Comment on Is the amount of Lemmy activity declining?
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day agoWatch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
“Total users” is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren’t using lemmy anymore.
“Monthly active users” is the only meaningful metric, and it’s fluctuating and currently going down.
“Activity growth” doesn’t actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you’d expect linear “activity growth” and with growing activity you’d see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn’t find the whole Lemmy in one place so it’s also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
Here’s all of fediverse: lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
Also remember, though it says ‘daily’ in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).
Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.
Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance’s operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.
This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that’s with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.
Aah I didn’t knew this issue from Lemmy, really interesting. Creating a decentralized platform raises many new challenges that are hard to solve!
Now I get why piefed approaches moderation in a different manner and tries to be more resource friendly.
Thanks for the info! Really interesting stuff :)
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
The user you are replying to has specifically sourced lemmy.world data there, which is not going to give you an overall for the wider fediverse.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
This here is a better source: lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
That’s all of the fediverse over the last 1000 days.
Most important takeaways:
Skavau@piefed.social 14 hours ago
I suggest you look at the piefed activity indicator for more context here.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Yeah, that makes sense. Though still Lemmy.ee’s closure is a drop of ~4500 monthly active users while piefed only totals ~1700 monthly active users in total.