I honestly like the small, eclectic vibe better.

I don't know what the number is, but I'll arbitrarily say, anywhere under a quarter million is perfect.

I know the federation model provides a strength against the cascading list negatives that plague popular platforms, but I don't doubt that with a large enough user base, exploits would certainly seep in, particularly with ease of AI bot manipulation and astroturfing.

It reminds me of the Linux saying "security through obscurity".

Another top quality blazepost. Thanks for those community recos

Lemmy is the only Corporate social media replacement I've stuck to for years. I've never gone back to reddit. I don't need it. I like the vibes here and it's just busy enough to suit my needs without allowing me to doomscroll nonstop new content.

So what's going on here, most likely, is that the intake of new users is declining as opposed to people specifically being driven off the platform (as some users allege).

In the repost on the Chile community, also saw one or other comment about Lemmy being toxic. I do notice a certain "toxicity", though from certain corners and which seems to stems more often from what I call "misery posting", which would be posts whose main focus seems to be to make the given topic appear like a lost cause to the reader (even some "meme" communities seem to fall on this).

Since some communities seem specially prone for such posts, I second blocking those as you notice the patterns to try to make your feed healthier, and to hopefully make such places shrink into a healthier size. Or at least, if you got the patience and resistance to mass downvoting and mobbing, to post in those communities and within their rules what to you is positive. Alternatively/Parallel to that, one could make sure to react accordingly to posts, instead of uninterestedly hide everything in feed as the user scrolls.

Otherwise, a given environment shrinking or tanking in growth could also mean people that use it are growing apathetic or anomic to popularizing it, to which I repeat my suggestion in the Chile community, change starts by small steps. So for example, if someone is on a platform compatible by extension but without an ActivityPub bridge or function active (e.g. Threads and Bluesky), to explain to them they could activate it, and e.g. Fedi Brdigy is working on Lemmy compatibility, so more potential users going around. Also, if you see a funny meme or the sort, you could share the link, provided it has a decent blurb preview on the platform to be sent.

Also spikes happen anywhere when competing platforms have issues, so current retention might just be its natural one.

And even on a Lemmy account I have (thus little noise from microblogging) and while highly curating my feeds there, the amount of posts is almost too much for me to be able to go through. So by observation, the "threadiverse" as a whole seems rather healthy in numbers.

maybe the real problem is Nicole left us

There are dozens of dozens of dozens of dozens of us! Dozenses!

i'm no line expert but i see a teeny tiny downward trend

need to include places like piefed and mbin in this too; reddit is just reddit but here you can be either lemmy, piefed, or mbin and talk to one another.

Is the shitposting helping?

I'm curious to know what PieFed's user base would look like.

Most people simply don't know about Lemmy/PieFed.

I think once features mature a bit more, if there is another rexit we could see numbers tripple or more.

Many people didn't stick around with previous rexit's because the UX sucked.

Woo we staying!

Also anyone know how to use their API? https://api.fediverse.observer/

I would love to make a "treadiverse" combo line. Cause its hard to look at when piefed is slowly going up, lemmy is slowly going down, and m/k bin is going all over.

EDIT: Never mind, found it. Theres an icon on the right hand side.

My problem right now is I'm on Fedia.io and I'm liking the interface, but more and more, what used to be other instances popping up in my feed, are disappearing, and I feel like I'm missing 1/2 the content that lemmy has to offer.

Mlem (iOS) doesn’t exactly consolidate comments across crossposts, but it does list, at the top, all of the crossposts, how many upvotes/comments each one has, and links directly to them. It also works across Lemmy, piefed, and Mbin accounts/instances.

Personally I still relate to the other graph. Lemmy posts can sometimes be much too focused on negative things, so I sometimes take pretty long breaks before coming back when it gets too depressing.

I'm completely new to Lemmy and fediverse in general. I wonder if there have been any initiatives to promote Lemmy more and help it attain the critical mass of people.

For exampe, having a Lemmy or Fediverse month, when the community attempts to advertise to friends that don't know about it yet. If a few of the main instances participate in this, I'm sure the community could come up with some great ideas for spreading the word.