Six months after the initial reddit surge (graphs)

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨troyunrau@lemmy.ca⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/12971023

Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.

It’s been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy’s crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I’m posting screenshots because they’re a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.

Because I’m posting on lemmy.ca, I’ll post quite a few related to this instance, but it’s probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I’ll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison – biggest server, and original server.

First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.

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First observation – there’s some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it’s probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:

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Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.

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As does lemmy.ca, below:

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I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.

Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml – I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.

In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.

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And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.

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Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn’t flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.

I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!

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Comments

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Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
API bullshit refugee here. Y’all are stuck with me.

Sorry.

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- scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I guess we’ll make do.
  
  /s hello fellow refugee!
  
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- CobblerScholar@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah I like yall here
  
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- BiggestBulb@kbin.run ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  API refugee here as well! I'm on Mbin, but I'm in the Fediverse to stay!!
  
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- drasticpotatoes@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Cheers, friend.
  
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- glarf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Howdy! There’s some engagement for yah
  
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- Wav_function@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hello
  
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- kinther@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Same. I post and comment on lemmy but only casually browse specific subreddits now. Some days I’m only on lemmy.
  
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- Jimbo@yiffit.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Seconded
  
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- Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  -“Sorry.”
  
  Found the canadian 😋
  
  Cheers and lets make this a place that rocks!
  
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BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Thanks for this. Unlike on Reddit I feel much better posting here knowing I’m not helping some company make more money.

Gives me the old internet vibes I’ve come to crave

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- explodicle@local106.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I wasn’t conscious of it until I had stopped, but on Reddit I was censoring myself to avoid my comments getting deleted.
  
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  - troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Here there’s a different kind of self-censorship. Anything you do (including your upvotes) gets propagated out using the ActivityPub protocol to all instances that are subscribed to that community. So in theory, admins on different instances can tell what you’re upvoting. A bad acting admin could stalk you here in a way that a mod never could on reddit - because mods couldn’t look at your upvote history.
    
    The good news is that they cannot delete or modify your content on other instances (only their own), so they’ll never pull a spez and edit someone else’s comment globally. And, bad acting admins will simply get defederated, so we should be self-policing (in theory).
    
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  - Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You were probably being racist. There’s only 2 things I can’t stand: intolerance and the Dutch.
    
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lung@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Personally I love Lemmy as is, and as long as it doesn’t die out, I don’t care if it goes mainstream. The mainstream has a lot of apathetic trolls and idiots - Lemmy feels like early reddit did, when it was just nerds, techies, pirates, and the servers were down every day - but Lemmy is better because we rallied around open source this time

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- CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I feel similarly, except I wish more users were interacted with my sports communities too. Guess it’s a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of problem.
  
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  - troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Chicken and egg problem. Communities are too small to have conversation, so no one goes there for conversation. I’m a hockey fan. On reddit r/hockey is huge and busy, but so are all the team subs. Whereas on lemmy, if I post to the team sub, it’s just crickets. So I suppose that if all the hockey fans all hang out in !hockey@lemmy.ca together, we might have critical mass for a conversation now and then. And we can worry about our team subs later, if the general community outgrows one place.
    
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- Amir@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s enough for me to have something to waste my time on during public transport commutes
  
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- Chee_Koala@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Same! Feels like it’s large enough to keep some balls rolling, and that’s all I ever wanted. It would be great for some of my more niche interests to have more representation (and I try and contribute to that) but if it would stay like it is now, I’m down to clown.
  
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Flex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lemmy has better user retention than Diablo IV confirmed

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- DrCatface@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  and the diablo 4 community is dead lmao
  
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  - TheRealKuni@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
    
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  - Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Diablo II FTW!
    
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- Pistcow@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There’s a lot less repeat cellar quests
  
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andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Thanks for sharing this, this is really interesting.

My hope is that when Reddit announces their IPO, more people will start talking about wishing for alternatives. I hope this motivates a few people who checked it out and left and lots of new people to take a first look, and when they do I hope they find an already active community that produces enough content to retain more people and generate more content.

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- troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  When the reddit API protests occurred, lemmy wasn’t really ready for the influx either. Historically, when a social network dies, it’s some combination of a protest and there being a pre-existing landing place that is ready to receive the influx. In the case of digg dying, that was reddit ready and waiting.
  
  But lemmy had so many rough edges and was almost entirely unknown at the time of the reddit protest – bugs, missing features, no apps… For most reddit users, even with the 3rd party shutdown, moving to lemmy at the time was objectively worse.
  
  You’re right though – the next time something happens, lemmy is now established, the apps exist, many of the bugs and missing features have been dealt with, etc.
  
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  - lvxferre@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).
    
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  - Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Totally remember the lack of apps. Initially, I just had to use Lemmy through a mobile browser. Lots of devs were working hard to publish their apps, and after a few months we had lots of options. That was just amazing how quickly it happened.
    
    BTW shout out to Bean, my favorite Lemmy client. It’s not perfect, so in some cases I still use Voyager to fill in the gaps, so bonus points for Voyager too.
    
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- Chainweasel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Those results might be slightly skewed by alternate accounts. When I first joined after during the Reddit Exodus I created this account on lemmy.world, but the instance suffered a LOT of downtime for the first month or so, so I created a few other accounts on lemmy.ml and sh.itjust.works so I could still browse while lemmy.world was down.
  After the instance stabilized I pretty much stopped using the account, so I personally am 2 of the people who “left” by leaving the other accounts inactive.
  
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  - someacnt_@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Same, it might have been this
    
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  - Rolando@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Same. It wasn’t clear how to choose an instance, so I ended up creating accounts in three different places and posting a couple times before settling on this account. I haven’t used the other accounts in months, so they’re part of that surge.
    
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  - sjmarf@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Same. I’ve made six accounts since I joined during the exodus, only two of which I actively use now.
    
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TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I didn’t really look at all the little letters but I like how line go up

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- troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Would you like to invest in my cryptocurrency? Here’s a graph
  
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  - TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    shut up and take my money!
    
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  - antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    :o
    
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- noobdoomguy8658@feddit.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Spoken like a true oil and gas stakeholder. Or any other stakeholder, for that matter.
  
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grue@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Looking at the rest of the data (especially the sustained linear increase in posts across the whole network), I’m increasingly skeptical that the drop in “active users” is really all that meaningful. Speaking for myself, when the big migration happened I created three accounts on different instances, but I’ve found myself only consistently using one of them. If a significant percentage of the rest of you did similar, that means there could’ve been what looks like a huge drop in the number of “active users” even though the number of actual people using the platform remained the same!

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- machinin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They is true in my case too.
  
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- ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think posts is being inflated with bots copying reddit, my subscribed feed has noticeably slowed and even trying to find more communities to get more posts hasn’t been a huge help.
  
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- Papanca@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes, i made four, because when i joined Lemmy, everyone seemed to urge new users to spread across the fediverse. So, i did. But over time, i did away with two accounts and am contemplating ditching another one.
  
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- notasandwich1948@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I only really ever made 1 account, this one
  
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- Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes, that’s true, but the number probably actually declined for a similar reason.
  
  Some created multiple accounts, others tried multiple platforms. Some were happy with lemmy and stayed, others did not.
  
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magnetosphere@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My sympathies to anyone who has to use reddit because their niche community either doesn’t have enough activity or doesn’t exist at all.

I’m more of a casual user who’s just here for the news and memes, so fortunately I don’t have that problem.

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- troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Okay, more serious answer. You look like you’re on kbin, so I don’t know if this applies – nevertheless.
  
  On Lemmy 0.19, the Scaled sort algorithm is such a good improvement over (Hot/All/Top/…) that existed prior to 0.19. It’s basically a Hot sort, but it’s weighted by community size. So if you’re subscribed to a small community, that gets one post a week, it’s still likely to end up in your feed. I’ve noticed a huge improvement when switching to it as my default sort – suddenly that weird music community I subbed to, but never noticed any of the posts – is in my feed. Etc.
  
  Lemmy.world is still on 0.18, but when they upgrade (I have no information on that process) I suspect that people should be switching to it as their default sort for a better experience if they’re into niche topics.
  
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  - Aurelius@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I chatted with the lemmy.world folks about a month or so ago and they mentioned that 0.19 wasn’t fully stable yet. The Lemmy instances being split is a real pain for app developers lol can’t wait till this gets resolved tbh
    
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  - deweydecibel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s cool and all, but sorting is only part of the issue.
    
    The other part is that they’re simply aren’t enough people here yet. That will change with time, of course, I’m not too concerned about that.
    
    Hopefully the sorting will help over time, though.
    
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  - Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So you’re saying I should try Hot sort now? Hmm. Let’s see.
    
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  - flames5123@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I still need to put in the work to sub to all the alternatives. I had hundreds of subs and my front page was so curated. But now on Lemmy, I tried Hot for new/fresh content, but I have to browse Active most of the time due to the amount of just single up vote posts on Hot.
    
    I just wish we had more people. I’m doing my part of being active though!
    
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  - magnetosphere@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hey, cool! I didn’t know about Scaled sorting. Thanks again!
    
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- FireTower@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My niche community didn’t exist, so I just made it myself and started posting. Be that change you want to see.
  
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  - sbv@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’ve got a pretty cool community. I enjoy every one of your posts.
    
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  - magnetosphere@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    THIS is the way to do it! Nice work!
    
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  - Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That takes a small amount of effort. Can you just create my niche communities for me?
    
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- SacrificedBeans@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I miss my niche communities, but I don’t have my app anymore soooo. Tough for me, tougher for spez.
  
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- troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In that case, I recommend !tenforward@lemmy.world ;)
  
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  - magnetosphere@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Subbed! Thanks!
    
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- notasandwich1948@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  sadly even things like memes were better on Reddit, maybe I could do something to change that
  
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Sekrayray@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve tried to go back to Reddit here or there, and I literally can’t do it. I only visit it for very select communities that don’t exist here.

The post frequency isn’t the same here, but the quality of the posts and the comments is so much higher. I’ve said this before, but current Lemmy reminds me of Reddit in the early 2010’s before it got shitty. One of the great things about early Reddit was that it was more mature, people tended to assume good intentions more often, and it promoted logical dialogue. That has VERY MUCH been lost in Reddit’s current incarnation.

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- andrew@radiation.party ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I used Apollo and Relay extensively and not having those makes it so hard to even try for me.
  
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  - Anti_Iridium@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I miss Relay.
    
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- Clbull@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is why I don’t want Lemmy to become mainstream and would rather see another Reddit clone pick up the slack.
  
  Lemmy is like circa 2010 Reddit, minus the jailbait, creepshots, incest-posting, racism and all the other degenerate shit.
  
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  - rar@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I do wish there was an instance that becomes perhaps half as popular as Reddit did at its peak. Just barely enough so we can expose to opinions outside the typical young tech-enthusiast crowd.
    
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Wav_function@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m here because of the API stuff, I was a reddit sync user so when sync made their Lemmy app I joined.

Honestly Lemmy feels much more confusing than Reddit used to, I don’t fully understand the federation stuff and different worlds or whatever, I imagine there’s a lot of people confused about it like me.

I’m happy to stay and contribute but I think I need to figure out how to use this on my desktop because I only check Lemmy because of the sync android app.

Any tips on how to get started migrating my experience to desktop? Like I literally don’t know what URL I would go to.

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nicetriangle@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sweet post. To me this looks like the makings of a sustainable community and I remain pretty optimistic. Curious what the numbers for Kbin would look like.

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LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Witnessing Lemmy grow in real time is the best way to say it’s natural growth. We had no clients, laggy servers, downtime and bare as bones communities.

It’ll take years to get a decent chunk of Reddit users.

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iarigby@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think these numbers are really good. I was using Memmy client before and for some reason it always displayed lower than actual count of comments on posts, so I had the impression that activities were really dying down. I wouldn’t click a post to go to comments because I thought there were barely any, so I would scroll through everything so fast that for a while I stopped browsing altogether. Feels nice to be back - with a different account because lemm.ee started having a weird bug for logging in

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onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That’s nice. Reddit just needs to fuck up once again and we’ll maybe double again in users, then lose half of those that joined and be at 50% from now.

Once Forgejo and Gitlab have ActivityPub, more services like Wordpress and Flipboard activate it, and kbin/mbin/lemmy/mastodon becomes able to interact with them, then we might see some organic growth. If we get to a point where people don’t even know they’re part of the fediverse yet interact with it naturally, then maybe we’ll see explosive growth. All in time though. There’s no rush.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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Aurix@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The good news is it is stable and healthy with that amount.

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doylio@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Awesome work! Thanks for sharing!

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kbal@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Meanwhile if you're curious how reddit has been doing, just look at this chart

Attachment: fedia.io ↗
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Blaze@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Great post, thanks!

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key@lemmy.keychat.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Details on active users count change:

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4235

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Clbull@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m curious, what led to the December user spike?

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Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I find the plateau quite puzzling (lemmy.world, but the total looks very similar):

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There was quite a steep increase, and then it suddenly stopped.

I would rather expect it to slow down, than to stop that abruptly.

We’re looking at a fairly large group of people making a decision to create an account on Lemmy. There are plenty of reasons to expect it to be fuzzy. Even if they all responded to one particular event in time, some would have done so immediately, others the next day, few more even later.

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hamid@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I want to see the hexbear numbers to compare. It is funny to me how people can’t let go of the language of a product that needs to be sold for a community run website provided for free. Engagement, growth, click thrus, daily average users all don’t really matter as long as the people running it enjoy what they are doing and the people who show up do too.

If it is not fun for you that is a real issue, but you’re not going to make it fun by chasing the tactics to grow a able-to-be-monetized product like attracting a large amount of teenager activity for example.

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JustZ@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m fairly sure that explosions, tsunamis, and cardiac arrest all begin with a similar waveform. Those things all tend to be exponential in scale.

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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Excellent work. Thank you!

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be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don't even use lemmy and that was interesting to read.

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NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
look at it

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magnetosphere@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My sympathies to anyone who has to use reddit because their niche community either doesn’t have enough activity or doesn’t exist at all.

I’m more of a casual user who’s just here for the news and memes, so fortunately I don’t have that problem.

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pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between.

My understanding is they started counting votes as activity.

The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml – I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest.

Makes sense that people who care enough to look into smaller instances would be more committed.

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