Link: https://survey.fedecan.ca//s/cmjcnqzgd0002th01dh6naqm6
The census will close on January 15th, 2026.
A lot has changed since our last census in 2023! We would like to take another opportunity to learn about our growing community.
Everyone is welcome to fill out this survey. You do not need to be located in Canada, and you do not need to have an account on one of our platforms. If you do have an account on lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, piefed.ca, and/or pixelfed.ca, you can indicate that on the census in order to be included in those separate graphs/visualizations.
No question is mandatory. You may skip any question by either selecting “no answer (skip this question)”, or by leaving the question blank. Some questions will be hidden depending on your selections. For example, the Pixelfed specific questions will be hidden if you don't select that as one of the platforms you use.
Sections:
- Section 1: Location
- Section 2: Demographics
- Section 3a: Instance Usage (Forum/Threadiverse)
- Section 3b: Instance Usage (Pixelfed)
- Section 4: Feedback / Closing questions
When results are ready, we will share them on our website and with posts on:
- !main@lemmy.ca
- !main@sh.itjust.works
- !main@piefed.ca
- A pinned post on pixelfed.ca
The questions were created with help from @Dave@lemmy.nz, based on the questions from their census this year :)
EDIT: We've made the links unclickable (see comments). The census is long, so I didn't want people to lose their progress near the end. The links are here:
Info got way too deep and personal only a few pages in, can't see a reason you need that info even if I select chose not to answer so just closed the survey.
That's fair!
We don't need it :)
Since the community on the fediverse is smaller than other social media platforms, the main goal of the census has been to create some graphs that people can look at. Since Lemmy (and Fediverse platforms in general) avoids collecting any data that isn't necessary for basic functionality, the census allows people to voluntarily share what they want to.
For example, when we first ran the census, we saw that the average user here is indeed older than on other platforms. Or how we have more users from British Columbia than we would expect based on population.
Then over time we adjusted the questions, and generally added more questions based on feedback that people were curious about more areas.
You can see some of those posts here:
https://lemmy.ca/search?q=census&type=Posts&listingType=All&communityId=2&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=true
I can also understand that people are generally cautious about giving out information these days, and we're always open to adjusting things based on feedback. Maybe we can add a question near the beginning to let people choose which sections to display?