How is the size of Lemmy’s userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?

I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven’t seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?

Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)

In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!

  • MBM@lemmings.world
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    7 months ago

    Anecdotally, the communities I’m interested in are getting more active in a way that seems sustainable (as opposed to last year, when it was a always a single person posting some, getting no responses, and leaving). I’m pretty positive about the state of Lemmy and the wider threadiverse.

    • filister@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I didn’t know there were almost as many Germans as Americans, the majority of Reddit users were Americans which has created Americocentric perspective on a lot of topics which from a European perspective was quite annoying.

      • waldek@lemmy.86thumbs.net
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        7 months ago

        I did not verify my thoughts but I think this could be because ovh has big datacenters in Germany and quite a lot of Europeans use ovh.

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I’ve seen it confuse North-American admins).

      • jeffw@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Fuck me, pie charts with 50 segments??? Maybe they look weird because pie charts suck if you have more than 2-3 things to show

        And the rest on the page don’t display well on mobile

        • PMF@lemmy.tellyou.social
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          7 months ago

          Youre right - feel free to make and share a better Version. I think the community appreciates forks and contributions :)

          • jeffw@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            No, I’m just here to sit in my armchair and judge other people’s design choices.

            But on a serious note, I wouldn’t even know how. I barely played around in R but the only semi-legit data viz stuff I ever did was in Tableau. And that was only with static data

            • lechatron@lemmy.today
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              7 months ago

              Not super tricky, they’re using ChartJS and with some very minimal tweaks to the config (aka changing “pie” to “bar”) the data would look like this!

              Image

              edit: does look a bit awkward due to the huge difference in values. A logarithmic scale would look better, but is much more confusing.

              Image

              • jeffw@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Still look less awkward than pie charts. And yeah, I wouldn’t use a log scale for a viz unless it’s going into a professional publication

      • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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        7 months ago

        It just gives current stats, not historical trends. I don’t think it is any answer to OPs question.

        EDIT: I was wrong, it was an issue on my side.

        • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          If you scroll down it does give historical trends on comments, posts, monthly active users, etc.

          What I meant is why do the graphs look so janky.

          For example:

          What happened in October 2023 that made so many users join?

          and

          What happened in February 2024 that made so many people stop posting?

          Edit: March -> February

          • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Sept/Oct '23 was the Boost lemmy mobile client release. A lot of people signed up and many of them bounced off shortly after.

          • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
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            7 months ago

            0.19 counts active users differently; prior to 0.19, the count is only if the user posted, after 0.19, all interactions results in the user being counted as an active user. This inflated the active users hugely as all lurkers are counted.

            The active users is dwindling. You can see the steep drop off prior to the change and a slow but continued decline after the update.

            I do not know the reason for the number of posts falling off, but that doesn’t look healthy either to be honest.

            • dave@feddit.uk
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              7 months ago

              The graphs are all interactive (touch to show labels, etc.). That can interfere with scrolling—try dragging at the edge or one of the pie chart titles. Fwiw, it scrolls ok on mobile safari…

        • PMF@lemmy.tellyou.social
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          7 months ago

          I mean there is a a graph about active users over the last months, so I would argue it does regarding user activity?

    • darakan@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      So basically, had a massive spike during the reddit blackout in July last year. Dropped down to half by November and has since shown fairly steady (if measured) growth. I think that’s a good sign.

    • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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      7 months ago

      What just happened to the number of servers? Did the admins just decide they want to go with quality over quantity? Or does it have something to do with political conditions?

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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        7 months ago

        Probably lots of people trying to start another general instance that didn’t draw any users and then deciding to shut it down. FWIW I think we have instances enough (from a users point of view, I don’t think it matters much whether there are 100 or 1000 instances). We could be spread over the instances more evenly though.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
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    7 months ago

    Lemmy is growing. Not exploding, but showing steady growth. It’s interesting because Lemmy tends to grow in sputters. The good thing is though, is that the growth is organic and after a bit of friction, we get new people that stick around.

    • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, from the graphs above you can see that the number of monthly comments is growing, such is the main thing I suppose

        • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
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          7 months ago

          That’s the thing I find beautiful about Lemmy. Take for example yesterday, I had a simple question about some networking equipment and it was like being Captain America in the lift, there were punches and kicks from all directions. But the punches and kicks were kindness and knowledge. It’s crazy how nice people are. It’s like walking into a village starving and everyone gives you a piece of their dinner and you’re stunned because you now have a massive plate. The level of interaction is such a beautiful thing.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 months ago

      The sputters have mostly been when reddit fucks up. The first big one was their API ban. The next was when they were going public.

  • Rimu@piefed.social
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    7 months ago

    It’s too early to say, as the method of accounting for ‘active user’ changed recently.

    Seems to me like Lemmy is “consolidating”. Some people are leaving but the community is deepening in norms, understanding, commitment and cohesion. This shows up as better content and discussions all the time. Spam is snuffed out quickly, more communities have better moderators. Our infrastructure is maturing and the software is getting better.

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
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    7 months ago

    At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.

    If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.

    What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.

    What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.

    The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.

    • ANNOFlo@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, it’s something I observed, too. I’m new here, coming from a STEM field myself - Many places give off a tech-elitist vibe, though.

      Customization options for Firefox get reactions like “nobody needs this”. I like it here so far, but the tech-bubble is obviously super prominent here, and in many places it simply seems very “If you’re not a tech-y don’t talk to me because I know better”. It’s worrying because it will lead to people leaving again when they get the cliché reactions of “use Linux, don’t use Windows” or “ewww, Reddit”. People should be less hostile, but I guess that’s just a problem of the Internet in general and doesn’t just apply here.

      I hope to see it succeed, though!

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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          7 months ago

          It’s really a major problem. Every time I mention how a lot of open source software suffers from bad UX, I get a lot of down votes instead of agreement and calls to improve things.

          • cabbage@piefed.social
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            7 months ago

            But at the receiving end you’ll have a talented backend developer who has created something impressive, and who instead of being recognised and motivated for her work just receives a bunch of shit about the UX being awful. Which is not great either.

            It’s a tricky thing to get right.

          • spiderman@ani.social
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            7 months ago

            how a lot of open source software suffers from bad UX

            Thought only I had this take in the whole world. Usually open source software are best but you have to spend some time picking the right one. Usually 5/7 would have great UI but only 1/7 would have the UX you might like.

    • Aa!@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.

      Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.

      Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.

      Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.

      The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in

      Also the sorting could be better.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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        7 months ago

        I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous and it sounds like it could be very manipulative. But of course you could go to instances that don’t do it but it might not be obvious.

        That said, I agree the sorting could be better. The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.

        • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous

          just letting the admins set defaults would be better than forcing these choices upon their users, which I think is was the above user was suggesting, which is kinda what Reddit does with having default subs

          The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.

          why not? if they’re getting new comments then they’re still active

          Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score [of the post] and time of the latest comment, with decay over time

          it’s like something inbetween Hot and classic forums-style sorting (New Comments sort in Lemmy)

          but I do not think that should be the default sort method, instance admins can already adjust what the default sort method is

    • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      7 months ago

      I’m not quite as pessimistic, but I agree that inclusivity is important to keep in mind.

      If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.

      Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community

      I’ve noticed similar behaviour as well, and it concerns me. There was a related post a few weeks ago on downvoting etiquette which received a surprising amount of pushback (+63/-108).

      I think this is a side effect of Lemmy’s small platform size pushing users towards browsing by /all. I never browsed /all on Reddit, and I don’t think this the best way to regularly use Lemmy either.

      Ideally, I think users should mostly stick to their subscribed feeds, and browse /all only occasionally to discover new communities they might want to subscribe to. (I recognize that what I think users “should” do is irrelevant when it comes to actual user behaviour.)

      As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.

      Do you have any ideas which could help make Lemmy more inclusive?

      • Blaze@dormi.zone
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        7 months ago

        As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.

        Promotion of communities to !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, and promotion of those communities to the wider audience

    • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I surf it because reddits app is trash and even the desktop old.reddit site is starting to be put out to pasture by reddit. It’s just better here. I use boost for Lemmy and it’s been amazing.

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        I came over during the whole API debacle and then realized it will either be great for my mental health, or eventually Lemmy will have just as much content. So far my mental health has improved… the content has improved a little too

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Yep, Lemmy right now reminds me of the very early reddit days, I’m sure in 15 years it’ll be completely different but for now it’s been great.

  • 5PACEBAR@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I feel like the quality and quantity of posts and comments have drastically increased over the last month. Idk what happened, maybe it’s just me but I’m glad this place exists. I’m having a blast! 💜

  • jeffw@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I think posting is probably the biggest thing you can do to grow the community. That and word of mouth - tell people about the fediverse.

    • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      at this point I think we might need comments more than posts, there’s lots of posts already but most of them are lacking comments

      • jeffw@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I think engagement is often driven when people see active communities though. Can’t have that without posts in communities. Sort of a chicken and egg thing ig.

        I post in some communities where I’m the only person posting for weeks and nobody comments. I post in others where I’m just a contributor and people engage in the comments.

        • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          7 months ago

          I agree as well. If I just wanted a bunch news articles and images I could use RSS and Instagram Pixelfed. Comment discussion threads are the best part of platforms like Lemmy.

      • DelilahBlack@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Yes, but it’s predominantly if not all news and politics or political ideological soap box posts or posts about defederation drama and instance infighting.

        Just after having used Lemmy for 3 years, all it really is, is a small platform, for people to create a space where they can freely be hateful and shitty and hostile to opposite political sides that they hate.

        It’s so they can experience feeling powerful over who they hate. In a sense, it’s their way of serving ‘justice’ keeping people out, defederating, is purposeful and habitual. It makes sense to me honestly.

        Keeping Lemmy small, it’s easier to control and to continue to be able to have a place where they hate who they hate.

        It’s annoying when ppl try to deny that.

        Just be honest about it. Be truthful, ppl appreciate honesty.

        Growing Lemmy would not be ideal, bc different people with all kinds of different perspectives AND INTERESTS THAT ISN’T TECH OR POLITICS would make them a minority. That’s purposefully being avoided.

        I found myself telling myself, “Go on reddit today, don’t go on lemmy. You need a break from all the extreme constant politics”

        I don’t engage in politics online at all for a while.

        But that’s all what is posted and talked about here. No one here even wants to have actual fun and be silly or have a good time enjoying themselves. What is the most irritating, is literally no one fucking engages if it isn’t political. That stuff gets ignored and down voted. This is a political place that is the issue.

        There’s no light hearted fun silly cool niche interesting happy or positive shit here. Everyone is angry and political and people are not interested in that.

        • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          I found myself telling myself, “Go on reddit today, don’t go on lemmy. You need a break from all the extreme constant politics”

          This happened to me too. What I ended up doing was extensively muting communities that made any political posts in my feed and using a keyword filter (Sync supports this). My blocked words include Linux, Biden, Union, etc… Now my feed is mostly memes

          • DelilahBlack@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Crazy right ? Yes so far I’ve done that in reddit pretty good. I cut it out real quick. If I see any political word or name I mute it. Cause it will just keep on going. So reddit experience has gotten better bc of that.

            With lemmy I’m constantly blocking most communities. What’s weird though is I feel like I’ve already blocked certain communities and they keep popping back up.

            I also use a few lemmy clients. So idk if the blocks are synced and carry over to each app.

            From what I have seen, some apps do, and some do not. I think that is a factor for sure

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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          7 months ago

          Tbf you are on an instance that federates with a lot of very political instances (like hexbear and lemmygrad). If you want less politics and a more curated feed, maybe go to an instance that defederates from such instances.

          • MBM@lemmings.world
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            7 months ago

            That + mostly sticking to my subscriptions (coincidentally, none of them tech or politics) makes it feel like I’m on a completely different Lemmy

          • DelilahBlack@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            I’ve seen more than enough in your matrix chat with other admins to know you’re full of it.

            Also

            Don’t direct message me telling me to block your instance because you don’t want anymore down votes.

            Who tf do you think you are internet boy ? I don’t care that you are an admin, I don’t fucking answer to you.

  • Secret300@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    I went back on Reddit a couple days ago and the difference is insane. Lemmy post and comments feel like real people. Reddit post are literally the same shit post or questions asked 3 years ago and filled with comments that seem like AI or just someone not putting in any thought

    • ManosTheHandsOfFate@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’m subbed to r/horrorlit and keep wondering if I’m taking crazy pills because it feels like 30% of the posts are some variation of “What’s the scariest/best horror book you’ve read?” They reword it or give it a slightly different spin but it’s essentially the same question over and over. And then of course the responses are always the same 40 books being mentioned repeatedly. I don’t understand why anyone who’s been on the sub for more than a month would keep upvoting the same question.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Im seeing more communities on my feed than ever. Even if it’s shrinking, the ones who stay are active.

    Just FYI, every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff as people dont both signing in every day – which is basically how people use reddit and other apps but with such a large installcount they’re not as noticeable.

    • fuckingkangaroos@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff

      Also as they see how much propaganda and political extremism is on Lemmy.

      • Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Yup, I mean I’m pretty left, but the endless politics is probs bad for the platform in the long run. We need more “normie” and hobby communities if we’re gonna keep attracting new people.

  • Blaze@dormi.zone
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    7 months ago

    Stable, around 50k monthly active users

    !lemmygrow could be a nice idea to help people find smaller communities (memes, tech, news and politics are easy to find, the rest not so much)

    Reddit continues to mess up, so we can expect more people as the Reddit experience gets worse and Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks improve

  • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Yeah it’s probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .

    Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.

    On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .

    • Liz@midwest.social
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      7 months ago

      I find your take on that data to be super weird, given that Lemmy has 10x the number of monthly active users than writefreely. We’re not going to be beating Reddit anytime soon, but we’ve got a decent little community going.

      • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that’s somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.

        Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.

        • Liz@midwest.social
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          7 months ago

          I don’t have anything to add but I wanted to say those are all good points.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      Sublinks and piefed don’t compete with lemmy, or at least, they don’t weaken the ecosystem since they are all inter compatible.

    • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Having other projects which are similar to Lemmy is a great sign. It means users have more choices available and developers can experiment with different solutions. It’s really not a competition, because the existence of more compatible Fediverse projects will also benefit Lemmy, as there will be more users and more content.

      • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.

        What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).

        I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most “thumbs up” on github).

        With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.

        • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

          Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

          New users for Piefed and Sublinks are most likely to come out of the millions of Reddit users, not out of a few thousand Lemmy users. So this will increase the size of the Lemmy network and lead to more activity.

          • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
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            7 months ago

            Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

            Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn’t a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.

            Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

            Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.

            I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 months ago

      Uh, did you check what is being posted on writefreely instances? It is no link aggregator, there is no competition with Lemmy at all.

  • numberfour002@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.

    The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.

    Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.

    More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.

    As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.

    • silasmariner@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      Hah weird I’ve been feeling the opposite - like, it feels like there’s more content on here than when I joined, ain’t that weird. Although maybe I’m using ‘stuff I like’ and ‘upvotes’ as a metric and you’re using “community and interaction” maybe? Would seem to make some kind of sense

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Anectodally is getting a lot better recently. Quantity and quality is increasing and number of upvotes per post on frontpage is also increasing.

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      I think the opposite it’s shrinking. Less posts, lots of reddit repost bots.

  • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    I keep thinking of ditching Kbin for Lemmy, because Kbin is down more often than I’d like, and I presume Lemmy is healthier. However, I’ve gotten quite used to this place, and am not eager to start anew elsewhere.

    • wahming@monyet.cc
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      7 months ago

      BTW, at least in my experience, kbin fails to federate a lot of content properly, leading to communities and posts seeming A LOT emptier than they actually are

    • april@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If you’d like to try mbin https://fedia.io/ is a good instance. Run by Jerry from infosec.exchange.

      Personally I support software diversity and Earnest seems like a nice person but Lemmy has a bigger development community and I wanted the mobile apps.

    • sgibson5150@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      I just did this. Yes, leaving kbin.social was a bit of a pain since I had to resub to my communities manually, but it is a one-time cost. I think it has been worth it because I’ve been able to be way more active just because the Lemmy instance to which I moved is actually usable. The learning curve is not steep at all and the optional photon and alexandrite front ends are terrific. I’d encourage anyone to make the move.

    • JowlesMcGee@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      I would suggest looking at other Kbin instances outside of kbin.social. or look to mbin, which is a fork that in told is more stable. I also haven’t made the jump from Kbin, but have been having similar issues with usability with it for awhile.