How is the size of Lemmy’s userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?
I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven’t seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?
Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)
In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!
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Anecdotally, the communities I’m interested in are getting more active in a way that seems sustainable (as opposed to last year, when it was a always a single person posting some, getting no responses, and leaving). I’m pretty positive about the state of Lemmy and the wider threadiverse.
Same here. It might be that the overall number of Lemmy users may be shrinking, but some of the communities I’m in are getting to a more sustainable level of activeness compared to automn.
Now I am surfing lemmy more than reddit, simply because lemmy load faster.
I surf it because reddits app is trash and even the desktop old.reddit site is starting to be put out to pasture by reddit. It’s just better here. I use boost for Lemmy and it’s been amazing.
I came over during the whole API debacle and then realized it will either be great for my mental health, or eventually Lemmy will have just as much content. So far my mental health has improved… the content has improved a little too
Yep, Lemmy right now reminds me of the very early reddit days, I’m sure in 15 years it’ll be completely different but for now it’s been great.
I feel like the quality and quantity of posts and comments have drastically increased over the last month. Idk what happened, maybe it’s just me but I’m glad this place exists. I’m having a blast! 💜
I think posting is probably the biggest thing you can do to grow the community. That and word of mouth - tell people about the fediverse.
at this point I think we might need comments more than posts, there’s lots of posts already but most of them are lacking comments
I think engagement is often driven when people see active communities though. Can’t have that without posts in communities. Sort of a chicken and egg thing ig.
I post in some communities where I’m the only person posting for weeks and nobody comments. I post in others where I’m just a contributor and people engage in the comments.
Gotta agree. A good discussion will pull me in more than lots of posts
I agree as well. If I just wanted a bunch news articles and images I could use RSS and
InstagramPixelfed. Comment discussion threads are the best part of platforms like Lemmy.
Yes, but it’s predominantly if not all news and politics or political ideological soap box posts or posts about defederation drama and instance infighting.
Just after having used Lemmy for 3 years, all it really is, is a small platform, for people to create a space where they can freely be hateful and shitty and hostile to opposite political sides that they hate.
It’s so they can experience feeling powerful over who they hate. In a sense, it’s their way of serving ‘justice’ keeping people out, defederating, is purposeful and habitual. It makes sense to me honestly.
Keeping Lemmy small, it’s easier to control and to continue to be able to have a place where they hate who they hate.
It’s annoying when ppl try to deny that.
Just be honest about it. Be truthful, ppl appreciate honesty.
Growing Lemmy would not be ideal, bc different people with all kinds of different perspectives AND INTERESTS THAT ISN’T TECH OR POLITICS would make them a minority. That’s purposefully being avoided.
I found myself telling myself, “Go on reddit today, don’t go on lemmy. You need a break from all the extreme constant politics”
I don’t engage in politics online at all for a while.
But that’s all what is posted and talked about here. No one here even wants to have actual fun and be silly or have a good time enjoying themselves. What is the most irritating, is literally no one fucking engages if it isn’t political. That stuff gets ignored and down voted. This is a political place that is the issue.
There’s no light hearted fun silly cool niche interesting happy or positive shit here. Everyone is angry and political and people are not interested in that.
I found myself telling myself, “Go on reddit today, don’t go on lemmy. You need a break from all the extreme constant politics”
This happened to me too. What I ended up doing was extensively muting communities that made any political posts in my feed and using a keyword filter (Sync supports this). My blocked words include Linux, Biden, Union, etc… Now my feed is mostly memes
Crazy right ? Yes so far I’ve done that in reddit pretty good. I cut it out real quick. If I see any political word or name I mute it. Cause it will just keep on going. So reddit experience has gotten better bc of that.
With lemmy I’m constantly blocking most communities. What’s weird though is I feel like I’ve already blocked certain communities and they keep popping back up.
I also use a few lemmy clients. So idk if the blocks are synced and carry over to each app.
From what I have seen, some apps do, and some do not. I think that is a factor for sure
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I haven’t seen this, I only browse Subscribed not All
Im seeing more communities on my feed than ever. Even if it’s shrinking, the ones who stay are active.
Just FYI, every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff as people dont both signing in every day – which is basically how people use reddit and other apps but with such a large installcount they’re not as noticeable.
every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff
Also as they see how much propaganda and political extremism is on Lemmy.
Yup, I mean I’m pretty left, but the endless politics is probs bad for the platform in the long run. We need more “normie” and hobby communities if we’re gonna keep attracting new people.
I went back on Reddit a couple days ago and the difference is insane. Lemmy post and comments feel like real people. Reddit post are literally the same shit post or questions asked 3 years ago and filled with comments that seem like AI or just someone not putting in any thought
I just came back a few days ago and have had the exact same experience.
I’m subbed to r/horrorlit and keep wondering if I’m taking crazy pills because it feels like 30% of the posts are some variation of “What’s the scariest/best horror book you’ve read?” They reword it or give it a slightly different spin but it’s essentially the same question over and over. And then of course the responses are always the same 40 books being mentioned repeatedly. I don’t understand why anyone who’s been on the sub for more than a month would keep upvoting the same question.
Yeah it’s probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .
Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.
On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .
Having other projects which are similar to Lemmy is a great sign. It means users have more choices available and developers can experiment with different solutions. It’s really not a competition, because the existence of more compatible Fediverse projects will also benefit Lemmy, as there will be more users and more content.
Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.
What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).
I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most “thumbs up” on github).
With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.
Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.
Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.
New users for Piefed and Sublinks are most likely to come out of the millions of Reddit users, not out of a few thousand Lemmy users. So this will increase the size of the Lemmy network and lead to more activity.
Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.
Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn’t a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.
Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.
Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.
I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .
Uh, did you check what is being posted on writefreely instances? It is no link aggregator, there is no competition with Lemmy at all.
I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.
The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.
Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.
More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.
As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.
Hah weird I’ve been feeling the opposite - like, it feels like there’s more content on here than when I joined, ain’t that weird. Although maybe I’m using ‘stuff I like’ and ‘upvotes’ as a metric and you’re using “community and interaction” maybe? Would seem to make some kind of sense
Anectodally is getting a lot better recently. Quantity and quality is increasing and number of upvotes per post on frontpage is also increasing.
I think the opposite it’s shrinking. Less posts, lots of reddit repost bots.
I keep thinking of ditching Kbin for Lemmy, because Kbin is down more often than I’d like, and I presume Lemmy is healthier. However, I’ve gotten quite used to this place, and am not eager to start anew elsewhere.
BTW, at least in my experience, kbin fails to federate a lot of content properly, leading to communities and posts seeming A LOT emptier than they actually are
If you’d like to try mbin https://fedia.io/ is a good instance. Run by Jerry from infosec.exchange.
Personally I support software diversity and Earnest seems like a nice person but Lemmy has a bigger development community and I wanted the mobile apps.
I would suggest looking at other Kbin instances outside of kbin.social. or look to mbin, which is a fork that in told is more stable. I also haven’t made the jump from Kbin, but have been having similar issues with usability with it for awhile.
I think there has been some influx where a lot of new users made room for themselves while pressing others to leave/defederate. Beehaw was the notable and initial example where the growth of people from reddit resulted in less interactivity.
Shrinking I was Joking
Oh get over yourself lmao. Like reddit didnt have the_donald up on the front page for years
Anyone downvoting can go back to reddit: sorry your favourite democrats arent astroturfing the front page with heckin police puppers or whatever slop you miss from that cesspit.
Shrinking because it’s full of, and ran by commie dumbasses. Nobody likes you guys.
Yeah, we are really, really bad. You should leave before you start transmuting yourself into a tank and begin involuntarily rolling over capitalists.
Not to mention their jokes suck
18 days for this comeback was worse.
