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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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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Imo almost a million active users is about the right place to be. Fuck being as big as reddit.
The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren’t enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.
Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don’t believe there’s an equivalent Lemmy community.
Reddit’s massive strength is that it’s big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.
Yeah, I get that too. It’s a valid point. I’m hoping over time the internet at large will absorb some of those niches. I don’t even care if sometimes a web search takes me to reddit, or somewhere else really. I just want a place to browse that is less toxic than reddit. Lemmy’s userbase has gotten a little shittier lately imo, but still way better than reddit.
A lot of Lemmy’s problems can be summed up in a question: how does this benefit from not being a dedicated forum?
I want to go back to the decentralized internet where hobbyists were running their own servers and communities. Lemmy, like reddit, encourages centralization onto a single major platform, and I don’t like that.
Agreed 💯
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Awesome!
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.
Lemmy doing an excellent job overall. I’m here every day and enjoying the banter in the comments. Not been back to Reddit since Judgement Day.
The smaller scale is feature, not a bug. I don’t want millions of cretins diluting the stock.
Reddit got worse and worse and worse and worse over the years. I was there since 2012 and I watched it steadily get filled with more and more toxic uninteresting idiots. I used to be able to have an actual discussion with other adults and now it feels like “summer Reddit” never ever ended. This place feels like old Reddit to me
100%. It happened slowly and collisions with idiots tended to increase imperceptibly over time. Eventually I forgot what it was like to have a polite conversation and my own comments became more negative and toxic. The site split on sectarian lines and the discourse has been distorted by the mitigations of hate speech, shadow bans, auto-moderation, etc.
It’s fitting that this hulking cesspit has been bought and paid for by a corporation, they are a perfect match.
Every comment in lemmy is a genuine contribution. What I hated most in reddit was chaining single letter comments to achieve what the shit. Makes me wanna barf.
Same. I don’t miss that, or much, but I think we can all agree on missing the genius of Shittymorph. He truly had a way of gripping you into a comment and then suddenly it’s nineteen ninety-eight again, and you finally look at the username. Truly entertained every time, was sad but understandable to see him retire.
His timing is incredible, I don’t know how he does it. He stays away just long enough for the paranoia of getting pranked lulls, and then he hits you with the lols hammer. He got me a couple of days ago while I was lurking in one of the subs.
Oh shit, he’s actually around again? Last I heard he had “hung up the hat” so to speak. Perhaps that itself was a ruse!
He is! It was three to four days ago max. He is definitely a loved character as the whole thread lit up once they realized they got got…
I’d forgotten about that guy! Loved him and can honestly say he’s one genuine thing about that place that I miss.
This kind of thing is what ruined the comments on Digg too. Too many people started posting ascii art comments and the discussion disappeared.
atm what makes me barf is the amount of spam. there’s tooo much of it on larger subs. i’m not clicking on your link gtfo.
To be spiteful I was thinking of selling my account to spammers to poison the well back there. I haven’t yet, but I’m still considering it.
I’m starting to feel concerned with the many new low engagement communities that are copy pasted from reddit. I think there is a lot of value in feeling like you are in the company of people as smart as or smarter than you. That there is the potential to discover something new or grow.
This.
Edit: Thank you for the gold kind stranger!
Kidding aside, it’s nice to show up to a thread and be able to join in rather than shouting into the void of thousands of other users.
To a certain degree, yes…but I feel like Lemmy has a lot more posts with comments chiming in only to sound smart or contrary. It’s super annoying, and I can’t tell if it’s better or worse than the constant in-jokes from reddit.
I feel like much of Reddit has the same problem to varying degrees depending on the sub (saw it all the time on r/Android and r/Apple, but didn’t see it at all on smaller/chiller subs like r/Tamagotchi). I don’t like seeing it on Lemmy either though, it’s not something the community or platform should positively reinforce
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It’s kind of crazy how much Reddit doesn’t want people to migrate here. 5 months ago, they banned the mod of a subreddit for Lemmy migration and reinstated the community after backlash. When you search Lemmy in Reddit search, you see a few top pinned posts about how to migrate but everything else is low effort trash talk from people who have never used Lemmy. The entire Lemmy subreddit is dedicated to complaining about it- I’m sure Reddit is doing this intentionally. Keep spreading the word- Lemmy’s growth starts with you! We have a brand new platform owned by all and the power to shape it into something great for everyone.
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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My activity dropped because I can’t enter a single thread that isn’t about, big corpo, Linux, and how I shouldn’t spend money.
Give it time! This is a little baby social network. If there is a niche community you want to see, you have all the power to start your own community- if there’s one on Lemmy.world that you don’t like then start your own version on a different instance!
All that being said, this information about open source and corporations are the things that corporate social media hid from you with their algorithms because they lose money- expand your horizons and you might learn a thing or two for the better! Don’t be discouraged to share your own opinions no matter how much backlash you get- Lemmy is small enough that you have the ability to have your opinion heard by others.
We’re glad to have you here!
Don’t forget being accused of being a fascist because your favourite game is rollercoaster Tycoon.
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.
Don’t make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.
Look at reddit’s stats, active users didn’t drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.
I did a Google search one time for Reddit traffic stats but came up empty handed. Is there a good resource for that?
I saw it through one of the apps which scrapes reddit comments for archival.
Reddit quit making those stats public a while back, sadly
A lot of us left entirely, but even more people just went full lurker mode. Taking “precious resources” away from Reddit servers while no longer giving them any free content in return.
Would that be better than outright quitting the platform? Genuine question
Not really, it’s like giving attention to someone you hate. They feed off of it.
Not necessarily. As long as you just cost traffic and offer absolutely nothing in return, blocking their ads and even restrain from voting. The difference that would make is directly proportional to the amount of users doing it.
I don’t, btw. Just completely left and deleted a “nice” account. Fuck you reddit.
These are the real heroes and martyrs
Yeah. This is me now. I was an active content poster previously but now I refuse to contribute anything.
My feed did feel busy with content the past few weeks.
Don’t kill me for saying this but I feel like Lemmy has become slightly worse than when the mass exodus happened. I won’t name names but there are so many copycat communities seemingly exclusively reposting the Greatest Hits from any given sub. It feels like we’re trying to be reddit 2.0 instead of lemmy 1.0
There’s also a discussion of this on hackernews, but feel free to comment here!
That hacker news bit got me, I won’t lie.
“An actual conversation about this post is happening elsewhere but I guess you can leave a comment here. I’m a bot so I won’t read it though lol”
To be fair, many of those are fascinating posts in their own right.
It’s one of the only bots I haven’t blocked so I do agree. It just feels weird to see. Like a reminder that hackernews is better
I went ahead and blocked it and spend time on HN along with Lemmy instead. HN discussions on those posts are always so much livelier than those sad, but interesting copycat posts.
Bot posts are soulless and when so many of the posts here are from bots, the whole site feels a little hollow
Agreed. I think it dilutes user engagement, because people will leave comments on these bot threads, never to be seen by anybody else.
It’s been a while since I’ve taken calculus, but if those charts are for total posts/comments, then I’d say that the derivative is more important and it sure looks like the rate of posts have gone down.
I’d like some clarity too but I’m fairly certain it’s posts per day. The comments certainly aren’t cumulative since they go down.
Numbers and posts can go actually go down because they are just the sum of posts/contents across all instances. If instances go down are considered to be spam they will not be counted anymore.
It’s definitely a good outlook and very positive for the Fediverse as a whole.
