Yeah this is looking to be a really good growth period. Pixelfed went from 15K in late December to a peak of 300K plus, and if it levels out at 150K that’s decent. I don’t think you want to suddenly grow too fast on a fediverse platform with a single part-time developer who’s also (singlehandedly?) running the main instance.
One thing I wonder is: how many of those people were already active on other fediverse platforms…
As expected, after growing and plateauing, pixelfed’s number of Monthly Active Users is now ebbing. If I understand the MAU stat correctly, this is because
As far as retention, I’m rooting for 200K+ but it looks like it might be around 150K. If I understand the Monthly Active User stat correctly, the line’s going down because (a) new users have stopped joining as much and (b) people who posted/liked/commented over a month ago haven’t done so since. I’m guessing that people who do this professionally have some kind of data-driven model that compares the ebb rate with the earlier decline growth rate, and has sample curves from previous social media growth periods. Just by eyeballing it, looks like over the last week pixelfed has lost like 10-20k users per day, whereas the month before the growth rate was around 40k per day.
As far as external events, John Oliver briefly flashed the Pixelfed logo on screen this Sunday, maybe that’s why the ebb was only 7k yesterday (a day or two to download and check things out before interacting?) Hey, people like 50501 are promoting boycotts of Amazon, Target, etc. maybe we should suggest boycotts of corporate social media? 50501 is organizing on r$ddit so I doubt they’d go for a complete boycott, but maybe it could be an “explore alternatives” or “bug out plan for social media” day or something.
Do we have a sense of what that dropoff from 2/11 to 2/12 is? At first I was thinking it might be that hexbear outage, but if I understand it right the MAU stat is robust against that. I was guessing it was some kind of data-processing artifact.