Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users
You should have seen Lemmy before June 2023. All posts were from the same five people. For now the community seems to be alive and healthy.
I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.
Let’s look at some numbers and do some napkin math:
Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)
My hypothesis is user account consolidation. I made several accounts across multiple instances (to deal with outages) but now only use a couple of them. So maybe people are not using their alts as much
You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity.
That is a very important point that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Lemmy is the largest and most active reddit alternative around. All the other sites that tried to capitalize on the API disaster have laughable numbers of users and most posts rarely have more than 10 votes or interactions.
How’s kbin doing? Granted they federate with Lemmy so it’s like asking about an instance. But not quite the same
Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.
Kbin’s main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn’t really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.
Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.
OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I’m pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it’s a worthy sacrifice even if it’s stunting activity for the time being.
i am hopeful still. and i prefer this to be quieter and hence, safer, honestly. personally, i am not an active user because i’m the type of person that feels shame just for existing, but internet is helping me socialize. still not to the point of having something useful to say without wanting to delete it immediatly, but when i see these posts, i automatically get strenght to give my support. i am not able to maintain a community, be a mod, i don’t know how to code, i just can post supportive messages or be a helpful user adding resources and so. but i should be doing more, yep. i am ashamed of posting, but not contributing probably would be more shameful haha sorry people… hehe
That is a very astute observation, and I would not worry about the temporary decline for this very reason.
Also, looking at your username… ”can somebody please find Margot Robbie so that I can make sense of all this”
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
Not to be confused with Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale?
lol forgot about fucking KONY
wonder what that ol’ fella is up to these days!
(is he dead? he’s dead isn’t he?)
It’s very simple, most of the posts here are circle jerks (Linux, FOSS, boy howdy aren’t we better than Reddit, communism) or rage bait.
I only come here when I’m having a good day and I want to reel myself in a bit
Edit: see below to see how far Lemmy users will go to circle jerk how much better they are than Reddit
It’s worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
That’s the reality of where we are. A quiet rural village that turned into a boom town, and now is finding a new normal.
I never even new lemmy existed until the reddixit and I never went back because I think lemmy is a lot less toxic. Also worth pointing out that this post alone has more than 800 likes When I firsf came around top posts had 100 likes tops
for what it’s worth, it’s a small active community. Those that stay participate, like a pre-Eternal September internet. I’ve seen memes here before they made it to reddit, that’s a shift in “power” that can’t be understated in the landscape of the internets.
I think “the good ending” looks something like that.
We aren’t beholden to stockholders, so we don’t need perpetual growth. We aren’t driven by an egomaniacal CEO so we don’t need to be the biggest social network around. We just need to find our equilibrium.
There’s some of us!
Exactly. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that chart, just a quick growth, that led to an overshoot, and now it’s stabilizing In the next months, we will probably see a more stable pattern of linear-looking growth, with occasional peaks here and there.
Personnaly, I’m really enjoying it. You can interact without the Reddit toxicity. I miss a few specialized communities but I can live without it.
I won’t lie. I mostly don’t engage with content I see here. I didn’t do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don’t really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don’t usually want to engage in what’s often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.
That’s not to say I haven’t had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I’ve had more here than anywhere else - I’m just not particularly motivated most of the time.
Social media as a whole is slowing down I think. People are starting to realize it makes them angry, sad, and annoyed.
People had multiple accounts because servers were unstable. Now that stability has increased we’re just abandoning the alts.
Absolutely the case for me, I had like 5-6 alts, now I use maybe two.
Can confirm.
Yep, can confirm. Over the last couple of week I closed 20.000 alts.
the average lemmy user has 3 alts factoid is just statistical error. the average lemmy user has 0 alts. alts georg, who lives on linux.community apparently and has 20,000 alts, is a statistical outlier adn should not be counted
Yeah, “monthly active users” does not necessarily mean “unique monthly active users”.
I would much rather see activity statistics like posts+comments or something like that. As long as those are looking good, then new unique users will continue to join gradually.
We need more idiots who can comment “this” on everything
I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever’s posted was on the front page last week.
Or the week before that I guess…
This!
Gonna build spezify_bot which will do that, copy over comments and comment “this” and “finally someone said it!” below the top comments. Maybe even some “I came here to say this, too!” at some points?
This
i second this
I third this
I turd
I shidded and farded.
That?
This
This
This
this.
psst
this
I’m sure it won’t just be anot- why, you little scamp!
And my axe!
this
Thizz
dis
this
+1
I, too, choose this guy’s wife.
lemmy still isnt nearly as good as reddit was by a long shot. niche communities suck, porn sucks, c/all content isnt bad but if you scroll once youll just repeat everything on refresh.
but god damn the reddit app is terrible now and the content sucks there now too it literally feels like its trying to be a tik tok clone.
Since the fall of reddit, I feel like I don’t know how to internet anymore.
I miss the good ol’ days when everyone on the planet was free to make their own unique websites using JavaScript and HTML. Now all we have is google twitter tiktok instagram LinkedIn
You can still do that, just your website will never be seen because it won’t come up on search engines
And when reddit was at its best, it took years to gather those user numbers. I just dont understand why people keep missing this point.
Lemmy isn’t on an upwards trend.
Of a few months…?
The problem is that this is a spiral. Less users results in less content and smaller communities dying, which in turn leads to less users.
Pro-tip: sort All by New Comments. Yes, if you refresh, you get repeat content, but you also find the unusual stuff and the repeated stuff is where the conversations are happening.
Quit porn
this is a crazy take to make from my comment but i respect ur grind ig
but no, porn and jerking off is good for you abstaining has no benefits and never will. and i can confirm im much healthier and far more shredded than youll ever be.
I mostly lurk so this is me being proactive!
I also mostly lurk, but I logged in to post now. I don’t think the goal should be too be as big as possible, but a place of better discussions.
Currently imagining a community that is only a place for lurkers to post in.
Squabbles had a community called “Lurkers_Anon” for that specific purpose. Was great! I would love to see something like that on Lemmy!
Haha what sort of thing were people posting on it?!
Mainly encouraging each other to post things, and Twitter-like Posts about things happening in their lifes
I’m doing my part!
(starship troopers.jpg)
The quality here is far better with the exception of maybe some user generated text stories. Posts don’t just get lost in a sea of posts. The users here may not be as many, but it appears to have more consistent engagement and far less people PM’ing me offering me Amazon gift cards for feet pics.
This really is a nice place. Even most engaged posts hardly get over 50 comments usually, but 48 of those comments are on topic, sane and unique even on a fandom community. Arguments are heated but mostly contribute at least some point of view rather than being rabid spoutings that either get upvoted (or awarded) to skies above or downvoted to hell unanimously.
We have way fewer posts, even fewer do in niche communities. However, the posts on the bigger communities are quite enough to pass the time. What we actually need is more people interacting with the seemingly dead niche communities of their fandoms and interests.
Big communities keep crossposting a lot of daily news or magazine-worth happenings, which kinda gets tiring after seeing the same post for the 5th time. Hiding crossposts per user settings would be nice to prevent the feeling of only same posts being posted for interested non-fediverse users.
Agreed. I do miss my niche subreddits like druggardening, centuryhomes, unclebens, and diyprint.
3d printing is one of the things that’s pretty popular on Lemmy, actually.
If you missed them maybe you can persuade those wikifeet contributors to join your lemmy instance.
NO. NO FEET PICS. BAD.
I swear that was the best part of reddit… When I was alone there was always someone to offer me gift cards for pics >.<
What about some feet pics for some blockbuster gift cards? It’s gonna make a comeback I’m sure
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
You just can’t keep doomscrolling here, the “active” search repeats all the time and the “best of the day” is like two pages.
And then there’s specific communities that just… Stayed on Reddit.
I actually like lemmy for the fact I can’t doom scroll Makes it easier to put down and touch grass
Yep, it’s been a massive improvement for me over Reddit on that end. No more doomscrolling, no more literally endless fights with strangers (still some ofc, but grass touching is back on the menu).
Well, perhaps that is healthier.
But it doesn’t trap eyeballs.
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
on top of that, there redundant communities that are unnecessary even in the same instances. For example there is the android@ and the askandroid@. The first one has a decent amount of subscribers while the second one has a single digit number. I wanted to ask a question, I posted in the first one since it would make sense to reach more people. The post got deleted and I was told to go to the other one. In the first one they were posting only news articles.
This is ridiculous. Splitting communities in such way was the result of the huge traffic that such communities had in the past in other platforms. This makes sense only when the traffic is so huge that it is practically chaotic to navigate and moderate between news/articles and support questions. When both communities combined have 50 subscribers, such split only harms the platform and the users.
Everyone wanted to migrate by bringing an identical environment to what they had used to. However this should be adaptable to the current situation instead of directly copying it.
The post got deleted and I was told to go to the other one. In the first one they were posting only news articles
Ill call it garbage reddit-brain moderation. The reason for an /ask~ comm is cause your main comm is flooded with repeated questions that would stifle discussion. It’s also not a good solution to that problem, not too mention they don’t have enough users to be having that problem.
The way you form a community is to discuss the same things over and over until a hivemind develops, it’s a good thing to have a group consensus, not that individuals can’t disagree. Now the crappy moderation is gonna cultivate a crappy subreddit vibe instead of something better.
I think some people expected their entire community to get up and move.
I actually found that I really like the “hot” scrolling so much better. On Reddit, everything I came across had ~hundreds of comments and everything was multiple hours old. I didn’t feel like I could contribute at all. But here… it feels a lot smaller, and most of the “hot” posts are not rubbish, so I feel like I can actually contribute!
Well for me, the real content of Reddit was finding an interesting thing and then reading a few dozen comments from people really in the know.
Here it’s going to be a dozen top-level comments and maybe one of them will have a thread longer than three messages.
It’s not just that. Most people here are into far left, anti-capitalist bs and people don’t care to deal with that
People clearly support that, and it makes sense, considering Lemmy’s founder is a Communist and decentralization appeals to Leftists.
Yeah if that’s a bad vibe to someone Lemmy might not be the best fit.
And that’s why it is losing users.
Yeah, quality of community over quantity, it’s a non-issue.
I like it here because of the far left anti-capitalist bs. The internet is full of edgy incel nazis and it’s pretty relieving to have some safe spaces 🤷♂️
