Lemmy active users down, comments steady and posts up
So since the mass-exodus from Reddit we can see that the total amount of active users has gone down rather heavily: https://i.imgur.com/MeQok2F.png
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading? But one has to remember that back during the summer many of us created several accounts to settle at an instance, there were also problems with spam-bots of various kinds.
So active users in itself is actually not that interesting. At least not the comparison with the peak. Instead we can watch the total amount of posts, how is that looking?
Well it's steadily going up actually: https://i.imgur.com/i3Vse7Y.png
Though the increase has gone down slightly. This number however is influenced by other parameters as well. There are several reposts bots and such that mass-post to different instances. But it's definitley a good tell it's not going down.
Another interesting factor is comments: https://imgur.com/hWT8xvF
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so. What's interesting here is that the decline has plateaued, which could indicate that the userbase has settled and become somewhat consistent. This is great news.
All in all, it seems like Lemmy has settled into a rather comfortable spot, with a decent amount of users, posts and comments. That is very slightly decreasing. Ideally we'd like to see this trend reverse, and perhaps that might happen naturally with due time when things have settled even more. For Lemmy I'd reckon the growth will look a bit like this. Whenever Reddit does something horrific (and it will happen more), we'll see a mass-exodus with more users over here. Then it'll decrease for a bit, settle and hopefully we can rinse and repeat. Anyway - that's some irrelevant thoughts from me on the subject.
Just wanted to post these rather good statistics!
I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.
Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.
One thing I love about lemmy is how easy it is to get a conversation going. On reddit it's really easy to be buried in a thread, and if you get a response it's often just a joke or a snarky remark. Here there's so much genuine engagement. It reminds me of the transition from Twitter to Mastodon. I guess people who bother to make the move are more likely to be more engaged users, too.
Lemmy's comment sorting does also actively prevent getting buried, unlike reddit (?). Newer comments are biased towards the top, and even heavily-upvoted older comments will fall towards the bottom. The lack of "global karma" and our community's propensity to heavily downvote anyone doing redditisms like pun threads are also doing a lot of work here.
I didn't even know about that, that's really cool. I have noticed that if I come back to older posts there's often a lot of new activity since I was there last.
Yeah! It doesn’t matter how stupid whatever point I have is, there’s usually some sort of conversation born from it, and I really enjoy that!
ignored ;)
As a forever lurker, I agree with you, I'm unleashing up votes like never in my reddit life
Someone better versed in Lemmy may correct me, but isn't comment activity more of a factor with some of the sorting algorithms (e.g. Hot/Active) here? In which case your upvotes may help but your comment may be even better!
i need to see those VWs please
I think it’s air_cooled_volkswagens@lemmy.world
Links:
!air_cooled_volkswagens@lemmy.world
another
TIL how to link to communities on other instances in a way that keeps you on your own instance. thanks for that!
No problem :)
It definitely makes life easier
Where are these VW communities you speak of..? Asking as the owner of an old Mk IV Jetta lol
They’d turn your Jetta into a fridge, I’m sure.
I had to block that sub, I can't stand classic cars being cut up like that.
My roomie is German so I share stuff from that community with him from time to time. It might be against the Geneva convention, but I’ve not faced repercussions yet.
Lemmy has replaced reddit completely for me. Sure the content isn't exactly the same, but it doesn't need to to be successful IMO.
Same. Since the app stopped working I sometimes accidentally get on Reddit, but not on my phone.
Also Lemmy banned a lot of bot accounts, so the user number is to take with a huge grain of salt. It could in fact be up from before the bot fiasco.
It takes time. Lemmy is still pretty niche and reddit just has a decade+ of accumulated lurkers.
The important part is that the best people from Reddit are here now.
(ヘ･_･)ヘ┳━┳
What did you call me? I'll have you know that, as a former Redditor, we bring a certain level of trash regardless. Nice to be here, though ❤️
Yea, seems like the active posters are here and the trash is left on Reddit. The quality of posts in my subscribed subreddits is terrible now.
I checked it yesterday as I was suffering through a meeting that should have been an email and the content quality on reddit these days is appalling. I don't have an account anymore, so I was just browsing r/all, but still, it's very noticeable compared to a year ago.
The most noticeable thing when I went back to the site with a fresh account (unfortunately there are still a few real niche communities that I want to participate in that refuse to move) I was inundated with a bunch of right wingy content. New subs like “true unpopular opinion” parrot a bunch of shitty views disguised as “conversations”. Lots of racism, homophobia, and other terrible shit now there right in the open on the home feed.
As soon as I started seeing Reddit posts cited on mainstream news media like 5+ years ago, I knew Reddit was going to shit. Happens when a platform gets too big.
If an article sources from reddit, there is a high chance you can toss it straight into the bin.
Gaming "journalism" is full of that trash. "Players are upset with change X from game Y" and then cites an angry reddit thread and quotes posts as if it was an interview. Actual bullshit content.
Don't make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.
Look at reddit's stats, active users didn't drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.
A lot of us left entirely, but even more people just went full lurker mode. Taking "precious resources" away from Reddit servers while no longer giving them any free content in return.
These are the real heroes and martyrs
Would that be better than outright quitting the platform? Genuine question
Not really, it's like giving attention to someone you hate. They feed off of it.
Not necessarily. As long as you just cost traffic and offer absolutely nothing in return, blocking their ads and even restrain from voting. The difference that would make is directly proportional to the amount of users doing it.
I don't, btw. Just completely left and deleted a "nice" account. Fuck you reddit.
I left with 15,000 karma points and eleven years as a Redditer. Sad to leave ornithology and many other subs, it will take awhile to get those folks to migrate.
Ouch. Damn. Such very niche-subs will take a while to get here for sure. Luckily I found most of my subs here. More or less. And more or less active. But hey, it's our own fault for putting time into such a thing. They always end up the same.
Yeah. This is me now. I was an active content poster previously but now I refuse to contribute anything.
I did a Google search one time for Reddit traffic stats but came up empty handed. Is there a good resource for that?
I saw it through one of the apps which scrapes reddit comments for archival.
Reddit quit making those stats public a while back, sadly
Don't kill me for saying this but I feel like Lemmy has become slightly worse than when the mass exodus happened. I won't name names but there are so many copycat communities seemingly exclusively reposting the Greatest Hits from any given sub. It feels like we're trying to be reddit 2.0 instead of lemmy 1.0
There's also a discussion of this on hackernews, but feel free to comment here!
That hacker news bit got me, I won't lie.
"An actual conversation about this post is happening elsewhere but I guess you can leave a comment here. I'm a bot so I won't read it though lol"
To be fair, many of those are fascinating posts in their own right.
It's one of the only bots I haven't blocked so I do agree. It just feels weird to see. Like a reminder that hackernews is better
I went ahead and blocked it and spend time on HN along with Lemmy instead. HN discussions on those posts are always so much livelier than those sad, but interesting copycat posts.
Bot posts are soulless and when so many of the posts here are from bots, the whole site feels a little hollow
Agreed. I think it dilutes user engagement, because people will leave comments on these bot threads, never to be seen by anybody else.
I don't use any social media except for Lemmy. It used to be only Reddit but jumped ship after the API changes. I'm enjoying Lemmy for the most part. Commenting is better because it gets more traction compared to Reddit. Unlike others I actually enjoy having all the varying opinions from "problem" instances. It makes it feel less like an echo chamber, which Reddit was bad for.
My only issue is because it's so much smaller than Reddit, there isn't as much content or niche communities. I miss some of the subs I used to frequent on Reddit. Some of them were made into communities here but barely have any activity, like one post per week. I guess at the end of the day it's a good thing cause I spend less time on Lemmy than I used to on Reddit.
My problem with niche communities, and most of Lemmy's content in general, is that people are using the most weird, random, out-there sources for all of their topics. It more often than not that I see some strange, clearly biased source, over more reliable or professional sources.
Definitely miss the niche communities, but not enough to go back.
There are many niche communities missing, but they will come with time and with people talking more.
I'm fully aligned here. I'm at the point where I lurk every day, but I remain wishing the niche communities were around. Obviously, I should be contributing myself, but...
Be the change you want to see in the Fediverse
I agree.
The best part I enjoy is being able to open this website without all the dark patters pushing me to install some dumb app just because they can scrape the data from my phone more easily.
Bringing the content from niche subreddits is what I am trying to do with Fediverser. What subreddits do you miss the most?
The problem with crossposting bots is that I rarely care for the OP as much as I care for the comments.
You're in luck. Fediverser is made to bring comments as well...
Yeah, but if I have a clarification question or want to further discuss it, the bot is not gonna answer me. It doesn't have the same feel to it for me, I dunno. But it's a start I guess.
It will, soon. I'm working to make two-way communication. Responses on lemmy to a reddit bot will create a comment on the reddit thread.
I really miss hobbydrama. Someone made a sub over here and was reposting the material but seems to have stopped in the last month.
I am starting to be a bit bottlenecked by the amount of subreddits that we need to track. I am planning to let people import their own API keys and/or private JSON feeds to help fetching more data. Would you be interested in joining it?
Thanks for looking out-- I don't really have any technical skills where I could mess with API keys or the like but I appreciate the thought.
Anecdotal, but I bounced around between 5 accounts when I first joined, then settled into 2. One regular account and one for memes/NSFW.
https://i.imgur.com/q2Dv3m3.png
One account! Own your depravity! Lol
I like to keep my funposting separate from seriousposting. I frequently fail, but I try.
One account to rule them all
too easy for a power tripping adm to ban you still. sadly that's one thing that lemmy is just as bad as reddit was
Does nsfw even exist on lemmy or am i on the wrong instance?
Check your user settings, you might have nsfw posts delisabled by default
I don't. But most I've seen is just OF ads of the same girl or bot reposts with communities that only have like 50 images.
Not sure how that got deleted.
That's just what lemmynsfw is unfortunately. It's mostly bots reposting content or girls hocking their OF. There's like Sexmeat who used to be a redditor, with a far more vulgar name (Fuckmeat) and maybe a half a dozen others.
.world might not be federated with NSFW communities, as a lot of major instances don't want to deal with the legal ramifications of hosting pornography in any form. .ca has not defederated from the NSFW instances, however most of our userbase tends to block the communities when they do pop up, assuming they have NSFW enabled.
I started to find the porn side of things to be weird and pathetic. Outside of the random ass niche fetish communities popping up, it just feels really sad to see the same half a dozen girls trying to advertise to basically nobody. We have an infinitesimally smaller userbase than reddit, and as much as I like seeing naked ladies, OF ads get fucking tiresome and I think they are way less effective here than elsewhere.
lemmynsfw also banned CNC and is hostile to the drawn/animated side of the medium, which, if Pornhub's numbers are anything to go by, is going to cut your participation big time. People love hentai and kink.
lemmynsfw's admins never seemed to get that running a successful porn site means hosting content that might turn you off personally and trusting your mods to handle content control in categories unfamiliar to you.
Not surprising at all to me that a bunch of reposts and sex work ads what they were left with.
Check out the lemmynsfw.com instance.
It's very confusing because there's settings for it in the apps, then there settings for it in your account and finally some instances don't even federate with NSFW content so you have to check at all 3 levels to get it working.
It does exist
The arrival of Boost for Lemmy did it for me. So now it's a case of stumbling around and finding the communities I like, and beginning to post, and that always takes a little while.
Welcome, Dave.
Dave's a beast!!
Everyone knows Dave!
Dave's not here.
Yes, but only on Tuesdays, 4 to 6pm. Don't want to steal the limelight, there's room for everyone.
I wish the app logo was slightly different so I can differentiate Boost for Reddit and Boost for Lemmy. I've turned off app names on the launcher years ago and it has never been an issue since every app is different, except for Boost.
it's too bad the stock launcher on android doesn't let you change app logos. you can do it using most 3rd party launchers, but that's probably not worth it for that one feature
I think the Nova launcher allows you to have custom icons on their free version.
Is there any point having boost for reddit still installed?
It's still my primary app for Reddit.
But isn't it shutdown? That's what the boost subreddit says and it isn't available on the playstore anymore, did they implement some way for people to pay the api fees directly?
It wasn't shut down, it was just abandoned. Furthermore, the app store won't forcibly uninstall an app on your phone just because it was removed from the store.
Whilst the pinned post says it will stop working after the API change, every other post is talking about how it's working, new bugs that have appeared as Reddit is changing their API, and others about how they chosen the wrong method to keep it working.
I don't visit the sub but since i was interested because of what you said, I've found someone say practically the same thing as I did here. https://www.reddit.com/r/BoostForReddit/comments/16upao5/comment/k2pp0ae
I don't know what the developer did exactly to keep it working. After the API change there was 2-3 updates within the first few weeks, and then I assume they removed the app from the store.
My activity dropped because I can't enter a single thread that isn't about, big corpo, Linux, and how I shouldn't spend money.
Don't forget being accused of being a fascist because your favourite game is rollercoaster Tycoon.
Wait what? Is it just because it's a tycoon game?
I'm just being a bit daft but I've never seen the word fascist being used so much anywhere as I do on Lemmy. Everyone seems to get labelled it at some point.
I gave up on it because I've tried logging in via Jeroba, Connect, and Voyager on my phone, and no bueno. I don't mind putting in some effort but eventually I give up.
I've found Sync to be very reliable and nice to use. I'm commenting from it right now!
I use Liftoff and it works great, plus it's free and doesn't sell any of my personal data.
Give it time! This is a little baby social network. If there is a niche community you want to see, you have all the power to start your own community- if there's one on Lemmy.world that you don't like then start your own version on a different instance!
All that being said, this information about open source and corporations are the things that corporate social media hid from you with their algorithms because they lose money- expand your horizons and you might learn a thing or two for the better! Don't be discouraged to share your own opinions no matter how much backlash you get- Lemmy is small enough that you have the ability to have your opinion heard by others.
We're glad to have you here!
I read your comment on the YouTube Adblock post, and how you were railing against the same things, but I didn't see that even mentioned in the OP at all, which is what you directly replied to.
Was trying to see your point of view but I didn't see the OP do any kind of hate raging against corpos, etc.
Man, Lemmy users also take things far more literal.
Was honestly trying to understand your perspective, and have a conversation with you about it (which is why we're here, right?).
There's no need to be rude about it.
Honestly, I apologize. I didn't read your comment like that at all and I genuinely apologize.
Appreciate the apology, thank you.
If you don't mind me asking, why give it five days later? Honestly curious.
I don't really check Lemmy that often. Hence why my usage has dropped off. I also have become less and less involved with social media over all, but I apologize where apologies are due if I happen to stumble upon something I said.
I regularly check history when I am on to see what was said. My Lemmy history isn't great. I haven't had an easy time getting integrated into Lemmy as I think it is just like Reddit.
Your comment, I read in a different context. It wasn't until I went back and looked at my history of the comment you were looking at that I grasped what you were actually trying to do. I read it in the opposite light. I essentially thought you were saying, "well I found a post where they weren't talking about Linux and big corpo but I got it backwards.
I owed you an apology regardless of time.
Every comment in lemmy is a genuine contribution. What I hated most in reddit was chaining single letter comments to achieve what the shit. Makes me wanna barf.
This.
Edit: Thank you for the gold kind stranger!
Kidding aside, it's nice to show up to a thread and be able to join in rather than shouting into the void of thousands of other users.
Same. I don't miss that, or much, but I think we can all agree on missing the genius of Shittymorph. He truly had a way of gripping you into a comment and then suddenly it's nineteen ninety-eight again, and you finally look at the username. Truly entertained every time, was sad but understandable to see him retire.
His timing is incredible, I don't know how he does it. He stays away just long enough for the paranoia of getting pranked lulls, and then he hits you with the lols hammer. He got me a couple of days ago while I was lurking in one of the subs.
Oh shit, he's actually around again? Last I heard he had "hung up the hat" so to speak. Perhaps that itself was a ruse!
He is! It was three to four days ago max. He is definitely a loved character as the whole thread lit up once they realized they got got...
I'd forgotten about that guy! Loved him and can honestly say he's one genuine thing about that place that I miss.
atm what makes me barf is the amount of spam. there's tooo much of it on larger subs. i'm not clicking on your link gtfo.
To be spiteful I was thinking of selling my account to spammers to poison the well back there. I haven't yet, but I'm still considering it.
To a certain degree, yes...but I feel like Lemmy has a lot more posts with comments chiming in only to sound smart or contrary. It's super annoying, and I can't tell if it's better or worse than the constant in-jokes from reddit.
I feel like much of Reddit has the same problem to varying degrees depending on the sub (saw it all the time on r/Android and r/Apple, but didn’t see it at all on smaller/chiller subs like r/Tamagotchi). I don’t like seeing it on Lemmy either though, it’s not something the community or platform should positively reinforce
I fell into the habit of just hiding the top comment on every thread because it was usually useless. They either didn't read the article or would be making a bad joke.
I'm starting to feel concerned with the many new low engagement communities that are copy pasted from reddit. I think there is a lot of value in feeling like you are in the company of people as smart as or smarter than you. That there is the potential to discover something new or grow.
W
H
Somebody
A
M
B
B
Yes. We banned a ton of fake accounts and servers.
You're right. Reddit was the same way during the Digg migrations. The first wave took place with the HD DVD code fiasco migration when some people setup their first accounts. It was a couple years later when Digg upset users again that the final big wave occurred. This is a great place for Lemmy as growing pains get worked out and development catches up to much needed moderation functionality.
As Cole and I say in reference to lemdro.id, it's a marathon not a sprint! !android@lemdro.id has also been steadily increasing in active and subscribed users.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0,
Big copyright die mad
Oh, memories. I was still in college.
Yeah I expect the same thing to happen. Reddit's gonna keep pissing users off as they race for their IPO and so this will happen in waves. And when Reddit goes public and needs to start MAKING BIG NUMBER GO UP, the site is really gonna change and people are not going to like it.
Meanwhile the Fediverse and its lack of profit motivation, algorithms, and advertising is going to start looking real appealing.
It might take years. But it does feel like the Fediverse is holding on and has what it takes to make it on the long term.
We will see another big one when old.Reddit.com dies, too. Some people just want a list, man! I don’t necessarily want to load every post and picture to scroll by…
Yeah I completely wiped my account and don't post anymore but I still browse the site because it's just a hard resource to replace overnight. But if they kill off old.reddit it's gonna be a lot easier to wean off of it. Killing Apollo has cut my usage back considerably as I no longer use Reddit on mobile.
So I think killing old.reddit will be a big step as will them seeking more invasive ways to pump revenue. It's all downhill for that site from here out as far as I see it.
I would add a strong subjective signal as well. That is, I am a pure lurker. Never posted on Reddit, don't intend to post here. I browse reddit to pass the time and to feel a connection to what is happening in the world. I set up lemmy during the summer and I have been very pleasantly surprised. I now surf both lemmy and reddit about equally. I'm finding that lemmy is always more enjoyable and increasingly more informative as well. It really feels like lemmy is well on the way.
I dig the positive trajectory.
Go Lemmy. I'm actually okay with how it is now. Lemmy feels like an exclusive club where the members are more inviting and accepting than Reddit ever was.
Me inviting and accepting?! Im gonna feed ya to the Joshua trees!
No, not the Joshua trees, I'll never survive! /s Love you too, fellow Lemming.
D'aww you guys...
Group hug!
No I am made of spite and covered in blood, now if youll excuse me Ive got to tear the copper out of this church and burn it down. Then me and the boys are going to dennys via the back of Kurts bickup.
It's kind of crazy how much Reddit doesn't want people to migrate here. 5 months ago, they banned the mod of a subreddit for Lemmy migration and reinstated the community after backlash. When you search Lemmy in Reddit search, you see a few top pinned posts about how to migrate but everything else is low effort trash talk from people who have never used Lemmy. The entire Lemmy subreddit is dedicated to complaining about it- I'm sure Reddit is doing this intentionally. Keep spreading the word- Lemmy's growth starts with you! We have a brand new platform owned by all and the power to shape it into something great for everyone.
Imo almost a million active users is about the right place to be. Fuck being as big as reddit.
The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren't enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.
Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don't believe there's an equivalent Lemmy community.
Reddit's massive strength is that it's big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it's easy enough to ignore them.
Yeah, I get that too. It's a valid point. I'm hoping over time the internet at large will absorb some of those niches. I don't even care if sometimes a web search takes me to reddit, or somewhere else really. I just want a place to browse that is less toxic than reddit. Lemmy's userbase has gotten a little shittier lately imo, but still way better than reddit.
A lot of Lemmy's problems can be summed up in a question: how does this benefit from not being a dedicated forum?
I want to go back to the decentralized internet where hobbyists were running their own servers and communities. Lemmy, like reddit, encourages centralization onto a single major platform, and I don't like that.
Agreed 💯
This is mostly good news, good to have a proper healthy Lemmy/Fediverse.
Side note been thinking of making my own instance after I move. Maybe I can cajole a few peeps into joining the fediverse.
I might join!
I've been a bit depressed. My bad.
be mindful of the now and don't let the negative thoughts get the best of you
hope you feel better soon :)
Blue names breaking our backs to carry! 🎃
You are the only ones I recognize. Oh! And that account with the name and photo of Margot Robbie.
Unfortunately, the software for both running and displaying Lemmy is still in beta. While it's still in active development, it's probably for the best that we stay niche because bugs and stability issues turn off a lot of people permanently from the platform. That's why I'm waiting until the Lemmy 1.0 release to really advertise, I don't think we're ready for that kind of growth yet.
Would be nice if the pace of development could be accelerated.
Still waiting for an instance to swap to photon or alexandrite as their default UI. Those seem to develop faster
I have Photon running at the same subdomain level as my main UI, but it's easy enough to host both.
Lemmy doing an excellent job overall. I'm here every day and enjoying the banter in the comments. Not been back to Reddit since Judgement Day.
The smaller scale is feature, not a bug. I don't want millions of cretins diluting the stock.
Reddit got worse and worse and worse and worse over the years. I was there since 2012 and I watched it steadily get filled with more and more toxic uninteresting idiots. I used to be able to have an actual discussion with other adults and now it feels like "summer Reddit" never ever ended. This place feels like old Reddit to me
100%. It happened slowly and collisions with idiots tended to increase imperceptibly over time. Eventually I forgot what it was like to have a polite conversation and my own comments became more negative and toxic. The site split on sectarian lines and the discourse has been distorted by the mitigations of hate speech, shadow bans, auto-moderation, etc.
It's fitting that this hulking cesspit has been bought and paid for by a corporation, they are a perfect match.
I've said it before but active users isn't indicative of anything really, the early numbers were inflated due to:
Bot instances before getting defederated
People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)
Early on there were a lot of small-ish instances that died off over time as people moved to more stable ones
Comments and posts are a much better indicator but it's still not entirely accurate since it's hard to tell how much of that is spam. I think it'd be nice if people stopped obsessing over graphs and just chilled out. I dumped Reddit a few months ago and it's been pretty nice here.
I'm curious how many actual users there are beyond alts and bots. Maybe 25k? How cares, at the end of the day talking to 20-30 people here is plenty enough
After twitter implements subscription for all users, prepare for twitter users moving to Lemmy.
Twitter new subscription tiers
or mastodon/threads mainly
This is much more likely, the way twitter works is very different from reddit/Lemmy style
Why don't news outlet cover Lemmy and mastodon as much as threads and twitter
meh, I'd say a mix of lack of ability to advertise efficiently on services like mastodon and lemmy and the fact that Lemmy and Mastodon are still in their "infancy" (I can't say that about the latter since its pretty old in comparison to lemmy). Also, lack of marketing power compared to something like meta with billions of dollars of resources and all the motivation to try to get people to move away from Twitter and onto their services. This is new tech so I'd rather just stick to being niche for now and enjoy the experience. Its not going to last long and maybe soon by the next year we're going to see alot progression.
I am guessing since they can't advertise there.
Bluesky as well
I despise bluesky but that too
Why? Honestly asking.
With proper image code:
Obviously, it's not total number of comments, but rather number of comments/monthEdit : it seems really odd that the number of comments would go down if that is the total number rather than a number by unit of time.
There is absolutely no way that ~40k MAU users are generating 4.2M posts and 10M comments per month. That would give an average of 105 posts per month, per user.
High expectations for a lurker 🤣
This whole analysis is embarrassingly wrong. Everything went down! MAU, rate of new posts and comments, active instances... they may stabilize a bit now but the decline is noticeable.
I really don't know so I edited my (faulty?) comment. I was here 4 months and made 660 comments : so 165 comments/month
And 165 comments/month is still not enough! For 10 million comments and 40k MAU, we'd need to have 250 comments/month per user on average.
I recently came back to Lemmy from reddit to escape the batshit pro-Israel censorship happening on there right now and I have to say that the quality of the content and discussion has just gone up.
You say pro-Israel but I was literally permabanned from a couple of subs for asking for a source other than Hamas. Then when someone insulted me I made a joke about them taking sides. Apparently it was a mod who reported me to the admins as harassing a mod. Boom account is permanently banned from reddit for breaking their rules... again.
I do love how many times I can just make another account when I piss them all off.
I called Israel a genociding apartheid state and am still not banned. But that comment has neither up- nor downvotes, so I might have gotten a shadowban, dunno how I can check that and I also don't really care.
They don't bat an eyelid when you accuse Israel of being an Apartheid-state - it's like water flowing off a duck's back. Call Israel a kapo state, however, and they lose their shit. That they can't ignore.
If you DM a link to your post, I can check for you. (I'm at work right n9w, but I can check in about three hours or so.)
Went to my profile on mobile where I'm not logged in and the comment says [removed]. I guess I got my answer lol.
Also I was misremembering, I didn't call them out for genocide. "Israel is a far-right nationalist apartheid state" was the quote.
I just joined after taking a break from reddit because of its toxicity spread into some of the smaller subreddits was active in, or they just shut down entirely. Now I’m kinda lurking around to get a feel for the communities here and the culture of lemmy in general. I like it here.
Reddit will continue to do things that push the users away. As apps and accessibility to Lemmy improve, hopefully quality posts and comments will continue to grow.
I'm doing my part!
O7
My feed did feel busy with content the past few weeks.
These metrics are only relevant if you're fattening for an IPO.
Or if you really care about having a social media network that is made for everyone and not just 27 stubborn people?
After the repeated DDoS attacks on Lemmy world alot of the small communities died
I've posted some variant of this a few times now, but I think there are a bunch of us lurking and commenting on some of these smaller communities. But since there aren't many posts in them I've been somewhat hesitant to post content for fear of being spammy.
Try spacing out your posts a day apart, and if other people post then skip your post for the day. Keep the community visible without spamming and hopefully people will join after a while.
This is what I did in the earlier days of !birding, and I rarely even post now since there are more contributors. (partly because I'm also running out of photos to share)
I don't appreciate being called stupid. Maybe I would comment more if people were nice to me
That's stupid. No, just kidding, you're a nice guy. And cool haircut!
Sometimes it feels like the Barista Manifesto on here but that will even out with time. This is brand new and lots of people are flailing around trying to shape the platform to their views. Just remember that this is for everyone- even if you get downvotes, don't be afraid to voice your opinion. Change starts with you! Remember that compared to corporate social media, you have the power to block anything that you don't want to see, even keywords. Kindness exists here, you just need to tailor the Lemmy experience to you.
We're happy to have you here and I hope that you find your niche!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
[https://piped.video/Jml7NVYm8cs?feature=shared]](https://piped.video/Jml7NVYm8cs?feature=shared%5D)
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
People are a bit nicer in general here, I think, although certain niche subreddit were far more welcoming to newcomers.
I've only had two people on lemmy so far tell me my thoughts are stupid without bothering to explain why they feel this way, and only one person has assumed they know my life from a single comment. (homer_so_far.gif)
I have yet to see a single interaction where someone has changed someone else's mind in an amicable and polite way with both thanking each other for their time though.
I tend to focus less on news post comments though. Someone calling me an idiot because I don't blindly support something or someone doesn't phase me.
Someone breaking down my comment about why Picard is a better starfleet captain than Commander Sisko and giving me reasons why I'm stupid for thinking that? That'll stay with me for a few days.
Perhaps I just don't interact unless it seems like the general vibe agrees with me, and therefore people are more likely to be nice, because I don't like rejection and mean comments are just different kinds of rejection, so I hide in places I know will like me.
0 reason to interact when you know there's a good chance you will come out unhappy, I get it.
While my mind isn't often changed, I try to thank people for offering their own perspective or the contrary take to mine.
Got to admit, it actually did make me laugh a bit that you highlighted the Captain versus Commander in your comment, while making a comment about somebody nitpicking your opinion comment.
Fascinating. Wonder how many more people are close to leaving other platforms and will end up here, what will be the next straw that breaks people's backs
With the trend that social media has been going, they're definitely going to implement more aggressive and anti consumer policies and features. They are desperately trying to be profitable without VC money.
I've been here for about a week. I found that the creator for sync for reddit finally finished sync for lemmy and immediately came in. As others notice I'm sure they'll be joining as well. Everything goes up and down so it's not surprising to see a slight decline. Looking forward to the growth!
It's definitely a good outlook and very positive for the Fediverse as a whole.
Yeah, that's great news overall.
Complaining about the dip in active lemmy users is like complaining about the dip in Bitcoin.
"It's not at its all time high!"
Although it is WAY higher now than it was before its breakout phase.
Haha, that reminded me of something:
Hahaha oh cognitive bias, you always know just what to make me say
I haven't been on Reddit since that time. I am really enjoying Lemmy especially now that I can use Eternity, the Lemmy fork of the reddit Infinity app I've used so long. It feels so familiar
eternity is great!
Holy moly even though the graphes have a slight decrease - but that cause has been explained in the text - but those are still huuge numbers.
Holy moly there are a lot of guys on this platform! Nice to see!
Thanks for sharing and explaining mate!
Not terribly surprised, new platform that's still teething. I've said it before but we will go through multiple growth and contraction waves if we all care to stick around long enough.
Personally I'm liking the smaller community so far. Definitely could use some growth, but more people comes with a lot of problems reddit has.
Testing if my account still works
EDIT: I was excited about this place during the exodus, but it stopped working for me for a while. Couldn't use it from my phone. Technical issues got me to stop coming, but they don't seem to be an issue now.
Have you tried any of the mobile apps yet? They're really good. I'm using Boost right now, Sync and Connect are also good.
I have Jerboa installed. It's okay.
I've used Jerboa and it is good but not as good as some others. Which is understandable since a lot of these apps are built off of their own Reddit apps and adapted to Lemmy.
It does.
Seems to. It federated to me at least, so it looks like it was saved correctly.
This happens with every migration from a large platform. One thing that insulates the fediverse, I think, is that it's non-commercial nature makes it enshittification-proof. There are a lot of significant problems, but it's super attractive that some tech-bro dickhead won't blow up the platform to satisfy shareholders' insatiable profit-lust.
Reddit is now firmly on the enshittification path, so it's only a matter of time before another exodus wave.
It doesn't need to enshittify because it's already kind of shit in a lot of ways.
A lot of basic features for moderation are not worked on, not prioritized by the dev team, and left to the wayside while large instances deal with CSAM attacks. There are massive, expensive SQL queries that can lock instances into downtime. If something is federated across the network it gets replicated, regardless of if it's genuine/legal/proper content or not. That's a huge flaw in the CSAM attack vector because it complicates the situation for everybody federated with the server being attacked.
I don't have to worry about the platform getting shittier because it still needs to achieve a lot of basic functionality.
The only real place to go is up.
Harsh but fair.
I had three accounts at one point, but lately I've only been using this one. The first instance I tried could never see any content because it was small. I then joined lemmy.world, and I could see plenty of content... when it wasn't down. But this instance seems to be working well for me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the active user count could have been explained by people trying different instances.
That, and people trying out Lemmy, but not continuing to use it at some point for some reason.
Like I peeked into two or three other platforms before sticking with Lemmy. I don't even know their names anymore.
If it's any consolation, the owner of Squabbles, the site a ton of people praised during the Great Rexxit because Lemmy is too confusing, changed the name to Squabblr and fired all the other admins because he doesn't believe in hate speech.
I noticed that many people commented that there should be more engagement, 'just like reddit'. So, i'm wondering if some of these people left and will return later to see if it's more 'reddit like'. So, those might be people who don't necessarily want to post and comment themselves, but are waiting until they can get served with an endless stream of posts to scroll through.
Just thinking out loud here.
Plus registered users don't count as active users unless they post or comment.
You're probably right
Because the site goes down too often. I get it, not the developers fault. But it will take off only if there is more reliable.
Did you see the early days, or even as reddit was "maturing"? Shit went down every other day
Even a few months ago you could barely access this place. Post errors, comment errors, login errors.. multiple times a day.
I haven't had an issue with the app I use or accessing the instance in maybe a month. I get on daily now too.
Are you talking about Lemmy World? Because that has noticeably improved over the last few months.
Which site? Choose another instance if yours is unreliable. That's the advantage of a federated system. Or just have a second account at another instance.
I used to be on Lemmy.world and it frequently went down. Have been using lemdro.id for some time and never faced any down time till now.
They never had to deal with DDOS like LW. But agreed, they have a very capable team. Hi @ijeff@lemdro.id <3
Don't jinx it! 😅
Total number of posts isn't really a helpful data point I think. Like yeah of course it will go up, but is the rate increasing or decreasing? That's the more interesting number.
Woot! I'm more of a lurker but I comment occasionally (not necessarily smart or informed as they should be ones) and I would love to post in recreations of some of my favorite niche places, but running them is quite an investment...
I'm pumped I can still see star trek memes though.
Do posts include bot posts? If so it'd be really interesting to see what that number looks like if you stripped out bots.
It's been a while since I've taken calculus, but if those charts are for total posts/comments, then I'd say that the derivative is more important and it sure looks like the rate of posts have gone down.
I'd like some clarity too but I'm fairly certain it's posts per day. The comments certainly aren't cumulative since they go down.
Numbers and posts can go actually go down because they are just the sum of posts/contents across all instances. If instances go down are considered to be spam they will not be counted anymore.
Or a more logical inference is that bots are posting reddit posts here, leading to higher posts. While users are leaving, leading to fewer comments and active users.
Praise the Stör
You can't be searayus.
I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to model the min/max/ideal number of users (and ...ugh... "engagement") for a healthy online community? It'd be especially tricky for a federated service, but I'd bet there's some overall population size that puts the average user in contact with the right number of other people (lower than the Dunbar limit, I'd expect) to make it seem worthwhile to keep interacting.
Is there a way to stay logged in? I have to log in like every time I use it.
Use an app? I use Voyager and it’s a really smooth experience, and I haven’t re-logged in since I first got it.
There is a small timing issue on the first time the page is first loaded. If you just reload the page you will be logged in.
I use Connect and I rarely have to re-login.
What a time to be alive
Awesome!
what happened may 2022? there was a slight bump.
Nice
The number of servers is also going down , i don't think comments and post are a good metric as it shows a total and not new comments/posts per month, so activity could still be going down.
The number of servers going down was an obvious eventuality. The actual work and cost involved running an instance is a lot heavier than many people would expect the minute said instance starts scaling up.
And almost nobody wants to put in the effort to run a instance just for themselves either and they'd also have to worry about all the stuff that goes with federating. Doesn't make sense for most.
The number of instances lemmy has (about 1,000) is not even close to the number of servers mastodon has (about 11,000), so if i am trying to be objective and look at the evidence i would say the attractiveness of lemmy at least currently has peaked.
I don't really agree. The thing is that Twitter is absolutely dogshit now for even regular old people. It's chock full of rightwing bullshit and misinfo now and only premium users float to the top of comment threads and that filters for some of the worst people on the platform. It's a majorly degraded experience. Twitter is also more of the moment and doesn't so much serve as a library of archival information well categorized into subreddits.
Reddit on the other hand has pissed a lot of people off a lot but the average person is at the most a little annoyed and just kept using the site. And it's still got 10+ years of backlogged content on it and tons of subreddits.
Also when someone leaves Twitter it's like shutting down a subreddit in a way. So as more significant people leave, more people have a reason to also leave. Nobody can unilaterally shut down a popular subreddit in the same way that a really popular twitter user can unilaterally pull up stakes and move elsewhere. They'll just open that sub back up and cram in new scab mods.
Point of the above is that Reddit's decline is nowhere near as far as Twitter yet and it has a lot of stored value and built up communities that cannot be replaced overnight. That will take years.
When do we commercialise for the owners? Can't wait to be exploited in novel ways.
If your instance goes to shit simply switch to another, including hosting your own if you really want.
My instance does a monthly post on the finances and at least right now we have room to approximately double in size without any increases in donations, so there's a fair amount of runway.
People forget that reddit ran almost entirely on donations for a very very long time.
Lemmy just needs to fix the transphobia issues in order to be able to grow to the next stage.
What transphobia issue? Genuine question.
Trans subs on lemmy.world always get downvotes on half their posts. And yesterday they removed their rules against transphobia. It's still against the rules to harass or bully, but if you don't do either of those things then you can spread whatever hateful rumours, stereotypes, or slurs you want. So basically just don't say it directly to a trans person and it's allowed.
The decline in comments is all the mods banning people for supporting Israel.