You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
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.
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.
This is a good point. I’m pretty sure that if you’re active on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, or even have multiple active accounts on multiple instances of each of those (like a lot of people do), each single one of those would count as a separate active user. I really can’t think of any way that this wouldn’t be the case, because how would the statistics servers know that your the same person?