Looks pretty normal. Pixelfed has been hyped. So a bunch of people try it out for a short while, but leave again. some stay.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Happened to Lemmy 2 years ago, but there's still more than enough of you ladies and gents to keep it as my only social media app :)
This is to be expected. The same thing happened with Lemmy, several times. I had a bunch of signups on social.photo; however, the new people that signed up aren't very active. I think a lot of people were just trying it out and weren't impressed.
Yeah this is looking to be a really good growth period. Pixelfed went from 15K in late December to a peak of 300K plus, and if it levels out at 150K that's decent. I don't think you want to suddenly grow too fast on a fediverse platform with a single part-time developer who's also (singlehandedly?) running the main instance.
One thing I wonder is: how many of those people were already active on other fediverse platforms...
I doubt many are from other fediverse platforms. Pixelfed has been well known for a while. There are a lot of sharp edges running a Pixelfed server. He's stretched himself thin with all these projects. They need more love for sure.
This is pretty normal. Every time there's a big wave of new fediverse users, a big chunk eventually goes back to their original social media. Some portion will stick around to be regular users and the cycle will repeat again next time a social media company pisses off a bunch of people.
I’ve enjoyed Pixelfed a lot more than I thought I would. I feel like the same principle applies to follow tags that you are interested in to make sure you feed has content that interests you. A lot of the same content surfaces on both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts as I follow the same hashtags on both. I did discover a few accounts on Pixelfed that I wouldn’t have if I just stayed on Mastodon though.
My biggest gripes with Pixelfed is that the app sucks. And the content I’d be most interested in seeing (pictures of my friends and family) aren’t on there. Probably because of reason 1 and because meta platforms aren’t as a big of pain point for them as they are for me
I use Impressia for Pixelfed. It’s pretty good.
I threw up my own Pixelfed instance. It was awful. I'm much happier with GoToSocial.
Plus I'm yet to run into a single person I actually know IRL on the fedi.
Plus I'm yet to run into a single person I actually know IRL on the fedi.
Is that a normal metric for monolithic social media?
monolithic social media
I...don't know what that means?
Lemmy is optimal for chatting with random people. If I want to share personal things, I prefer to do that with people I actually know.
Monolithic as in Twitter, Reddit, Facebook - platforms that do not federate.
Is that a normal metric for monolithic social media?
Maybe not for you. For me, I use social media as a way to sew and cultivate personal relationships. Someone I know posts something interesting and I might pick up the phone and call them and talk about it or we discuss it the next time we see each other. Or maybe there's a local event that someone shares and looks fun and I ask to join them.
Almost all social apps are about algorithmic feed suggesting content from people you don't know. Facebook is one of the few app that are still about personal connection. I can't remember a single person i interacted with usernames on apps like lemmy
That sounds lovely but it's not been my experience of using social media (except Facebook). I'm not suggesting my experience is normal, or that yours is. I genuinely don't know.
I couldn't care less about what's happening in the lives of celebrities or companies, or the unsupported political opinions of random strangers, but I guess I'm a weirdo in that way.
I tend to use things like Pixelfed to find people interested in the same hobbies. Mastodon I use more for general nerding out.
I wasn't intending to criticise your use-case. I don't know what normal usage patterns look like.
Yeah I wasn't trying to accuse you of that, just pointing out why I don't care much for these types of platforms in general.
I mean, you could mention the fediverse to people you know IRL and get them to join.
But I've only done that a handful of times, quite ineffectively, so I can't presume to judge you.
I've only done that a handful of times, quite ineffectively
Same.
Instagram is mostly influencer driven. The lack of which will get idolaters bored of pixelfed and move back to the zucks.
What caused the jump in the first place? I only just opened an account myself because the folks who run my home instance lemmy.ca started up pixelfed.ca about a week ago and I decided to check it out.
The official Pixelfed app released and I also think the whole TikTok ban had something to do with it.
Ah ok, thanks!
I tried it out after the Instagram censorship and while I haven't been back to Instagram, I also gave up on Pixelfed the 4th time I had to log in.
Is there a dark mode yet??
So far no dark mode yet
I'll wait it out, then. I'd love to use it for obvious reasons
I use firefox to log into pixelfed, dark mode works on that. (Dark Mode Reader extension fwiw). haven't tried it on firefox android tho.
As expected, after growing and plateauing, pixelfed's number of Monthly Active Users is now ebbing. If I understand the MAU stat correctly, this is because
- users who posted/liked/commented over a month ago haven't done so since (retention)
- new users haven't been checking it out as much -- a month ago this was driven by external events (mostly Zuck turning pro-Trump, I think.)
As far as retention, I'm rooting for 200K+ but it looks like it might be around 150K. If I understand the Monthly Active User stat correctly, the line's going down because (a) new users have stopped joining as much and (b) people who posted/liked/commented over a month ago haven't done so since. I'm guessing that people who do this professionally have some kind of data-driven model that compares the ebb rate with the earlier ~~decline~~ growth rate, and has sample curves from previous social media growth periods. Just by eyeballing it, looks like over the last week pixelfed has lost like 10-20k users per day, whereas the month before the growth rate was around 40k per day.
As far as external events, John Oliver briefly flashed the Pixelfed logo on screen this Sunday, maybe that's why the ebb was only 7k yesterday (a day or two to download and check things out before interacting?) Hey, people like 50501 are promoting boycotts of Amazon, Target, etc. maybe we should suggest boycotts of corporate social media? 50501 is organizing on r$ddit so I doubt they'd go for a complete boycott, but maybe it could be an "explore alternatives" or "bug out plan for social media" day or something.
All things considered, it's not yet falling off as quickly as I would have expected, maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember Lemmy had a harder crash after the first reddit exodus, as did mastodon several times, when people fled xitter.
I seem to remember Lemmy had a harder crash
iirc during the r$ddit API debacle, Lemmy went from 1000 MAUs (40 MAU for kbin) to a peak of around 70k then down to around 38k MAUs (lemmy + kbin). However I think this was only counting posts and comments as "activity", I think it was around March 2024 they started counting up/downvotes as well and the MAUs stabilized in the lower 40ks for the rest of the year and is now slowly rising.
new users haven't been checking it out as much -- a month ago this was driven by external events (mostly Zuck turning pro-Trump, I think.)
A lot of users came over from TikTok too. There was a more organized TikTok campaign to get people to move to Pixelfed. Plus the ban and removal from stores gave people a bigger push to move.
I am not gonna lie, I tried two or three separate times and was never able to get a sign up email to go through from multiple instances. I don't know if Gmail has been black-holing them all to protect their interests or not, but I pretty much gave up.
Has the code been completely open sourced? I haven't been following that very closely
Pixelfed has always been fully opensource (and Libre) and there has been fully open source clients, like Pixeldroid, for a long time. The new iPhone app which used the name of the network made things confusing unfortunately.
For lots of people it'll be less confusing. They open their app store and search for this Pixelfed they've heard of and find an official app. That's what they expect.
Ah, right, I mistook it for Loops!
It deserves it. That software works SO poorly right now. I went to edit a post I made and it crashed the app. Figuring that was a fluke, I tried again and it crashed the whole app every single time without fail.
Another time, I tried to post a video that was cropped to Loops and IT LOST MY ACCOUNT PERMANENTLY and won’t let me use that username anymore. Guess I don’t need a Loops account anymore? 🤷♂️. Tech support was nonexistent so I just wait until hopefully the dev gets his head out of his ass long enough to fix his buggy, shit software that makes the rest of the fediverse seem like dumbasses.
The best part: the sole dev of both of these apps doesn’t think he needs any help and refuses to open source them. The Kobe Bryant quintessential ball hog of software engineering.
the sole dev of both of these apps doesn’t think he needs any help and refuses to open source them.
Oof, that sucks. Seems like someone else needs to create an open source alternative app. The platforms themselves are libre software, right? I couldn't find a lot for loops on that, but Pixelfed itself seems to be.