Fediverse seems like its stabilizing: https://fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
(and these are the servers that allow the crawler from the observer, so its highly likely the numbers are much larger).
We are seeing:
- A small decrease in users on Lemmy: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=365
- And a small increase on Piefed: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=365
- Peertube is up in total users and stabilizing in active users: https://peertube.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=365
- Mastodon is all over the place: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=365
Overall pretty good! Keeping the momentum going. Thanks everyone, whichever platform/instance you hail from!
And I used it since ~2007. Sure, I'll concede that OC existed back then, but expectations/standards were far lower. Simply starting topics or a meme template that hadn't been done before were fine, often times even hailed. Two broken arms, jollyrancher, coconut, whatever other gross ass viral thing weren't even pictures/videos, they were comments and/or text posts. They became Reddit legends/mythos/lore, regardless.
Anyway, that type of OC isn't going to invigorate the masses like it used to. Any of those stories nowadays would be met with heavy cynicism/skepticism (rightfully so, I might add). I guess my point is, Lemmy has only been somewhat known for a couple of years. It takes a lot of time to build momentum. Reddit continues to enshittify ever further, just like Digg did. Times are different now, there's a fuckton of competition in this type of social media format. What will make it successful is hard to say for certainty. I think sticking to link aggregation and topical discussions is a good start.
I agree that the standards were lower. That resulted in a lot of fun because things were easier. It would be harder to gain momentum that way now.
The thing about link aggregation is that it can be done on any platform. You can post links to Piefed, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr along with all mainstream sites. So why choose Lemmy over them?
The difference will be the OC. If users don't want to put in the work for it then people who join will get bored and move on.
I'll read comments on Reddit talking about Lemmy. Users will say they tried Lemmy but there was no interest/posts/discussion in their niche communities so they ended up back on Reddit.
We'll see what happens I guess.