Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy

snoopa@lemmy.ml to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 1502 points –
Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
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I'd love to see some stats on reddit engagement now. Anecdotally, I logged in just to look at my usual subreddits (the ones that are open) and they seem dead.

I use RSS to get feeds for subs that are not active in lemmy.

Many posts are dog shit level now. Either looking for help or just garbage.

Check out r/lemmino lol.

Yep. I feel like all of the high-value like high-quality posters are now here or elsewhere and are done with reddit. I used to post a ton on reddit, even across multiple accounts. Now I just post here. lol

Oh RSS feed is a good idea. The only sub I still check is r/Genshin_Impact_Leaks xd

Edit: Anyone knows a better free web-based RSS reader than Feedly? It kept sending me to its paid service for trying to sub to a Reddit feed, until I subbed to it via SiftRSS D:

Ive been using FreshRSS for years. You can either selfhost it or use one of the public instances.

EDIT: Sorry, I missed the "web based". Today I'm incredibly distracted.

Feeder is pretty good if you use Android.

No worries, but I'm a diehard PC user xd

I might end up going with an open-source desktop app in the end, both Fluent Reader and Raven Reader look good.

I self host FreshRSS & RSS-Bridge in Docker and view everything in Fluent Reader (Linux), FeedMe (Android), and Read You (Android). I absolutely love it!

I tried out Fluent Reader (Windows) yesterday, but it was a bit buggy and lacked some necessary features, so I'm testing NewsBlur for now. The free version is kinda limited, but I love the training feature, and in general it feels the most user-friendly out of the 4-5 services/apps I tried yesterday.

A fellow leaks enjoyer, hi there! It's also the only community on Reddit I still check as well. Excited for Fontaine?

Sound like you two need to get on the sources and start a Lemmy community.

I'd be terrible as a mod, but I might be up to preprare the posts when I hit my vacation in a few weeks.

Also, there's already a community, but with low traction right now.

Yeah, the issue is that the whole sub is just screenshots and videos of leakers' Telegram, Discord and Twitter channels. I don't have free capacity for trawling through these kind of feeds, checking for reliability, etc. 😅

Same for me, with family and full-time work, but I can probably set up a bot during vacation to check for these sources. If I set it up to just check for stuff every two hours or so I don't think I'll hit any kind of rate limit.

I'm moderately excited, looking forward to exploring the new landscape, but aside of Lyney, I don't particularly want to pull for any of the characters. (Maaaybe Wriothesley, depending on his personality and kit.)

I'll get Furina since collecting archons is a safe bet. Aside from her I'm still evaluating who I really want (possibly Arlechinno, Navia and Neuvillete).

I'm much more interested in the lore and hoping hoyo finally starts moving the celestia/abyss plot forward big time. It's about time we see some real big stuff to happen.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to meeting Navia in-story, she seems nice, just not sure if pull-worthy nice. Otoh I really like geo characters, so if her kit is good, maybe :D I'd love another geo catalyst.

Re story: Yeah, tbh that plot arc is pretty much the only aspect of Genshin's story I find engaging. The rest is too juvenile for my taste 😅

I'd really love her to be a Geo off-field DPS, but without her damage being tied to a construct like Albedo. I need more damage for my Noelle team 🥲

hosting freshrss locally and just tested that it can subscribe to reddit no problems (although I don't want to) - their cloud instances should work : https://www.freshrss.org/cloud-providers.html

thanks, I'll check it out! I'd probably go with one of their cloud instances, as self-hosting is a pain with my skill level.

I have been using CommaFeed for years. I'm not a huge fan of the most current design, but overall it works well.

It's funny reading people suggesting RSS on here as a way to replace Reddit. Aaron Schwartz helped create both of them.

Huh, just looked him up, sad that he died so young :c

If Lemmy supported images in it's RSS feeds I'd never leave my client.

Its open-source, so it wouldn't be impossible to add images. Probably pretty trivial actually. Might be a good first PR

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The bots won't stop. And probably have increased. So it'll be tough to see without slices we'll never get

That's the punchline that makes me chuckle when I read how "little impact" the protests and migration have had.

Here's a little secret: Reddit mods can't know for sure which accounts are bots. They can suspect, but they're no easy, reliable proof. Reddit admins, though, know exactly which accounts are bots — they just prefer keeping that info to themselves.

For me, that triggers a great big "Hmmmm".

And they'll never differentiate them. If their investors know how much of their traffic was just bots they'd divest immediately

I made the mistake of reading comments on one thread (I moved here full time) on r/Iamatotalpieceofshit about landlords.

It's turned into a capitalistic hell hole, not only some of the horrible comments you read but also just need to look at the way the votes go, I felt disgusted tbh.

I doubt it made a dent. 250k doesn't even register on the map of 100m active users.

It does if those 250k are the ones submitting/creating content.

Are they though? I didn't submit posts on reddit. Looking at the front page of lemmy it's missing a lot of the topics and subjects reddit posts about.

I'm not trying to be a downer, I think 250k is great and it's enough to make lemmy 100% replace reddit for me. But I don't think it dents reddit. I talked to my friends and they barely noticed anything except the blackout. I go on reddit all the same communities are still posting and commenting as normal. But saying that when I looked at reddit I realized how much garbage is posted there compared to lemmy.

This is it though, of my subreddits that are open, it's just complete trash being posted and a few comments (and even less meaningful comments).

I think that which 250k migrated will eventually end up making quite a significant dent. It isn't the technophobic lurkers that make up the Lemmy early adopters.

Basically this. I guess the people leaving Reddit are evened out by simply rounding the resulting values before rendering them into a graph.

Wish someone would create a bot to copy r/HyruleEngineering to the community here.

You can request that on lemmit.online if I remeber the name of the instance correctly

My local area sub is still pretty active, but I did notice that in the other subreddit the comments section is a lot more sparse.

They are probably confused about how to use an app that behaves like an ad carousel

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I think having a link aggregator is going to be so great for the fediverse. It allows us to gather content from all over the internet and bring to to the often secluded fediverse.

It also means we can post links to fediverse discussions and draw people in.

Just need ma boi Sync.

Hopefully soon, along with an API for kbin (since I'm there and want it too lol).

It would be nice to link kbin to a blog post as a comment system integrated with forum

I'm curious, why did you choose kbin over Lemmy? I immediately started away from it due to the lack of a mobile app and just seemed less integrated.

I originally went with kbin over Lemmy because the kbin webapp looked and functioned (for me) so much better. But now Memmy has gotten pretty good and close to Apollo so I’ve moved there. For me it’s all about ease of interaction/function.

Lemmy has some bonus points which at the time when I signed up (I joined Beehaw around the same time) that Lemmy does (or didn't) have.

Blocking domains, blocking instances (coming soon), better UI (subjectively), user styles to add extra features, each community has a "normal topics in a forum" and a "Twitter-lite" area for different post types, I believe kbin has better integration/federation with Mastodon (which I also use) compared to lemmy, along with others I'm probably forgetting. (Edit: Forgot one lol, on kbin we can see upvotes and downvotes, as well as (on a topic by topic basis) you can see who upvoted and downvoted things, which I get some people wont like, and some will like, but we also have that on kbin, and can see those stats across instances of kbin & lemmy).

I don't follow your end of the development so Lemmy may have some of those in the pipeline, or may already have some added, but at least a month ago it was a bonus on this end. The lack of an API right now does suck since it limits the app thing, but they will have an API, several of the apps devs have already said kbin will be included when time comes, and kbin mobile is honestly real good regardless so it works out.

Awaiting Boost for Lemmy, but I'm happy with Connect for now.

So far, all the lemmy apps I've used are in very early stages and quite buggy. Currently enjoying WefWef (PWA / web-based app) which I like the best.

Looking forward to Sync, though!

They’ve progressed very rapidly. Personally I don’t think we’re still in the “very buggy” era. I’m participating daily without major issues. There’s just a lot left to build.

I like how open it is, their git is pretty active and we get updates almost daily.

wefwef was renamed voyager a few days ago

I'm going to keep calling it WefWef since I like that name more lol. Not a fan of the Voyager renaming.

Haven't reinstalled the app so that it is still called that on my phone.

Probably wanted to keep with the space theme, given that it's the go-to for Apollo users right now. I think it's a neat little nod.

Ahh that makes sense. This was my first experience with anything related to the Apollo app since I switched back to Android before it came out.

Since it's based of Apollo then I completely understand why it's called Voyager :)

I'm going to call it whatever the devs call it because I want other people to find it and use it. Simple as that really

What was wefwef supposed to mean anyway?

It’s a combination of the word “we” (as in social) and “woof woof,” as if to say “together we all bark like dogs.”

Not sure when you last tried Jerboa. It really shit the bed during the Lemmy 0.18 transition period but it's been working a lot better since Jerboa v38 and is quite smooth.

I just use the mobile web interface. Good enough for now.

I was using mobile website on ios but then tried the Memmy app. The app experience is much better.

It's mobile optimized, but it's painfully slow and laggy. Have they fixed the annoying post auto-loading?

My lemmy.world instance used to be painfully slow, but it works perhaps faster than established big social sites now, probably due to the lack of trackers.

It looks good and works quite well especially in the newer pure black theme.

!memmy@memmy.ml is great on iOS

started using Liftoff since today I'm quiete like it. better than Jerboa i used before and is almost "there" to where i would want it to be.

Liftoff has all those weird issues regarding subscribing to communities, I got a "not logged in" or general authorization API error.

I just downloaded connect and so far, so good. I can see my subscriptions, I can post... It also looks somewhat familiar as a Sync user.

did you had those issues with lemmy.world? because i had the same issues with jerboa and other apps on lemmy.world. seems to be an issue with the instance not apps.

Thunder has been amazingly stable for me. I've tried everything else for android and they all stagger with loading, while thunder is buttery smooth.

Voyager is great too but I find it struggles keeping its place if you scroll as much as I do.

Okay, I just tried Thunder. This is the best one yet. Clean UI, everything's fast. How do I edit a comment, though?

weird ux but you have to hold your phone upside down when you long press it

Doesn't work for me

Edit: oh, it's a swipe gesture. I wish I could edit directly from my comment history, though.

I was totally kidding but I'm glad you tried it 😁

Voyager definitely needs to add some loading/activity indicators and implement better separation between interface and data fetching. But it's definitely the cleanest UI I've tried so far.

Connect has been working well for me (a thousand times more reliably than the official reddit app ever has).

I encountered a weird bug with connect, where I'm logged in, but I can't access my profile or inbox. Some parts of the app think I'm logged in, others do not.

Could that be to do with when some instances got compromised and they had to log everyone out? I had to log out and back in as my profile/inbox weren't showing after that, but it's been fine since then.

Connect dev here. Yup exactly and it was a bit wonky afterwards too, seems to be okay now though.

started using Liftoff since today I'm quiete like it. better than Jerboa i used before and is almost "there" to where i would want it to be.

started using Liftoff since today I'm quiete like it. better than Jerboa i used before and is almost "there" to where i would want it to be.

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I just wished the Lemmy API docs were better lol.

Yeah, that's a problem with a lot of FOSS passion projects. We devs kinda like writting code, but not really documenting it. Hopefully with the influx of devs helping that will improve

More devs that don't want to write code?

Edit: damn, meant to say write documentation. We only want to code!

Well, more devs that have to sit down and figure out how the code works and then document it for future new devs

I don’t really like all the LLM hype, but I’m hoping that documentation will eventually be generated by some open source model, with human verification

I think that this line of reasoning becomes less and less tenable when things like Swagger exist.

Maybe we'll eventually get the corresponding influx of tech writers.

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I just wished the Lemmy API docs were better lol.

Finnegans Wake makes more sense than Lemmy API docs. Even calling it "documentation" is a stretch.

I literally had to clone the Lemmy git repo and read the source code to find the implementation of an API endpoint and see how it worked for a script that I was writing.

These days the standard is to create an API Doc out of a OpenAPI document generated from the code itself. Someone will probably contribute to it at some point.

Fediverse software API documentation is bad across all fediverse software.

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Ribbit

There is r/Lemmy and r/LemmyMigration

They did ban lemmymigration, right?

The creator of the sub is heavily biased towards kbin, so they restricted r/lemmymigration to sway people towards kbin. They don't seem to be willing to give the subreddit to someone who actually cares about Lemmy either.

Asshole move if you ask me.

I love it how a subreddit with Lemmy in its name doesn't direct people to Lemmy. I mean how the fuck did that happen?

Did they also make an /r/kbinmigration and use it to direct people to Lemmy? Because that would be amazing.

The Lemmy subreddit directed people to Lemmy at first, but after the creator was made aware of controversies surrounding the developers and lemmy.ml, they decided to restrict the Lemmy sub and forward people to the kbin subreddit instead.

Yeah it's very unfortunate, those subs could bring alot more people to the fediverse if they weren't so biased, specially with the fantastic apps Lemmy has already.

How would a Lemmy subreddit be useful? The only thing I could see would just be a pinned message regarding general guidance

Advice on what instances to join, coordination to move communities, technical advice for those communities to form instance, etc.

I come from Reddit and that would be absolutely helpful, I'm still getting around how everything works.

Feel free to ask if you face any difficulties

Should be interesting to see how the fediverse in general handles more traffic, as we’ve seen with kbin and lemmy over the last month or so there are certainly some growing pains

at least we are making the most of our new space here, we all seem to be building something fun here ghost

@lohrun @snoopa lemmy's federation is buggy af and is causing excessive congestion from failed jobs

Federation in general seems to be pretty buggy, I’m running my own instance and I can see a ton of failed jobs happening in the logs. Seems like some of the issues are short comings of the ActivityPub protocol

@lohrun they are shortcomings in lemmy's flavor of apub. activity pub is more akin to json than it is an actual social networking protocol.

@jeff@federated.fun i don’t know if there is much we can do about that though. I have read through the activity pub spec as I was considering writing a fediverse web app…I won’t disagree, it is glorified json. Unfortunately it’s the “standard” that has been loosely agreed upon. I might have the willpower to write a passion project FOSS fediverse web app but I know I couldn’t remotely begin architecting a new federation protocol as well.

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I don't think lemmy is still growing. I might be wrong but this graph https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
is trending down and i've seen a lot of smaller magazines/communities that haven't had any posts for 1-2weeks by now.
I try to help that problem at little but i doubt lemmy&kbin has >100k active users right now.

Lemmy will still be receiving stragglers. E.g. I only signed up yesterday! I only went on Reddit once every few weeks or so, and thus only just found out where my communities had migrated to. I’m sure there are many users like me who haven’t yet followed their communities to their new homes.

They might be using some smoothing, because all lines are noise-free. and the last point might just be an artifact. It looks like a constant growth

According to the graph it accounts for active users within the last 30 days. 30Days ago the reddit strike started and an influx of people started posting. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people haven't been here since. There was a lot of performance and other issues with lemmy&kbin at that time.

There is also always a flurry of people trying out accounts in multiple instances whenever there's a migration wave, so not only are we seeing people who dipped a toe in only to leave, or go back to Reddit, but we're seeing the effect of people understanding how the ecosystem works better and settling into a single active account.

Yeah, I've been on 3 Lemmy instances and now kbin in like 3 weeks

Finding out kbin let you block a whole instances instead of just communities was enough to warrant a new account

Good point, I have 2 lemmy accounts and 1 kbin

I think it is currently growing, as in more people will visit tomorrow than did today, but also it has shrank since a couple weeks ago when everyone was hyping it up as a reddit alternative and trying it out. Not everyone who came to try it has stayed.

A lot of people just want the endless scroll. No need to comment or post, just consume the posts. They would go back to Reddit for now because Lemmy is not a decade old content machine.

The dip is attributable to kbin which has some weirdness around active user counts, largely because they don't keep track of them, so I'm not surprised that their numbers might vary somewhat over time.

Otherwise, yea, it'd be accurate to say that the migration wave has come to an end. Mastodon went through multiple waves over the years so we'll see what happens from here. I for one am rather happy with how lemmy (and kbin) have turned out and am not desperate that a hole bunch more people come over.

My biggest concern is that there isn't more cross talk between lemmy and mastodon, and that's because the fediverse is yet to actually do a good job of making the boundaries between platforms thinner. There are many conversations going on in parallel that would be happy to connect but can't because the fediverse hasn't worked out a way to make that work well (yet).


EDIT:

My biggest concern isn't that there isn't

I hear that some free third party apps still work, so when all of them finally go down there will probably be another influx of people.

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As I type, it says 130k active users (updated hourly)

I think that's normal. People will try out Lemmy but if they notice that the communities they frequent doesn't have a lot of content they'll just leave back to reddit.

We can hope for organic growth but it'll take a long time (especially with how big reddit is)

And it's understandable. Reddit had more than 16 years to build up the user base that it now has.

Also years of AITA or relationship_advice content to read when bored. Not to mention loads of amazing askreddit threads you can binge.

Content takes time to create.

I'd be happy enough with just new content TBH. Totally out of the loop on wrestling and movies without Reddit.

Time to go the sources Reddit usually has and post them yourself.

But the entire point of getting the info from Reddit is so I didn't have to do that. Why watch seven hours of wrestling per week when I could watch two minutes of highlights and read discussions of the events?

A one-day minor downtick isn't a trend when it's been up day-over-day for a while now. I'm sure the user counts will ebb and flow over time, but as long as the community stays healthy and the big social media companies keep being greedy, I think this platform has a good shot at long-term viability.

Need to wait a bit I guess and look at the trends over a larger period of time instead of more granular time scales.

I think what you're seeing is stagnation or downtrends in certain communities, but still growth. As more people come to Lemmy they are finding the instance that works the best for them. lemmy.world has the biggest user base. They will continue to grow while others shrink as people want to be where the action is. This may fluctuate or change in the future.

Do you mean users that don't understand federation will think they need to be on lemmy.world? My account is not on lemmy.world and I don't miss out on anything from other instances

How did you get that?! I was simply saying that lemmy world is the biggest instance right now and people naturally click to where more people are. That's it. Pretty straight forward and simple.

Your comment implied that people would choose an instance based on popularity. I was pointing out that popularity does not correlate with content and community if you are on another fully federated instance.

We have also seen the weaknesses of being on a large instance recently, where lemmy.world issues affected a significant number of users

Bro, it was just my opinion. Calm down. It's not that deep. Go to reddit if you want to argue.

Yeah, I see the same but the community sprawl was vast there in early June. There appears to be a pretty healthy base forming. Pruning dead communities does need to happen somehow though. A admin tool is gonna need to be likely.

Those were going to leave left by now, but there are several alternatives. Lemmy didn't take all Reddit refugees.

True but I've heard that Discuit and Squabbles are well under 10k users apiece so the majority of refugees came to Lemmy I think. Which makes sense because those alternatives are centralized anyway, so they were never going to solve the problem we were running from.

Yeah, that's why I ended up here after trying the others.

Squabbles is at 30K and I really enjoy that site, lots of engagement

Ok, I want to say we should get them over to Lemmy, but everything will work itself out in due time. I'm just happy that's 30k more people who left reddit.

https://the-federation.info/platform/73 -- try this one instead. Click on the major instances and then check "active users this month" or "posts" or "comments" and you'll see that it's doing quite well in terms of the content snowball.

Estimated active users is about 70k on Lemmy. Not sure about kbin. However, active on Lemmy means posted or commented, so the lurkers should be higher.

That’s OK. Lemmy doesn’t need to be huge and we have had a lot of apps developed for it and there have been a lot of donations to help the platform grow. I think it is large enough now to survive and will slowly grow over time.

Just wait for the next big Reddit mistake. People will come over to Lemmy again and it will be a better place than last time.

I think people are because of the latest trends in social media thinking that you need to be huge to be successful. While you do need a certain threshold of people, semi-anonymous social media really doesn't need to be that big. Just big enough to sustain enough little bit niche communities. That doesn't just need users it needs time. People have this habit of hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. And while I am not able to mod because IRL, I am still looking into niche communities here to see if I can help in some way as contributor. Just need to get through my imposter syndrome in that I don't really feel good enough for comment creator.

Kbin probably only has around 20k active users, Lemmy has about 70k. And I'm not sure kbin federation is working perfectly either. If you're looking for more content I'd recommend making a lemmy account, it's possible that you're not seeing everything from your kbin account.

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I’ve been using the Memmy app and it does a decent job of improving the experience for an Apollo refugee, makes the transition away from Reddit much easier

Memmy is fantastic and the developer pushes updates to TestFlight almost daily.