cross-posted from: https://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 https://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.
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:
Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.
As does lemmy.ca, below:
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.
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.
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!
You must log in or register to comment.
I didn’t really look at all the little letters but I like how line go up
Would you like to invest in my cryptocurrency? Here’s a graph
shut up and take my money!
:o
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.
Here’s the kbin graphs directly on the site that generates the charts. I’m unfamiliar with kbin as a backend, so I don’t know how to interpret any of their numbers. But you can play: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
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
I wasn’t conscious of it until I had stopped, but on Reddit I was censoring myself to avoid my comments getting deleted.
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).
Do we have an expectation of privacy for our upvotes, or is that generally supposed to be public information? I like to think my comments and upvotes match up pretty well.
I’m not sure how that expectation lines up. On reddit they were private (except to yourself and the admins). Because there’s no warning anywhere on lemmy that they are public (or at least semi-public), I’m going to presume that most reddit refugees believe it works like reddit.
Fair. I’ve heard kbin allows viewing, so there are federated sites which can see them without needing to be an admin or run an instance.
You were probably being racist. There’s only 2 things I can’t stand: intolerance and the Dutch.
Awesome work! Thanks for sharing!
Details on active users count change:
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!
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.
They is true in my case too.
I only really ever made 1 account, this one
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.
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.
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.
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).
Well, there was also the DeCSS key censorship debacle…
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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.
Those results might be slightly skewed by alternate accounts. When I first joined 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 other accounts, so I, personally, am 2 of the people who “left” by leaving the other accounts inactive.Same. I’ve made six accounts since I joined during the exodus, only two of which I actively use now.
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.
I can’t wait for reddit’s next fuck up so we can get more folks over here!
They are closing in on an IPO so that could come anytime now
I feel like we have been saying that for 5+ years now.
Lemmy is big enough that we don’t need to wait for that. We can grow organically, but there are still some issues that need to get worked out. One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence. I rarely see high effort OC on lemmy and I think that’s a big reason for it. People that create content that takes tens of hours to create aren’t going to bother with a platform with no kind of verification option where they can show that they’re actually the real creator and not a copycat account since you can have the same username on any instance. I think that could be fixed if there were a special instance for verified accounts only that content creators or notable individuals could use to post from.
That makes me think they it might be a good idea to have an instance called @therealdeal.com or something. You could even make it a complete service where you provide services for promotional/marketing activities, etc.
Personally speaking, and I don’t think it’s too controversial of a view, but I kinda like that about lemmy.
I have come to hate “personal” focused social media and prefer “content” focused social media. I don’t care about random people or someone hoping to become an internet personality, I’m here for varied content and a selection of opinions in the comments. I don’t want those comments to be from the same people, and if they are, I’d prefer to be oblivious to that. I kinda like how lemmy goes further than Reddit in that it gets rid of cumulative karma counts too, hopefully means we avoid seeing a Lemmy equivalent of karmawhoring.
There was loads of high effort OC on Reddit, people typically weren’t doing it to create a presence (and if they were, they couldn’t have picked a harder platform to accomplish that, other than maybe 4chan)
One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence
That’s not an issue. Reddit was equally anonymous yet it did just fine (relatively speaking). The different users’ usernames that can theoretically appear the same can be fixed by making it mandatory to show your instance next to your username, rather than hiding it if you change your default username. But even without that anyone can hover over your profile name and see which instance you’re from, so really you can’t actually deceive people regarding the nature of your account.
One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence.
So what? I find it strange how many people on link aggregators like reddit and lemmy/kbin don’t seem to understand the point of a link aggregator. There are plenty of places to go on the internet if you want to create “a presence.” But link aggregators aren’t it. The closest it gets are novelty accounts and power users.
A lot of reddit’s issues trace back to the fact that they stopped being satisfied with being a link aggregator because there isn’t much money in it. It’s been all downhill ever since they started morphing into a more traditional social media website and trying to attract more content creators by doing things like making userpages their own subreddits and adding half-assed knockoff “features” from more popular social media sites/apps. Lemmy isn’t profit driven and therefore doesn’t need to parrot reddit’s mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with link aggregators being link aggregators.
Hopefully another dozen.
I noticed I was blocked today when connecting via the same VPN I’ve used for years, including back when I was a user. That’s fuck up enough for me.
API bullshit refugee here. Y’all are stuck with me.
Sorry.
Yeah I like yall here
API refugee here as well! I’m on Mbin, but I’m in the Fediverse to stay!!
Cheers, friend.
Seconded
I guess we’ll make do.
/s hello fellow refugee!
Howdy! There’s some engagement for yah
Same. I post and comment on lemmy but only casually browse specific subreddits now. Some days I’m only on lemmy.
Hello
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
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.
Lemmy has better user retention than Diablo IV confirmed
There’s a lot less repeat cellar quests
and the diablo 4 community is dead lmao
Diablo II FTW!
There are dozens of us! DOZENS!
x doubt
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.
Meanwhile if you’re curious how reddit has been doing, just look at this chart
You the real MVP of this meme.
chart doesn’t seem to show up on lemmy. Not sure what I did wrong there, but it’s the first time I tried an image in a comment. I guess this way works better.
Worth two comments and a page load 😁
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.
Let’s hope for an API debacle 2.0 then. Fuck Spez!
