We’re seeing an increase from 53k active users at the beginning of July to 72k active users at the time of this post.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, an active user is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Lurkers aren’t considered active users, so basically these are content creators on Lemmy.
Sources:
Impressive stats all around. The way that reddit and reddit-likes work with feeds/frontpages you don’t need millions and millions of users for a place to feel active and worth visiting. Reddit was an interesting place all the way back in 2010 when I first started going there, and I imagine they had an order of magnitude less users back then in the pre-smartphone app era.
With more users you get more of an eternal september effect… but you also get tons of people that might frictionlessly see and participate in more nische communities.
I think that a lot of the early migrants are tech savvy (not just chronically online), and have seen the dawn of multiple eternal Septembers. I think this is partly why everybody is doing their part to encourage conversation, because we all remember what a platform that has passed the critical mass looks like, vs one that has not.
I hope that the leaders of the Fediverse listen to their users, and allow people who understand how to improve the user experience contribute without stubbornly sticking to their ideas of how things should be run, while at the same time preventing the 'verse from turning into another soulless vanity factory.
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honestly I’m happy for know and use Lemmy platform, I thought that Reddit was a unique thing: but this is awesome, is its evolution
Commenting so that I can continue to be a positive statistic. 🫡
I’m doing my part!
I disagree.
I’m doing my part.
I’m doing my part!
I’m parting my do!
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I’m throwing my dart!
I might as well try.
Me too
I‘m doing my part!
I’m parting my do
I’m doing it, too!
Joining you
Samesies
It’s weird these numbers are so small, it should feel dead. But there are a lot of great discussions and a lot of good laughs to be had here.
The level of engagement for the very small numbers here must be quite impressive.
I guess it’s the old quality vs quantity.
I suspect the type of person who was motivated to move to Lemmy is the type of person who posts more often.
There are also people who are posting here more because they want to participate and see Lemmy grow. I know that is me and I can’t be the only one. I’ve posted more on Lemmy than the last 3 years of Reddit combined im pretty sure. I always just lurked over there but I want this to go well so I participate more.
While this is encouraging, I wonder how many users have multiple active accounts, like I do.
Just create a slightly different personality for each account.
Hmm I like this but maybe I will do one for each mood I am in.
And with different purposes and contributions
35% in a week is pretty good. I feel like from here we’ll see steady growth and continue building and when Reddit inevitably kills oldreddit we’ll get a big influx and be ready for it.
While there is definitely a bunch of content popping up now thanks to to influx of actuve users, there still are some more niche communities that were pretty active on old reddit that i guess just can get to critical mass on lemmy and so are pretty dead. I hope that can change going into the future though.
If the community you’re looking for exists but doesn’t contain posts, the best thing you can do is to start posting yourself, no matter the quality you think your content has.
Humans tend to follow others, which leads to both positive and negative feedback loops. If nobody is posting, anyone discovering the community will think “oh this place is dead, no point in posting”.
Being the first to break the ice and do something in a group setting is scary, but once somebody is doing it it’s much more likely others will join in.
It’s often uncomfortable to be the first person to start dancing to the music, but have you noticed how much easier it is for everyone else to join in when that one guy starts going off?
That’s a great way of looking at it.
On first read I really thought you said “… a bunch of content pooping up…”, which would have been very lemmy actually :-)
Thanks for the content active users!
We need MORE!
Well, there it is.
I’ve been lurking, thanks to these users for providing content for me to enjoy while procrastinating.
As have I — this site has effectively wholly replaced reddit for me outside of search.
I used to have a high barrier of thought prior to posting but now I just post whatever bullshit is on my mind at that moment just so I can keep threads active. Like I’m doing now
Thank you for your service! o7
No need to thank me, shitposting is my godgiven duty o7
That’s exactly why I’ve always been a mere lurker. Maybe I should change that!
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On reddit I always had the feeling that someone else had already made my point for me. Here I find myself submitting all those comments and posts that I just deleted halfway through before.
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I’m glad to hear from you anyway :)
Ditto that.
And the frustration that comes of that isn’t so much “I didn’t get to make a point, for which I lost the opportunity to receive credit” but more “I didn’t get to engage with the discussion in realtime without having a sense for how others would react, appreciate, or challenge my views”. Reading things afterward has that line of discussion set in stone in a way that’s unlike being a participant.
It feels like a threshold has been crossed. Reddit related content is there but not so dominating as before. People are memeing other things, news and politics discussion is popping up, particularly popular posts from more niche communities as well, it feels like a much more healthy mix of content now compared to the beginning of July and especially compared to when I joined during the reddit blackout.
I think this has been the first week when I didn’t have to like put Lemmy down cause I was just seeing posts I had already seen. It’s nice to have a good feed to scroll again, and not feel like I have to deep dive posts and read every comment just to see something new. Feelsgoodman.
So much this. Exploring this place at first felt a bit empty so to say. Not that much stuff to see or read. Now there’s tons of comments, posts and upvote activity that makes this place feel fresh and alive now. FeelsGoodMan indeed, and we’re the oned giving it life.
I feel good reading about what you said about feeling good. You inspired me to say my first fediwords, and I wanted them to be about feeling good.
Thank you. It feels good to be inspiring others, as I was inspired by other’s excitement and happiness to be here. Welcome
I love all of you beautiful bastards
We have hit the critical mass; and that is a cause for celebration. A month ago when I joined, I thought that people would come, post a bit. See the limited content and leave. And I will admit it was painful to use Lemmy back then since a solid 90 percent of posts where about the site or were rips from Reddit. Fingers crossed for the future of Lemmy
It was also painful to use Lemmy back then because any time there was a new post it would push all the old ones down the screen and you’d often literally have to chase the links that you wanted to click. That on top of how generally slow and unreliable the platform was back in June. The technical improvements to Lemmy over the last few weeks have been absolutely amazing.
Oh I remember that!
I agree overall, though I’m not convinced the threshold has been passed or reached just yet. If this level of growth can be sustained though, it just might.
I wonder if this will be used as a case study for critical mass of social networks in the future. We have Tildes, Squabbles and Lemmy all competing for scraps off Reddits table and so maybe what we’ll end up with is a fairly clear ballpark for what kind of active user count is needed to reach the snowballing point.
Is Tildes really ‘competing’? The invite-based signup obviously invites the most dedicated and ‘quality’ individuals, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help with critical mass.
As for Squabbles, I’m suspicious of yet another centralized platform. Honestly, I’m just sorta ‘done’ trusting wannabe billionaires.
All three are quite different, which actually makes following their respective growth more interesting to me.
I suppose it’s fair that Tildes is not truly “competing” since they’re invite-only. I don’t have an account there but I’ve heard they want to focus on long-form high effort posts, so it’s never going to be real competition on terms of size, though it will be interesting to see whether a site with that profile can grow enough to thrive.
I’m not a fan of Squabbles personally but some people obviously are since they’re at 30k users soon. It’s run by a single person, and I am a little worried about whether that persons individual preferences influence development too much and in general the way development is heading. I don’t like the layout and I think the logo and name are a hindrance in terms of mass adoption.
On a larger scale though, Squabbles doesn’t allow any NSFW, and that is the benchmark I’m most interested in. Can a site of this nature reach critical mass without it?
Honestly, now that you say it…that does sound like quite the case study.
Yeah, I’m glad I’m not really the only one who feels this way. I mean the most important part of a “social” media network is to have people on it. Also I can’t really see anything that tildes has that Lemmy doesn’t. I might be missing something, but it seems pretty inferior. But as for the centrallised platforms; yeah I’m pretty done too.
Absolutely, and it’s been very refreshing to see discussion get broader and be filled with memes and other interesting content.
It will take a while to get somewhere close to Reddit, but if we talk about how it feels, I see it getting closer and closer day by day.
I looked at the front page of Reddit without logging in a few hours ago and the site is almost unrecognizable. I’m sure there are people that prefer this iteration but I’m fine moving on.
Considering how toxic reddit was getting, I’m okay if lemmy doesn’t get close to it.
I rarely ever posted on Reddit, I’m trying to share my original content here now.
Hopefully we’ve not just crossed the activity threshold for people to stick around and shitpost but also for people to figure it’s worth posting some quality stuff here
Depending on what type of quality content you’re after, they might be more related than you think. Shitposting keeps the attention of the larger crowd, and the presence of a large audience makes certain high quality stuff feel more worth it to post.
I would imagine this applies for stuff like AMAs and posting OC artwork etc in particular but I’m sure more things than those.
While there is less reddit content I do feel this past week it just got replaced with meta/threats, and personally it has been kind of even more tiring than reddit content as it has tended to feel like an echo chamber where everyone read the same post and spread a lot of negativity about how Lemmy won’t survive Meta if we don’t block instances that don’t block threats and the like and also the idea going around that if someone wants to federate he is either ignorant or stupid, and talking about that, the elitism on this threats treating everyone on insta and threats as stupid people and saying they don’t sant any of those people here because it dumbs down the content… This last week has been really toxic on the larger communities.
Sorry for that little rant, I had to get that out of my system jeje.
Super impressed with growth over the last week alone. I really was worried how I would adjust to not being on Reddit after Apollo died but I feel pretty encouraged now.
Yeah, I stuck with Reddit for a while because I didn’t like Lemmy on Desktop, but now I’m using Memmy so I have no excuse. I just wish the search function were a bit better.
Me too! Replacing Reddit for me is not so easy but I’m getting better at using Lemmy. Still browse “popular” on Reddit in an alt to compare a bit but so far so good
Only thing I feel like I am missing is r/onepunchman the rest is no loss for me. And I have spend some time to get more news feeds here on Lemmy. I can get used to this.
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Amaaaaaazing username! Love it!
Haha thank you <3