https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Looks like Pixelfed’s growth spurt is slowing down. Absent any new external stimuli I’m guessing it’ll stabilize around 200K to 300K monthly active users – over a hundredfold order of magnitude from what it was just a month ago.
The fediverse has had a very low retention rate. My bet is that after a year MAU will come down to 60k. That is if meta doesn’t embroil itself in another controversy.
The retention is bad because the new user experience is abysmal. It takes a lot of effort, even for a tech savvy user to get Lemmy & Mastodon to a usable state. Most people are not going to do that and will churn out when there’s no interesting content and the app does weird things like shows you the same posts over and over, if you don’t manually change settings for things like “hide read posts” in Voyager.
Lemmy and mastodon have been very usable for me.
Peertube and friendica on the other hand…
I can get about one user at a time, if I sit with them and explain it. The Fediverse is essentially the scene in Silicon Valley when Richard sits down with the focus group to explain to them for 3 hours how his software works. It’s really cool. It should be the way forward, but the masses have no idea how this works and don’t care to. They want a button to install. They want to search for their friend and find them immediately. I haven’t found any fediverse software that can just do that much, let alone everything else that’s expected.
Idk, Lemmy also inreased it’s userbase by a factor of 30, mainly from a single event. It had like 1,500 MAU before summer 2023 and now we’re at 45k. So I’m not sure what to make of this. I kinda agree though, it’ll stabilize at a lower number than during a hype period. And Pixelfed aside, the more popular places on the Fediverse seem to be stagnating right now. I hope we’ve learned from the past and drama that happened and we don’t need to repeat the same things.
Dunno, from Fediverse Observer, it looks like lemmy and mastodon are growing slowly over the last couple weeks. (the mastodon stats look a little weird tho – there’s a plummet on Jan 30th that looks like a data collection artifact.)