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!
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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!
Do posts include bot posts? If so it’d be really interesting to see what that number looks like if you stripped out bots.
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.
I’ve said it before but active users isn’t indicative of anything really, the early numbers were inflated due to:
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Bot instances before getting defederated
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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)
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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.
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)
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
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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.
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.
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After twitter implements subscription for all users, prepare for twitter users moving to Lemmy.
or mastodon/threads mainly
Bluesky as well
I despise bluesky but that too
I despise bluesky
Why? Honestly asking.
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.
This is much more likely, the way twitter works is very different from reddit/Lemmy style
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.
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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.
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:
Any news about mainstream social media
“This is good for Lemmy.”Hahaha oh cognitive bias, you always know just what to make me say
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! [email protected] 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.
Anecdotal, but I bounced around between 5 accounts when I first joined, then settled into 2. One regular account and one for memes/NSFW.
Does nsfw even exist on lemmy or am i on the wrong instance?
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It does exist
Check out the lemmynsfw.com 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.
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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.
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.
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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
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.
