It's the gold rush over?

QubaXR@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 150 points –

It's been a while since I last seen anyone posting graphs showing user base growth. Are we past the initial rush and bleeding numbers now?

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Slow organic growth is far better than explosives, unsustainable growth. We continue to provide content and actual authentic conversation and they will come.

Yep, I also love the late 00s and early 10s feeling to Lemmy now. I find myself having more stuff done IRL since quitting reddit and browsing Lemmy occasionally.

I'm finding I use Lemmy more than Reddit, because the place is less hostile and the discussions are usually actually worth reading again.

And I'm finding myself actually posting comments instead of drafting and deleting them like I did on Reddit for the last 6-7 years. The comment threads really deteriorated on Reddit over the last decade

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I came. And I agree. Anything that gets too popular too quickly just turns to shit. A huge influx of users who stuck around would have ended up turning this place into Reddit 2.0

I don't want this to be Reddit 2.0

It very nearly did. I was noticing reddit like behavior during the july 1 period of lemmy. Thankfully it has subsided and the general civility of discourse has returned.

Either that or it's because I have blocked enough people already to weed out the assholes.

What kind of behavior happened during July 1?

I noticed a somewhat trend of reddit like replies, you know the usual one liner tired puns, never ending chain of them. The replies were aggressive and argumentative. Some comments straying from the topic of the post, in favor of making in jokes that were traceable to reddit it's origin (obviously because majority came from reddit)

Right now, there is less of that. Might be most people got tired and returned to reddit.

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That’s possible. I think kbin/lemmy were less ready to replace Reddit yet for most users this time.

There was one guy in office who posts screenshots of funny Reddit posts in slack. Guess which app was he using! Official Reddit iOS app.

The two mayor problems here are:

1- The Fediverse's current lack of network infrastructure (on the idea that it pretends to be an alternative to both Reddit and Twitter).

2- The lack of an app that satisfies the users needs, while also having a nice layout and stability.

I do still have hope though, as Boost for Lemmy is yet to release.

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It genuinely doesn't matter. I'd prefer it if it would stay at this level. Reddit sucks now. This is like Reddit was 13 years ago.

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Stats would indicate that we may be approaching the leveling out phase.

I don't think we will be able to tell until we are looking back at it

So posts are going up, users go down. I know that millions have been purged, but the loss looks much more organic.

Kbin stats seem very depressing, but it's most definitely cause there's no app yet and it relatively new compared to Lemmy

Until the next big social media fuck up, which neither Spez nor Musk can stop themselves from making.

You're just here early, and the platform still needs work. It hasn't even hit 1.0 yet.

Oh I don't mind at all. I liked it here. I think it only bugs me when statistics reporting is contingent on good news.

Content is up but users are down. Take that as you will.

Active users is up slightly, that's a better metric for growth of the platform imo.

Content is up but users are down

I used the Point of View gun. It was me. Sorry. But now you all share my suffering. Hah!

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I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the "Imaginary" series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don't have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That's not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.

Yes! I think we have many communities that are either:

  • way too specific
  • carbon copies of identical topic on another instance

Carbon copies are actually quite of an issue on the long term. It is difficult to understand the best one for a topic unless one visits many of them.

Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance

As someone who mostly lurks/occasionally comments and someone who likes to view hot/active posts from all communities, repeat posts from similar communities in different instances is something I find really annoying. I'll see the same post four or five times as I scroll. It can make things feel really empty to see the same things more than once.

Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance

Huh is that actually a thing? That's kinda dumb, but explains the tiny numbers I've seen a few times.

Yeah, unfortunately that is a thing. Example:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/collapse@lemmy.ml (lemmy.sdf.org's local view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 22 subscribers. In effect, this is the number of people on lemmy.sdf.org who have subscribed to this remote community.

https://lemmy.ml/c/collapse (the original/direct view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 2.11k subscribers. I don't know whether this number shows only subscribers from lemmy.ml or an aggregate of all subscribers across the fediverse.

Unfortunately, another issue even if the count on the direct link to the community is an aggregate, is that it's probably not counting people who are stuck in a "subscribe pending" state. A ton of the communities I subscribed to weeks ago still show in this state on my communities page. I understand that what this means is that I'm subscribed on my end so that everything works for me, but the original community hasn't acknowledged my subscription, so I expect that this means it also doesn't count me as a subscriber.

Ahh interesting. Well, that's growing pains, and fairly minor ones I'd say. Let's hope it'll eventually get better.

Also thanks for explaining "subscribe pending", I was wondering about that.

For sure. The growing pains haven't been too bad for me either. I think that things will definitely get better with Lemmy.

You're welcome.

Maybe we got to ambitious with niche communities and should have stayed broad.

But the niche communities were the best parts of Reddit. I pretty much avoided the general subreddits.

Yeah but in the beginning of reddit there wasn't niche community.

I think a lot of the imaginary communities were on one of the .ml instances so are currently in suspended animation. That domain shutdown was really badly timed...

Otherwise, it's the standard problem that only a small % actually post and Lemmy is much smaller. I do think that a better/fixed hot algorithm would help with post discoverability for smaller communities though.

( I mod a niche imaginary community for the Cosmere book series(es))

Yeah, I don't think asking communities that are already fairly small on Reddit to create the same community on Lemmy was a good idea.

For something like this it'd be best to start with a single community for the whole broad topic (like, ImaginaryStuff). Hell, Reddit used to be a "single subreddit" originally. And the niche subreddits didn't pop up until fairly recently where they were actually able to entice enough people to use them.

September will be a boost when HS and college get going.

Then Reddit will mess up again and we will have another big influx. Its bound to happen.

That would be an honest shame. All of this fuss of moving over and for what? Just for that rush of a breeze of not being on Reddit? I wondered how many treated it as that, took a break from Reddit before hopping back onto Reddit expecting things to magically improve during the time they were gone for.

It's still a shitty place, people.

Yup, but I'm getting very strong Google+ vibes...

No matter how small and quiet it gets here, I like it better than what Reddit has become.

I noticed the same thing on Mastodon. The new users per day ratio is slowing, but each time Elon does his thing there's a new wave.

Wait for Boost and/or Sync to release, that will be the real gold rush

So far memmy is the best app in my books, pretty close to what Apollo used to be but still missing some key features like the jump bar.

Voyager/wefwef is literally just an Apollo clone but it limits its search functionality to lemmy.worlds instance allow and block lists, cutting off less savoury parts of the fediverse, even if your account is hosted with a Switzerland (everyone allowed, nothing blocked).

I just don’t like the idea of not having access to ALL of the instances, even if I never choose to go there. But like I said, memmy is the only app that truly searches across all instances sfw or not.

Voyager/wefwef is literally most an Apollo clone

That’s an extremely good quality, imo

Doubt, but would be great to see. We're already all here using alternative apps until sync/boost releases then we'll move over. Will suck for existing apps to see a big loss.

I've seen a lot of comments on disgruntled users on Reddit that are willing to give Lemmy a try, but only with a polished app. We'll see

For now.... until reddit's admins find themselves some more feet to shoot themselves in. In the interim there's always going to be a steady flow of those who have been permabanned for obscure and arbitrary reasons

it is just showing how much people actually use reddit on pc plus how much people dont care about actually using the bad reddit official app vs coming here where the communities are still few and front page is still so uninteresting