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.
Have a look here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
I didn't know there were almost as many Germans as Americans, the majority of Reddit users were Americans which has created Americocentric perspective on a lot of topics which from a European perspective was quite annoying.
I did not verify my thoughts but I think this could be because ovh has big datacenters in Germany and quite a lot of Europeans use ovh.
fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I've seen it confuse North-American admins).
I think one of the Lemmy devs is German too
Yes that's me :)
Yeah open source seems to be a big thing in Germany specifically for some reason
Why do the graphs look so weird?
Fuck me, pie charts with 50 segments??? Maybe they look weird because pie charts suck if you have more than 2-3 things to show
And the rest on the page don’t display well on mobile
Youre right - feel free to make and share a better Version. I think the community appreciates forks and contributions :)
No, I’m just here to sit in my armchair and judge other people’s design choices.
But on a serious note, I wouldn’t even know how. I barely played around in R but the only semi-legit data viz stuff I ever did was in Tableau. And that was only with static data
It just gives current stats, not historical trends. I don't think it is any answer to OPs question.
EDIT: I was wrong, it was an issue on my side.
If you scroll down it does give historical trends on comments, posts, monthly active users, etc.
What I meant is why do the graphs look so janky.
For example:
What happened in October 2023 that made so many users join?
and
What happened in February 2024 that made so many people stop posting?
Edit: March -> February
Sept/Oct '23 was the Boost lemmy mobile client release. A lot of people signed up and many of them bounced off shortly after.
Lemmy is growing. Not exploding, but showing steady growth. It's interesting because Lemmy tends to grow in sputters. The good thing is though, is that the growth is organic and after a bit of friction, we get new people that stick around.
Yeah, from the graphs above you can see that the number of monthly comments is growing, such is the main thing I suppose
It's too early to say, as the method of accounting for 'active user' changed recently.
Seems to me like Lemmy is "consolidating". Some people are leaving but the community is deepening in norms, understanding, commitment and cohesion. This shows up as better content and discussions all the time. Spam is snuffed out quickly, more communities have better moderators. Our infrastructure is maturing and the software is getting better.
Theses stats are a bit weird to read and idk how trustworthy they are, but generally i would agree because even though total active user count might be stagnant, the comment and post numbers are steadily growing.
The total user count is meaningless. Look at the monthly active users. That gives a good picture. And those are the correct links and graphs.
(The total users mainly show how the Reddit exodus happened. Lots of people made an account and used it once. Thus the steep incline in users. But they're not real, just zombie records. Also it's heavily affected by instances moving, shutting down or doing maintenance. Also lots of people here have multiple accounts. And there is some degree of farming and bot activity...)
We need to up our stats. Get some AI bots in here posting content!
/s
At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.
If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.
What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.
What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.
The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.
Yeah, it's something I observed, too. I'm new here, coming from a STEM field myself - Many places give off a tech-elitist vibe, though.
Customization options for Firefox get reactions like "nobody needs this". I like it here so far, but the tech-bubble is obviously super prominent here, and in many places it simply seems very "If you're not a tech-y don't talk to me because I know better". It's worrying because it will lead to people leaving again when they get the cliché reactions of "use Linux, don't use Windows" or "ewww, Reddit". People should be less hostile, but I guess that's just a problem of the Internet in general and doesn't just apply here.
I hope to see it succeed, though!
Open source culture remains the biggest problem with open source software, sadly.
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don't think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won't care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don't want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn't want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they'll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
Strong agree
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 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 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.
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.
Stable, around 50k monthly active users
!lemmygrow could be a nice idea to help people find smaller communities (memes, tech, news and politics are easy to find, the rest not so much)
Reddit continues to mess up, so we can expect more people as the Reddit experience gets worse and Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks improve
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) .
I find your take on that data to be super weird, given that Lemmy has 10x the number of monthly active users than writefreely. We're not going to be beating Reddit anytime soon, but we've got a decent little community going.
Sublinks and piefed don't compete with lemmy, or at least, they don't weaken the ecosystem since they are all inter compatible.
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.
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 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
Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19
Beehaw are still on 0.18.4. If/when they make the planned move to Sublinks, they'll effectively be on 0.19 in some ways I suppose.
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy