The retention is bad because the new user experience is abysmal. It takes a lot of effort, even for a tech savvy user, to get Lemmy & Mastodon to a usable state. Most people are not going to do that and will churn out when there’s no interesting content and the app does weird things like shows you the same posts over and over, if you don’t manually change settings for things like “hide read posts” in Voyager.
Comment on Pixelfed's first plateau in progress
mtchristo@lemm.ee 2 days ago
The fediverse has had a very low retention rate. My bet is that after a year MAU will come down to 60k. That is if meta doesn’t embroil itself in another controversy.
pixelswarm@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 2 days ago
I can get about one user at a time, if I sit with them and explain it. The Fediverse is essentially the scene in Silicon Valley when Richard sits down with the focus group to explain to them for 3 hours how his software works. It’s really cool. It should be the way forward, but the masses have no idea how this works and don’t care to. They want a button to install. They want to search for their friend and find them immediately. I haven’t found any fediverse software that can just do that much, let alone everything else that’s expected.
commander@lemmings.world 1 day ago
Lemmy and mastodon have been very usable for me.
Peertube and friendica on the other hand…
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 days ago
Idk, Lemmy also inreased it's userbase by a factor of 30, mainly from a single event. It had like 1,500 MAU before summer 2023 and now we're at 45k. So I'd say it could be a bit more than your estimate.I kinda agree though, it'll stabilize at a lower number than during a hype period. And I hope we've learned from the past and drama that happened.
Sergio@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Dunno, from Fediverse Observer, it looks like lemmy and mastodon are growing slowly over the last couple weeks. (the mastodon stats look a little weird tho – there’s a plummet on Jan 30th that looks like a data collection artifact.)
Emperor@feddit.uk 2 days ago
There has definitely been an uptick in sign-ups - first around the Inauguration (despite being a UK instance) and then with Reddit’s pornmaggedon. In between it didn’t drop back down to the old rate in between. db0 have seen a.massive spike recently too.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 days ago
Though, I'd argue if we were awesome and had something truly nice to offer, we'd grow on our own. And not just if someone else messes up and becomes unbearable. But it's complicated.