I’m tired of this question asked.

You’ll know it’s big and popular when it is talked about and has thousands flocked to it.

more popular, and more problems that come with popularity. like a continual slide in content quality.

What i notice the most the past year is a huge uptick in ragebait and doombait posting. some larger communities are like 95% nothing but click-farming headlines and users trying to one-up each other in how raging and hateful their comments are.

even a lot of the lighthearted stuff, like memes and showerthoughts, 90% of the posts are just doomerbait.

You can have a poke around at !fediverse@lemmy.world but actual stats seem elusive, although I didn’t try hard, in server search is bad (although Kagi now does it, might have better luck there).

I found this about 200K lemmy.world users, and in it was a graph from fedidb.com, which is 3 weeks later ‘server error’, but indicates MAU are much lower, 14.5K a year ago and 12.5k recently. That’s just one (large) server, might mean diaspora which would be good, but seems to indicate stable-ish with slow decline.

I am sanguine, quite like the types that have washed up on this shore, good enough for this person to use.

I’ve been here for 10 months, and from what I can tell (who knows if my perception is correct), the Fediverse and Lemmy are gaining popularity (or maybe I’m just slowly learning how to use them properly… that’s also possible xD). Here’s how I came to that conclusion: When I first joined, popular posts on world would get a few hundred upvotes. Now, they often get more than a thousand. It’s not a massive surge, but if we assume these are the posts that get the most views, then either interest is growing or the user base is expanding.

Are you asking how the popularity of lemmy and piefed combined changes over time, or how the 2 compare vs each other? I see that responses assume the first… and I don’t know the answer to the second.

To me it feels like about the same over time. There is some life in the bigger generic communities but most specialized communities I subscribed to remain dead.

It’s like an ‘old school forum yet to be discovered kinda thing’ for me. I like it

If user graphs are to be believed then it is more popular since reddit killed 3rd party apps.

I have nothing to back this up, only personal experience: It just feels a bit of the same. Though with somewhat more hostile people here and there.

Lemmy is more active link

Lemmy has grown more accounts but monthly active users has slightly dropped.

Piefed used to have a history, but it appears to be gone. Piefed has been slowly dieing due to terrible design decisions by the guy that runs majority of it.