why is always Bluesky on top of these lists, better marketing?
It’s Twitter 2.0. It’s what the average person wants. It’s popular because it has algorithms and all the other addictive things from corporate social media.
Mastodon and others don’t have these things and are harder to get started with. Picking a server is weird and scary. After that, getting your home feed started is difficult if you don’t know to just follow some hashtags.
Picking a server is weird and scary.
As a scientist, I would be cautious of inferring the reason and beating ourselves up for it until we have crystal clear proof that that is the specific thing that’s turning people away.
Not that one thing alone, obviously. But it’s a big part of it.
We can call it a hypothesis if that helps.
I don’t think we need a full-on study to show that an additional barrier to entry hurts adoption.
It’s no different than signing up for an email account
Email? Do you mean Gmail?
Plus, you could pick a server that quashes free speech (looking at you .world)
(Yes. I know I’m guilty too)
Even then like, I don’t know. I don’t want my feed to be strictly chronological. For stuff like Twitter-likes and TikTok-likes I want an algorithm. I don’t want to be on there all the time, and I don’t want it to be my only form of social media. But when I do go on there I want an algorithm to serve me some slop that I don’t even know that I want but actually do.
For stuff like Twitter-likes and TikTok-likes I want an algorithm.
Until recommendation algorithms are transparent and auditable, choosing to use a private service with a recommendation algorithm is giving some random social media owner the control of the attention of millions of people.
Curate your own feed, subscribe to people that you find interesting, go and find content through your social contacts.
Don’t fall into the trap of letting someone (ex: Elon Musk) choose 95% of what you see and hear.
Algorithmic recommendations CAN be good. But when they’re privately owned and closed to public inspection, then there is no guarantee that they’re working in your best interest.
Better marketing, better UI, lots of users, and plenty of non-political content.
Fediverse is intimidating to normies.
“Email is hard!”
What’s non-political content, Lemmy?
Closest thing we have is people really hating Windows.
As is reasonable
The cat pictures community mostly.
Non-political Lemmy is… Bluesky?
In November last year, Bluesky had more than 3 million daily users in the US alone. According to fedidb, the Fediverse as a whole has 1.5 million monthly users globally.
Just FYI, fedidb is wildly wrong on the numbers lately. You may want a different source.
For example, there are instances on GoToSocial that have 2-3 users showing up with thousands on fedidb EX: https://fedidb.org/network/instance/s.scintilla.social. And some lemmy servers show up multiple times on their statistics.
Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?
Wish I did! I know lemmy has https://lemmyverse.net/ which seems accurate. Maybe others can chime in?
Ive been keeping my eye on fedidb for a time, after they stated we had over 12 million users…then it dropped off to 11 almost overnight. It did some retroactive counting. I then looked at software in general and found they are not counting things correctly. Some things overestimating wildly (like the example above) and some its not indexing at all.
I guess there’s also Fediverse Observer: https://fediverse.observer/stats
They put the whole Fediverse at 1.38M active, so a bit lower than Fedidb. Might be more accurate.
Interesting. I hope so.
I cant find GotoSocial so I cant check the above server I used as an example. However I do have a couple of servers. Let me see if they show up.
EDIT: Looks like its MUCH more accurate on one of the servers I maintain. However im seeing a couple of servers not showing up:
- The # of active members is correct on the mastodon server.
- Peertube server is correct as well.
- Pixelfed is correct.
- Lemmy.world has 17.8K users / month on the sidebar and the website states: 17841 users. So that also looks correct.
- However the GoToSocial site that is my families is not showing up. And its definitely federated.
- s.scintilla.social also does not show up on the site. Again leading me to believe it might be something to do with GoToSocial here.
So it might still be having issues with GoToSocial OR GoToSocial might be the odd one out. It is much better though.
It seems GoToSocial comes with some reservations against being crawled, which is why fedidb had to update their robots.txt. So it might not be included here by design.
Or at least that’s the impression I get from this comment section: https://piefed.social/post/496750
It’ll be interesting to see what’s going on with today’s bump in users. I’m afraid you might be right about the reliability, but then again the GoToSocial instance you linked earlier has now been removed.
Here’s a Peertube mirror, timestamped at the shout-out to Mastodon and Peertube:
https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS?start=25m14s
