Theres a lot of websites that claim to track the fediverse in its totality. But the numbers are all over the place.
So…hows the Fedi vibe lately?
For what I can perceive is a stable flow of new posts, maybe a little bit more comments than before. Overall alive and kicking.
Yeah I agree. Seems like people are actively using their platforms. Its fun to see like startreck website person talking to a lemmy.world person arguing with a piefed person. All getting confused about a post on the sdf funhole community or something.
Im seeing a bit more comments on some niche communities I frequent. Its still a bit of a stop and go but thats how early websites/early reddit/etc… all felt and worked.
Not great, IMO.
Lemmy seems to have stabilized, if not stagnated. There are a few active political and tech communities, but they’re not particularly diverse in their viewpoints. Most of the other communities I used to follow on Reddit (local/regional discussion, US sports, cycling, etc) never really reached critical mass here and are basically ghost towns.
Mastodon is similar. I’ve observed a number of moderately high profile accounts move back to X/Twitter in recent weeks/months. I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017 or so. I think 2023 or 2024 were probably the high-water mark for activity. Things may look different from other perspectives.
I’m still here, and have no intention of going back to X/Twitter or Reddit any time soon, but the fediverse increasingly feels like usenet. Still inhabited by a few diehard lifers, but generally irrelevant to the broader population.
Unlike usenet, it seems like all it would take is another big exodus, though. Or, so one hopes. And it’s not like anything about the world is really stable right now.
but they’re not particularly diverse in their viewpoints.
Much like the Borg. Even as a part of it, damn, there really isn’t a lot of divergence, lol.
there really isn’t a lot of divergence
There’s plenty of divergence, for example we have everything from Debian to NixOS users, and heck even the odd BSD user. And they don’t even agree on which text editor is the best for programming, so there’s plenty to discuss.
You had me going for a while there.
Speaking for Lemmy, I feel like political and meme communities are alive and well, but smaller specialized niche communities still haven’t been able to get a foothold.
The collective user base is pretty small, so only the broader interest communities get engagement and or survive c/all.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about this lately. I’m starting to think that the platform itself requires too much tech literacy to use and understand to ever be appealing to anyone other than highly tech-literate individuals. While I’d like to believe there’s enough of us out there to build rhobust communities around non-tech topics if this is true, I’m starting to worry that there just aren’t.
For all it’s flaws, Reddit was always very simple to understand and interact with, and it seems like the fediverse is just inherently more complex. Even if that’s not true, it’s going to FEEL true to anybody new since virtually all the active communities are peopled by the tech-literacy 1%
With the smaller and more specialised communities, often if you have a question or post something you do get engagement, there are people interested in them but often just not much volume there
I like the Fedi right now. It feels like early Reddit before it went to shit.
