Lemmy's active users appear to have stabilized over the past two weeks

lackthought@lemmy.sdf.org to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 73 points –

According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Lemmy has ~67,500 daily active users over the past two weeks (it did peak at around 72,000)

How do you feel about the activity in your communities?

Do you think it will take another 'event' on some other website for more growth, or do you think Lemmy can grow naturally from here?

Or are you fine with the current activity and don't necessarily see the need for more users at this time?

Active Users Screenshot

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I quite like it not being as busy. Everything feels a bit calmer.

anytime I saw a thread on reddit with 1,000+ comments I didn't even bother to add my own view

I do like how pretty much any thread here on the fediverse is small enough that I feel like I can make a comment and participate

It’s not about being busy, it’s about being used.

Most subs are dead or just one person posting content trying to kick it off. We need more people for the niche communities to survive and thrive:

I think it'll come with time. As Lemmy (the software) and its userbase matures, the situation will be better for smaller communities.

Lemmy has cleared some early hurdles to grow from near-zero to 60k DAUs in a month. I’ve enjoyed talking to people over the past month in a more friendly and intimate way than on that other site. The main communities are fun and viable but the niche ones are mostly empty. I run a niche hobby community and despite having a few hundred subscribers <5% have ever commented, <0.5% have posted. I think Lemmy needs to be perhaps 10x larger than it is now to be self-sustaining for niche communities.

I guess in your case, people are maybe enjoying their summer in hikes and less on their phones/computer he he

I think it's just okay. I very much wish there were at least 10x as many daily active users.

I think natural growth will be either very slow, or negative, for the time being. But I also think future "events" will probably end up being more effective - because with each new influx of users Lemmy will be more mature as a platform, and have a larger pre-existing userbase to fill it with content that isn't just about Lemmy or reddit - which was so bad when I joined that I nearly quit.

I'm fine with how active things are. The most popular community I run (!bluey@lemmy.world ~750 subscribers) is receiving at least a post per day, sometimes up to five.

If another "event" happens, I'm sure we will get busier, but things seem manageable for the two of us so far. I'm not opposed to more traffic, however.

some communities do feel quite active, but I think sports as well as some niche interests could use a boost in activity here

For sports, isn't it break time? I know it is for european football

Baseball is in mid-season right now and it appears each team sub has a bot posting game threads and live updates. American football will be starting up in a few weeks as well.

Dam that's small the linux places i hang are thousands strong. Goes to show who uses lemmy

If for an event you refer to something like the Reddit API fiasco then I wonder how many people joined here not because of Reddit, but because looking for social news aggregators.

Maybe some folks come from Mastodon but before Mastodon for me the Fediverse (indeed I just thought it was a selfhosted Twitter and nothing else) was non existent, even when I knew about Lemmy (on Reddit) I didn't relate it with Mastodon.

I feel my smaller communities aren't as active as I would like, I suppose the best way to fix this is that we all lurk less and contribute more, that and share fun stuff from here to acquaintances, even through other social media.

I hope they would find a way to minimize fragmantation, instead of having one well maintained (lest's say) ABC community we now have an ABC community per instance (abc@lemmy.world, abc@lemmy.ml, abc@kbin,...) with one half active and the rest barely kicking off with mostly copy/paste content from other similar communities.

Some places seem to be gaining more members though. Maybe the current users are searching more.

Natural effect of people looking for content and converging to some communities

Few thoughts:

  • Plenty of (valid) concern about niche communities in here. I do wonder if it is something lemmy can help with some features.
    • A Best sorting algorithm is in the works, which would rank posts by how popular/hot they are relative to their community, and might be a great way to surface interesting stuff from smaller communities
    • Some sort of "Multi-Communities" that can be created and defined by the user would be wonderful too, especially in combination with the Best sort. All the news communities in one feed, sorted equally, eg. Could really be quite powerful IMO.
  • A controversial thought maybe ... would getting more mastodon people over in some way or another be a good way to increase user counts? They're already on the fediverse and understand something about federation. How to get them over is probably rather non-trivial though.
    • Some sort of "campaign" to let mastodon people know about lemmy/kbin. You'd be surprised how little mastodon users are aware of other platforms.
    • Very controversial and probably very difficult ... adding some sort of microblogging interface to lemmy so that a mastodon user would feel more at home migrating to a lemmy instance that allows them to stay plugged in to their microblogging space. At the moment, mastodon's UI is not doing a good job at allowing federation between lemmy and mastodon to be functional, and that's unlikely to change any time soon, so it may be up to lemmy to bring microbloggers to here so that they can participate in both kinds of formats.

I found Lemmy because I learned I could crosspost my relevant Mastodon posts to a Lemmy community. That's an easier way to get more posts, because I can get engagement from either Mastodon or Lemmy and it doesn't feel like I'm posting on a dead forum just to be forgotten about. Also I find myself checking up on that Lemmy community directly to see what other people are posting, because viewing the content from Mastodon is too messy.

Yep, this matches my impressions as well.

To illustrate how "not great" the interface is between lemmy and mastodon right now ...

  • the best way to post in a way that allows both platforms to participate is to post from a mastodon account and tag a lemmy community in that post so that it appears as a post in that community too. Lemmy and mastodon people will naturally start talking to each when that is done.
  • But ... the best way to view that conversation is from lemmy as it provides threading and sorting while mastodon's flattened reverse-chron feed is rather confusing and unhelpful.

Because mastodon is unlikely to improve anything on this front any time soon ... I think lemmy adding some sort of person-following blogging interface (as crazy or difficult as that might be), at this moment, could be an interesting idea for its future growth. I say that partly because I think momentum is growing behind the idea that the fediverse needs more than what mastodon provides. But also because I suspect a person-following interface really isn't a radically different feature set but rather is or could be an extension of what is here already.

I made a post about this (in !lemmy@lemmy.ml) asking for people's thoughts: https://lemmy.ml/post/2432594

Kbin?

Could Kbin be the UI for this use case? I currently keep the two worlds separate. But I wonder if I need a paradigm shift.

The other problem for me is that I am way more open about my identity on Mastodon (and post accordingly) but not in Lemmy/KBin - same as I was on Insta/Twitter vs Reddit.

Yea, kbin's great. Two thoughts though:

  1. Kbin is still community/magazine focused at the moment. It integrates better with mastodon, allowing you to follow people etc, but it seems to really be about pulling mastodon content into the magazines as much as possible. For instance, there is no way to view a feed of just the posts of the people you follow, AFAIU. I'm not aware of there road maps on this though.
  2. Platform diversity is valuable for the fediverse, as no platform can make everyone happy, so two platforms having the same general feature (as lemmy and kbin do already with communities/magazines) is not only not a problem but a good thing.

the sorting algorithms definitely need some work, I try to use 'Hot' but it constantly shows me posts from 1+ year ago

and multi-reddits were the only way I used that site once the feature was created so that would be a very welcome addition to lemmy!

I wish more people were interested in association football.

To be fair, we are in the off-season. Perhaps activity will increase when the major European Leagues kick off.

according to that same website, kbin activity has been dropping

down from ~57,000 average at the beginning of July to about ~32,500 active users now

https://kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats

I know I've been having issues with federation from kbin magazines to my lemmy instance, so I wonder if this is part of it?