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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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 💯
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.
The decline in comments is all the mods banning people for supporting Israel.
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.
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.
I’d forgotten about that guy! Loved him and can honestly say he’s one genuine thing about that place that I miss.
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…
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
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.
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This kind of thing is what ruined the comments on Digg too. Too many people started posting ascii art comments and the discussion disappeared.
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.
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.
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.
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┳━┳
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.
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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.
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 ❤️
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.
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
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.
Yeah. This is me now. I was an active content poster previously but now I refuse to contribute anything.
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.
These are the real heroes and martyrs
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
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.
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.
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.
be mindful of the now and don’t let the negative thoughts get the best of you
hope you feel better soon :)
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.
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading?
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?
There are dozens of us!
However, seriously, I like Lemmy the way it is now and I think the shityfication trend will continue for commercial platforms, bringing more users to the Fediverse.
Still due to the persistent success of things like WhatsApp (despite the existence of Signal), I assume the Fediverse will remain a niche for a long time, if not forever - but hey, I’m glad we have what we have.
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.
Be sure to check out some other instances as well. I’ve enjoyed kBin a lot.
I’m on Kbin! Can confirm it’s great!
It’s weird how drama free kbin seems to be. Perhaps because we’re still smaller
True, yet big enough to have decent topic coverage. The software itself is pretty great
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Kbin is a seperate software project from Lemmy. However they are very much compatible with each other in terms of ActivityPub interactions. Meaning I, on a Kbin instance, can interact with you, on a Lemmy instance, flawlessly.
Kbinners are generally really cool.
But tbf, kbin/Lemmy federation is far from flawless, it’s still very inconsistent. For instance, kbin moderator actions don’t federate to Lemmy instances, so I constantly have to remove spam from kbin communities that our users are subscribed to.
Point being, we are making it work right now in suboptimal conditions, so it should get even more enjoyable once the software catches up to where it needs to be.
I do follow some kBin communities. I learned about federated social networks recently and I am still exploring them. It’s the same with Mastodon. I’m on the main server but I might switch to another instance because I’m more active with people on it, it happened gradually though. I’m just trying to learn where I fit in the best.
No rush and no worries. Take your time finding a seat and pick whatever you think fits you best. Happy to have you here on the Fediverse 🤘🍻
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.
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.
