I just noticed that active users on Lemmy got slashed, what happened?
References:
School probably.
Honestly, what’s more surprising is the numbers are that drastic. I didn’t think we have that many Gen Z users here.
What happened with active users on Lemmy?
Submitted 2 months ago by 101@feddit.org to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
Sundial@lemm.ee 2 months ago
ccunning@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t get it. I work full time and have no problem wasting my
lifeI mean time here…doctortran@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The notion of “summer reddit” went hand in hand with the “moms basement” sayings, and even “touch grass” in a way:
Namely all of them ignore the simple fact we all have the internet in our pockets and can be chronically online and actually out in the world doing things at the same time.
expatriado@lemmy.world 2 months ago
i’m in school, still have to shit from time to time
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Hijacking top comment to give the actual answer: feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Sundial@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Oh wow didn’t even see this. Thanks for providing the actual reason.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
What is your default sort set to?
I’m set to scaled and subscribed by default which mostly gets me posts from the last 0-6 hours. But for some reason Lemmy on FF keeps logging me out so I get to see the default all with active sort and it’s a wildly different user base.
There was a post the other day in like Linux memes about case sensitivity in the file system. Early on the post was mostly the Linux die hards who love their case sensitivity. After about 1.5 days it showed up in active and all of the newer comments were (probably normal people) bashing case sensitivity. It’s almost like R*ddit to a degree where the general consensus in the comments can change over time as different users start seeing the post.
Sundial@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I sort by new a lot so it definitely could be that actually. Good point.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How does the software pull the numbers? Maybe an instance got blocked 30 days ago?
rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 2 months ago
We need @SorteKanin@feddit.dk to dive in and tell us how these numbers work!
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Here you go: feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
1984@lemmy.today 2 months ago
I think because we have mostly memes and any discussion is just won by downvoting your opponent. :)
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Unfortunately, the Lemmy community copied opinion downvoting from Reddit.
There are good reasons to downvote, but a different opinion is not one of them. This just leads to echo chambers.
There are 3 options: upvote, downvote and the 3rd one is just not clicking anything.
1984@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Literally all my downvotes are from people with different options. This is a huge echo chamber. I never insult anyone and I’m always polite. I don’t believe vaccinations are safe for everyone since there are side effects, and I think each person should make their own decision about them. I don’t think gender issues are the most important thing in the world.
These are controversial opinions on this platform. :) And I get a lot of downvotes for those opinions when they show up. Not that I care, because I just ignore it. But in the larger picture, it makes people leave the platform.
Why should they stay? I think Lemmy needs to have a good reason to be used. Memes won’t be enough.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
The platform right now is lacking actual discussions.
I keep promoting the non-memes communities every time I can (usually on !newcom@lemmings.world ), after a while it just seems like most of the users do not actually even want to discuss that much, just look at memes (which is also fine)
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Memes and tech
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
The platform right now is lacking actual discussions. Everyone seems to just like memes.
Honestly I’ve just blocked most of the meme comms 😅. It’s easy to see memes when I want to anyway by just opening a private window where I’m not logged in and going to the all feed. It’s always mostly memes anyway. Then when I’m logged in, I can see some other stuff without all the memes clogging up my feed.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Same here
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Not to mention the deluge of posts/comments advocating greater violence in the name of stopping violence. Honestly? I think people are just waking up to the fact that behind the techno babble and ideological propaganda, Lemmy is a social network just like any other.
squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
101@feddit.org 2 months ago
The statistics there is confusing for me.
DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
School started? 🤷🏼♂️
urheber@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
I’m still here most of my day.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Honestly, it’s a short-sighted move made with hubris by the developer’s personal ideology. Both @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml admit in the PR that it’s not a good solution, but yet they continue any way — probably because it’s an easy “solution”, despite alienating 41% of their active user base.
It’s a terrible trend in a lot of programming circles that programmers think because it is easy and it “works” that it must be correct. This can be evidenced by browsing StackOverflow and reading the accepted answers for a lot of questions (I do not have any specific examples off the top of my head).
In my 18+ years of experience, if I find an “easy” solution to a complex problem, I keep looking for the correct solution. What is “easy” now will most likely lead to more complex problems down the line. And as they say, “if you can’t find the time to fix it right the first time, where are you going to find the time to fix it again?”
Look, I get Lemmy is meant to be decentralized. Hiding away your biggest instance looks shady to outside users not in the know. The real solution is to “go door to door” to app makers and ask them to not default to any one instance of Lemmy (side note: randomizing a default server is not much better). If anything, add a link to join-lemmy where people can browse the list of ALL instances (yes, ALL of them) and let them make a genuinely-informed decision on their own. As a convenience, and API should be provided (assuming one does not already exist) so that apps can query a pageable/searchable list of existing/active instances (maybe also provide a link to their homepage too).
Hell, if it makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, the default sorting of returned values can be weighted by percentage of active users (i.e., higher percentages get lower weights to help promote smaller instances). This would help to round out the number of signups without excluding instances.
But whatever developers do (not just Lemmy devs), do NOT overly dictate how people use your software; lest you piss your user base off.
/two-cents
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
alienating 41% of their active user base
Why would distributing users to smaller instances alienate Lemmy.world users?
If anything, distributing the load results in a better user experience, since the last Reddit exodus was taking down .world every few hours.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Because it’s not simply “distributing” the load; it’s actively hiding an instance as if it doesn’t exist. So what do they do when the next instance gets “too big” for their liking? Hide it, along side LW? And the next?
Re-read my comment — specifically the second half where I offer a potential solution that would actually destroy Ute the load more fairly without having to hide anything.
thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Eh … i use lemmy pretty regularly but not in the last few days. Maybe it’s just a lull
shootwhatsmyname@lemm.ee 2 months ago
yeah it’s probably @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org ‘s fault
RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 2 months ago
theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Think a lot of people joined because they were mad at Reddit’s fuckery last year but have since gone back.
TehWorld@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have NO idea about the actual answer. Is it possible that these are from different time-of-day readings?
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Did a russian troll farm get shut down or something (/s)
SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
No, ml and hex are still online
dsilverz@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
The asterisk means that, by “active users”, they’re considering only those who commented and/or posted “in the last month”. Maybe join-lemmy’s algorithm is considering from “day 1” of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?
If it’s true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We’d need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.
Also, “only those who commented and/or posted”. Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
That’s easy - Lemmy devs decided to exclude lemmy.world because it’s too big.
github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/358
101@feddit.org 2 months ago
Holy shit, the most active instance right now on the website is LemmyNSFW.
Image
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
🎵 the internet is for porn 🎵
Heartwotalk@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Image
borf@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
I missed when reddit had more porn so here I am
eee@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That’s stupid.
The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn’t a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they’ll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Way to alienate potential users.
cabbage@piefed.social 2 months ago
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I'm happy for it and all that, but... 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
buT mUh DeCenTrAlIZatiOn!
TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 2 months ago
It’s because the devs suck
AsudoxDev@programming.dev 2 months ago
what steep learning curve? what’s so steep about thinking of social media like email?
someguy3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Nah we’ll keep dropping instances when they hit 20k users.
someguy3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I want the biggest Lemmy you have.
No, that’s too big.
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 2 months ago
It’s a genuine concern though. If you want one centralised server hosting all the content, just use reddit.
expatriado@lemmy.world 2 months ago
so lemmy.world became too big to fail and the other instances decided didn’t want to risk a bail out?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
This has nothing to do with other instances. The join-lemmy.org is run by the Lemmy developers and they decide what happens with that site. They think it’s problematic that lemmy.world is as big as it is (as one of the points of the fediverse is decentralization). So they removed lemmy.world from the listing on join-lemmy.org.
Note that this is in no way a defederation or anything of that sort. The site just doesn’t show lemmy.world, that’s all.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Right, I didn’t think how it would affect the total active user count. Will have to think of a solution for that.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
I guess a new flag to only exclude it from the list but not exclude it from the stats 🤷
101@feddit.org 2 months ago
That is a very weird thing to do, unless they are looking to boost their own instance.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
You can read their motivation in the linked pull request. FWIW I don’t think there’s any ill intent here and certainly not an attempt to boost their own instance. I think they just want Lemmy to be decentralized and lemmy.world being as big as it is kinda prevents that.
I’m not sure I would’ve done it that way personally but I can see the reasoning and it’s not entirely unreasonable.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
I very much doubt that they have discouraged signups to their instance many times
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 2 months ago
@Blaze@feddit.org falling asleep with a smile on their face tonight :)
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Not really, pretending a third of the monthly active users do not exist isn’t really anything I’m happy about.
LW is still in these stats, so there’s that
doctortran@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Why does removing them from the site also mean cutting their user count from Active Users though?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
That’s just how it works at the moment. It only counts active users from the sites listed.