PixelFed has increased the Fediverse's monthly active users by over 40% in the last few weeks, how do we feel?

1. The official Pixelfed app just has a nicer looking UI
2. There's not really a competing app for people leaving Insta like there is Bluesky vs Mastodon
3. Pixelfed's content is mostly visual so it's easily digestible to casual users and you don't have to scroll past dry Fedi arguments
4. Better discover features so users don't have to do a bunch of legwork to find who to follow

Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time

The tide lifts all the boats... there is also a noticeable uptick in Lemmy registrations, at least here on our instance.

We can't want the Fediverse to get bigger but be scared of normies when it does. I say welcome in! We should be mindful to listen to the new recruits, because their feedback is the most unbiased.

So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:

The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It's kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it's felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I'll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.

People don't seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I've literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being "too complicated" to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see "this place is great and all, but..." posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I'd estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they're unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether...

Pixelfed is easily the most diverse "corner" of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren't. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.

I've seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as "Global Switch Day" so hopefully it'll keep blowing up.

Glad to see more people introduced to the tech bro free social media.

Lemmy is full of bad news, hate and toxicity while pixelfed is full of artists and people sharing cool pictures and their passion. Visiting my pixelfed account from 2023 a few days ago set such a contrast with what I see on lemmy that I started using it regularly. It really felt weird to visit such a wholesome place after using lemmy for a long time. Now I use pixelfed to balance out the bad stuff from lemmy for maintaining my mental health and to appreciate the art which is not common on lemmy.

Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?

I suspect image browsing is less reliant on specific content creators, so Pixelfed probably has an advantage there compared to something like Mastodon. You're only going to move to Mastodon if the people you wanna follow are there too, while if you're for example just looking to browse pictures of food and cats you don't really care who is posting so you're not as reluctant to try Pixelfed.

I don't use either Instagram or Pixelfed though so might be totally off base here.

I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.

Corporations have learned long ago the importance of properly identifying your audience, and the Fediverse is not exempt from that rule. Lemmy is the Fediverse version of Reddit and Mastodon is the Fediverse version of Twitter, and just like these two giants could live together with each other and also with Instagram without stepping on each other's toes, so do their Fediverse versions can live with the Fediverse version of Instagram, PixelFed.

Now we're just missing a Fediverse version of Facebook.

that's cool, what's the furry instance

I'm excited. I'm one of those users, but I haven't used it much because I can't find followers. To be fair, I never used Instagram. I like the fediverse, I usually see the same articles get sent through other centralized communities other than reddit (tildes, hacker news, etc), but I enjoy the community discussion the best around here.

Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?

Yes. The interface is good and familiar. The majority of the traffic is on one namespace where discoverability is good. Because of the nature of the medium, getting started with no algorithm is a lot easier to stomach than just looking at what your local people have to say.

This is not to bash Mastodon, but they need that algo, which is why Bluesky is hoovering up users. Also, their UI, depending on the server is more tweetdeckish, which might scare off a lot of casuals.

edit: I've been informed the bsky has no algo, so somehow they seem to be getting better results in discover, perhaps single name space or perhaps they have something behind the hood.

Also, to start with, all the journalists FLOODED info, Mastodon, without any algo; you just got a hundred wordsmiths screaming past each other and they all immediately followed each other, so you couldn't just find people like Jeff Jarvis, you got to see everyone he had a professional experience of which is WAY more than anyone is prepared to read :)

Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?

On this topic I just want to point out the microblog format with twitter even BEFORE musk bought it had gotten very cold, harsh and toxic.

As a result the most positive thing you can say about people's feelings about microblogging is that they are bored of it (in terms of it having inspiring potential) even if they use it daily themselves and like it.

I don't think that is fair to mastodon or microblogging, it is just how the ships happened to sink as they crashed into the reef.

I say this all to emphasize that it is ok for mastodon not to get hit by massive hypecycles. Mastodon is useful and awesome, if people see it is as boring I say let that be a compliment because that means people are beginning to slowly trust the medium again.

Twitter/musk made people REALLY sad about microblogging and it is going to take time for people to get excited about it again like they do for the 'grams and the 'toks.

First time i have posted on anything resembling insta in 111 weeks

I wonder how many of those users are the same person with multiple accounts on different platforms.

Don't wanna throw cold water on what should be a celebration, but are these all distinct active users? I have separate accounts on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, and Loops--do I still count as one active user, or am I four? If the latter, I think it's plenty likely that others like me have simply gotten used to the first fedi platform they chose and are branching out as they learn about more. Maybe doesn't account for all the growth, but would explain away some of the meteoric rise.

I know I can Kagi or duckduckgo it or whatever you people are using these days, but what is PixelFed and what's it an alternative to? News aggregators aside, I don't social media so I'm not sure if it's a tiktok or instagram or whatsapp or faceplace.

It's quite good, in my opinion. If we had some bridge to lemmy's posts, it would be even better. Also I've checked and if you like or comment a mastodon post from Pixelfed you'll receive the notification, so, it's something🤷‍♂️.

Nothing works on pixelfee for me. Half the photos are just black. It shows an account has a lot of posts, but I don't see anything. Searches being up results but selecting one of those results produces zero results.

How are y'all getting pixelfed to work?

Its' pretty great.

As with the time I joined Mastodon, it takes a couple of weeks to find what you like and build up a good feed, but once you do that, it's useful and fun. I wish it had more curation tools, but I enjoy it.

Is there a way to peruse pixelfed feeds from Lemmy or Mastodon? Or do I have to make yet another account?

The mood and anger here is starting to feel like Reddit recently and now I know why

I find it sort of shocking that you didn't think people who use different types of social media would be swayed by non-micro blogging specific platforms. Nobody wants to join the fediverse because it's the fediverse. They want to join something that's fun and similar to what they're used to.

Micro blogging sucks. I hate it. I've always hated Twitter and none of that hate has come from anything related to who has owned it or their policies. I've just genuinely never felt a desire to communicate with 280 characters (historically 140). The discussion threads are also garbage and all over the place. Why would someone who is used to platforms like Reddit or Instagram want to use Mastodon?

Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?

Yes, it's done "not be a micro blogging platform".

I'm aware Mastodon doesn't always have the same character limits that Twitter does, but that's apart from the point.

Lemmy can't federate with pixelfed yet can it? I know we have some integration with mastodon, but I'm guessing we can't connect to pixelfed directly yet?

If it brings more diversity, I’m all for it. If it makes it even more super left psycho Echo chamber-y then it will just be annoying.

Need better flagship app tbh. Pixelix is better imo but its 5bucks on playstore and sideloading on my current main phone is a hassle :/

More users isn't necessarily good.

Every time there's an influx from whatever shit storm we retain about 20%.

Still no funny content so disappointed

It's barely news worthy. Small mostly unknown service gains 400,000 new accounts. Ok. 400k.

Instagram apperently has 4 BILLION accounts, with 143 MILLION monthly users.

400K sounds great, until you compare it to the pie. It went from less then 1% to less than 1%.

Growth is great and all, but since it's January, I'd rather see a retrospective of where they stood on Jan 1st 2024, and where they stood on Jan 1st 2025. With a detailed analysis on all the fluctuations (which at this point I would assume to be nothing but upwards) but also, what caused each event.

But hearing a single month, with an influx of 400k seems like a non-story, and won't be interesting until Jan 2026 when we get the 2025 retrospective. And we put into context that this was when meta decided to go all political, and ban searches for "democrats", and the whole drama with tiktok.