cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12971023
Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.
It’s been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy’s crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I’m posting screenshots because they’re a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.
Because I’m posting on lemmy.ca, I’ll post quite a few related to this instance, but it’s probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I’ll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison – biggest server, and original server.
First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.
First observation – there’s some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it’s probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:
Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.
As does lemmy.ca, below:
I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.
Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml – I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.
In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.
And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.
Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn’t flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.
I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!
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API bullshit refugee here. Y’all are stuck with me.
Sorry.
Yeah I like yall here
Cheers, friend.
Howdy! There’s some engagement for yah
Same. I post and comment on lemmy but only casually browse specific subreddits now. Some days I’m only on lemmy.
Hello
Thanks for this. Unlike on Reddit I feel much better posting here knowing I’m not helping some company make more money.
Gives me the old internet vibes I’ve come to crave
Personally I love Lemmy as is, and as long as it doesn’t die out, I don’t care if it goes mainstream. The mainstream has a lot of apathetic trolls and idiots - Lemmy feels like early reddit did, when it was just nerds, techies, pirates, and the servers were down every day - but Lemmy is better because we rallied around open source this time
I feel similarly, except I wish more users were interacted with my sports communities too. Guess it’s a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of problem.
Chicken and egg problem. Communities are too small to have conversation, so no one goes there for conversation. I’m a hockey fan. On reddit r/hockey is huge and busy, but so are all the team subs. Whereas on lemmy, if I post to the team sub, it’s just crickets. So I suppose that if all the hockey fans all hang out in !hockey@lemmy.ca together, we might have critical mass for a conversation now and then. And we can worry about our team subs later, if the general community outgrows one place.
That’s how it happened there. Macro to micro.
It’s enough for me to have something to waste my time on during public transport commutes
Same! Feels like it’s large enough to keep some balls rolling, and that’s all I ever wanted. It would be great for some of my more niche interests to have more representation (and I try and contribute to that) but if it would stay like it is now, I’m down to clown.
Lemmy has better user retention than Diablo IV confirmed
and the diablo 4 community is dead lmao
There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
x doubt
There’s a lot less repeat cellar quests
I didn’t really look at all the little letters but I like how line go up
Would you like to invest in my cryptocurrency? Here’s a graph
shut up and take my money!
:o
Looking at the rest of the data (especially the sustained linear increase in posts across the whole network), I’m increasingly skeptical that the drop in “active users” is really all that meaningful. Speaking for myself, when the big migration happened I created three accounts on different instances, but I’ve found myself only consistently using one of them. If a significant percentage of the rest of you did similar, that means there could’ve been what looks like a huge drop in the number of “active users” even though the number of actual people using the platform remained the same!
This is true in my case too.
Yes, i made four, because when i joined Lemmy, everyone seemed to urge new users to spread across the fediverse. So, i did. But over time, i did away with two accounts and am contemplating ditching another one.
I think posts is being inflated with bots copying reddit, my subscribed feed has noticeably slowed and even trying to find more communities to get more posts hasn’t been a huge help.
I only really ever made 1 account, this one
Yes, that’s true, but the number probably actually declined for a similar reason.
Some created multiple accounts, others tried multiple platforms. Some were happy with lemmy and stayed, others did not.
My sympathies to anyone who has to use reddit because their niche community either doesn’t have enough activity or doesn’t exist at all.
I’m more of a casual user who’s just here for the news and memes, so fortunately I don’t have that problem.
Okay, more serious answer. You look like you’re on kbin, so I don’t know if this applies – nevertheless.
On Lemmy 0.19, the Scaled sort algorithm is such a good improvement over (Hot/All/Top/…) that existed prior to 0.19. It’s basically a Hot sort, but it’s weighted by community size. So if you’re subscribed to a small community, that gets one post a week, it’s still likely to end up in your feed. I’ve noticed a huge improvement when switching to it as my default sort – suddenly that weird music community I subbed to, but never noticed any of the posts – is in my feed. Etc.
Lemmy.world is still on 0.18, but when they upgrade (I have no information on that process) I suspect that people should be switching to it as their default sort for a better experience if they’re into niche topics.
I chatted with the lemmy.world folks about a month or so ago and they mentioned that 0.19 wasn’t fully stable yet. The Lemmy instances being split is a real pain for app developers lol can’t wait till this gets resolved tbh
That’s cool and all, but sorting is only part of the issue.
The other part is that they’re simply aren’t enough people here yet. That will change with time, of course, I’m not too concerned about that. Hopefully the sorting will help draw attention to vacant communities in need of filling.
Hey, cool! I didn’t know about Scaled sorting. Thanks again!
I still need to put in the work to sub to all the alternatives. I had hundreds of subs and my front page was so curated. But now on Lemmy, I tried Hot for new/fresh content, but I have to browse Active most of the time due to the amount of just single up vote posts on Hot.
I just wish we had more people. I’m doing my part of being active though!
Even if you find alternatives to all your reddit communities, they might be empty placeholder communities. Someone needs to get the content kicked off in them.
Admittedly it’s not just a lemmy problem. Small reddit subs sometimes have the same issue. My specific field of science is called geophysics. I stopped posting to r/geophysics during the API protest – it was already pretty quiet, and I previously accounted for a significant amount of the content/chatter. But after I stopped posting, what remains is conspiracy theory nonsense mostly. Well, normally I’d report that, but now I’m just watching reddit burn. Started !geophysics@lemmy.ca and it’s just as quiet in there, with mostly me posting… but hey, if I’m going to scream into an empty void, it might as well be here :)
So you’re saying I should try Hot sort now? Hmm. Let’s see.
My niche community didn’t exist, so I just made it myself and started posting. Be that change you want to see.
You’ve got a pretty cool community. I enjoy every one of your posts.
Thanks! User engagement is what keeps me going. Otherwise it feels like I’m just talking into a void.
THIS is the way to do it, folks! Nice work!
Thanks! !forgottenweapons@lemmy.world has been around for about a month and we’re almost at 1k members!
lol that’s YOU?!? https://lemmy.world/c/forgottenweapons showed up randomly in my feed one day, and I subscribed because it’s unique and interesting! Awesome!
Glad to hear it! And yes that is me. You’re making me feel like Lemmy’s second biggest celebrity, behind the android community moderator Margot Robbie. If you enjoy the posts don’t forget to check out the Forgotten Weapons YouTube channel & website.
The community is sort of a place for fans of the show to post stuff that other fans would enjoy, but it’s got a whole bunch of members who actually have found out about Forgotten Weapons through the Lemmy community first. I’m really glad to see people who find out about Forgotten Weapons from the community. It makes me feel like I’m giving back to Ian McCollum for everything I’ve learned from his show.
I’ve watched several videos! I know next to nothing about guns, so hearing about the oddities is a fun way to learn.
It’s also fascinating that Robbie finds a way to balance her celebrity career with moderating a community on Lemmy lol
That takes a small amount of effort. Can you just create my niche communities for me?
Sure. But only if your niche community is centered around a YouTube channel run by a man with a three musketeers looking mustache and ponytail who travels the globe to disassemble military prototypes.
That sounds pretty fun. Does he do UFOs too?
No but I think we have one for UFOs
I miss my niche communities, but I don’t have my app anymore soooo. Tough for me, tougher for spez.
In that case, I recommend !tenforward@lemmy.world ;)
Subbed! Thanks!
sadly even things like memes were better on Reddit, maybe I could do something to change that
Sweet post. To me this looks like the makings of a sustainable community and I remain pretty optimistic. Curious what the numbers for Kbin would look like.
Here’s the kbin graphs directly on the site that generates the charts. I’m unfamiliar with kbin as a backend, so I don’t know how to interpret any of their numbers. But you can play: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
I’ve tried to go back to Reddit here or there, and I literally can’t do it. I only visit it for very select communities that don’t exist here.
The post frequency isn’t the same here, but the quality of the posts and the comments is so much higher. I’ve said this before, but current Lemmy reminds me of Reddit in the early 2010’s before it got shitty. One of the great things about early Reddit was that it was more mature, people tended to assume good intentions more often, and it promoted logical dialogue. That has VERY MUCH been lost in Reddit’s current incarnation.
I used Apollo and Relay extensively and not having those makes it so hard to even try for me.
I miss Relay.
This is why I don’t want Lemmy to become mainstream and would rather see another Reddit clone pick up the slack.
Lemmy is like circa 2010 Reddit, minus the jailbait, creepshots, incest-posting, racism and all the other degenerate shit.
I do wish there was an instance that becomes perhaps half as popular as Reddit did at its peak. Just barely enough so we can expose to opinions outside the typical young tech-enthusiast crowd.
I’m here because of the API stuff, I was a reddit sync user so when sync made their Lemmy app I joined.
Honestly Lemmy feels much more confusing than Reddit used to, I don’t fully understand the federation stuff and different worlds or whatever, I imagine there’s a lot of people confused about it like me.
I’m happy to stay and contribute but I think I need to figure out how to use this on my desktop because I only check Lemmy because of the sync android app.
Any tips on how to get started migrating my experience to desktop? Like I literally don’t know what URL I would go to.
The most intuitive analogy to federation to me is email. You may have an account with one provider (gmail.com in the example of email, or lemmy.world in the example of Lemmy) but you can send emails to other providers (email example) or post messages to other instances (Lemmy).
Just like with email providers, a Lemmy instance may decide not to allow communication with another instance - this is “defederation.” Instances that allow communication are “federated.”
Just like email, you don’t normally need to worry much about whether you are on the same instance as a particular community or user - it just works.
This is a simplification, but for me is a good working model.
Thanks
The url for you would simply be lemmy.world. Just login with your account from the app and start scrolling, no need to migrate anything.
Federation in principle is actually really simple. Basically there are multiple servers (aka instances) run by different people and with their own urls, and they just send each other messages to stay in sync. E g. if you post something on LW, that server also sends it to all the others (all it is federated with), so they can show it to their users too. If someone upvotes the post then their server sends that info to all the other servers as well, so everyone can update their vote counter for that post. That’s it, that’s the magic.
The result is that all instances have the same content, and users can message each other no matter what instance they are on. That means it doesn’t really matter which one you sign up on, and no content is lost if one of them goes down.
Thanks
Witnessing Lemmy grow in real time is the best way to say it’s natural growth. We had no clients, laggy servers, downtime and bare as bones communities.
It’ll take years to get a decent chunk of Reddit users.
I think these numbers are really good. I was using Memmy client before and for some reason it always displayed lower than actual count of comments on posts, so I had the impression that activities were really dying down. I wouldn’t click a post to go to comments because I thought there were barely any, so I would scroll through everything so fast that for a while I stopped browsing altogether. Feels nice to be back - with a different account because lemm.ee started having a weird bug for logging in
I’ve also been building a lemmy web client (Quiblr) and I can tell ya that these types bugs often come up due to API issues. Honestly, it can be difficult at times to know if it is actually an API issue or if it is an app bug. So app bugs go unresolved because they get written off as API issues lol The alternative is that you invest a lot of time trying to fix something, only to realize that it is out of your control
I think Lemmy’s API issues will be fixed, but the growing pains are definitely there!
Bug reporting in general is kind of confusing for Lemmy users who aren’t intimately familiar with it’s development.
For example, filtering comments by date on user profiles just doesn’t seem to work. You can sort properly, but try filtering them by day, week, month, etc, and it never filters them. It always shows all comments from All Time. But this sort of filtering works fine everywhere else. Happens on the three Lemmy apps I’ve used, and the web UI last I checked.
But I’m not sure where that bug is actually coming from, and I haven’t seen any other bug reports about it. Is that an issue for Lemmy’s dev, Lemmy’s UI devs, the app devs, the instance admins, etc. I don’t know who to submit it to.
I don’t want to waste anyone’s time making them bug hunt something that isn’t under their umbrella.
lemm.ee started having a weird bug for logging in
Hey, can you share some more about this login bug? I’m not aware of any login issues currently. Could it be related to an app you were using not supporting 0.19 yet?
I wish I had written down the bug, but it’s possible that was the reason, because the client started saying “invalid login” while I was already logged in. The thing is, I then visited the website and had trouble logging in there too, it kept getting stuck on loading. I clicked “rest password” and it finally logged in 😅. Then I tried changing my password and at that point apple keychain’s autofill might’ve messed up and remembered a wrong one. I now reset it again and the client works.
Based on the description, I am thinking this was related to some general issues we were having after the 0.19 upgrade (which have been solved now). Thanks for the info!
Yes :) Thanks for your work!
Out of curiosity, what app are you using now?
It’s called “Bean for Lemmy”. I really enjoy how it looks.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try
That’s nice. Reddit just needs to fuck up once again and we’ll maybe double again in users, then lose half of those that joined and be at 50% from now.
Once Forgejo and Gitlab have ActivityPub, more services like Wordpress and Flipboard activate it, and kbin/mbin/lemmy/mastodon becomes able to interact with them, then we might see some organic growth. If we get to a point where people don’t even know they’re part of the fediverse yet interact with it naturally, then maybe we’ll see explosive growth. All in time though. There’s no rush.
didnt read no bump 👆🤣🇺🇸🌀🦈🔨🤮
The good news is it is stable and healthy with that amount.
Awesome work! Thanks for sharing!
