So since the mass-exodus from Reddit we can see that the total amount of active users has gone down rather heavily: https://i.imgur.com/MeQok2F.png
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading? But one has to remember that back during the summer many of us created several accounts to settle at an instance, there were also problems with spam-bots of various kinds.
So active users in itself is actually not that interesting. At least not the comparison with the peak. Instead we can watch the total amount of posts, how is that looking?
Well it’s steadily going up actually: https://i.imgur.com/i3Vse7Y.png
Though the increase has gone down slightly. This number however is influenced by other parameters as well. There are several reposts bots and such that mass-post to different instances. But it’s definitley a good tell it’s not going down.
Another interesting factor is comments: https://imgur.com/hWT8xvF
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so. What’s interesting here is that the decline has plateaued, which could indicate that the userbase has settled and become somewhat consistent. This is great news.
All in all, it seems like Lemmy has settled into a rather comfortable spot, with a decent amount of users, posts and comments. That is very slightly decreasing. Ideally we’d like to see this trend reverse, and perhaps that might happen naturally with due time when things have settled even more. For Lemmy I’d reckon the growth will look a bit like this. Whenever Reddit does something horrific (and it will happen more), we’ll see a mass-exodus with more users over here. Then it’ll decrease for a bit, settle and hopefully we can rinse and repeat. Anyway - that’s some irrelevant thoughts from me on the subject.
Just wanted to post these rather good statistics!
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The decline in comments is all the mods banning people for supporting Israel.
I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.
Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.
I had to block that sub, I can’t stand classic cars being cut up like that.
My roomie is German so I share stuff from that community with him from time to time. It might be against the Geneva convention, but I’ve not faced repercussions yet.
As a forever lurker, I agree with you, I’m unleashing up votes like never in my reddit life
Someone better versed in Lemmy may correct me, but isn’t comment activity more of a factor with some of the sorting algorithms (e.g. Hot/Active) here? In which case your upvotes may help but your comment may be even better!
i need to see those VWs please
I think it’s air_cooled_volkswagens@lemmy.world
TIL how to link to communities on other instances in a way that keeps you on your own instance. thanks for that!
No problem :)
It definitely makes life easier
Where are these VW communities you speak of…? Asking as the owner of an old Mk IV Jetta lol
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One thing I love about lemmy is how easy it is to get a conversation going. On reddit it’s really easy to be buried in a thread, and if you get a response it’s often just a joke or a snarky remark. Here there’s so much genuine engagement. It reminds me of the transition from Twitter to Mastodon. I guess people who bother to make the move are more likely to be more engaged users, too.
Yeah! It doesn’t matter how stupid whatever point I have is, there’s usually some sort of conversation born from it, and I really enjoy that!
ignored ;)
Lemmy’s comment sorting does also actively prevent getting buried, unlike reddit (?). Newer comments are biased towards the top, and even heavily-upvoted older comments will fall towards the bottom. The lack of “global karma” and our community’s propensity to heavily downvote anyone doing redditisms like pun threads are also doing a lot of work here.
I didn’t even know about that, that’s really cool. I have noticed that if I come back to older posts there’s often a lot of new activity since I was there last.
I noticed that many people commented that there should be more engagement, ‘just like reddit’. So, i’m wondering if some of these people left and will return later to see if it’s more ‘reddit like’. So, those might be people who don’t necessarily want to post and comment themselves, but are waiting until they can get served with an endless stream of posts to scroll through.
Just thinking out loud here.
Plus registered users don’t count as active users unless they post or comment.
You’re probably right
You’re right. Reddit was the same way during the Digg migrations. The first wave took place with the HD DVD code fiasco migration when some people setup their first accounts. It was a couple years later when Digg upset users again that the final big wave occurred. This is a great place for Lemmy as growing pains get worked out and development catches up to much needed moderation functionality.
As Cole and I say in reference to lemdro.id, it’s a marathon not a sprint! !android@lemdro.id has also been steadily increasing in active and subscribed users.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0,
Big copyright die mad
Oh, memories. I was still in college.
Yeah I expect the same thing to happen. Reddit’s gonna keep pissing users off as they race for their IPO and so this will happen in waves. And when Reddit goes public and needs to start MAKING BIG NUMBER GO UP, the site is really gonna change and people are not going to like it.
Meanwhile the Fediverse and its lack of profit motivation, algorithms, and advertising is going to start looking real appealing.
It might take years. But it does feel like the Fediverse is holding on and has what it takes to make it on the long term.
We will see another big one when old.Reddit.com dies, too. Some people just want a list, man! I don’t necessarily want to load every post and picture to scroll by…
Yeah I completely wiped my account and don’t post anymore but I still browse the site because it’s just a hard resource to replace overnight. But if they kill off old.reddit it’s gonna be a lot easier to wean off of it. Killing Apollo has cut my usage back considerably as I no longer use Reddit on mobile.
So I think killing old.reddit will be a big step as will them seeking more invasive ways to pump revenue. It’s all downhill for that site from here out as far as I see it.
I just joined after taking a break from reddit because of its toxicity spread into some of the smaller subreddits was active in, or they just shut down entirely. Now I’m kinda lurking around to get a feel for the communities here and the culture of lemmy in general. I like it here.
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I’m on Kbin! Can confirm it’s great!
It’s weird how drama free kbin seems to be. Perhaps because we’re still smaller
True, yet big enough to have decent topic coverage. The software itself is pretty great
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Kbin is a seperate software project from Lemmy. However they are very much compatible with each other in terms of ActivityPub interactions. Meaning I, on a Kbin instance, can interact with you, on a Lemmy instance, flawlessly.
Kbinners are generally really cool.
But tbf, kbin/Lemmy federation is far from flawless, it’s still very inconsistent. For instance, kbin moderator actions don’t federate to Lemmy instances, so I constantly have to remove spam from kbin communities that our users are subscribed to.
Point being, we are making it work right now in suboptimal conditions, so it should get even more enjoyable once the software catches up to where it needs to be.
I do follow some kBin communities. I learned about federated social networks recently and I am still exploring them. It’s the same with Mastodon. I’m on the main server but I might switch to another instance because I’m more active with people on it, it happened gradually though. I’m just trying to learn where I fit in the best.
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What a time to be alive
I haven’t been on Reddit since that time. I am really enjoying Lemmy especially now that I can use Eternity, the Lemmy fork of the reddit Infinity app I’ve used so long. It feels so familiar
eternity is great!
Lemmy has replaced reddit completely for me. Sure the content isn’t exactly the same, but it doesn’t need to to be successful IMO.
Same. Since the app stopped working I sometimes accidentally get on Reddit, but not on my phone.
Also Lemmy banned a lot of bot accounts, so the user number is to take with a huge grain of salt. It could in fact be up from before the bot fiasco.
Reddit will continue to do things that push the users away. As apps and accessibility to Lemmy improve, hopefully quality posts and comments will continue to grow.
I had three accounts at one point, but lately I’ve only been using this one. The first instance I tried could never see any content because it was small. I then joined lemmy.world, and I could see plenty of content… when it wasn’t down. But this instance seems to be working well for me.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the active user count could have been explained by people trying different instances.
That, and people trying out Lemmy, but not continuing to use it at some point for some reason.
Like I peeked into two or three other platforms before sticking with Lemmy. I don’t even know their names anymore.
If it’s any consolation, the owner of Squabbles, the site a ton of people praised during the Great Rexxit because Lemmy is too confusing, changed the name to Squabblr and fired all the other admins because he doesn’t believe in hate speech.
Praise the Stör
You can’t be searayus.
The number of servers is also going down , i don’t think comments and post are a good metric as it shows a total and not new comments/posts per month, so activity could still be going down.
The number of servers going down was an obvious eventuality. The actual work and cost involved running an instance is a lot heavier than many people would expect the minute said instance starts scaling up.
And almost nobody wants to put in the effort to run a instance just for themselves either and they’d also have to worry about all the stuff that goes with federating. Doesn’t make sense for most.
The number of instances lemmy has (about 1,000) is not even close to the number of servers mastodon has (about 11,000), so if i am trying to be objective and look at the evidence i would say the attractiveness of lemmy at least currently has peaked.
I don’t really agree. The thing is that Twitter is absolutely dogshit now for even regular old people. It’s chock full of rightwing bullshit and misinfo now and only premium users float to the top of comment threads and that filters for some of the worst people on the platform. It’s a majorly degraded experience. Twitter is also more of the moment and doesn’t so much serve as a library of archival information well categorized into subreddits.
Reddit on the other hand has pissed a lot of people off a lot but the average person is at the most a little annoyed and just kept using the site. And it’s still got 10+ years of backlogged content on it and tons of subreddits.
Also when someone leaves Twitter it’s like shutting down a subreddit in a way. So as more significant people leave, more people have a reason to also leave. Nobody can unilaterally shut down a popular subreddit in the same way that a really popular twitter user can unilaterally pull up stakes and move elsewhere. They’ll just open that sub back up and cram in new scab mods.
Point of the above is that Reddit’s decline is nowhere near as far as Twitter yet and it has a lot of stored value and built up communities that cannot be replaced overnight. That will take years.
Do posts include bot posts? If so it’d be really interesting to see what that number looks like if you stripped out bots.
This happens with every migration from a large platform. One thing that insulates the fediverse, I think, is that it’s non-commercial nature makes it enshittification-proof. There are a lot of significant problems, but it’s super attractive that some tech-bro dickhead won’t blow up the platform to satisfy shareholders’ insatiable profit-lust.
Reddit is now firmly on the enshittification path, so it’s only a matter of time before another exodus wave.
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It doesn’t need to enshittify because it’s already kind of shit in a lot of ways.
A lot of basic features for moderation are not worked on, not prioritized by the dev team, and left to the wayside while large instances deal with CSAM attacks. There are massive, expensive SQL queries that can lock instances into downtime. If something is federated across the network it gets replicated, regardless of if it’s genuine/legal/proper content or not. That’s a huge flaw in the CSAM attack vector because it complicates the situation for everybody federated with the server being attacked.
I don’t have to worry about the platform getting shittier because it still needs to achieve a lot of basic functionality.
The only real place to go is up.
Harsh but fair.
I’ve said it before but active users isn’t indicative of anything really, the early numbers were inflated due to:
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Bot instances before getting defederated
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People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)
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Early on there were a lot of small-ish instances that died off over time as people moved to more stable ones
Comments and posts are a much better indicator but it’s still not entirely accurate since it’s hard to tell how much of that is spam. I think it’d be nice if people stopped obsessing over graphs and just chilled out. I dumped Reddit a few months ago and it’s been pretty nice here.
People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)
I’m curious how many actual users there are beyond alts and bots. Maybe 25k? How cares, at the end of the day talking to 20-30 people here is plenty enough
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