Don't forget that Reddit was made up of 90% lurkers, and less than 1% of active posters, the rest would comment but rarely post themselves. These numbers are great if we keep those statistics in mind
I think of a lurker as someone who doesn't post - I guess your definition is someone who doesn't interact at all (besides making an account and subscribing, I assume). But yes, I mean users who only vote are now counted (it's not using views afaik).
I'd like to think that too but I still go to Reddit and browsed a lot of those threads. In almost all of them, people were making the claim that there was nowhere to go, with maybe the occasional person chiming in to name-drop Lemmy, followed by a couple more comments from people bad-mouthing it.
People are definitely mad at Reddit but there does seem to still be this overall sense that Lenny is not good enough yet
My internet experience has been slower since switching to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin. And it's so nice. The things I see are more interesting. The conversations are usually more well thought out. And lowest common denominator dopamine content isn't being driven into my eyeballs by Algorithms. I've legitimately been happier since the Reddit API debacle.
It's surprising the psychological difference of "net seventeen people think you're an asshole" vs "twenty people think you're an asshole, but three people get you".
FYI, a browser plugin called Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) exposed the vote breakdown on Reddit as well, although like all scores on reddit, it was fuzzed to confound cheaters.
I think the default UI is fine but the good thing is that neither of us are forced to use any UI - we are free to have third party apps and stuff like that :)
I too use Photon when on PC. However I do believe the majority of users here liked the old reddit style of things maybe. Might be why the default look of lemmy looks like it does? I'm only guessing here though!
Most web apps, especially social media - get that peak and then have this huge falloff (see Threads for a particularly grisly example). Lemmy seems really good at keeping its user base.
It reminds me that I need to contribute posts more often myself. I’m think the only reason I ever go back to reddit is that it has some specialized subs we just don’t have here yet. But sometimes you have to start posting to an audience of 0 to get things going.
the only reason I ever go back to reddit is that it has some specialized subs we just don’t have here yet. But sometimes you have to start posting to an audience of 0 to get things going.
Same. I've had some success with starting or reviving communities just by posting and commenting regularly, interspersed with a few cross-posts to related communities. Be the change you want to see in the world, and I hope more users will come!
I have not been paying attention to threads and so I gave it a quick google. It seems that threads is doing just fine, with 130 million monthly users now.
I definitely really like the quality of discussion on Lemmy, it makes me feel like it's actually worthwhile to comment and discuss things again. It feels like how it felt when I started using reddit back in 2012 or so.
It's also a volume thing. By the time I reach a reddit comment thread what I wanted to say has already been said, and if I say it again my comment will drown in a sea of heavily upvoted comments. On lemmy you can be several days late to the party and still get both upvotes and responses.
I don't think that initial peak was ever "real" anyway. I think it was due to people creating multiple accounts on different instances (or maybe even claiming multiple usernames on the same instance) before settling down with the one account they were actually going to consistently use.
Yeah that's me. I signed up for and used beehaw for a month before switching to my current lemmy.ca. My old account would definitely be counted the same way as someone who signed up, got bored and left
There are definitely people that bounced off Lemmy for whatever reason. No idea how many though, I myself had 4 accounts on various instances before I settled on this one.
I've heard about Lemmy for a while, and I just joined after getting permanently banned for "threatening violence" after posting "nice sub here" in a new subreddit. I wish I were joking, but it personally doesn't surprise me that much when considering my past experiences. The appeal was denied.
Reddit's most dedicated and longstanding users can only tolerate so many nonsensical and frivolous permanent account bans over the years before they flock to that beautiful forest sprouting up across the river. Lemmy should continue to grow because people like me intend to be here for the life of it.
My last few months on Reddit were spent tracking bot accounts, and taking note of suspicious patterns of certain subreddits refusing to take action against blatant propaganda bots. I'm glad to be past that, at least for now, and I wish the users I'm leaving behind luck. Things were nuts.
Just be aware Lemmy has its own share of issues and extremist views. It's not as simple as Reddit is evil and Lemmy is good, both have their pros and cons at end of day and realistically they both probably have a role to play for people.
It is as simple as the fact that being banned from a Lemmy instance does not shutdown access to all of Lemmy’s communities like it does with Reddit.
This allows actual, messy, contextualized moderation to happen within communities according to the values of those communities without creating broader distortions in a global moderation policy and enforcement scheme.
In other words there are unfortunately transphobic communities on Reddit and Lemmy, but the difference is there are also (many) communities on Lemmy that if you start spouting transphobic bullshit a moderator will unceremoniously and fairly quickly shut you down without a bunch of techbro handwringing about censorship or general apathy towards violence against trans people.
This aspect does in fact make Lemmy clearly better than Reddit on the whole, because this is a fundamental issue to social networks and communities.
Lmao, I was banned on reddit for reporting something somebody else wrote. Banned for abuse of the report system. Just want to repeat, it was a full reddit ban, not a subreddit ban.
I had submitted a total of 5 reports over the life of the account. The first 3 were acted on by the admins (clear calls to violence/racism) and 2 that passed admin review.
The first report I submitted on r/worldnews led to me being banned from reddit.
I still post there occasionally. I made 4 new Reddit accounts from behind 7 proxies, but they all got banned due to browser fingerprinting. But I wised up and now the 5th one's still not banned even though I access it from my home IP. I really try my best not to give such a hostile company more content, but there's still a few local subs and specific content that isn't big enough yet on Lemmy.
Yeah, I still browse reddit from time to time (mostly when lemme feed is dried up or I'm at my computer. I don't browse it for hours like I used to, though. And I haven't made a comment that wasn't on r/lfg for months.
Most of my feed is about Canada, makes sense, I live there. But a vast majority of it is right wing propaganda. Anti immigration, pro PeePee, anti Trudeau, etc. Every week a new right wing subreddit crops up.
AFAIK, V0.19 adds anyone that votes to MAU instead of just commenters and posters, so any server thats converted is reporting better #s. With Lemmy.world now on 0.19, expect this to be even sharper.
The IPO announcement w/ shares being offered to Reddit users. Also, the deal with AI training off of user data without consent. Hard to keep track these days lol.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see another boom in active users and new accounts due to that. Just depends on how much this pushes users who were already annoyed over api changes over the edge.
Reddit can't help but treat their mods and user base like absolute shit. So while it may not be much, there will be a slow and steady drip of users over time.
If you don't know, Reddit updated their interface in February and made it worse by doing so. People who tolerated the older "new" interface can find a way to use that (at new.reddit) while the older interface is still there too (old.reddit).
Still, it seems like Reddit keeps making changes to drive away their older user base which hypothetically is drawing in new users (otherwise it seems a bit silly for them to be doing those changes).
That's it? Wow, a lot fewer people were upset about the loss of 3rd party apps than I thought. We need to add at least 3 more zeroes to that number if this place stands a chance at taking down reddit.
I… kinda like lemmy the way it is I guess? Sure, I wish some niche-communities were a bit more active (looking at you, /c/malefashionadvice). But then again on Lemmy I actually feel motivated to contribute actively. Because I know my content won’t be monetized by some corporate behemoth. So maybe this is just fine the way it is?
Every once in a while I check up on what reddit looks like now.
I find the same or similar topics posted, with 600 comments instead of 30, and 570 of those 600 are just whatever's the first thing that pops into everyone's mind after reading the post title.
I like it better here.
Both sides have their benefits, and it's a shame there is no good best-of-both-worlds. I get where you're coming from, I never felt the urge to participate on Reddit because it was so often just shouting into the void and getting buried in hundreds of one-word replies and in-jokes and memes. Here I feel seen, and often feel like my contribution (although mostly just small comments) makes an impact.
At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit's, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now. Lemmy has a very distinct userbase slant and if you're in the target audience (tech, FOSS, Linux etc) you're probably great here. But even common interests like sports struggle for traction, and true niche stuff has an extremely tough time.
It doesn't need to take down reddit. I'd like to see Lemmy at 1 million active users though. Just need enough critical mass to be able to branch into more smaller sublemmys which draws in the fans of those subs specifically and creates better curated content.
at 1 million active users though. Just need enough critical mass to be able to branch into more smaller sublemmys which draws in the fans of those subs specifically
I was responding kind of someone else as well, but where are these numbers coming from?
Is it truly 1 million? Or maybe 500k? Or maybe 2 million?
After browsing Lemmy for a while, you get the sense that the average user here is the type that gets upset about a social media company making changes to an API. That is a very specific type of person and you can see it in the comments.
I’d guess people get turned off by that type of person and leave.
I come here once Reddit and hacker news content is old. This isn’t a place I’d recommend to anyone, unfortunately. There are extremely strong biases all over and deep echo chambers. Users here seem like the perpetually online type. Most perspectives I’ve seen have been heavily influenced by online discourse rather than reality.
I visit this site less and less due to the user base.
Slow but steady growth is better imo, especially since Lemmy's moderation tools are still not that good and instance admins often get overwhelmed maintaining their own instances. Some instance admins got frustrated so much, they decided to create a new lemmy backend: https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api
I don't want Lemmy to go after Reddit. I want it to be its own thing.
With that being said, more users would mean having some living communities. Some major communities on lemmy.world like videos are hilariously empty, probably less so than small, local subreddits.
I like the idea of a slow increase over time. I remember Reddit did that one chatroom experiment where you started out small. And then merged with larger and larger rooms. Small rooms had at least a chance to hang and chat and the larger rooms turned into twitch chat spam. To a degree maybe the same could be said for comments, on Reddit now I still see thousands of redundant replies to subjects whereas here it's definitely still fresh if not shorter chains.
Though in terms of niche topics it may definitely need more traffic somehow. I think reddit benefits a lot from its search indexing and if Lemmy ever began to appear in search traffic more like forums did in early Google I could see that improving.
Lemmy.world updated to 0.19.3, which count anyone who voted(lurker), as an active user, hence the bump in user. The same bump can be seen on january, where a lot instance started to updated to the latest version.
Really like being able to block the porn instances too. I don't care if people want porn but I don't like randomly running across it, I personally don't care for it.
Great news. it's also nice to see they are more accurately counting active users with the latest update. I still think Lemmy will surpast a million active users with in a year or two.
As someone who mostly lurking back in reddit, lemmy sort of forces me to engage (give back) in community. While at first I felt weird, it grow on me to contribute for discussion and hopefully I can start my own post in a community lol.
My hope is to have more small communities migrate here. Best part of Reddit was the small fan/enthusiast communities. Lemmy would be a good home for those 🤞
There might be a significant number of users here waiting for everyone else to switch over to lemmy. If you start a niche community, it's a little easier for someone else to be like "It's kind of empty, but it exists on lemmy too." What you need is a critical mass of people. It usually takes time and effort to reach that, and someone must be first.
Guess it just depends but I see a lot of people interacting on certain topics and a lot of posts I make get a good amount of activity. I get way more interaction on my posts than I had on Twitter for instance.
I want to like mastodon but I don't want to do the leg work of finding accounts. I like the algorithm to some extent, I want help to find things.
I also have trouble deciding how to support the post. Liking doesn't do anything and tooting or whatever puts it on my page. I don't feel part of the community boosting topics I like.
I like voting things up and down.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I try and get instantly bored because I have to hunt for everything. I really tried.
For me it's just being able to have longer discussion. I dunno, maybe I can do that on Mastodon but it feels to quick for me. I've always liked forum posting, so this suits me better
I will say unlike Reddit I find the best experience on here tends to be sorting posts by newest comments so that way discussion pushes things to the front of my page. There's still too little content for sorting things by Top in various different communities to be worth the time. I suppose this turns it into more of an old-school forum homepage in a way.
Reddit making all third party apps a PAID service after releasing the paid API, and its first party app being total AD oriented instead of user orientef sure helped!
Part of it could be that people post less during the holidays and there is a significant portion of people who browse sites like reddit/Lemmy during their downtime at work.
I think Lemmy is a good foothold for activitypub. Reddit has been going to shit for some time and their userbase is tech savvy enough to actually migrate to something like Lemmy in significant enough numbers for it to matter.
The network effect is compounded by all the other applications that interop with Lemmy, ActivityPub apps sure but more so KBin and MBin and others that provide a similar service to Lemmy.
I'm fairly sure that the admins of lemmy.world said that we could expect a big spike in active users after the upgrade to 1.19 due to a change in how active users are calculated. I can't seem to find the post now, though.
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
My usage dropped for a while, but it’s the only ‘social media’ that doesn’t actively leave me feeling worse about the platform and the world after using it.
Does Lemmy need to grow for some reason? Sometimes I swear I can feel the Reddit community toxicity seeping in and its really disappointing. Honestly, for me personally if Lemmy continued on exactly as it is today, I'd be perfectly content.
That said, if there are benefits to growth beyond the wide scope of mass adoption fucking over the proprietary social medias I'm all ears.
Lemmy doesn't have the niche communities that Reddit did, and those come with a larger user base.
Lemmy has plenty of memes, politics, Linux, and anime, but there are many small communities which do not (yet) have active equivalents here.
Here are a few of my own examples, but everyone will have their own unique list: r/wheresthebeef, r/Penderwicks, r/twistypuzzles, r/Cubers, r/fusion, r/legoRockets, r/HarryPotteronHBO, r/anarchycubing, r/deextinction, r/cubinggore.
I would welcome more users if it means more niche communities.
I understand what are you saying but forget about overall size of the community for a second, what lemmy would really benefit from is more niche subreddits with active users. That will only come from more people on lemmy and that is the real reason to desire lemmy growth besides a basic wish for other people to not be stuck in a shitty corporate silo.
Well it's not really just about making you happy, the project is about displacing corporate controlled media so that community projects and social movements can flourish allowing us up create a better world for all.
I myself have very elitist and isolationist tendencies but I think it's important to set them aside somewhat for the common good.
We can always crawl further in to hide from scary normal people, but the normal people need this type of platform too. We can just subscribe to our nerdy communities and stop browsing all or everything once there is too much stuff to browse that way anyway.
Over time people from that initial spike realized that the platform isn't what they expected/liked, some likely went back to their previous platform but i am going to be optimistic and say they moved to mastodon.
The climb we see now is fresh users that heard of lemmy and are now checking it out.
//This is how i read this graph, other interpretation may be possible, you can't really know for certain without more data.
Traffic peaked at the reddit migration, after that, people either left or became mostly lurkers, and since lemmy versions before 0.19 didn't count votes as activity most users were not included in the graph.
Now that instances are upgrading to 0.19 there's an increase of activity.
0.19 broke federation for quite a lot of people for the majority of December, probably has something to do with it.
I've been an almost daily Lemming since last summer but when nothing I posted was making it off my server for about three weeks there wasn't much point!
Speculation on this graph alone, I would say that students being off/people avoiding family gave the bump in December. And I'd expect another bump in May/June as Summer starts
According to: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=270 the monthly active users are still in decline... even if we take into account the new way of counting active users, the previous bump comes from v0.19 being added to other servers
i'm pretty sure i account for about half of those. i had dozens of fediverse identities before lemmy and now... well lets just say **i** don't think it's a problem, but at this point i think i could identify a lemmy welcome email at 200 feet.