PieFed is seeing quite steady growth, nice to see.
Anyone know what that blip was?
He-he!
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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The recent downtrend was 1 month since the big upswing - many people make an account, try it for a few minutes and then don't come back. But these stats are monthly active users so people like that stay in the stats for a long time and don't get removed from the count until 1 month later.
Halfway through that cycle https://fedinsfw.app/ was launched and that's the second wave of growth.
Hey, aren't you that guy who develops that porn site?
My goodness, I hadn't realized how big fedinsfw.app had become. It's now easily the biggest piefed instance with almost 2x the MAU of piefed.social.
The internet is in fact for porn
Jimmy Carr jokes how he calls the internet "the pornography." As in, "did you know they have Piefed on the pornography now?"
I recently looked at the graph and server list (that has server/instance sizes/MAU) from the same source.
The first growth spike ended up growing Piefed MAU 50% (~1000 MAU) after accounting for the decreased MAU the following month.
The rest of the growth (~2700 MAU) to current MAU is Lemmy porn instance moving to fedinsfw.app.
So wait, is this just people through Piefed, or does this encompass Lemmy and like the other members of the fediverse?
Sorry for the dumb question, I'm from Reddit and tbh don't quite understand this service.
This graph is PieFed by itself, Lemmy is still the majority of the users here
I am a refuge from reddit, as I understand it, incompletely, lemmy is it's own thing, piefed is a new one, with some differences in moderation and moderator tools. Lemmy has a lot of tankie influence is a big factor, communists, they are kind of dicks, to put it lightly.
I think there is a third one too, they can all talk to each other on here.
Lemmy has a lot of tankie influence is a big factor, communists, they are kind of dicks, to put it lightly.
This is why I've moved away from Lemmy and now do my monthly donations to Piefed.
Thank you for your contributions, SatansMaggotyCumFart
Yup. I actually pulled my Lemmy donations when Nutomic started his begging campaign last year with his "come on guys my kids need to eat" sob story while still refusing to actually apologize for his transphobia and still defending Dessalines problematic... Everything.
Fucking dumpster fire. Piefed is the way
My first account on my first day or so I said something on one of their threads, thinking they were just super politically correct leftists, and they jumped all over me. Followed me around for months, the entire time I was on that instance really, some made non tankie instance accounts just to troll me. Pathetic really, but I got sick of it, I can give better than they can but I don't want to get in pissing matches with trolls all the time.
They've actually never followed me out of their echo chambers I think because the light it bright and it hurts their eyes.
You see, I didn't know they were communists, so didn't see why they would be offended by my comment, so defended it, like 50 replies if not more to hundreds of comments from multiple users jumping on my shit, until one of the cool ones explained to me they were communists mostly living outside the US, so I started ignoring them. But one of their enforcer types demanded I apologize and I told him to eat a dick or something, so that didn't help.
Lemmy is software. PieFed is software. And they have the same content. Okay, people hate the email comparison, but I'm gonna make one anyway :)
So: Google has programmed a web service that receives and sends so called emails for its users. And then another company, called Microsoft, has programmed another web service, that receives and sends those emails as well. "Email" is not a product of either Google or Microsoft. Email is not even software. Email is kind of... Nothing. It's just a protocol. Email as a concept is just the data that travels between various email servers. Email is nothing more than an agreed-upon standard that various web servers programmed by a lot of different teams are all able to interpret more or less in the same manner.
The word for that is protocol. Email is not a program programmed by either Google or Microsoft. Email is a protocol.
And the same goes with this thing called ActivityPub. PieFed is one server software, programmed by a certain Rimu.
And then Lemmy is another server software.
...written by a Marxist-Maoist person who likes supporting various genocides because authoritarianism is awesomeness or something.
And then there's also MBin. And bunch of other similar server softwares. This conversation we are now having is being relayed to the world by a server in the address http://piefed.social/. It basically shouts out all the activity that takes place under this post to whatever server cares to listen. And then the other server can replicate the content.
The "shouting out all activity" is done using a protocol called ActivityPub.
So, here's this very conversation you are reading, seen from:
- A PieFed server at http://anarchist.nexus/
- A Lemmy server at http://sopuli.xyz/
- An MBin server at http://kbin.melroy.org/
- A Lemmy server at http://lemmy.world/
- A PieFed server at http://piefed.blahaj.zone/
As you can see, each of the links points to a different server. But it's still the precisely same content.
When it comes to moderation: The admin on anarchist.nexus can only moderate stuff that is either:
- published by users of that server
- published in communities hosted on that server
- plus: if the owner of some community has appointed them as a moderator on that specific community, then also there.
If a user from lemmy.ml is being an ass on a community hosted on kbin.melroy.org, the admin of anarchist.nexus cannot really do much anything at all about them. However, they can completely severe the connection to either of those two servers. That is called defederation. For example, many servers have indeed defederated from lemmy.ml, because the admins of that server allow their users to behave like asses towards people living under occupations by authoritarian colonial empires. And either you basically give those people free reign, or you severe the connection to the offending server. Users of servers that have defederated lemmy.ml have a much better experience, because they miss most of the tankie content. And people who are not pro-authoritarianism don't really have any reason to stay on that server, so they tend to migrate to something that is okay with the concept of human rights.
For example piefed.social ~~has defederated from lemmy.ml~~ (EDIT: correction, no, it hasn't But it has defederated from two instances that are even worse). That means, you are very unlikely to see tankie shit in the comments of this post. Anything coming from communities hosted on piefed.social (such as this one is!) or from users on piefed.social is invisible for users of lemmy.ml. And the other way around.
It's a very interesting way to do moderation: You either moderate your server's users in a sensible way, or your server gets cut off by other servers.
Defederations are done on a per-server basis. That means, comment chains can look very different depending on where you're reading it from. Piefed.zip does federate with lemmy.ml, so a community running on piefed.zip is able to have comments from users of lemmy.ml. But a user of piefed.social will not see the comments made by users of lemmy.ml – nor any replies to them! That's why many people don't like to reply to users from lemmy.ml: A lot of people will be unable to see your reply! If you want to say something to a user on lemmy.ml, better write a top-level comment and tag them. Of course, any replies to their comment is invisible for a huge share of Fediverse readers.
A detail: Piefed.social has not defederated from lemmy.ml. It has defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear though.
I was against any sort of censorship of other groups, until I got a taste of those guys, not just .ml, the worst are hexbear in my experience. The thing is a lot of their users are actually cool, but there is like a hierarchy, it's not a collective so much as a top down operation, with enforcers or sorts. Their users need permission to accept a new theory on something.
But you can have some good conversations, until the enforcers notice you again.
You almost have to cut these guys off, there's a danger doing that to too many groups over disagreements and making echo chambers, but as others pointed out, not defederating has led new users to be chased off the site after being abused by those dickheads.
I think there is a third one too, they can all talk to each other on here.
Mbin is the other big one. Also NodeBB has recently started federating with the Threadiverse too.
This is just piefed, not including Lemmy users.
I'm curious, did anything in particular cause the sudden spike in January?
Your username might be the answer to that
I made a bunch of posts on reddit that got ~500k+ views in total.
See fedibridge to see the posts
Reddit admin didn't find bs to violate you for? They are on my ass. Not permabanned, but within a few days now I get a violation for something that isn't even against the rules, not even close, if I make a new account.
They did in the right communities.
What do you mean?
The OP promoted piefed in like r/buyfromeu, r/degoogle and r/buyfromcanada. They got majorly upvoted and thus directed traffic to here.
I joined because of one of these posts in r/buyfromeu
Others have said even mentioning lemmy gets them targeted by administration. Come to think of it, so did I my last new account that only made it less than a week before a violation for something that wasn't even close to against the rules. But it could be a lot of things with me, I'm rather aggressive on some issues, Israel the big one, but also trashing politicians, none of which is getting tolerated as much anymore. I'm probably on the list of the administration of people to bump off social media. Sounds paranoid but I bet I'm right, but I digress.
I've mentioned the Fediverse many times on Reddit and have never been targeted.
I learned about lemmy on reddit. Maybe everyone is getting targeted for other reasons. One thing is for sure, the administration violations are not always in good faith, not by a long shot.
I'm not sure about the blip.
As I recall, ICE was receiving a lot of media attention over the killing of Renee Good, and that was followed with the killing of Alex Pretti. Reddit was accused of running ICE ads on its platform, and there was a backlash amongst its users.
If this backlash is part of the blip, then the following plateau is curious. Was that some kind of intervention by Reddit, and what exactly is that? Retraction of the ads? Soft-Censorship? It sounds like Reddit actively polices efforts to draw users off the platform.
No, Ek-Hou-Van-Braai did multiple effective advertisements in February, caused a flood of new users specifically to piefed.social and piefed.ca in particular, but obviously after the month ticked by, a bunch of accounts were one and done. As is the way anywhere. Hence the decline.
The recent spike is the emergence of fedinsfw.app which is the successor to the closed lemmynsfw.com
Good stuff!
10 K MAU is the next target!