active users are declining
Insane to start the plot at 45k. The rate of decline is rather minimal
In the last 3 months it went down by about 10,000 users. Comparing with the rate of increase in total Lemmy users, active user rate should have at least been stable. I guess we will have to wait for reddit to fuck up again for another influx. And Lemmy is only getting better with time so probably on every influx more users are going to stay.
I try to get people from niche subs I follow to move to Lemmy but every time I do I get downvoted. Could be automated by reddit idk
People generally don’t like being proselytized.
Right. Just make great lemmy content and screenshot it. Then when people ask for the source you provide the lemmy link
Or only mention it to people actively looking for an alternative. I see that from time to time, then I point them to /r/RedditAlternatives where most of the posts are about Lemmy
I try to get people from niche subs I follow to move to Lemmy but every time I do I get downvoted. Could be automated by reddit idk
Have you tried opening your comments from a private window? Sometimes they get shadow removed too
The starting point is just so you can adequately see trends for both plots shown and is quite sane. I also don’t know if I could call an ~5% decline and clear trend minimal either.
If you start the plot at 0, you can distinguish between a strong trend, a weak trend and a lack of a trend. This one is terrible for gauging that.
All starting at 0 would do is ensure that you have no way to accurately gauge the data points values. It would also just compress the data to an incomprehensible smudge of a line.
Let’s put that to a test
Showing the data over an entirely different timescale than what’s currently under discussion means nothing in this context to illustrate your point.
Starting from 0 on the y axis just means you need to change the scale, which like I said makes reading any data points incomprehensible, or end up with an unnecessary amount of whitespace.
If you start at 0, you see exactly what you’re supposed to: there is a rather negligible trend in the given timeframe.
That’s the point. The number of users has very slightly declined in the past few months. Under the original plot, you have a lot of people (rightly) misinterpreting the data, and saying that a lot of users are leaving the site.
That’s why you start at 0. So that people interpret the data correctly.
The same plot with a more reasonable y-axis:
Active users (monthly is what you should be looking at) is very slowly declining, however we are still above the level that we were before the most recent influx.
Gotta ask why it seems to slowly decline after each influx, tho, rather than slowly rise or stay stable.
Seems at least some of these people are not liking what they find.
Gotta ask why it seems to slowly decline after each influx, tho, rather than slowly rise or stay stable.
Because there is a big influx of people looking for a new home and some of them don’t feel this is it and move on.
What is Interesting about the graph is that the drop-off after Rexxit was much steeper and, despite the drops, the numbers don’t go below the level they were before.
Sometimes you need u/spez to give you a couple more blows before you say “fuck it, fuck this”. It happened to me.
before you say “fuck this, fuck you”
FTFY 🙂
That works too.
Does he give blows?
You had to send a few bitcoin through the glory hole first, but yes
He makes transactions. If passion is lacking in your life, don’t get overexcited.
I’m probably missing something, but what are the two bumps in December and Feb from?
December changed the way active users were counting, adding the votes on top of posts and comments
February was LW applying that update
Oh so they are not new users coming in? Well that paints a pretty different picture then
Indeed, actually the change in calculation makes it hard to actually evaluate
Well that was anticlimactic, but I appreciate the information
Very interesting, thanks!
They’ll be back.
It used to be a much more significant decline, it seems to have leveled off mostly at 45k, so those who are left are pretty dedicated. I’m sure we’ll get another influx if Reddit messes up badly again.
ifwhen
What counts as an active user? If you are a lurker do you still count as an active user?
You count as active if you post, comment or vote.
If you vote, post or comment, you count as active user.
I’ve BEEN saying this for a while now. How Lemmy users need to welcome new people with interests that are different than their own. People from different generations than their own.
I’ve given ideas how to make starting an account easier. The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start. And if you fuck up, and randomly choose the wrong instance? You have to start over. All your comment history gets left behind.
So people are going to choose the most active instance, trusting the idea that OTHER people know what they’re doing.
I gave the idea that Lemmy needs to adopt standards across all instances so you can push a button and move your account. All your data would come with you.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
I hear a lot of people on here complain about corporate greed, and enshitification, but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
In 2010 Steve Jobs was reviewing the new iphone prototype. Jobs said he wanted it slimmer, and wanted it airtight. The developers said it was pretty airtight, and there was no more room inside to make it slimmer.
Essentially telling Jobs that his demands were not going to be met because it would be a lot of work. So Jobs stood up, grabbed the prototype, walked to a fish tank, and dropped it in. It sank, and bubbles came out. Thus destroying it.
He said “See that? Bubbles. There’s air inside, which means there’s room inside. It also not airtight. Make it smaller, and make it airtight.” Then he left the room. When it released to the public, the final design was smaller, and airtight.
Not saying it WON’T be hard work to make true account migration a reality, but it IS possible. The developers just figuratively need their prototype dunked in a metaphorical fish tank.
Because until this process is easier, and users are greeted with a friendlier userbase, people are just going to sign up, realize they fucked up, realize the experience isn’t great, and leave. If they have access to reddit, they will leave.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago. Which suggests to me that reddit fucked up, users exploded here, gave it a chance, disliked it, and left.
Meanwhile, I point out just SOME of the glaring problems. But instead of embracing the problem and starting a think tank on how to fix it, my posts are instead turned into an echo chamber of how wrong I am. How the ideas will never work, and the problems presented persist to this day.
All because I’m thinking from the perspective of the normie 95%, and not the linux minded 5%. Which really places an artificial self installed glass ceiling on top of you.
but you gotta admit that they do get shit done.
I opened Reddit again today to have a look at my local city sub, where I’m an (inactive) mod, the interface to moderate now offers a terrible experience. Bloated, clunky, slow. So I’m not so sure they get things done.
All your comment history gets left behind.
What’s the big deal with you leaving an old account behind? Lemmy has no karma, if you keep the same username (and even more with the same picture), people are going to recognize you, you can even add links to both accounts in the bio to make sure. I’m on probably my 10th alt, people still recognize me from time to time, whatever the account.
Instead I was given a list of technical reasons why it would never work. The basis of these reasons came down to “it won’t work because it would be a lot of work”.
As @[email protected] pointed out, the 2 main developers have limited time and resources. What is the community supposed to do, threaten them to leave will the vast majority finds account migration a non-critical feature?
The concept of picking a home instance for someone who’s never heard terms like “instance”, “federated” or “decentralized” can be quite intimidating to start.
Here’s the post I made a few days ago on /r/RedditAlternatives: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to
Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.
There is a whole community here who has no idea what an instance or federation is, but they still use this community, and post 100 comments every 3 days. The platform is similar enough to Reddit for them to use. And I can tell you very confidently none of them (between 100 and 150 monthly active users) use Linux.
It seems everytime I search for a topic all the results are from a year ago.
Of course if you ask questions on a very niche topic on a dead community nobody will answer. That’s what [email protected] threads are for, to make active communities emerge.
There is even https://quiblr.com/ if people want more tailored suggestions
The statement about comment history is inconsiderate. People absolutely care about their content. I don’t have to know nor care for their reasons why but it is important to users.
Depends what they use it for
- being able to access past discussions? Still possible from an alt
- wanting to keep their persona and reputation? Use same name and add links both ways in the bios
I can’t think about anything else, but if anyone knows, feel free to jump in
I think your idea is a good one, and I’d like to see that happen someday.
I would point out though, that Apple was a behemoth company with large teams and massive budgets (essentially unlimited resources). Whereas Lemmy is just two guys barely scraping by a living wage from donations while slowly tackling an endless list of bug reports and feature requests.
Tossing Lemmy in the equivalent of a fish tank to motivate the devs would, most likely, just cause extreme burnout and a throwing up of hands. They are resource and time limited to a pretty extreme degree considering how popular Lemmy has become, and that should be appreciated and taken into account.
I I wasn’t talking in a place where the developers gather. I was talking here. With other users, whom I assumed would have the health of the fediverse in mind.
The idea wasn’t me stating a final idea of “do this now!”. It was more of a starting point of a think tank. I was expecting to start the batton running, and pass it off to the next idea, or the continuation of the idea.
Instead, nobody joined in. Nobody took the batton. They swatted the batton down, and collectively said “No batton! No change!”
They swatted the batton down, and collectively said “No batton! No change!”
That’s not what happened. People just agreed that other features have a higher priority.
The list of upcoming features is available here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Among them
- Multicommunities
- Moderation tools improvement
- Private communities
- Post tags
- Ease discovery of federated communities
- Post scheduling
- Plugin system
- Etc.
Which one of those features would you deprioritize compared to the account migration?
I was expecting to start the batton running, and pass it off to the next idea, or the continuation of the idea.
I think I see what you’re saying. Lemmy is indeed a place where it’s very easy to get involved, and people get involved in different ways. A lot of us just pick a community and start posting regularly. Some of us adopt dormant communities and bring them back to life. Others contribute by becoming mods or admins or setting up their own instances or debugging/coding. Even those people who were giving you reasons why the “transfer your account easily” project was difficult, they were helping you by telling you the challenges involved. Whenever a well-run project is started, you think about the hurdles, risks, and mitigations, then integrate those into your project plan.
I encourage you to keep getting involved. The trick is to find the right level of involvement for you, then sticking with it and seeing it through.
Nice comment, also cool to see you around
I agree with your argument, but not what you’ve applied it to.
“Federation” isn’t the main feature of Lemmy, and we don’t need to focus on it. It’s enough that it exists. When selling a house, would the first thing you focus on be the insurance rates if something goes wrong?
I agree with you that the onboarding process is complicated for a user that doesn’t want to invest time into learning how the fediverse works.
I think that is a positive thing.
The good thing about the Fediverse is that it isn’t profit driven, it isn’t necessary to grow without end, and because of this it also isn’t necessary to appeal to the mass of users who don’t want to learn how things work here. It’s a filter, weeding out the people who aren’t open to new structures - that often comes paired with the inability to have open minded discussions.
I do agree with you regarding the missing transfer options, but since karma isn’t a thing here, a simple import/export function for subscribed communities and blocked items should suffice, and shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
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I’m unclear what that means.
You could decentralize user accounts so that they aren’t attached to any instance, or at least the account owner can move their account from one instance to another.
This would be way easier to implement without blockchain. Data portability doesn’t require any of the consensus mechanisms or distributed computation, even if they would result in user data being portable.
If your instance disappears, then how can you make sure that you could use your same username on an instance that is created after that one disappears?
Again the interesting thing is that a lot of other sites have a huge difference in numbers. But they are all saying the same thing, “Active” users are declining or getting close to equilibrium but number of users are increasing. Strange.
I personally think that piefed/mastodon/other servers federating with lemmy might be messing up the numbers in some way. Both pumping up the numbers and making others “go down” in different sites and how they are pulling the data. Like if I respond via my mastodon account, is that a “new” account? Does that make it pop up as an active user? If I dont repost it via the mastodon account for a while, will I now be an inactive account, even though I still look at lemmy with it? Im not sure.
Bit discouraging tbh
Nice post on 3D printing
You could have a promising career in finance
The decline might be because instance owners have strengthened the account creation process. I remember in “the early days” how there were an insane amount of bots, but now it seems like most of them have been banned or mitigated.
It’s amazing to me just how hassle-free it is to use Lemmy as opposed to reddit.
Rddit just feels like it’s actively trying to get you to leave it.
Reddit is like the late Roman Empire. It looks fine on the outside, but it’s corrupt all the way down, powered by unpaid labor, and the lead pipes are slowly killing everyone.
No, no, the pipes are fine (mostly). They have calcium buildup that prevents lead leeching.
The REAL major source of lead poisoning in the Empire is much stupider - knowingly making wine syrup in lead pots because the lead makes it taste sweeter. Despite knowing that lead is toxic af.
There’s probably an apt comparison in that to Reddit as well.
That’s late stage capitalism baby. 😎
All time high all time!
The latest annoyance is that they will AI-translate posts and stick those into search engines.
Interesting. May I ask how?
Because with old.reddit and RES it really doesn’t feel much different (apart from the vibes in the communities)
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I stopped using reddit on mobile, so I exclusively use the website. Might be different there
Yeah, old.reddit is like a dam for users that will flow with the fediverse sooner or later.
Yes, I feel like the days of old reddit are numbered. We better be ready for the influx of new users when they close it.
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Vibes are def getting worse the more folks flock in from reddit.
Bad moderation is still an issue here. Like allowing people posting pictures of text or low effort meme content on comms that aren’t for memes
Feel free to create Meta posts about that.
And if you reasonable meta posts gets removed, post on [email protected]
I use the report button
Sounds good, but from what you are saying, they are ignoring your reports
I guess we need more people to report it? I don’t know what their admin UI looks like, but I imagine posts with more reports sort to the top?
What might happen is that mods ignore you because they don’t care, and admins don’t want to interfere with community level moderation
I migrated over to Lemmy a few weeks ago when the piece of shit Reddit app refused to load any posts but continued to load ads. I have found this community to be far more interactive, kind, and enjoyable to discuss pretty much anything with. I haven’t found a reason to return to reddit at all.
I have found Lemmy the most interactive of all the social networks I am a part of. It is my main home now.
Its my home too. Does this make us flatmates?
in this damn economy renting a flat on your own has become impossible…
Get off my lawn
I haven’t been to Reddit since the API debacle and don’t plan to
Welcome!
I started using lemmy because of the reddit api fiasco and the platform really feels more alive now. Or maybe the bots got smarter.
I’m sure it’s little of column A and a little of column 01000010
As an AI language model, I fully agree with your last point.
Sure! I can find agreement between AI language models and actual users of lemmy decentralized communication systems with your last two points…
To find agreement with your last two points, AI language models would need to agree with both of your last two points.
First, AI language models would have to agree with your first point.
Next, AI language models would have to agree with your second and last point.
In summary you would need AI language models to agree independently to each of your two different points so that it can agree to both.
Here are my last two points and AI’s input:
I don’t care about “number go up”.
Lemmy now has enough users to provide plenty of content, and really interesting new communities I’ve never seen on that other website are starting to pop up.
It also has its own memes and culture already.You don’t have 1000 comments under every meme post, but the comments that are there are usually worth reading.
It’s not a reddit replacement - it’s much better.One of the nice things about Lemmy is that you actually get replies under your posts/comments and it’s not just repeating phrases to earn as much karma as possible. There’s always a sweet spot of engagement in online communities and I feel like we’re pretty close to where it begins. Other sites just make you feel like you’re shouting into the void.
Actually being a part of conversations is great
tl;dr - We don’t want the most users. We want the best users.
Fair, but I do like seeing the federated model thrive and prove itself as a viable alternative to main stream social media. My utopian dream would be that profit driven internet would fall apart against what we have. I hate how much power is given to so few.
There is still not enough people for niche topics.
It is the eternal struggle as more users come niche communities will improve or even exist, but general communities will get worse.
Maybe not every niche needs a dedicated community.
They kinda do though. I can’t post about my gaming niche in a gaming community because it’s barely tangential, and still haven’t found 99% of the communities I had on Reddit.
Lemmy is good for /all, and that’s about it tbh
Which kind of gaming niche is it ? Are the subreddit mods open to creating a post presenting Lemmy as an alternative?
Simracing. We don’t relate to typical gaming at all. It’s all high end hardware, all very specialized and typically doesn’t interest normal gamers.
Subreddit mods are very against Lemmy or anything that moves them off the platform. The absolute butthurt rage for weeks after the protests proved that one right.
Mostly I just don’t see this platform as an alternative for medium sized communities. It works for large ones where there’s enough people that after a move if 25% transfer then you still have a lively community. Or for small communities where you can get 70%+ to move. But those mid size, 100k users on average communities trying to get them to move just ends up with a ghost town here.
Have you tried [email protected] ? @[email protected] posted there 2 times in the last 2 days
I’m actually a mod over there, but as a general consumer of content, there’s not enough to make it a viable community. It’s seen a little more activity recently, but is overall a fairly small and dead community.
I feel like lemmy is in a decent place right now. The main page is busy enough with a good amount of OC and alright discussion. It’s a lot to ask for 1000+ active niche communities. I have a few things that bug me and I’m not sure ballooning members would fix it: reddit-like anti-social behaviour, excessive reposts, and posts about MAGA people. I’ve blocked a lot of communities, some users, and very few nsfw instances.
I was one of them.
I also was one of them. Still am, but also was
Actually…I was two of them. me.world and me.ca
I order the club sandwich all the time, but I’m not even a member, man.
One of us!
I think I was 4 of them
With my alts I might be contibuting to 3-4 in this graph aswell
Nerd.
Heh.
Lemmy is one of the most harmful platforms I’ve ever been on.
Not even on Reddit have I spent so much time on here. Quality content and engaging conversations taking so much of my time and doomscrolling. I love you guys, keep it up.
Least harmful you mean? Lol
Bro is not touching grass because of Lemmy
Mostly harmless? I’ve brought some fish.
I really hate graphs that start at 99% and top off at 100%
The gain is really next to nothing in the 2 months shown in this graph. It goes from ~1,456,000 to 1,468,000… which is a 00.8% increase, less than 1%.
Yep we’re gaining 1’000 new accounts every couple days, maybe every week. Which is pretty cool given we have an average of 40’000 active users. But nothing compared to the total of 1.5 million accounts. The vast vast vast majority of which are dead. Made one year ago to check out lemmy and never came back.
There’s also lots of people who made an account in multiple instances before realizing that you don’t have to do that
Or people like me who keep on switching instances because they want to find the perfect one that blocks everything they don’t like and federates with everything they like.
Can’t users just block entire instances themselves now? So the trick would be to join one that broadly follows your interests and cut down as required.
Blocking instances doesn’t block their users. Only defederation does that.
Ah fair didn’t realise that. I assumed it would.
Microcosm of online dating behavior spotted
Already got a wife so now I’m looking for the perfect instance I guess 😂
Get that unicorn!
People make throwaways all the time for services like this. I expect lemmy to be no different.
Monthly active users would be a better statistic to track imo. That gives you a real idea as to how big the community is.
Anecdotally, content wise does seem better than a few months ago. Unfortunately lots of it seems to be highly polarizing and hateful stuff when you look at all communities. Othering seems to be as strong as ever, if not stronger. Probably because hate groups can just setup their own instances or take over parts of existing ones without much blowback like they would get on other sites.
Yeah I don’t feel like it feels much larger. But at the same time my blocklist has added 30+ accounts in the last couple of months.
Are we sure it’s counting 1.5 M users and not 1.5 M memes posted by picard, pug, and squid?
Just wouldn’t want any newcomers to the history communities to up and think the place was dead! Lemmy cannot live on Linux alone 🙏
Oh shit you mean like AskHistorians? Is there enough density now for that?
I answer on AskHistorians, but don’t post there. But I’d love to see activity there too! Mostly I run three history meme communities (HistoryMemes, RoughRomanMemes, and ShermanPosting), and four communities for sharing historical images of interest (HistoryPorn [not my choice of name, it’s just for photos], HistoryIllustrations, HistoryRuins, and HistoryArtifacts)
That’s great. The history communities on the other site were such great quality on average and I miss them. How do you have time to do all that?
Know where to look to grab pics real quick + Light moderation load + Not many other hobbies + Work from home with downtime between tasks
Keep up the good work
And meme free space
are you entirely a human? you post really often
No, I’m part metal. Helps to keep going longer than mere organics, but getting through the airport is a bitch.
More seriously, I take 2-4 times a day to grab some pics from my stashes and post them real quick on my regular communities. Takes maybe 15 minutes each time. 60 minutes every day is a good chunk, but it’s far from grueling.
Now, my FOMO causing me to check my notifications every moment I get free time? That’s a little more grotesque.
I don’t think lemmy would be what it is without the contributions of any one of these three- let alone all of them.
Lemmy at first was Abit barren but I’m super happy with it now. Let’s hope we don’t see reddit collapse and the masses turn their attention here like the digg event
My biggest complaint is it’s dominated by memes, and in a distant second is news, and that’s kinda it. We need so much more diverse content still.
Be the change you want to see!
Anyway those are probably the lowest effort content which is why you see it most. Over time though the other forms will come. Most of Reddits front-page is memes and news for the same reason.
Feel free to have a look at [email protected] for other active communities
What I do to get around that is: subscribe to communities that are not memes, news, or tech, then read new posts by “subscribed” and “scaled”. When I run out of those, read “all” to find new communities to subscribe to.
Memes are the key
Sort by “active” that’s where the most discussion is happening
I’m only but one person.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t become overrun with reddit’s far-right psychos after reddit collapses.
We can’t stop them from using Lemmy either. They’ll come.
But this time we can defederate from servers that tolerate intolerance.
Also encouraging our local instance admins who are or seem receptive to not tolerate the intolerant.
Like Facebook, Reddit will probably just become a cesspool of conservative morons. I’m fine with them staying on Reddit. I don’t think it’s gonna “collapse” anytime soon.
i’m not completely confident that those far-right psychos are even real people for the most part. Reddit is probably the most botted place on the internet.
I imagine that many will flock to right-wing friendly instances that end up widely defederated. Most of them though will go back to 4chan and other similar sites.
Exploding Heads is a Nazi instance that many people don’t even know about because of how defederated it is.
Was, it’s no longer in existence currently. Many of them moved to Nostr, though some of their members came back to Lemmy and set up the hilariouschaos Lemmy instance.
Gross, thanks for the info though.
They’d get sent to Exploding Heads, most likely.
So long as the Israeli bot networks stay off of here. I don’t like how China is discussed here but it’s a function of the type of people this place attracts, i.e not fans of authority.
On one hand I think it’s very positive that everyone starts using decentralised platforms that don’t run on profit, that work for their users and not their shareholders, but on the other hand having a space mostly without conservatives is great.
Politics is so stupid and bipolar
We need more femboys
Femboys, cats, and femboys dressed as cats. The foundation of any healthy forum site.
The interesting thing to note is each website I go to that looks at the total number of lemmy users is wildly different. Im wondering if there is some sort of blocker/defederated instance occurred a couple of months ago? Im not sure.
Either way, number of users are up.
I think counting fediverse users is about as difficult as counting e-mail adresses.
Your probably right. And if an instance defederates with others, it may look like the number of users dropped without actually dropping.
I’m a super happy new Lemmy user. Last week, I created an account on Reddit for the first time ever. I replied to 3 posts in a polite manner and right on topic (in a Linux-related community, someone asked for a book recommendation. The other two were answers to technical questions on Rust and Linux). A couple of hours later, I was reading about what
shadowbanmeant. I waited a few days, sent some messages to admins / support but to no avail. Then I searched for alternatives to Reddit and landed here. It’s been 4 days, and I absolutely love it here. Lemmy seems to have that spirit of the Internet of the 90s, which I thought was long gone. Also, my assumption is that Lemmy users are of a higher quality than those on Reddit. It’s very easy to end up on Reddit / IG / Facebook / etc. On the other hand, to become a Lemmy user, one actually needs to apply some effort and do at least some research. Or to have a cool friend who can recommend becoming a user here (if you have a cool friend, that makes you kind of cool too, right?). I should probably start telling my friends about Lemmy 🤔Welcome here!
Lemmy seems to have that spirit of the Internet of the 90s, which I thought was long gone.
That’s what I like about the Fediverse too. After Big Tech started hoovering up eyeballs, I got disenchanted but this has put fire back in my belly.
Welcome…
Comrade.
“More!!” -Kylo Ren
“MORE!”
believe it or not also Kylo Ren
