Submitted 9 months ago by LambLeeg@lemm.ee to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/c99a178b-043c-47b5-a73a-d9d96ec6a6ca.webp
Similar to Mastodon’s spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source
That doesn’t seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it’s that active. I would’ve expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.
Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
It’s all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it’ll attract and retain users.
And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored.
Why I’m encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it’s just a little bit.
One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.
Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I’m a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn’t care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
the average user doesn’t care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
Truer words were never said.
I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I’ve tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.
Am I being retained?!??
Sigh… You’re free to go sir. Have a nice evening Mr sovereign user.
until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.
This is honestly it.
I like the site, I want to use it, I want to encourage others to use it, but I’m getting tired of only talking about the same things here.
Maybe we need to start encouraging people to post rather than just expecting them to.
we don’t need more memes, we need people to start going to the games, movies, shows, and hobbies they like and making posts.
I’m in the process of making some stuff, I just worry that the community I post it to on lemmy isn’t big enough to get the word out community-wide.
For context, I’ve been working on a very long dogelore thing. But in the same way, I feel like this hurts any bhj or mtcj stuff I might do. The community on lemmy isn’t big enough to get traction, so what’s the point?
I’m not going back to reddit, and discord is annoying, so it’s just a little discouraging.
It feels like it’s mainly talking one way or another about Reddit, or describing how one of the 3P apps is now available for Lemmy. The content is super stale, but it will grow. Fuck, Reddit back in the day was not exactly the thriving metropolis it was maybe six or so years ago. And reddit peaked and came down to how it exists today. So it’ll take time.
That being said, I don’t check Lemmy anywhere near as frequently as I did Reddit, and mainly because the subs I frequented most have smaller footprints here for now. Which is what you said, but in fewer words.
Also, liftoff kinda sucked, but I just figured out some features of Sync, and it’s fucking beautiful.
So we’re blaming liftoff for the downward trend? Cause the ih-so-amazing Sync does not seemed to have reversed it to spite all the claims I keep seeing.
I’m still using wefwef. What am I missing?
For what it’s worth, memes have helped me stay. I doubt I’m the only one.
They’re quick and easy to browse and some get a bunch of topical comments and links to other relevant communities.
It’ll take a while to reach a level that’s known in the public eye like Twitter and Reddit, but the low-hanging fruit helps keep people interested while more niche communities are forming.
We don’t want to be in the public eye. Let’s enjoy what we have while it lasts
Yeah, I really want r/sysadmin on here.
They have a Discord but Discord is so incredibly annoying to use for this.
hot is completely useless because its filled with content that’s less than an hour old with virtually no comments. its very poor quality content.
I will say I was looking for some opinions on new Internet browsers.
Posted on Reddit and here.
Already got responses on lemmy, but my Reddit post is just being ignored.
Also, Lemmy posts tend to get real conversations going rather than reused meme templates.
If you’re interested in the right (tech) topics I can see Lemmy being better yeah
The two biggest ones I know of are startrek.website for trekkies and blahaj for all things trans/lgbtq. But even those don’t see to have much activity. We need better advertisement to smaller communities somehow.
its not about the instances, those are actually hindering growth by dividing communities across instances and defederating them. lemmy is basically several copies of reddit in a trench coat pretending to be a social network.
Which site?
Lemmy.world? Lemmy.ml? Lemm.ee? Programming.dev? Lemmy.ca? Lemmy.nz? …
I think I’ve blocked the biggest meme sub or two. Helps a lot with that.
Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.
We have to wait until tomorrow?
There are also conscious efforts to weed out bots and other measures that try to remove potential cancer from spreading.
There was a post recently that outlined not weeding efforts on a couple dozen instances that tanked user number by something like 1/5 - clearly visible on graphs.
Lemmy doing great. Even if plenty small communities are still not big enough here.
exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:
sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
I’m not sure what else will be able to cause a spike again. Reddits behavior over the past month is pretty much as terrible as it can get. If people aren’t moving to Lemmy anymore, it’s going to take something apocalyptic to cause Lemmys usercount to grow again.
I’m to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.
Even lurkers are still part of a community.
I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
It’s quite nice being part of a small community now.
I used to be a reddit lurker. I would go into a thread for a post and look for the thing I would have posted, and upvote it.
I can’t do this on Lemmy, I actually have to write stuff now I guess, otherwise it doesn’t show up. I don’t like it.
Feels weird man.
I try to comment when I can. Even if it’s not insightful. A small compliment keeps a community going.
Hell small compliments keep people going let alone an abstract sense of community
I try to browse and upvote in new also
I’m to tired to make quality posts.
There’s room for shitty posts too. 🫂
How mildly opinionated of you.
Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.
I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.
I feel like I’m witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect…
I’m not too worried. Graps dont only go up. :)
FYI, Lemmy doesn’t count lurkers as active users. Here’s how Lemmy counts active users:
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.
Joined today. I’ll likely just lurk in the background…
Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
I’m generally a lurker so here. I posted.
Lemmy.world has been down a lot, I’ve been trying to use it but half the times I’ve logged on it’s been down. So that might be part of it?
No worries, Lemmy is alive. Lemmy and Fediverse in general is better to grow organically.
Some people might have made multiple accounts and chosen one possibly?
As a lurker I mostly just vote. But gotta post every once in a while to add to active users stat!
can’t maintain 90% uptime
why are we losing users?
There’s also people that create multiple accounts in different instances and end up using just one.
Lemmy needs a middle logical layer to really take off. If a local server moderats it as such, the default view for say /c/technology shouldn’t be slit across a dozen instances. Instead it should be merged into one view.
Without it you have a bunch of largely stagnant communities.
It is expected that there are corrections in numbers after a huge spike. The bigger goal will be to sustain this community.
Reddit is going to keep trying dumb methods to monetize or annoy their user base. Digg did a similar thing. The people will slowly get more and more annoyed and the content here will increase. It’s just a waiting game and federated services are the future.
For the last month and a half, I have not used reddit at all. Lemmy has most of the communities that I was a part of.
But I get that, some niche subreddits still don’t have communities here on lemmy. A few of my friends, stopped using lemmy because it didn’t have the subs they were active in.
I’m sticking with it for now. Reddit can piss off. The Spez shit was just the last straw for me after a lot of other disappointing shit in recent times.
My biggest issue is that at least two out of three times I go to browse/post/comment on lemmy.world, the server is down. I have no clue the actual up time, maybe I am just unlucky. But I am considering migrating my main account to another server.
My alt’s server has never experienced this much issue. Hopefully the devs add a migrate function.
“Chart go down” isn’t necessarily bad.
For example, this could be due to general disinterest, or it could be from troll removal/defederation too, no?
Because you like numbers i reply. Now it’s going up by one active user
It’ll hit equilibrium eventually. Not like this is something unusual for a platform that’s making the rounds as the new and exciting thing.
I’m just gonna leave this post here, for statistics.
Joined Lemmy today and find it kinda refreshing and reminding me of the old days when web was small yet varied.
Didn’t they purge a shit ton of bots recently? Those could account for the decline.
Joined few days ago after sync released, thou I’m boost user at reddit before I will stay here no matter what. I’m already done with reddit and their trash app… Can’t wait boost for lemmy to release.
Sadly, there’s just not a critical mass of users in most of the communities I’m interested in. I pop in here every one and a while to see what’s going on, but it’s currently lacking the diversity of content that you get on Reddit. I’m still rooting for it to succeed.
Chocrates@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
RxBrad@lemmings.world 9 months ago
Having recently jumped from the largest instance to a small unknown one, I will say that it’s nice not having to deal with downtimes roughly 20% of the time when I try to use Lemmy.
Cybermass@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I wish there was a way to migrate all my subscriptions, cause then I would probably change instances to ease the burden on my current instance.
flameguy21@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I appreciate World’s transparency but it’s been a lot nicer on lemm.ee for me. Not having a way to kill time when I need to isn’t the end of the world but definitely annoying.
infyrin@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“You broke Reddit!”
No, you broke yourself.
svahnen@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I have also recently moved and it makes me wonder, will users moving to other instances affect the graph?
requiem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
scytale@lemm.ee 9 months ago
And FOMO. New users gravitate towards the large instances because they think they will miss content, not knowing they can easily access said content on any instance as long as it hasn’t defederated from them.
FuzzChef@feddit.de 9 months ago
Of course it’s not about centralisation per se, but the problems that a centralised platform does not have to deal with.
Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 9 months ago
Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse ‘All’ it really isn’t any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
lily33@lemm.ee 9 months ago
It’s not that users want to centralize everything. It’s that Lemmy’s design is such that there are advantages to centralizing.
Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 9 months ago
This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 9 months ago
You also don’t have the content of Reddit. It doesn’t take too long to scroll through all top six hours and get to the single digits of upvotes.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 9 months ago
Kinda cozy though, if you pay attention you kinda see who’s active.
Like you, only user on my instance who has more comments than me.
demesisx@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. IT’s smart to go to a smaller instance but it’s also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That’s why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
fraydabson@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
It’s that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don’t want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
I think it’s also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that’s the way it always worked on reddit.
So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
SageWaterDragon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That’s just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
wasabi@feddit.de 9 months ago
Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
callinean@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Same shit happened with the ‘temporary’ mass migration to Signal.