this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
109 points (90.4% liked)

Fediverse

35277 readers
400 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Paddy66@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

It could be a reducing interest in posting totally public stuff. Perhaps people want to just use group chats in Signal instead?

[–] aceshigh@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Why does everything need to expand? I’m happy with where we are. It feels cozy.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 4 days ago

It doesn't, but stalling is different than just sitting roughly the same. I am talking about my experience, with my peers and clients... most of whom have just upped and left

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 6 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I have enjoyed this discussion but some of my UK peers have added that the fediverse in general (like most social media to be fair) when it is new seems to "american" for them. Bluesky suffers from this criticism as well. This puts a lot of UK users off. Heck even threads is described by many as too us focused right now (see the I'm in the UK is anybody else posts on threads)

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That's really interesting. Australian here, and I've remarked several times how the userbase of the fediverse isn't dominated by American voices like most other social media platforms I've used.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yes, it's nice to see German, Canadian, Australian, French and all the other instances blossom

[–] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago

Yay I was included in a list!

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

https://feddit.uk/ has 400 monthly active users and is as British as you can get

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 days ago

I think most of us are based on different instances too, the main UK community is showing more than double that per day.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Aye it is.... but 400 users seems really small compared to others

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

again - no bias but that seems tiny compared to other "things"

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

What other things? For the Fediverse, there doesn't seem to be a large UK mastodon instance: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list

For corporate social media, is there any UK based social media?

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Nope.... us Brits are a strange lot. Heck it is why I asked the q to start with because brits ARE so strange

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Still, what other UK "things" have more than 2500 monthly active users ?

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

All the meta products, reddit, old fashioned forums... plenty of things. Discourse (pah) tik tok. Different but have way more users. I'm genuinely curious how they get so little traffic in this day and age against other methods. And yes, I know I'm asking on Lemmy, but I'm new here, and I still cannot fathom why they are so quiet

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

All the meta products, reddit, old fashioned forums… plenty of things. Discourse (pah) tik tok. Different but have way more users

Aren't all of those US focused?

I’m genuinely curious how they get so little traffic in this day and age against other methods. And yes, I know I’m asking on Lemmy, but I’m new here, and I still cannot fathom why they are so quiet

Network effect. !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want to help spread the word

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

nope they have plenty of UK focused things. Run by a US corp of course, but plenty of local content. I welcome the debate, but for the majority of people not in the fediverse ecosystem, the numbers just look awful and that is a massive reason they don't either look here, or stay. Herd mentality is strong. Most of them are in no way shape or form techy either

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago

If they're OK on corporate social media, there's not a lot of reason to switch here indeed

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 3 points 5 days ago

Feddit.UK is kinda nice as there's the little british bubble in Local

It's an interesting perspective. Historically the fediverse was more European; Mastodon is based in Germany and initially got a lot of traction in France, NLNet has contributed a lot of the funding, and there's historically more adoption by European governmental organizations than US. But these days a lot of the energy is being driven by corporate interests (Flipboard, Wordpress, Meta, Ghost) which are primarily American (Ghost being the only exception), so that's leading to a change of dynamics. Distressing, especially given what's going on here in the US!

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 days ago

Also British, trying (somewhat failing) to avoid more of the political stuff and that seems to be most of the national specific stuff that gets posted.

[–] J52@lemmy.nz 2 points 5 days ago

Kiwi here, originally European so I get content in two languages and from people with some interests in similar. Good percentage of local and international stuff generally keeps me happy. (Not too concerned/glad about overall numbers - there's no continuous growth on a finite planet)

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I think because Emperor has vanished, might be a factor

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 points 5 days ago

A very active britposter

[–] mintiefresh@piefed.social 107 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I do generally wish there was more content. So I've decided to start actively participating rather than lurking more recently.

[–] v01dworks@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Yeah I’m new to Lemmy, myself and this is really my only complaint. There’s some things that I’m interested in that just don’t really have an active community on here at all

I’m liking it here so far so I’m going to try to do the same and post more actively, I mostly lurked when I was on Reddit

[–] Endmaker@ani.social 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I appreciate your effort. I was more of a lurker on Reddit, but realised we all got to actively participate here if we want Lemmy (and the Fediverse at large) to succeed.

Unfortunately, content marketing is a long-term ROI strategy. IMO other marketing means (e.g. ads, influencers) would do a better job of bringing new users onboard in the short term, helping us to tap into the network effect.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] trinsec@piefed.social 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Didn't the UK recently have a controversial online safety act or something? And didn't many servers defederate UK servers as result?

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago

No, lemmy.zip just geo blocked UK IP adresses, but the content is still available from other servers, no instance defederated.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] rimu@piefed.social 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (17 children)

But usage is not going downwards. Check these stats out: https://fediverse.observer/stats

MAU has been steady at 1.1 million since this time last year.

Within the fediverse there are some platforms that are losing ground and some that are growing.

load more comments (17 replies)
[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago

As a general comment, I suggest everyone interested in making the Fediverse grow to join those two communities

Nobody likes to shout into the void. The second one helps finding people to help you grow your communities.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people's apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there's a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it's grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can't say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it's federated in pretense only, there isn't another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn't stopped growing. It hasn't exploded but we're not complaining about where we are, are we.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I definitely get burnt out on it faster when half my front page is meta posts. I don't have time to curate, I just want to see content that isn't about itself.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There needs to be a community tasked with advertising Lemmy on Reddit.

load more comments
view more: next ›