It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
I can tell you the drop in active Lemmy users was NOT from hexbear and lemmy.grad. Those trolls are worse than the_donald was on the other platform.
Might as well say Beetlejuice three times
Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
I see very few memes and far too much political content.
This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn’t this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.
And then there isn’t seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don’t defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.
Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:
Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it’s userbase, and it’s userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.
You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn’t even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit’s engine: it’s diverse userbase’s activity.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.
Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven’t been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos’ part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.
I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some “hot” category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.
Hot exists, doesn’t it?
In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.
Not to say it’s all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.
I vote for sorting by new comments… I’m generally entertained with this setup
I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.
That’s funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.
In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.
Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can’t even get off the ground.
So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.
Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.
It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.
Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.
I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore, and I definitely do not appreciate to have the deficiencies of this place thrown on my face as if that’s my responsibility. It’s not exactly welcoming or motivating.
Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.
Reddit admins literally ran bot accounts to fill content on reddit and make it seem more active at first. The users who came from Digg had similar complaints, and reddit userbase fluctuated at lot in the first few years. It’s actually exactly the same (minus the admins using bots to make it seem more active).
I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore
No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.
Eh, remains to be seen. The pacing of the internet today is very different.
No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.
Then don’t get on my case for not liking the lack of content, geez!
Sorry, I just think it’s a dumb, entitled complaint. I’m not asking you to do anything other than stop whinging.
Maybe I need to be on ml then. I feel like world is just full of the same.
I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you’re missing out on those if you’re on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they’re still defederated.)
I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it’s not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I’m only here because there weren’t as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.
You also might check out !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, they flood my feed with good memes.
I blocked 196 because it was just shitty memes being spammed
196 is amazing
Just gotta follow The Rule
Political memes are so stale these days.
Noted! Good feedback.
Numbers will go up again once the reddit infinity client stops working.
Don’t revanced apps with personal API keys solve that issue?
I’d argue that some people are not tech savvy enough to figure that out. Whereas Lemmy is actually less complicated.
I think there are two types of users
- either they are tech savvy enough to use revanced
- or they are not, but then they don’t mind the official Reddit app
In both case, they are not moving to Lemmy
Yeah asking people to sign up for developer accounts and manage their own API is a pretty big blocker.
I know a lot of people are probably scoffing at the above statement, because in reality it’s quite easy, but I think people often forget how tech illiterate the average person is. Hell, the number one criticism of Mastadon, Lemmy, and other fediverse sites is that the sign up process is complicated, despite the fact that it involves exactly one additional step (pick an instance).
I think there are two types of users
- either they are tech savvy enough to use revanced
- or they are not, but then they don’t mind the official Reddit app
In both case, they are not moving to Lemmy
Yeah. Since Reddit is back to normal, the majority of people who left it due to protest now returns.
Yeah, there’s even upcoming third-party apps to fill the void left by apps like Apollo (at least for a while).
What keeps me there and not here are some niche subs for music genres/subgenres and bands, and I don’t see any of them crossing over to the fediverse until Reddit completely and utterly dies. It even seems like some went over to Discord and I’m not really a fan of that, but it’s probably more lively there than here for my interests.
That’s a personal opinion, but I would also be happy to see some groups spread on different communities to decide together on one community and make it grow together.
Browsing /all and seeing still another book or gaming community first post always makes me question if that post would not be better used in an established community.
And I know this will happen naturally overtime, I guess sometimes I would just like things to happen a bit faster and on a organized way.
I personally don’t mind having multiple communities on different servers because some of these servers go down… a lot.
Makes sense to have “backups” sort of littered throughout the Fediverse, imho. I like seeing what different groups have to say about the subjects, too. Like, a thread will be wildly different on lemmy.world and beehaw.org, because I’m fairly sure beehaw is still defederated with lemmy.world, meaning I’ll see very different groups of people on each instance’s community.
I do not think people understand. Lemmy is not going to become a forum guzzling behemoth like Reddit. Nothing will. The userbase will expand over time, as people on Reddit start getting fed up, and at some point there will be a combination of aggressive censorship (if IPO goes through) and privacy intrusive authentication. Many hobbyists do not like it, and are only quiet because they can make unidentifiable accounts, even if it requires official Reddit apps or websites to access.
People do not even understand how platforms work. Lemmy has become a non-mainstream, sane platform with federation that is not a shithole like any other previous alt-right failed Reddit clones. There is plenty activity for what are initial days, as users figure out the signup part and the cultural differences between Lemmy and Big Tech social media like Reddit. As a long term Reddit user, Reddit has been becoming shittier by the day, and is largely used due to decades of valuable posts and comments, and niche hobby communities. Ones that exclusively use frontpage are worthless audience and overlap hugely with Tiktok and Instagram users.
Bizarrely it feels way more active, the people leaving were never going to contribute anyway and that’s fine. It seems to be stabilizing at a good amount of content per day.
Switching between “Active” and “Top [1h/6h/12h]” at different times of the day has provided me with enough content & interactions to make Lemmy my new home. I always was a lurker on the old site, no comment nor post, not even an account. Now, I’m slowly trying to break from this habit. Being on Lemmy feels like I’m not shouting in the void; when a platform gets too big, you get lost in the crowd. It’s always nice to see recurring usernames on different communities.
JFC there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing? 😳
Yeah, it’s not a good thing and I’m getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody’s claiming that’s good for those platforms.
We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don’t buy this arguments of “people are just not using their alts”, I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP’s arse with nothing to back it up.
The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users.
These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform’s profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.
The average user cares about the health and quality of the platform though and a declining user-base is not good for either of those.
Sure, we don’t want to be flooded with millions of users either but that’s because we have a distinct lack of mod tools and features to deal with it. The solution is better tools and better ways of handling those users, not to keep the platform isolated and haemorrhaging users.
Do you need to be so agressive?
I mean, if you are saying the sky isn’t blue, why not? A drop in users is a bad thing. Lemmy needs people and it needs content. This smells of the “good for bitcoin” meme all over again.
I edited because it seems it was too controversial, but anyway.
I commented saying that this should probably be a signal for people to start focusing on a few core communities instead of spreading like crazy.
It seemed that people were thinking that users would magically come to every community and make them active, but we are seeing the opposite. Which for me was a good thing because it would make people realize platform growth doesn’t happen magically.
Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics.
Definitely
The standard web UI also needs major improvements. Nobody logs in through an app for their first time and first impressions are critical. It needs to be easier to navigate and use without downloading an app so people will stick around long enough to get involved and have a good time.
Yeah I am a software dev and was even confused for a bit. Reddit has /r/all and things that make it easier to find subreddits, I still struggle with lemmy sometimes. Sync made it a bit easier, but I wish I could seamlessly browse all instances and their comments under 1 profile
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world’s role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)
stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view
I definitely think letting users block posts and/or comments from specific instances is way better than full defederation (maybe the instance admin could set a default block list for new users)
but now I’m thinking maybe communities should be able to block instances too
found a feature request for it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3022
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These kinds of comments are why my usage has gone down. There is an inclusive we are different vibe and this mentality that people just shouldn’t have an opinion if it doesn’t fit the Lemmy opinion. It’s just weird.
removed by mod
Exactly. It’s enough active users to have a stream of good content compared to what it was a few month ago. I’m enjoying my time here right now.
At the very least it’s less engaging than reddit. Makes it easier to scroll less frequently and focus on other more important things.
Yeah, honestly outside of sports subreddits I have preferred the Lemmy experience to Reddit.
commenting to show I’m still active lmao
Lol. I came from reddit after 10 years. It was nice to see the lemmy connect app get an update soon after the influx. I’m still trying to get a handle on navigation but I’m hoping to become more active here.
These numbers are not descriptive. Check out the daily stats.
- Active users per day has already stabilised.
- Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.
- Shitposts per day are growing exponentially.
- People are still leaving from the Reddit influx. Lemmy just wasn’t for them.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120
Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.
If people were coming in, shouldn’t the monthly active users increase as well?
If the MAU is decreasing, it means that we are losing more people than people joining. On your graph, the MAU trend is clearly decreasing.
Maybe I’m missing something?
People are going out faster than they’re coming in.
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I’m getting pretty tired of the obvious “Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good” bias that Lemmy seems to have. It’s definitely decreased my usage over the last week or two. I guess it kind of comes with the territory given Lemmy is a more complicated platform that will naturally attract more tech-oriented users, but it’s still getting super old seeing the same flavor posts every single day.
The biggest issue for me is the stale posts keep showing on my feed. Either the posts are too old, or it’s too new with low engagement. I think the sweet spot for me is when a post is in its 1/3 of its lifecycle. Already got a discussion going but not too far that I can’t engage meaningfully.
I find sorting by ‘Top’ either 6 hours or 12 hours helps me see new posts I’ve not seen that have decent engagement
This is exactly my issue with Lemmy in all honesty.
Also let’s not forget the Hexbear “Russia is good actually” posts.
Don’t forget the hardcore left wing echo chamber… Oh wait that was Reddit as well.
Post more my dude. Start the conversations you want to see.
Yeah but it’s like screaming into the void sometimes. You just hope more people somehow discover the community. A lot of my interesting communities are pretty much dead now, so I just subbed to a bunch of porn and get on here once a day to look at boobs.
“Big tech company bad, Twitter dead, Linux good”
Add Firefox in there and yes I’ve seen this everywhere. So many posts about browser news or the web that just devolves into a circlejerk about how great Firefox is.
I get it with the others, but given what Google is currently trying to do with Chrome and the open web, I think the Firefox evangelism is the least sinful of these by far. Or maybe I just became part of the problem.
It’s not inherently bad, I don’t even disagree with it. It’s just that (A) we all get it, enough already and (B) the open web is about letting people use whichever browser they want, so it’s kinda paradoxical that we all say we should all be using the same browser
It’s not even that these evangelizers think we should all be using the same browser. It’s that there are currently only two realistic choices: Chrome (and it’s derivatives) and Firefox (and it’s derivatives). There is safari too, of course, but it hardly compares to either in it’s current state.
Given those two choices, only one of them is in support of the open web. The other is literally trying to add DRM to the web.
As to your first point: I agree that here it may be preaching to the choir and that we all get it. But it has such a small marketshare, I’m not sure it is good for those encouraging it to be quitened.
There is safari too, of course, but it hardly compares to either in it’s current state
Curious to hear you elaborate on this. It’s the #2 browser by marketshare and Apple, while slower in the past, seems to be hearing developer feedback and catching up to what we’re asking.
