Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users
Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users
Similar to Mastodon's spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source
I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
Of course it's not about centralisation per se, but the problems that a centralised platform does not have to deal with.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
It's not that users want to centralize everything. It's Lemmy's design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.
- Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
- Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
- Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
- In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a "moderated" feed (with communities selected by admins). The "local" feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it'll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that's more lively.
- For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
This is the big one to me. It's much more difficult to search for specific content if it's isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
It's hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It's smart to go to a smaller instance but it's also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That's why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
It's that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don't want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
I think it's also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that's the way it always worked on reddit.
So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That's just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
Same shit happened with the 'temporary' mass migration to Signal.
Signal
Interesting what do you mean? I use signal but I can't get anyone other than my ex wife to use it with me. It is so much nicer than google voice or the texting app, regardless of the end to end encryption.
That doesn't seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it's that active. I would've expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.
Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
It's all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it'll attract and retain users.
Why I'm encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it's just a little bit.
One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.
To be fair, (to be faiiiiiir), Subreddits didnt exist when most of the Digg migration occurred.
What you are seeing is a lot of the most tech savvy/privacy concerned/anti-corporatism folks from reddit making the switch early, while some of the populist folks trying it out.
Feels exactly like the weeks prior to Digg buying the farm. There was an early surge, a slight decline, then a wave of people.
That being said, I don't think the masses move to the fediverse. It is too nuanced and technical for 90+% of typical reddit users and will always have that barrier for entry.
Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I'm a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
Truer words were never said.
I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I've tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.
Am I being retained?!??
Sigh... You're free to go sir. Have a nice evening Mr sovereign user.
until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.
This is honestly it.
I like the site, I want to use it, I want to encourage others to use it, but I'm getting tired of only talking about the same things here.
Maybe we need to start encouraging people to post rather than just expecting them to.
I'm in the process of making some stuff, I just worry that the community I post it to on lemmy isn't big enough to get the word out community-wide.
For context, I've been working on a very long dogelore thing. But in the same way, I feel like this hurts any bhj or mtcj stuff I might do. The community on lemmy isn't big enough to get traction, so what's the point?
I'm not going back to reddit, and discord is annoying, so it's just a little discouraging.
It feels like it's mainly talking one way or another about Reddit, or describing how one of the 3P apps is now available for Lemmy. The content is super stale, but it will grow. Fuck, Reddit back in the day was not exactly the thriving metropolis it was maybe six or so years ago. And reddit peaked and came down to how it exists today. So it'll take time.
That being said, I don't check Lemmy anywhere near as frequently as I did Reddit, and mainly because the subs I frequented most have smaller footprints here for now. Which is what you said, but in fewer words.
For what it’s worth, memes have helped me stay. I doubt I’m the only one.
They’re quick and easy to browse and some get a bunch of topical comments and links to other relevant communities.
It’ll take a while to reach a level that’s known in the public eye like Twitter and Reddit, but the low-hanging fruit helps keep people interested while more niche communities are forming.
We don't want to be in the public eye. Let's enjoy what we have while it lasts
Also, liftoff kinda sucked, but I just figured out some features of Sync, and it's fucking beautiful.
Yeah, I really want r/sysadmin on here.
They have a Discord but Discord is so incredibly annoying to use for this.
P.S. change the sort mode to hot or top (x hours) to get more content. The default of active sucks.
The two biggest ones I know of are startrek.website for trekkies and blahaj for all things trans/lgbtq. But even those don't see to have much activity. We need better advertisement to smaller communities somehow.
its not about the instances, those are actually hindering growth by dividing communities across instances and defederating them. lemmy is basically several copies of reddit in a trench coat pretending to be a social network.
I will say I was looking for some opinions on new Internet browsers.
Posted on Reddit and here.
Already got responses on lemmy, but my Reddit post is just being ignored.
I think I've blocked the biggest meme sub or two. Helps a lot with that.
I've been posting on the HP and Tolkien communities and begun modding them too. I'd encourage people to post, and if necessary take up a little responsibility too.
Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.
We have to wait until tomorrow?
There are also conscious efforts to weed out bots and other measures that try to remove potential cancer from spreading.
There was a post recently that outlined bot weeding efforts on a couple dozen instances that tanked user number by something like 1/5 - clearly visible on graphs.
Lemmy’s doing great. Even if plenty small communities are still not big enough here.
exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i'd guess you could expect it to look something like:
- spike
- drop off
- plateau
- spike
- drop off
- plateau above the last plateau
- etc etc
sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
I'm to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.
Even lurkers are still part of the community.
I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
It's quite nice being part of a small community now. Even just an up/down vote from you will be worth more here. It's great.
I’m to tired to make quality posts.
There's room for shitty posts too. 🫂
How mildly opinionated of you.
Thanks for pointing that out! High quality content takes time to craft. It's being skilled and/or knowledgable, being able to convey that across on a digital platform (where basically everyone's anonymous and of unknown backgrounds), and being engaging while you're at it. It definitely can be demanding for some.
Beans on toast are better than vegemite on toast!
Noodles on toast is better than both
I'm actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝
I feel like people just want to hang out and talk about stuff. We don't always need to be wowed by some crazy high quality content or new OC. We just want to hang out with friends and shoot the shit. Most of us are on here to distract us from whatever bullshit we should probably be doing instead.
To be honest, I do the same thing. A couple of simple rules to keep the web entertaining:
- Filter everything that triggers you
- Ban porn
- Never, never look at comments on politics, religion and family. You're like to want to erase humanity afterwards
Yeah it took a long time for me to finally curate Reddit to something I enjoyed using, I've started increasingly working on my filters and it just gets better and better here.
Like Reddit, I find trying to find communities I'm interested in a little difficult so I'm just defaulting to all and continuing to filter for now. At some point soon I'll be able to just default to subscribed.
Yup. Exactly.
there's always something of value to share at least on c/lemmyshitpost
Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.
I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.
I feel like I'm witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect...
Yes, most people give up as soon as something does not work first time.
Maybe there are enough of us to be enough abd to fix those annoying little things that make lemmy complicated to use.
A lot if issues got resolved, apps are here,it is getting better fast.
I think those issues will be solved though. Apps will increasingly make onboarding simpler so Lemmy will be as simple to use as Reddit.
At that point really its just a case of waiting for Reddit to fuck itself, which it absolutely will do eventually via corporate greed, and there we go, all the Lemmy content anyone could ever need.
I don't think Reddit will fall, sadly.
It harbors too many people, who go there for a specific content and don't care about the internal dramas, or who leads the place and what he thinks about the userbase. In addition... Eh, it hosted Obama, Arnold, plenty of actors, celebrities.
My assumption is that it will simply evolve into something different, but no less popular.
After all, Facebook was caught redhanded on such abominable practices that it should be burnt to a crisp long time ago, and yet it's still there, led by that automaton, what'shisname...
One thing that bugs me is people asking for/using tools that replicate the look and feel of Reddit instead of learning the ropes. I left Reddit, I don't want another one. I get it, familiarity is comforting, but when the user base is a fraction of the other platform, no UI or app will ever give you the same experience. I say move on, get out of your comfort zone and participate.
Amen to that.
I don't imagine staying on some site that resembles a drowning wreck, because "I got used to how things work here".
I think I am on shitjustworks.. i don’t know how big my instance is I just chose it because it has a cool name.
It has gone down a few times and at first my reaction was to go to is it down dot com to see if the problem was with my app… but then I had the realization that ohhhh, it’s just my home server is down… I thought about making a separate account on another instance but instead just decided to do something else with those few minutes I would have spent here….
No big deal…. It’s happened a few times in the couple months I’ve been here, but it always works eventually… I really like this platform, and the philosophy behind it, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand all the inner workings and how the instances work together, but I don’t feel like I need to.
But I can see how people who understand it even less than I do might get frustrated and so that is going to be a limiting factor with new growth here I would assume…
I’m just here because I like the pretty 3rd party apps.
I'm not too worried. Graphs dont only go up. :)
Graps are delicious and I love the wins they make.
:) I erased any evidence of any misspelling that may or may not have taken place here tonight.
Joined today. I’ll likely just lurk in the background…
They said while commenting...
Used to say that too,but now Im commenting too.
I thought so too but I don't mind leaving a comment or making a post here and there.
even if it's stupid it's still something for ppl to downvote lol let em think of something better. or make content mocking mine
If you comment on posts you think are under-rated and upvote, you'll push them up the activity queue and it'll reach more people.
Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Also, instance hopping and users registering on multiple instances before picking only one/being active on only once may be an explanation.
Also worth noting is Lemmy only counts posts/comments as "active users". Lurkers who only read and up/downvote aren't counted.
wow, I lurk so much more than I post stuff.. one would think they would track this
In this case, I have a theory. I remember a month ago people were posting a lot on Reddit and the [email protected] community was extremely active. It was like group therapy for refugees. But now the new reality is setting in and people are actually having real and meaningful conversations, which means more lurkers.
So it doesn't mean that active users are down per se, it's just that it's stabilised because people are mostly over Reddit.
I wonder if lurkers were counted in reddits active user data
Some people might have made multiple accounts and chosen one possibly?
Yeah i did something similar, though mostly bc i was confused about the whole instance thing. Made three or four accounts over the first few days. I kept forgetting the password, or didn't really understand what an instance meant, or how to log on via Connect. Now that's done with, I just stick to one account
I did it too. I had like 4 or 5 accounts and used 2 or 3 actively until recently if my main instance went down. Now I'm just using 1.
I'm moving to lemm.ee personally for similar reasons. I'm keeping the dotworld account as backup and may be creating communities here.
This is me. I bounced between a couple of instances before I settled on lemm.ee; I also am generally a lurker because I don't want to comment or post unless I know that it will generate quality conversation.
I'll personally post as long as it's relevant. Ideally it's an interesting comment but not always. I stay away from reddit-type inane comments with no substance, though I'm sure they have their place here as well.
For some the novelty of lemmy dropped pretty quickly. Most reddit users which make up a huge chunk of lemmy users would go days if not, weeks without commenting or posting. You kinda have to factor in that a lot of people are lemmy lurkers that will comment or post once they find something that interests them.
I don't understand why people have expectations from a young platform like it's supposed to be the new reddit/facebook all of a sudden. I lived through the digg->reddit move and believe me, it was worse than what we see on lemmy sometimes. Let it grow and it will have a chance. Offer help when you think some communities aren't correctly moderated or when you think you have better ideas. People usually will try to help (not all the time).
It is expected that there are corrections in numbers after a huge spike. The bigger goal will be to sustain this community.
I'm pretty sure it's kida going already, even when the post only had 200upvotes and 10 comments they where good posts and the comments made up in quality for what they lacked quantity
Reddit is going to keep trying dumb methods to monetize or annoy their user base. Digg did a similar thing. The people will slowly get more and more annoyed and the content here will increase. It’s just a waiting game and federated services are the future.
Ads are coming. (Well, more ads.)
Old.Reddit will be killed too. I know they said it’s not going anywhere but they have shown to be full of shit in the past.
Sites like reddit, Instagram, and twitter make the cognitive effort to go from signing up to using the app as low as possible. The users' experience is considered from before they even have an account. They make sure you don't ever see a blank page or feel like you're battling the app to find content.
Lemmy actively puts roadblocks in the way. Server choices, the hoops you need to jump though for server memberships, and highly fragmented communities all but ensure that people will face issues when signing up.
Sadly, a lot of users here feel that because they had to overcome them, so should everyone else. Until that changes then the self-defeating cycle will continue.
My biggest issue is that at least two out of three times I go to browse/post/comment on lemmy.world, the server is down. I have no clue the actual up time, maybe I am just unlucky. But I am considering migrating my main account to another server.
My alt's server has never experienced this much issue. Hopefully the devs add a migrate function.
It'll hit equilibrium eventually. Not like this is something unusual for a platform that's making the rounds as the new and exciting thing.
Joined few days ago after sync released, thou I'm boost user at reddit before I will stay here no matter what. I'm already done with reddit and their trash app.. Can't wait boost for lemmy to release.
Try infinity dude. It's alpha but tyyyyyyyte
I'm just gonna leave this post here, for statistics.
Joined Lemmy today and find it kinda refreshing and reminding me of the old days when web was small yet varied.
Also really dig the web interface, especially the vaporwave-light theme :D
The problem with lemmy is that it's not 100% stable. I like it more than Reddit but at least 20% of time lemmy is overloaded, down, not refreshing or else.
I haven't had that problem at all. Maybe a month ago, but now its stable. On the other hand I suppose if might be relative to the instance you joined?
There always some issues. It was unusable a couple days ago for me. Whilst I can tolerate it for now, that’s a huge barrier for people especially newcomers.
Lemmy isn't overloaded. Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml are.
People need to move to other instances. Lemmy was never designed to have main central instances. There are supposed to be many smaller and more specific ones and people choose the ones that fit their usage.
Unlike Reddit, where no users have ever seen a message that said "you broke Reddit" with a sad snoo...
Reddit is also not 100% stable; Lemmy is just experiencing growing pains. Here's to hoping it only gets better
That's a problem especially with lemmy.world . They took the brunt of the Reddit migration and had to massively adjust their servers to accommodate the influx of users and communities. Other instances have been more stable
also the apps often have a lot of bugs or issues in general. i would love to use lemmy more, but Liftoff can't even sort my profile comments by new. i click on it.. nothing happens. and if i just quickly switch to another app (clicking a link that opens the browser etc), and come back.. everything is reset and i have to search the post i was again etc.
because such things i don't use lemmy as often i would like..another issue is that lemmy isn't supported on older browsers and the devs just tell you to update or get another one.. yeaahh nah thanks. not gonna switch or destroy my browser (newer browser versions are often shitty.. just look at chrome who nags you all the time) just because of lemmy. so.. i wait for this issues to be fixed to then be able to use it more. before this happens, the user experience is just too frustrating.
These are natural growing pains of any new platform. A lot of people will come over, check it out, and then go back to Reddit.
I just swap between lemmy.world and lemm.ee whenever one of them goes down. They're the first two options on the app I use lol
With the fediverse known for its opposition to infinite growth, this feels ironic
What opposition? I see folks complaining about excessive size of individual instances (mostly out of concern that power imbalances could develop), but basically nothing against the growth of the network as a whole.
I think the "infinite growth" here is referring to our expectations of some systems we use growing infinitely, even when the system itself is bounded by finite terms, such as population or hype.
For example, US Social Security works on the assumption that there are more people working and inputting money into it (via payroll taxes) than retired people taking money out. That assumption requires a growing (or at least very stable) working population, as a shrinking working population means that there will be more people taking money out than there are people putting money in. This growth, inevitably, will have to stop at some point. However, many retired people expect, and in some cases financially rely on, Social Security giving them money.
A large portion of the Fediverse have expressed their disdain for such systems, and molave here is finding it ironic that they'd expect this platform to infinitely grow, as well. The initial hype from the whole Reddit shenanigans are dying off, and the platform will soon stabilize, at least until Reddit pisses off its users again.
I keep forgetting you have to comment or post to be considered active
Upvotes don't count?
It's natural progression once initial hype wears off. As long we manage to keep core amount of users it should grow slowly over time.
It's way better than the relative numbers of Threads. I expect a decline of active users, since a lot of Reddit users registered to a Lemmy instance expecting a similar experience that couldn't be fulfilled. It will stabilize and grow up again with peaks when, for example, old.reddit.com is ditched.
A big issue was loosing all the .ml lemmy instances. I lost mine and had to create a new account. lemmy.ml is the only one that's still up.
I was an early Reddit adopter and can remember how lonely it felt back then. It took years but it got better in ways and worse in others. I believe in Lemmy because it isn't susceptible to the pressures of a company trying to be profitable. Sure it'll have its own challenges but I've personally had enough of idiot CEOs running social websites into the ground.
The big problem with lemmy is that some niche communities did not migrated so when you Look for example for fairphone news you Look to reddit beacuse lemmy dosent have equivalent. Likewise i havent seen something similar to r/tailsof. You know the niche communities that were the bread and bucket of reddit with the few exceptions ( programers and Linux communities fully migrated and are obviusly standing out beacuse those pepole are always first to move to opensource alternatives )
Lemmy has already hit equilibrium as far as I'm concerned if your on lemmy world I suggest changing instances my instance midwest.social was down alot in the beginning when lemmy was getting alot of new sign ups but has since then been updated a few times and been rock solid since now it only occasionally goes down for maintenance
I think that app choice makes a difference, too. I would guess that most people on mobile picked one or two apps to try, and if their picks weren't great (or the user was too impatient to wait for improvements) they called the whole experience shitty and bailed. Those of us committed to the move hung on and waited for our apps to get better.
In my case, I grabbed every ios app I could find and tried them all. Some were not so good, some were good and improving at a lightning rate. Living through those growing pains is worth it to me, especially when the improvements are crazy fast. I'm mostly using Memmy now, and I'm really happy with it. I only have one tiny, unimportant issue with it involving text selection, but it's nothing compared to how good they've made this app so quickly. Memmy is a large part of why I stick around.
I tried only Jerboa and that's what I stuck with. It loads fast and has every feature I want. Compare that to the official Reddit app, which is a slog on even high end devices. Seriously, what are they doing that it loads SO SLOW?
Lemmy put my 1st post here
The novelty has worn off. Contributions are going to fall to the baseline for this platform. Question is, is the Lemmy space going to expand from that point?
Sync's already had over 10k downloads, but the ability to post (apart from comments) hasn't yet been added. Once that happens I imagine there'll be a decent spike.
Growth is not always consistent.
This is an expected statistical artifact given the "last month" aggregation and a huge influx of new users of which many don't stick around. I am saying they don't stick around, because that's generally just what happens with a lot of new users (e.g. they checked it out, decided it's not for them) and also due to the federated nature they might have switched accounts and similar things. Then the bit about "last month" aggregation: Have a look at the "Active 6 months" graph - it's still trending upwards. Those are likely a trailing average aggregations, so a maximum is reached when that 1-month-window starts (roughly) at the beginning of the huge user influx. For the 6-month window that hasn't happened yet, so still going upwards. Assuming nothing changes (similar amount of new/leaving active users) the graphs gonna be interesting in the next few weeks: After the initial wave of influx the balance was most likely negative (more users from "the wave" dropping out again than added users afterwards), however I'd hope it's gotten positive since then. If that's the case the graph should start trending upwards 1 month after the balance became positive. It's unclear when that was the case, but some towards end of July might be a reasonable guess? The same graph with a smaller window could shed some light on that (or just expose useless noise ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).
Another sign I'd consider good: The active user ratio is trending upwards.
Disclaimer: I don't know how the data is aggregated, nor how exactly "active" is defined - the gist of the above very likely applies though. I was too lazy to look it up in the code - if someone knew how these graphs are aggregated and were so kind to let me know, that'd be appreciated :)
I think people who've only ever known reddit/instagram/twitter will find it dull, but this is still a relatively active place with quality users and mods.
The bigger and more reddit-like it gets the harder it will be to moderate and the more expensive it will be to run. Things are fine right now.
As a new user, I kind of can’t get over the idea that bots just seem to scrape links and repost them here.
That seems to be most of the contributions to communities to me.
Unpopular opinion: bots might be a good thing for now.
I’m speaking from a growth perspective. Assuming users want to use social media to…socialize… you need active users and constant content. New social media platforms have a lack of users and content. Bots can bridge that gap until enough users are contributing and using the platform.
If you really think about it, it comes down to a platform using bots effectively. Let’s say the bots will only submit content when user submitted content falls below a threshold. Maybe it will auto generate threads for breaking news.
What if bots are used to ask questions and further conversations, like a social lubricant. Employed in a way to pull more useful information from users or to keep people engaged.
This all hinges on the ability for a bot to appear real.This sounds super fucked when you think about it. I’m not a fan of bot content. If you didn’t know it was a bot, what difference would it make? LLM might be able to make it engaging and natural.
Imho that's a horrible idea. A large part of content on the instance I'm on has become bots just reposting news articles without any own contribution, no discussion, nothing.
The go-to counterpoint being that people come to social media to socialize with other humans. The moment another "human" hits me with "As an AI...." or are otherwise unmasked for any reason is the exact moment I lose a little bit of faith in the platform.
It's not enough faith to make me stop using it the first time or even the fifth, so long as the promise of almost always interacting with another person is dangled in front of me. But that little bit can't be regained and eventually it's going to hit zero and I will leave.
I already have chatbots if I want to talk to myself. Talking to the cat makes me feel less lonely than chatbots do, and given the choice between the fedi forever remaining niche or retaining the bot "activity" of reddit....I'd just move to tildes.
The only halfway good argument is the use of a breaking news bot, but I've found I tend to get tired of those very fast for the same reason. They just make me sad and irritated, and I end up blocking them. If the news is interesting enough, I expect humans will spam it.
If they could be programmed to only post when user interaction falls....maybe, in theory, but that feels more insidious to me than anything else. The idea of a company pumping their numbers will never make me like them, and if bots are already posting stuff, why do I have to interact in order to get content? They're already doing it. 🤷♂️
If I'm lurking enough to trigger the theoretical user activity bot, I'd also be fine lurking while "other users" (the bots) give me things to look at, and they'll never go dormant.
Bots are on every social media platforms.
Doesn't make them good or necessary just because they're common. When I see bots, I tend to block them pretty fast regardless of contribution, and my experience has been pretty damn nice here in very large part because the bot users are (to my knowledge) mostly or entirely dormant.
Nobody wants to interact with a known bot, or post where that's the main contributor. The bot is never going to engage with them, and it somehow feels worse than posting into the void.
I will admit, I was hard into Lemmy at first, but then gradually slipped back into the Reddit habit. This is my first visit to the site in a few weeks.
I could see myself doing the same, but I only browse mobile. Without a decent app, it's just not happening.
However, Lemmy now feels like the super early days of Reddit and I don't want to give that up.
Just real conversations, normal comments, none of the repeated Reddit jokes in every thread, and minimal right wing trolling
I've been dipping on both. What gets me more there are niche stuff though.
A lot of what I enjoyed about reddit was news discussion. On Lemmy, about 80-90% of those threads just get over run with trolls.
I would also note that some instances with the ml ending like fmhy.ml got wiped out of existence a few weeks ago because Malaysia forcefully took back that domain suffix back. I was on there and had to make a new account elsewhere after I saw it wasn't going to come back up.
Can bot cleaning explain this?
Could be something to do with frequent outages. Every now and then I will have error jump out. I then give up for a day and then try using tomorrow.
Thats the case for most new platforms you get a surge of users and then some titer off and stop using the platform. But don't look at the small dip look at the massive growth compared to a few months ago.
That decline is slower than I expected. It shows that more people stay than not
The number of users are just stabilising. This is expected after a sudden spike in users.
How much is Threads down in DAU?
I think a better comparison would be mastodon after the twitter acquisition, but I would agree everything always has a huge surge at first and then there is a drop.
Their daily active users declined by 82 percent from its peak https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/threads-user-base-has-plummeted-more-than-80-metas-app-ended-july-with-just-8-million-daily-active-users-/articleshow/102435552.cms
People always tend to bounce back to the bigger platform.
How I like to deal with this is to use two or more platforms of the same kind.
Occasionally open Reddit, and occasionally Lemmy. Occasionally checking Fedi, and occasionally going on Twitter.
It may be disorienting at first, but it's better to get used to going on many websites than sticking to just two.
This is normal. We've gotten a big enough surge where we have consistent content now. Lemmy was a bit rough when the migration started, but hopefully improvements will go a lot faster now. We're definitely missing a lot of core features and polish still. But Lemmy is a long term social network that is grass roots. All we need to worry about is creating a sustainable community now, and polish up the experience to newcomers so we can sustain the next exodus and be more of a viable platform.
It's because Reddit is still alive and well and Lemmy just doesn't offer enough to be a serious alternative (yet)
This is how the Digg to Reddit migrations worked. Initial wave wasn't a death blow but things will keep maturing on Lemmy. By the time Spez upsets people again on Reddit, we will likely see another big wave - hopefully moderating tools are improved enough by then.
Lurkers not counting probably has something to do with that.
Because every post is just Lemmy users jerking themselves off raving about how much cooler they are than Reddit.
It's so fucking cringe I I can't scroll more than 5 minutes without giving up.
This comment is so ironic seeing as how I didn't see a comment like you are saying besides yours. Come on. We're all here together. Get over yourself.
Bruh all you've contributed so far are a couple snarky comments yourself. You're not really in a position to be criticizing what others are posting. It's a new site, you gotta grow the communities you want to see. If that's not something you want to be part of then check back in a few months. You don't like the programming, get up and change the channel.
Don't go to !memes. Thats all really. Block the community because thats where 99% of the circlejerk comes from (and app shaming somehow??)
I don't see that on my front-page. You need to curate your own experience on Lemmy just like you do on Reddit. Plenty of Lemmy isn't metaposting
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active&nsfw=null - list of communities in Lemmy
https://lemmy.world/post/2216085 - list of casual communities to subscribe to to get you started.
if you browse c/all you're going to see a lot of annoying trash you aren't interesting in, same as Reddit.
Block memes and politics if you must - I blocked the latter and my experience is superb.
The important part is that you still found a way to feel superior.
Not surprising that the initial hype from the Reddit meltdown is wearing off, the question is how much momentum can be retained and how to attract users organically.
Being new to Mastodon and Lemmy I personally struggle to figure things out. Just finding a brief summary on how Lemmy works in contrast to reddit has, so far, yielded no helpful results. While I think for me this is just a matter of sticking with the services I can imagine that a lot of people would check in, struggle and check out again.
The, let's call it infrastructure, of Lemmy and the way registration works due to the fediverse is quite different to what most people are used to.
@LambLeeg I swear we have this this at least a copule or few months of someone getting anxious there's a sight dip of active user on the Fediverse and eventually it goes up again.
I woudn't worry too much about the graph and just try to vibe here instead.. 🤷♂️
I feel like it's one small community instead of an interconnected larger one, unfortunately.
Still a massive increase compared to a few months ago.
What are people saying to be calm for? Nobody way raising alarm
I'm doing my part!
I'm active with comments, but not posts. That's all I can offer.
Me too. What's your reason not to create posts? I don't do it much because I'm anxious about the possible low quality of my contributions.
I just have nothing I want to post. I was on reddit for 8 years and only made like 10 posts in total. Just can't be arsed.
Just like a whale, scraping off barnacles, for greater speed and efficiency
take my monthly comment
Number of active users slightly dips after exponential growth, surely the platform is dying, lets run around in circles and scream that the sky is falling.
Why don't we, instead, sacrifice u/spez to the gods, so they have mercy of us?
Doing my part...
Still waiting for the ability to block instances as a user.
People on vacation in July and august too maybe ? Might have a slight rebound later
Still better at retaining its users than Threads.
I will use Lemmy more when Sync will fix hiding posts. And no, I'm not gonna use "remove read"
Interesting data considering the climbing daily post/comment(?) numbers I saw yesterday.
A platform can always be improved, always. Lemmy is alpha software now and the growing problems we had in the beginning may have annoyed some users.
I think the most important thing is to keep making improvements to attract new users. I'm already finding the content infinitely better than it was a month ago.
Thank fuck, I was worried my hosting bills were going to keep escalating... xD
Yeah cuz the shot is down constantly. I have 2 apps and one usually doesn't work.
I mentioned this in another thread but I think it's regression to the mean
Posting smth so I count as an active user again
I can use Lenny with Lenny sync on my phone without issue but when I try to use my browser on my laptop I can't login. It's the same instance, save credentials.
To be expected. I like it but it's still quite an immature platform overall. There's lots to be done to make it easier for an average user.
This is not a bad thing. Lurkers have always been a significant part of the user base in all social media.
Lurker mainly but looking to get more involved!
A good part of that can be explained by the low time resolution of the graph. 1 month.
Let's assume 1 month ago, 100 new people signed up. Let's say 20 of those made a comment or post, which is the requirement to be counted as an active user.
Many of those 100 didn't stay for various reasons. Of the 20 'active' users, only 15 were coming back the next day.
But the graph still counts 20 active users for a whole month. Only 1 month after a user last commented or posted, this user is no longer counted as 'active'. So now we see a drop of -5 (all numbers made up).
I think it's perfectly normal that not everyone who signs up makes a post or comment. And that not everyone who tries out something new will stick around the next day, or the next week.
With a large number of new signups, which we had in the last months, it can be expected that another a large number is only active for a short time. Due to the low resolution, we probably see what happened 1 month ago.
Well, everybody kinda knows each other a little bit here, whereas on reddit unless you are one of those accounts nobody even bothers reading your username.
Lol
We'll see how it goes, hopefully it keeps growing, but a user loss seems to be quite common after the initial wave of new users for new platforms
Lemmy didn’t take off like all my other moves and that’s ok. Can’t stand what Reddit stands for. I won’t ever contribute there but I’m forced to visit to get commentary I need to see on the war and other niche topics.
The robots have filled the content problem but not the commentary problem. And no, I don’t want bot commentary.
Interestingly I've actually seen comments go way up in the last month despite the user count going down.
I expect it is natural that there is a tipping point, where there is enough content that it becomes engaging for others. It's like going to a house party. The first few people to arrive at the party awkwardly stand around and might leave early. Once there is the right number of people, the group dynamic shifts and the entire energy of the party is elevated. The Exodus brought a lot of curious visitors, but everyone was standing around. Now there's engaging content and comments are growing. Some of those who stopped by in June will likely come back at some point if they left early -- I did the same thing in the early days of Reddit. I think there's been a large enough influx to kick things off and I expect things to continue to grow, but the active user count was probably inflated significantly over the past couple of months and will be resetting to more reasonable numbers.
Been posting on masto since lemmy.world keeps getting outages. New posts seem infrequent on the sorting algorithms. I'm sure once the hardware hiccups die down it will stabilize
The number of posts per day keeps growing though.
Well I'm here and I like it. So there.
Those are pretty good numbers
I'm just incompetent all around 💁
Can someone normalize facebooks active use chart over the same time range?
love that last point about topical meta-communities. could be the answer to niche communities fragmented across several instances
Average mass is too mid to come out of their "none is here" mindset for most superior alternatives.
Some of those will be bots or trolls or just shitheads in general so no great loss
Lemmy feels, some days, like its bots all the way down. Just reddit repost bots everywhere.
I feel like this was a lot of lemm.ee for a while, which is why sunarus is clamping down on that.
Lots of other communities out there though!
Yeah this was always going to happen after a big rush. On any website a certain % of users that sign up won't like it and will move on. If you have a steady influx of users, you wouldn't notice it, but because of lemmys explosive growth due to reddit shitting its pants, then just like we saw a tonne of people leave at once, were now seeing a tonne of people leave at once, and now that that explosive user growth is normalising, for a short time we will see an overall decline in users until the amount of leavers normalises as well.
If were still losing people in a month, then we should be worried.
¿Se consideran como activos los que solo entran para leer y votar? Pues no comentan pero rien y no paran de reir. No hay que fiarse tanto de los números sino mas bien de la naturalidad, neutralidad y originalidad de respuestas.
Are those who only enter to read and vote considered as assets? Well, they don't comment but laugh and they don't stop laughing. You should not trust the numbers so much but rather the naturalness, neutrality and originality of responses.
I'm very interested to see where it settles. It should give in indication of what percentage of people are able/willing to use lemmy in it's current state.
The fediverse is such a cool project but it can be pretty rough from a usability standpoint.
Anyone know why I have to log back in every day or two?
quality over quantity: trash users can find their way out
