Hey, I am relatively new to the federated web and I only use lemmy currently. But I love the idea of an alternative social web ecosystem that is not ruled by big corporations. To see how the fediverse has developed in 2020 I decided to look into the stats (stats go from 2nd January 2020 til today) over at https://the-federation.info/:
No. of nodes:
6043 --> 7849 (+29.9%)
Users per Node:
817 --> 840 (+2.8%)
No. of users:
3,597,652 --> 4,153,555 (+15.5%)
Active users (6 Months):
1,348,965 --> 1,175,150 (-12.9%)
Active users (1 Month):
476,457 --> 432,75 (-9.2%)
Active users ratio:
0.132 --> 0.104 (-21.2%)
So before I say something about these numbers I want to warn you that these numbers are not the really correct because not all instances of the fediverse are not correctly listed in these statistics. This might be for a variety of reasons but I guess most of the unlisted instances just want to stay under the radar. However, I still think that these stats can give us an indication how things are going in the federation.
If we look solely at the number of nodes (+30%) and registered users (+15.5%) we can see that these numbers have risen within the last year. It might not be incredible growth that indicates mainstream adoption but I think it is nothing to be concerned about.
However, if we look at the active user stats we can see that activity activity has steadily decreased over the year. It seems like we have lost roughly 13% of active users within this year.
Tbh I don't really know how to judge these numbers as I am pretty new to all of this. So I wanted to ask the users who have been here longer and might even use several federated services. Did you notice a decrease in activity? Is the fediverse healthy? If not, what might be the reason that the active user stats are on a downwards trend and how might we be able to change this?
I've been using Mastodon for a couple of years now and it's become significantly more active in that time from what I see anecdotally. That said, I'd say the key question for health is whether the community is big enough to support ongoing development and hosting. I think at this point the answer to both questions is a definite yes. There are millions of users in the Fediverse now, plenty of users are technical and are actively contributing.
I think we'll see active users fluctuate over time, but I don't see the core base of users abandoning Fediverse at this point because they've already established their social networks here.