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!
I think there has been some influx where a lot of new users made room for themselves while pressing others to leave/defederate. Beehaw was the notable and initial example where the growth of people from reddit resulted in less interactivity.
IceShrimp is cool if you liked FireFish
I think the opposite it’s shrinking. Less posts, lots of reddit repost bots.
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I wonder why this was “Removed by mod”? It seemed like a relatively lighthearted and facetious comment.
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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
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.
I just came back a few days ago and have had the exact same experience.
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
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.
Can’t hurt to make an alt account on a lemmy instance as a back up even if you don’t end up switching full time.
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.
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.
Oh get over yourself lmao. Like reddit didnt have the_donald up on the front page for years
Anyone downvoting can go back to reddit: sorry your favourite democrats arent astroturfing the front page with heckin police puppers or whatever slop you miss from that cesspit.
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.
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
I agree as well. If I just wanted a bunch news articles and images I could use RSS and
InstagramPixelfed. Comment discussion threads are the best part of platforms like Lemmy.
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.
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.
I haven’t seen this, I only browse Subscribed not All
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
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
Thank you for this by the way
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.
That + mostly sticking to my subscriptions (coincidentally, none of them tech or politics) makes it feel like I’m on a completely different Lemmy
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.
There’s no light hearted fun silly cool niche interesting happy or positive shit here. Everyone is angry
Oh the irony
Yeah, I think we figured out what their problem with Lemmy is.
Well that escalated quickly…
Haha I guess so
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.
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.
Yeah, from the graphs above you can see that the number of monthly comments is growing, such is the main thing I suppose
Honestly, we don’t need content creators as long as we have good convos, like an actual forum.
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.
Yeah, the uptick in comments is definitely an encouraging thing. Makes the whole place feel more populated and less like a ghost town.
yes
Have a look here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Why do the graphs look so weird?
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
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
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!
edit: does look a bit awkward due to the huge difference in values. A logarithmic scale would look better, but is much more confusing.
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
OMG, Pareto analysis… so sexy.
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.
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
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.
Thanks for the post. Something on my browser only shows the pie charts and doesn’t let me scroll down.
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…
Sept/Oct '23 was the Boost lemmy mobile client release. A lot of people signed up and many of them bounced off shortly after.
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.
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.
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).
I think one of the Lemmy devs is German too
Yes that’s me :)
Yeah open source seems to be a big thing in Germany specifically for some reason
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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?
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.
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.
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.
Theses stats are a bit weird to read and idk how trustworthy they are, but generally i would agree because even though total active user count might be stagnant, the comment and post numbers are steadily growing.
We need to up our stats. Get some AI bots in here posting content!
/s
The Reddit strategy? Genius!
Thank you. I’m glad you could see my vision. Now please give me money for my new Lemmy IPO idea.
Let’s charge 8$/month for verification maybe add a checkmark so people know!
The total user count is meaningless. Look at the monthly active users. That gives a good picture. And those are the correct links and graphs.
(The total users mainly show how the Reddit exodus happened. Lots of people made an account and used it once. Thus the steep incline in users. But they’re not real, just zombie records. Also it’s heavily affected by instances moving, shutting down or doing maintenance. Also lots of people here have multiple accounts. And there is some degree of farming and bot activity…)
total active user count
Thats what i said, whether you filter by day or by month or whatever is a different question.
Hehe, now I get you. But I don’t think there is something like “total active…” 😆 It’s either the active users or the total amount… You just confused me by using both opposing words in a row.
yeah i see that does not make a lot of sense indeed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546425 9 Months ago > 2M.
- And now 1929762 lemmies are living on 381 instances last update: 2024-04-01T05:51:03.779Z https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
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.
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
