followers, then shows "popular on the fediverse" which are thumbnails of posts of the people it just recommended. It always recommends at least 5 of the same people day after day, week after week, even people you already follow.

        The official app can't even show a global feed so it is literally impossible to discover new people unless you know their name and specifically search for them, or they are recommended by luck on the discover page (of which there are multiple repeats per day, so not likely)

        Pixelix at least allows you to view a global feed though. Definitely a better experience, but Lemmy discovery is not any worse than that.

      • What do you mean by user abstraction? First I've seen this mentioned, or put this way.

      • Absolutely agree with this.

        It's hard to discover something new, sometimes.

    • Is the iPhone app still missing darkmode?

      • What about Android? I don't see dark mode in options.

      • yup… (at least in the stable channel)

        what’s most infuriating is that it used to have it but at some point they redesigned the app and made it worse…?

        you don’t have to imitate instagram that much, dansup

    • I don't think Mastodon was really competing with Bluesky. Bluesky is way ahead while Fediverse fanboys thought people would somehow just learn to use Mastodon. (while they wouldn't shut up about Bluesky)

  • 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.

    • 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.

      This was a huge part of why I now spend more time over on pixelfed as opposed to here -- I have a few accounts I've used here, and every single time I'm in a thread about a woman who's been sexually assaulted, or about a woman's shelter, etc, the 'not all guys'/'men suffer too' bros come flooding in. I've logged out of accounts for weeks, switched to another one, just to let them scream into the void of my inbox for awhile, and it happens every time. I befriended a woman here when I responded to one of the most sad-to-read replies in one of those threads, that read like: "Women are often abused by men--not all men, just some, and I want to reiterate that this is about those specific men..." and it just went on and on trying to placate the inevitable furious white men in the comments section. As someone who lived as a white man for over forty years, I know just how whiny, sad, and ridiculous they look, and they they still get their way.

      Over on pixelfed I haven't once had an interaction even close to that. It's extremely pleasant, people helping each other learn the platform, people asking for help in bad home situations, and it's a community. People have messaged me when I made mistakes linking things in extremely pleasant ways, and two people debated alt-text (is it helpful to those who use audio captions, or is it training AI?) without once insulting each other. Lemmy was very briefly that, yet there's a lot of tribalism that is not only unnecessary, and frankly, childish. I'm quite often embarrassed of my fellow men here.

      (Well, non-binary now, yet I still feel the experiences of 40+ years of being a man are helpful.)

      So anyway, I agree pixelfed is a lot more inviting, and a lot more diverse.

  • 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

  • It's quite good, in my opinion. If we had some bridge to lemmy's posts, it would be even better. Also I've checked and if you like or comment a mastodon post from Pixelfed you'll receive the notification, so, it's something🤷‍♂️.

    • You can post from PixelFed into Lemmy but you won't see replies and that's too bad.

  • 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.

  • IG was always much bigger than Reddit.

    Good to see people moving to Pixelfed though.

  • Its' pretty great.

    As with the time I joined Mastodon, it takes a couple of weeks to find what you like and build up a good feed, but once you do that, it's useful and fun. I wish it had more curation tools, but I enjoy it.

    • I created a mastodon account a few years ago and I log in every once in a while but I really have no idea how to use it haha, it just keeps updating a bunch of posts and I don't know how to make it stop

      • That's probably the global feed, which yes, moves super-fast. I found that annoying at first too.

        There's a checkbox to turn off auto-scroll in settings, and it's got an appropriate name: Slow Mode.

  • I really wish it were more straightforward to deploy. It would be great to see many more instances popping up.

  • How do I feel?

    I was following my Lemmy rule and hunting out smaller instances rather than pile into the biggest one.
    tried 4 separate smaller instance sign ups and never got a single one of them to work and send me a verification email, so I kinda gave up....

111 comments