Comment on we need more users

• OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  But we aren’t “stagnant”, we are decreasing.

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  • desentizised@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I’d say monthly active looks pretty much stagnant. Of course we would all benefit from greater adoption.

    For me it was spezgate that brought me to abandon reddit. Yes, a platform is only as valuable as its userbase. Someone else here boiled it down to “quality over quantity”. I don’t expect this to be the final verdict on the trend.

    To me this is a lot like Linux vs Windows market share. Microsoft are currently doing everything in their power to enshittify Windows 11. But the endgame for a community first product like Linux isn’t to promote itself better towards potential switchers. People need to make that switch themselves.

    The big tech product will probably always “win” in terms of adoption, even if it is inferior in terms of its own merits. At the end of the day nobody wants to be Microsoft (reddit) in this analogy. And Apple (bsky) isn’t that much better.

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    • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Hard agree there - growth at any costs should not be our motto, just improvement in terms of features for our own sakes, and if people enjoy that and want to join us, then that’s wonderful as well.

      Though at one point we had 55k active users, and now we “only” have ~35k, so it seems like it has gone down over the years. Though to be fair, then it cycled back upwards, then downwards, then upwards again, then downwards - and yet always decreasing from that peak of 55k to where we are now, an overall negative trend. Even just six months ago we had 41k, a loss of ~15% now compared ot then (correspondingly, PieFed only has ~2k users total across all instances, so this loss of 6k for Lemmy was nowhere near balanced by a corresponding increase in PieFed as would be explained by a migration effect).

      But even if you are fully right, and this all reflects relative stagnation, that’s still not a good thing imho, given the waves of Reddit migrants that we’ve seen coming here during the same time-period. It means that in roughly equal numbers to new people joining we are also losing a LOT of people, to parts unknown (perhaps they went back to Reddit, as many claim to have done in r/RedditAlternatives, or perhaps they moved instead to BlueSky?).

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      • desentizised@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I think that every platform will reach sort of an equilibrium during its lifetime. That relative “plateau” may last for months, years or even longer than that, but I think it will always be reached after its peak.

        imho the height of that peak and plateau speak to the overall popularity potential of the platform. Which is just that. A potential to attract masses. Whether maximizing this is a core goal is a different question.

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