this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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MAU vs UE (piefed.social)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by ozoned@piefed.social to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I know lots of folks are talking about Monthly Active Users when it comes to health of the Fediverse.

We use that to compare social medias and even ourselves, a social network, to each other.

I argue we should be focused on user engagement. I know LinkedIn has "impressions", but idk what that means.

So I wonder if there's a good way to generate this. Someone posting is the highest, commenting, subscribing, liking, disliking, and follow on down. I guess that would be a statistical model? But with diminishing returns. One SUPER ACTIVE ANNOYING poster does not a network make, but "media" it does.

I don't have a clue how this would work statistically. But I theorize, that while we're smaller MAU, our user engagement is significantly higher when population size is accounted for.

Is there any data anyone knows of to back this up or disapprove it? I'm pro small.social though, so maybe I'm wrong. Any data scientists in the Fediverse? :-D

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[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

MAU afaik is the easier number to find closer to actual engagement.

But I think engagement could be measured by (comments + votes + downvotes + boosts if available) / (number of posts).

However, size of a given instance, specially for smaller ones, may cause odd fluctuations, so standard deviation or a threshold of small/medium/large instances may be needed when ranking.

Also an instance that had a massive initial engagement metric, or an abysmal one, would have its overall score affected for quite a while, affecting the interpretation of others about its metrics. So to mitigate, maybe taking the numbers by time period may be better, e.g. one ranking for the past week, one for the month, one for the semester, one for the year, and one for all time.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

If my quickly written down SQL query is right, those are the numbers for the last month from my instance's perspective (my subscribed communities):

 num_comments | upvotes_on_posts | downvotes_on_posts | num_posts 
--------------+------------------+--------------------+-----------  
       188597 |          1646685 |              46461 |     13928

So without the boosts, it'd be a total score of 135.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Impressions" is the amount of time a piece of content was viewed. This is a key metric in advertising-based situations because you want to know the ratio of clicks on the thing vs how many impressions it has to judge how effective a bait it is.

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

" the amount of time" so is this by the minute? That's really gross imo and makes me want to stay off there even more. Thank you Fedica! :D

[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I was actually working on something to measure this today. I may have something for you tomorrow. Otherwise, it'll probably be next week.

Update: I've gotten all the servers (Mbin, Piefed, Lemmy) and the stats for each (users, comments, posts). I'll need to work to make that data into something useful.

Trivia: it takes about 6 minutes to request data from all ~300 servers.

Update 2: I found, I think, some interesting analyses (ex. retention efficiency, current vs. historical activity, etc.). Not sure how I'm going to fit 300 servers with 25-30 columns each in a post, though. Problem for next week.

Update 3: improved building the server list (now >500 servers) and found a couple more analyses that might be interesting. Working on the post script, finish tomorrow or Monday. Also, I've been grabbing the data daily so date/days could be another area of analysis.

Update 4: I have a plan for how to post the analysis, now just implementing it. May see the post tonight.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 3 points 1 month ago

Exciting!

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

AWESOME! Please don't hesitate to ping me! I'd love to share it when you're ready. <3 :)

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I guess with statistics, you'd always better ask a very specific question. I mean, these are just numbers, I guess? And if you're fixing an old Linux computer, there is no point in lots of people commenting on meme posts. You want the one person who's done this before to be part of the network, read your post and then reply... Or if you want to discuss politics, all the people re-posting the news articles on geopolitics don't really count, you've already read the newspaper, now you'd like nuanced opinions in the comments. I'm a bit unsure whether a single abstract number means anything.

For the health of the overall network, I think MAU isn't even all that bad. There's probably a strong connection between "health" of a place, and how many people think it's worth subscribing and then coming back on a regular basis.

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I agree with statement about statistics. But I disagree that if I'm fixing an old linux computer, and someone posts a meme, it's not what I wanted. What I personally want on the Fediverse, is human connection and interaction. So I think that's a wholly valid post. I'd like the answer, but I'm here to build bonds. I've met so many people I've talked with on the Fediverse, because I don't just want the answer. I want REAL conversation.

I agree if you're looking at health of a SERVER, MAU counts. But let's just take Lemmy. If we just look at lemmy.ml MAU doesn't begin to tell the whole picture of "LEMMY" and not "lemmy".

I was just talking with someone that compared it to pamphlet bombings. You have NO CLUE how many see it. It's more about how many SHOW UP. And I'd argue that "showing up" would look completely different even on Lemmy vs Mastodon vs Pixelfed vs anything else. So it seems like an INSANELY complex idea.

I want folks to feel GOOD about the future of the Fediverse. And these posts about "MAU" distract from the real point. I can't do anything about someone posting, I greatly appreciate the work, but I'd like to have a discussion about how we turn this value that has ZERO real world use on the Fediverse, and help pivot to how we can actually help grow our own communities in our own ways. :D

So I guess maybe the real problem is I just don't want to admit that MAU fluctuating might truly indicate the "health". But I love it no matter what. :)

Sorry, I'm an idealist and a romantic for the Fediverse. :D

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Totally agree. First of all with the Linux vs Meme... Yeah, we're all living in more than one dimension. Guess I more or less wanted to say, most helpful advice I got on what non-spec combinations of RAM and computers work etc... I got from Reddit. I think it's a bit an amount of users thing.

I'm also for human connection. I'm also here to talk to people. Especially in the comments. Also why I sometimes disagree with people on what the Threadiverse needs more of.

With the pamphlet bombings... Well, the internet changed a lot in my lifetime. We had times we thought it was a bit unethical to do statistics on what software you install, hence what packages in Debian are installed how many times. As a more privacy-oriented person you were told to just put it out there and not worry about collecting that kind of data... Or just write your Blog mainly for yourself and maybe some people will like it as well. I think as of today, that's very niche way of thinking. Thanks to the advertising industry, we need exact page impressions. And everyone expects social media to come with all these engagement metrics, how many people saw the post... Not only professional "influencers". I've heard random people will also have a look at the numbers. And your local youth organization also wants to know about the propagation of their invitation to the summer party. What the algorithm does to their posts, etc... Just counting how many people showed up isn't how communication works any more. At least in my experience.

I've upheld the opinion, the change in the MAU is probably a rough indicator on our attractiveness. If a place is nice, people will come and want to join the party. But it's a bit of a diffuse metric and doesn't tell anything in specific. Plus it's not the only factor.

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago

Incredibly profound. Thank you for sharing. :-)

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Similarweb reports a estimate of the total visits in a month. lemmy.world report says "520,592" total visits which is a lot (more then a website in my country i visit relatively frequently).

That of course does not indicate the quality of the interactions which is obviously important ( i still spend time on reddit, but the quality of interaction in youtube for example is better then reddit and even lemmy for me because it has actual experts in it TBH).

One way it is measured is by customer satisfaction, where for example for social media bluesky currently gets the highest score at least as measured by the ACSI. with pinterest and youtube in the second place. but the scores aren't that high (bluesky is at 82/100).

Other then that there are various awards, like the oscars or the emmy. Maybe we need a fediverse platform of the year award and fediverse instance of the year award. People could have to donate some money to vote so there won't be a risk of too many bots gaming it and the money could be used to fund the instance/platform or fund the marketing of it. but i don't know if enough people are interested in that.

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

OH! This is brilliant stuff! Thank you!

I run BT Free public charity https://btfree.org/ . I had been thinking about doing like a community vote and donate and like the top 3 split the prize pool or something. So allow people to vote on Lemmy or Piefed or Mastodon or whatever with like $1 donation. Yes, maybe Mastodon has the most users (idk) but can they get them out to vote? And no matter what, it's supporting YOUR communities directly and spreading the word about these other platforms.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

I run BT Free public charity https://btfree.org/

I suggest putting it on your about page. i personally try to limit my time trying to contribute to FOSS. seeing that someone is a actual contributor helps prioritize how to try to help. i assume other people have a similar approach.

maybe Mastodon has the most users (idk)

Probably

can they get them out to vote?

My assumption is that if someone is willing to pay and support FOSS he is going to be more thoughtful. There is a risk that just newer platform might not be well known yet so they will get less votes despite being superior. maybe have people give a score on a scale of 1-100 like the ACSI and if a platforms say have one percent of the votes and has the highest average it is selected. if this will gather interest and will go on for a few years different approaches could be tried. and you could do polls asking the community what to do . you could set up some kind of paywalled community, i think discord and patreon has that feature but maybe there is a open source alternative (mitra?).

Nice job growing your instance BTW.