Fediverse

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.

Pixelfed's monthly userbase has gone from 15k to almost 300k in the past month. Absolutely massive for the fediverse.

I'll probably try it out eventually^TM^

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.

It's nice to see. I'd compare it to back when Lemmy was in the same situation and tens of thousands of users came from Reddit to Lemmy over night.

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🤷‍♂️.

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.

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

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

Great

I really wish it were more straightforward to deploy. It would be great to see many more instances popping up.

IG was always much bigger than Reddit.

Good to see people moving to Pixelfed though.

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.