A few years ago I tried to move to the Fediverse exclusively and basically found nobody to talk to. Over the past Plague Year I’ve attempted to do so again and I’m finding vibrant communities with tons of people to talk to. Mastodon and Matrix are the most active, I feel, followed by Lemmy. I use Diaspora but there aren’t many real people there. The point is, I think it’s growing and I think as long as we can stay accepting and open (and not bully people off the platform for small mistakes) then we can continue to grow it.

A note added after this comment was initially posted:

When I talk about being “open” and “accepting,” obviously I’m not talking about nazis. Fuck nazis. BUT we also shouldn’t be hostile to any and all newcomers for small disagreements and/or mistakes.

It’s hard for me to tell. I currently see a lot of interesting content on Mastodon, and the people I follow don’t seem to be leaving any times soon. New platforms are being created (Lemmy looks like it will be a big one). I’ve also been able to discover artists who’s work didn’t relate to FLOSS having account and communicating on the Fediverse.

There indeed seems to be a lot of dead accounts on the Fediverse, but I’m sure it’s the same for most proprietary websites too. There will always be waves of people joining and leaving. But the Fediverse is healthy enough that I don’t expect it to die any time soon.

The fediverse has been chugging along for a decade now and for most of that time it had much less nodes/users than it has now. To me, it does seem like activity has been declining, but there will always be core groups of people who stay here. I don’t think the fediverse will ever rival the big platforms, because it will never be a cohesive system. It will always be small groups of nodes/peoples that can talk amongst themselves. We already see that with huge sections of the fediverse isolated from each other, either through blocking or incompatibility.

Separated islands works for some people who like the small communities, but not for others who don’t want to worry about which server their friends are on or miss out on some cool artist on a different platform.

I wouldn’t pay any attention to the numbers beyond the suggestion that “there’s some people here using some services”.

Did in to any of the projects - look at Matrix, the 2nd largest number of nodes, for example, and see that there are 0 users using it, 0% of the time for a total of 1 huge ghost town. (If you wanted to interpret the lack of reporting detail in that fashion)

Look at Pleroma, the next highest number of nodes, and see there’s no active users reported.

I think that over time, as more nodes from more projects are set up, are being used and aren’t reporting all the various details that the-federation.info could report on, the less useful the statistics there will be, especially around the ‘active users’ stats.

Last example - lemmy - Lemmy’s over-reporting users (Lemmy seems to count all the users it knows about (?) - not just the local users on an instance) and not reporting those ‘active user’ stats either.

So, I’d say the fediverse is doing fine - but you can’t really tell what’s going on from the-federation.info.

Anecdotally, I feel like there were independent e.g. illustrators who were game to try Mastodon and left when they saw tiny fractions of the engagement they get on ordinary social media. This is a big bummer to me. For visual art, we need the equivalents of the IG accounts that repost art with permission and link backs. For other stuff, I don’t know the answers.

It’s somewhat cliche, but many (especially in SEO) were talking about the covid effect where many sites across the web experienced a meaningful bump in numbers as people moved much of their life online. I saw some stats back around april, but I don’t know how scientific they were. There might be more research on it. Point being, growth numbers could be a bit skewed by a hopefully outlier event.

Other factors like Jack Dorsey giving a nod back then to federation might also have contributed. I also don’t know how major platforms are portraying alternatives and if people are more or less inclined to try something new.

I admire your attempt to quantify it and would like to see more.

Mastodon’s API has an endpoint, /api/v1/instance/activity, that serves activity information. As far as I know there is not any other fediverse project serving activity information. Thanks to that API endpoint you can get real activity from every Mastodon server, activity meaning all users that logged in the last 12 weeks. I did a Python bot that collects all activities from all alive Mastodon servers (https://mastodont.cat/@activity). This is the last report from my bot (current week):

Registered users: 2961289 This week logins: 130708 Average server activity is 4.41%.

Yes, average activity is very low.

This year we saw a lot of progress in what moderation of instances mean. These numbers could be highly influenced by large changes in the network due to instance bannings like when Gab arrived and was quickly banned.

It’s healthier than Facebook and Twitter

I’ve been using Mastodon for a couple of years now and it’s become significantly more active in that time from what I see anecdotally. That said, I’d say the key question for health is whether the community is big enough to support ongoing development and hosting. I think at this point the answer to both questions is a definite yes. There are millions of users in the Fediverse now, plenty of users are technical and are actively contributing.

I think we’ll see active users fluctuate over time, but I don’t see the core base of users abandoning Fediverse at this point because they’ve already established their social networks here.

I find it fascinating that lemmy is the only fedi thing you use