Ask Lemmy

At a rough glance, it looks like PieFed's active users went up by roughly the same number as Lemmy's went down!

Although that's just the last couple of months - on top of that, the "Threadiverse" (including Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, and flarum, though the wider "Fediverse" also includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other stuff that isn't based on community forums like we do here; note from here on I'll focus exclusively on Lemmy) activity has been going down for quite awhile now, basically since the Rexodus.

According to people talking on r/Redditalternatives, Lemmy just isn't interesting enough. Before Blaze's (and others) heroic efforts to counteract it, previously the other top reason was that it was too confusing to have to pick an instance first before signing up (which is a legitimate thing for Mastodon even if not so much for Lemmy).

I get it: not everyone uses Arch Linux and hates Windows hard enough for this audience. Purity beatings will continue until morale improves.

Also Lemmy can be so incredibly toxic - sharing any kind of nuance will almost certainly be lost in the flood of people piling on not even for what someone says but if it sounds vaguely like something else that is popular to hate on. Argumentative people are just looking for excuses to argue, period. You personally have helped with that a ton, thank you so much for caring and sharing positivity vibes 😽❣️!! You are helping people not want to leave and go back to Reddit (which sounds odd I know, but remember that the tiny niche subs there really are different than the larger ones, and people can be much kinder in them than the more popular subs there, or the more popular communities here).