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.
Lemmy is full of bad news, hate and toxicity while pixelfed is full of artists and people sharing cool pictures and their passion. Visiting my pixelfed account from 2023 a few days ago set such a contrast with what I see on lemmy that I started using it regularly. It really felt weird to visit such a wholesome place after using lemmy for a long time. Now I use pixelfed to balance out the bad stuff from lemmy for maintaining my mental health and to appreciate the art which is not common on lemmy.
Many groups of lemmy are full of political content but you can block them and still have a decent amount of contents.
The political stuff is leaking into any other community though. I’ve already blocked every politics specific and news specific community and a handful other communities and I still get a lot of that. I’m also blocking a few keywords as well, this stuff just gets through regardless of what you do and in no small amount either.