Lemmy, it’s a new Reddit !
reddit asked for it themselves :)
Noice!
How many on Lemmy alone ? BTW what’s kbin? Is it like another instance?
Kbin is completely different from Lemmy, in that it is not Lemmy. It’s like a mix of Mastodon and Lemmy.
And are we using/seeing/editing kbin content from our Lemmy instances? Or it’s isolated from us? (Like Reddit)
They’re not isolated. They are also part of the Fediverse. I regularly see many people posting and commenting from Kbin on Lemmy instances.
You are reading a post from kbin right now, typed from my phone.
Yes, they are fully interoperable - the power of ActivityPub!
Kbin and Lemmy federate with each other. In fact, I’m talking to you from a kbin instance right now!
Could we run a kbin instance as well, sameway we do with Lemmy?
Yes, there are more than one instance of kbin
This will be weird when different people will start using the same username in different instances.
Same thing as email addresses, the domain name is part of the username or community name
But for example, on kbin I am on kbin.social/m/technology. That’s not the same as lemmy.world/c/technology right? When I search for common subs it doesn’t show me the subs from the other.
Never mind. I just found out how to find federated instances on Kbin. It only defaults to local instances and I can’t seem to make it show federated instances by default. It’s a shame because I like its UI more than Lemmy.
Yes it’s also federated, so you can access their instances and communities pretty much like the Lemmy ones.
But kbin and lemmy can federate with each other (that sounds strange) so it’s not a competition.
We did it Lemmy!
I don’t think that’s accurate. I something funny is going on with kbin that is causing fedidb to see one instance as two separate instances. So this number is about 50k too high.
Also, if I may be a little realistically pessimistic, for those hoping for continued growth. These things tend to happen in waves with deflations in between. It seems the Reddit wave has come to an end, and some drop in numbers might happen over the next few weeks or months. It’s natural, and I wouldn’t be dismayed by it at all. Events like the migration cause curiosity in some people who don’t settle. It’s fine.
Who knows what will happen going forward, Reddit it seems is still doing it’s bullshit it seems. But if you like it here, there’s plenty to focus on here to make this place happen. And we don’t need to worry too much about whether Reddit a dying or who’s winning.
Here’s a secret, online analytics are never that accurate. They’re a huge mess pretty much everywhere. If you want to get real insights from analytics the best thing to do is compare things relatively, like with a/b testing.
To improve growth, I think Lemmy needs:
- a more welcoming web UI (even Voyager - formerly known as Wefwef - only feels nice on iOS)
- a nice-looking opensource mobile app that is offered to newcomers (I like Thunder, sorry Jerboa)
- a checkbox during registration asking people in they want to receive email notifications when someone sends a reply (if you’re not in the habit of coming here you’d forget otherwise)
I don’t mind Lemmy in its current state, but it could be a bit more universally appealing if growth is a goal.
I’m using and recommending Memmy on iOS, this is quite reminiscent of Apollo imo.
On the web UI, something I’d like to see is the various front ends people are making to be folded either into a user setting where you can select from a list or provided as different end points like
old.redditor, as lemmy.world has done, m.lemmy.world, or as lemmings.world with old.lemmings.world.There’s wefwef/voyager, alexandrite.app (for desktop, using it right now, see !alexandrite@lemmy.world ), the standard, and I’m sure a few others that many would be happy to use right now. And it would be awesome if you could just use which ever you like whenever. Also a wonderful demonstration of what FOSS can bring to the table.
Alexandrite is an interesting development. Being able to choose from multiple UIs is nice, but mostly we just need to have good defaults that appeal to a broad audience.
That’s again assuming Lemmy wants to pursue growth of course. If Lemmy wants to optimize for existing users who prefer things the way they are, that’s a different story.
Well, arguable the way the fediverse grows and survives is through options, freedom and flexibility. Defaults matter, of course, but you can’t make everyone happy all the time.
have you tried liftoff?
Liftoff in my opinion is the nest so far. But for some reason after updating UI for my phone it started crashing all the time so I cant use it. Using wefwef.app now.
hmmm that’s unfortunate. But yeah, Liftoff has provided me with the most pleasing and stable experience so far. (Even if some of the features present in other clients and especially in the webapps are missing. Like showing the downvotes for example or the handling of multiple accounts and timelines in a weird way as well as liking too much to leemy.world…)
Memmy on iOS is promising. Some bugs, but I see the intention (Apollo refugee).
It’s good and has a lot of features. But it’s being developed for both android and iOS and therefore does not feel completely at home for iPhone. For example the frosted glass effect is missing. Mlem is a native iOS app and will be soon released on the App Store. I prefer to use that app, even if it is not at feature parity with Memmy yet.
Memmy is an iOS only app though. It would like pretty out of place on android as it is right now imo. And personally I find the design to be a little more clean than Mlem right now.
Yes, I checked just now and you are right. I was sure they were using universal tools to build the app, because it does not feel iOS native. That’s weird and does not explain why it doesn’t fully follow the iOS design guidelines.
It’s made in React/Expo… fancy JavaScript. The devs will release for Android eventually.
Only in development a few months and lots of updates.
Yeah, I’m waiting to see where we end up with Mlem before 100% committing to Memmy, but so far the latter feels more to my heart as a long time Apollo user.
Still, I have both installed, and alternate between the two to see new TestFlight updates and whatnot.
I’ve very much grown to love Memmy, but I think they are both already up there, getting awesome, so whichever one chooses, it’s probably going to feel good. Choice is always a treat to have!
Step one is making sure the tools exist. Step two is showing them to potential users so they know they can get a good experience here.
I’m in Android and Voyager feels good. I was an Apollo user though I guess.
It needs to have a much easier way to rapidly suggest a good instance to make an account on without trying to explain all the details of Federation to new users. Just one click and done. They can learn about Federation afterwards.
Plus maybe an unintrusive one-time message showing off the nicest Lemmy apps for iOS and Android. If people are aware that they can get a good experience on mobile, they’re more likely to become active users as they take their phone with them during the day.
I understand why people are weary of pushy marketing, but for better or worse product education does help growth.
Maybe it can suggest an app and other “getting started” stuff through a system message of some kind, like how Reddit delivers notices via it’s /u/Reddit bot.
Definitely there should be an updated list of apps as the first recommended app (Jerboa) is like… Pre-alpha. Constant authentication issues for the one day I used it, plus other usability issues galore.
I only found any mention of Connect for Lemmy on Lemmy itself and it’s a far superior app, used it ever since.
Connect doesn’t seem to be open source. For now I’m using Thunder, which despite its alpha status is surprisingly stable and nice-looking.
Very rational to curb the expectations, but I tend to think that people who would be dismayed by numbers (I.e activity) dropping, weren’t going to settle either way long term, which is of course fine and very valid too.
The steam a lot of communities have picked up won’t likely completely fade anymore though, here’s to hoping so at least.
Oh I’m not talking about a collapse or anything like that at all. Many are happy spending time here, even those that also spend time over on Reddit for some things too and the effect of this migration won’t just disappear.
But these things come in waves, and so far have been trending upward, at least that’s what has been seen over on mastodon.
with deflations in between
Worth noting that Hexbear(currently makes up 25% of all posts on lemmy) only saw a deflation in the initial weeks after launch. It then stabilised and didn’t deflate at all over the course of 3 entire years of operating, it happily ticked along with new users coming in at the same rate as user churn. If other communities establish themselves and actually foster a real community that wants to maintain the space there will be an initial deflation but then people will just stick around visiting daily.
A culture of simply permanently moving here should be something people work to establish.
Interesting. Hadn’t thought about the amount of posting done on hexbear. Do you know why they kinda defederated and are now re-federating?
Otherwise, another factor is the effect of the wider fediverse. Interconnectivity between lemmy and masto is not great, but I’m seeing more attempts at it and interest in it from both sides, which is cool. And people are likely to create accounts from either side too, which for lemmy/kbin means that millions of people are slowly learning about them with an already vested interest in fediverse platforms succeeding.
Interesting. Hadn’t thought about the amount of posting done on hexbear. Do you know why they kinda defederated and are now re-federating?
It was caused by technical differences in goals. At the time Hexbear came over things were built in a rush because /r/chapotraphouse had just been banned and there was very limited time to rescue some of the userbase who had migrated to a discord as a lifeboat.
Lemmy at the time was early development, and was absolutely not capable of sustaining the MASSIVE amount of activity that thousands of CTH users would create.
So Hexbear forked and developed solutions to handle the high load they needed while Lemmy at the time was pursuing other priorities - federation wasn’t a thing and they had to achieve federation by a certain deadline to get some of the funding grants they were getting.
This difference in priorities led to the situation, and then Hexbear coming back took a very large amount of time because it was not trivial to migrate without massive issues. On top of that it was handled by dozens of different people throwing in help for free. Burnout and motivation play significant factors there. They will be federating with a limited list soon, I believe the intention is not to federate with anywhere that hasn’t blocked meta though which makes me unsure about whether they will federate here because of the soft stance this instance took.
You’ve just reminded me I have an account there.
My transition from Digg to reddit was a 3 year process.
I made a reddit account immediately. Barely used it for a year while I basically still begrudgingly used Digg and also used other sites like stumbleupon and Tumblr.
Year 2 was a pretty even mix.
Year 3 I made a reddit account Id end up using for like 10 years, daily. stopped Digg, and others, held onto Tumblr for porn til pornpocalypse.
That the initial wave of migration is subsiding is very clear, we can see it in the growth rate of lemmy.world as an example. After the initial boom around July 1st there was about a week of daily growth by 3-4k new accounts. Since then, the growth has declined and now hovers around 1k.
This is a crucial moment in time for Lemmy I think. It will be interesting to see whether that big chunk of initial migration is enough to achieve if not critical mass then enough momentum to get the snowball rolling.
We can’t expect another huge Reddit blunder sending folks this way (though killing old.reddit isn’t inconceivable), so we have to rely on naturally attracting and keeping users around now by adequately varied content and active enough communities. That requires a lot of active users and I wonder if we attracted enough to get there.
Honestly, I’m just waiting for sync for lemmy and boost for lemmy to release. Those two can actually get the snowball rolling as they were the most popular of the third party clients. (and also because I freaking loved boost 😍)
Yeah, people shouldn’t be pitting things against one another, it’s not us against them (reddit). It’s us FOR us. Let’s go make lemmy better together, to hell with reddit.
Hope it continues and that it’s not all bots and multiple accounts.
Just FYI, some people have two accounts, one on Lemmy and one on Kbin, so some of these numbers may be duplicates.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the real number of users was half, or even a third of that.
I have four accounts.
deleted by creator
To my knowledge there’s also no way of identifying bot accounts unless they proactively self identify so these numbers don’t don’t mean much
Monthly Active Users is the stat to track
Yeah, I wish posts would straight up not mention the total number of accounts. It’s not something to brag about. A significant number of the difference between active vs total is gonna be bots. Especially since we’re so new. If active is monthly, then active would include almost anyone who has actually used their account.
The active users count is probably inflated for a bit, too, due to people making multiple accounts as they switch instances or try new ones out. e.g., I used a kbin account early on before switching to try Lemmy. I also have a Beehaw account that was actually the very first one I signed up for and gave up on because of the manual approval taking too long, yet I think I may have posted at least one comment cause I used it to try Lemmy first, then switched to an instance that had downvotes and didn’t defederate as many instances. So I’m counted for probably triple. On the long run, I’ll probably end up using just one of these accounts, but that would depend on features. I switched to Lemmy because of the features it had and if kbin gets better, I might switch back.
EDIT: oh, right, and then there’s also porn accounts. The way Lemmy works makes you almost surely want a separate account for the porn instances. It’s easiest to browse those instances by local posts, but that requires you make an account there (it also won’t show NSFW without an account, which is a silly barrier that is just going to hurt adoption). As well, voting is public, so if you want to privately vote on NSFW stuff, you should use a separate account. By comparison, on reddit, as long as you didn’t intend to post or comment, there was no reason to use a separate account for Porn.
Eh, I personally took the route of becoming comfortable with my consumption of pornographic material. Who cares if someone sees, it’s not like your putting identifying info all over your account, right? And the sort of person who’d take the effort to try and use the things I like against me are hardly the sort to have opinions valuable enough to concern myself with.
Admitting to my porn account, I primarily just wanted to browse
localon the porn instance and not bother with waiting for someone else on beehaw or slrpnk to subscribe to a porn community
At that stage bots and spam accounts are unlikely tho. Maybe in a year it would be worth it. Especially if\when Tumblr or Threads get into that, but I doubt it.
huh? What’s tumblr got to do with this? Is this about Automattic adding the ability to connect up Tumblr accounts to the fediverse? Because you do know that isn’t the same as the Threads situation right?
It’s very probably going to function like how Wordpress and ActivityPub already functions - as a way to let people look at and interact with your blog from a Mastodon or other instance. And if Wordpress is anything to go by it’ll also probably be limited to self hosted/paid accounts rather than something that everyone can have so the bot/spam/ghost account worry is kinda moot
There have already been instances found that had thousands of bot accounts, they’ve been defederated but clearly people are gearing up
I have 4 accounts. Most probably have at least 2, one for nsfw
The active user count is much more accurate.
Kbin doesn’t seem to track active users. Their total users are the same as their active users.
It’s not the same for me. Total users: 53342 Monthly active users: 40878
On Fediverse Observer they used to show exactly the same number till several days ago. Regardless, look at the post/active user ratio on Lemmy on fedidb. It’s 1200000/72000 or 16.6. For Kbin it’s 44000/45000 or 0.97. It doesn’t make sense the active users of Kbin to be 16 times less active than Lemmy’s. To me that’s evidence that whatever Kbin is reporting as active users is very different than what’s reported by Lemmy. According to these stats Lemmy has about 27x the posts Kbin has. That number is probably correct since it doesn’t depend on what’s considered active. A post is a post. Yet Lemmy has only 1.6x the active users. That doesn’t make sense.
If you use the total numbers for both from here, you get posts per user ratio of about 0.7 for both. That makes a lot more sense.
Amazing to see, as I look further into these platforms such as Lemmy and Mastodon I love them more and more as they seem to be so much more freeing than current mainstream platforms on the market.
Misleading
Explain.
How is that being downvoted it is obviously misleading. It is not users is number of accounts because if you make an account in different instances you count as 2 users but it is actually one so it is misleading. There are 500k accounts not users
Let’s go!!!
Let’s not call it that, tho. Fucking please.
It was called that for a while.
When I used Lemmy before the reddit exodus, it was getting like 12 updoots on the front page. I’ve noticed a hugeee difference, this post getting over 1.2k+ upvotes for example. Content is a lot more exciting. Haven’t touched Reddit in like 3 weeks now.
I’ve been full RSS reader, Mastodon, and Lemmy. It feels good.
What do you mean by full RSS reader? What exactly are you looking at?
Thanks for your help
I guess by full, I mean like full-on. Like most of the content I relied on Reddit for, I could get from RSS feeds. I play Genshin Impact a lot, so I don’t need to visit that sub anymore now that I have an RSS. Also there’s replacement communities on Lemmy now.
Other then that, software or blogs you like, they usually have an RSS feed and then can group them under like a “Tech Blogs” category for example. It’s something you build up over time, and RSS has been around for a long time so most things support it and there’s a million clients out there.
Fun fact, every Lemmy community has an RSS feed to subscribe to as well, even Mastodon profiles! RSS feeds directly grab from the source, so there’s no centralized anything, so it’s probably the most sustainable method of getting method possible.
I’m curious, how do you use RSS to stay up to date with Genshin content? What kind of feeds do you follow?
Not the person you replied to, but I’ve been using RSS for a couple decades now to keep up on the news. Instead of following a blog or news outlet that reposts on social media, I just subscribe to the source (blog, news site, whatever) in my RSS app. People using Twitter and Facebook to follow things like CNN was always weird to me… that’s what RSS was built for.
Since a lot of those places likely aren’t on Mastodon yet, people are going back to RSS to fill the gap, which is great.
I love that I learn so much on here. Thanks for that explanation!
Isnt kbin also lemmy? Why the destinction?
No. Kbin is it’s own seperate project and software https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
But I can read and comment on Lemmy threads from kbin
The magic of ActivityPub
I think the problem is people say lemmy when they mean either. My cheat sheet.
Fediverse: a family of applications that are able to communicate with each other and provide various facilities.
Threadiverse: subset of the fediverse, any federated program providing content aggregation / forum facilities.
Lemmy: the main established application in the genre. Providing a primarily content aggregation and forum redditesque experience.
Kbin: newer project providing the news aggregation and forum features but also micro logging that works with mastadon.
Others I don’t know about but do exist.
