756
Pixelfed user count has gone vertical.
(lemmy.world)
Editing to let people know that I will be blocking anyone who feels the need to tell me why this graph is inaccurate. I truly don't care, but feel free to chime in with your useless take and land a spot on my block list! 🙂
Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.
Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you've seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.
I don't think that either Mastodon or Lemmy slid back anywhere near as far as back to baseline? Sure, usage went down, perhaps even significantly compared to the peaks, but I think that both retained a lot more users than they had before their respective spikes. I'm an example of someone who came into Mastodon with the Twitter exodus and into Lemmy with the Reddit exodus, and I've stayed for both.
I don't mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.
Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg's meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.
@rglullis@communick.news tbh we shouldn't expect the adoption curve of any Fediverse software to be somewhat similar to the ones of centralised social networks, since Fediverse completely misses the commercial aspect that encourage key users to stay in the platform easing communities to stick to it as well. My guess is that without the action of commercial dynamics, the situation wouldn't be so different from the jumps-and-losses moments we're used to
ok, that's a fair point. But then this whole talk about "going vertical" and "exponential growth" is useless, and the only thing that we could (perhaps) try to take out of these mass migration events is to ask ourselves "would we able to reduce churn in the Fediverse without compromising on any principles?"
In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks? Does this mean that leaving Instagram and coming to PixelFed is the same as quitting unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and realizing that when you switch to a healthy diet you simply don't eat as much at all?
And if any of this is true, shouldn´t we change the effort from "leave Instagram and come to PixelFed" to "Leave Instagram and quit all social media"?