You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.
Yeah, I created an account on a difference instance just because I didn't know how to post in a community from a different (but federated) instance in this instance.
Active users isn't perfect either, for two reasons:
Bot accounts can be actively doing things -- in fact, it's likely that they will do so at some point to build legitimacy. We had someone farming regularly-created bot accounts back on /r/europe around the time I left, reposting slightly-mangled old comments and slightly cropped and rotated old highly-upvoted old images. Dozens of accounts a day.
Some (human) users are just going to lurk, and won't become active users.
It may be an input into a better estimate, and may be better than total users at this point, but it isn't the "right" number either, and I would wager that it will start to increasingly deviate from the legitimate number if people start activating bots.
Good to see, but as with all posts like this, it’s important to note that the really important number is “Active Users” That number has gone up significantly as well, just not as fast as number of accounts.
It took me months to actually start using Lemmy and Mastodon. I would consider myself a tech savvy person and it still took a while getting used too. I think there need to be better tutorials linked on the sign-up pages that help people understand the basic concepts. That would help drive true user acquisition.
I just started with mastodon. Lemmy I'm pretty understanding at but do you have any people/ hashtags you reccomend following on mastodon to not make the whole place feel so small and repetitive? I'm interested in pretty much anything.
From the docs: "Lemmy also shows counts of active users for your site, and its communities. These are counted within the last day, week, month, and half year, and are cached on starting up lemmy, and every hour.
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included."
i've only been on the platform for a few days but i've noticed a decent uptick in content and unique posts. probably still a lot of bots but with a decent surge of users and people getting a handle on the platform there's been a good bit of activity.
yea track the monthly active users number. It continues to go up. And on lemmy, to be "active", a user actually has to post, not just sign in and lurk.
Conversely, kbin doesn't really track active users, so it's more or less the same as total users.
Yup, came here to say that as well. it's al bots. The active users graph is much more realistic.
And I've been seeing some...odd looking.... comments recently from users at instances known for being mostly bots. Some of these comments really look AI generated, and have a suspicious number of upvotes.
The web app wefwef.app is actually a really great alternative to apollo for lemmy! I'm using it right now on android, and while it does feel weird with the ui differences it has gestures and the same interface and generally feels really good.
Yeah once the first hits we're gonna see a huge spike in users. The growth right now is just from people who deleted their accounts in protest on the 12th.
It shows 50,000 active users per day compared to 2,500,000 total users per day. Most of the difference, presumably, is dormant bot accounts. If they were all activated and started posting one day, they could probably bring the network down.
I'm confused though by the active comments per day being about 100 times the active users per day. Surely users are not commenting 100 times per day on average. Is there something wrong with how the comments are being counted?
The posts count also looks a bit odd, since it means active users are making more than 10 posts a day on average. That seems implausibly high.
“average user posts 100 times per day" actualy just statistical error. average user posts 0 times per day. Feddi Georg, who lives in cave & posts over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
That and some of the active users are also bots. Lemmit.online is a good example; that community is set up to harvest content from Reddit via RSS and then Bots post it into the community. Other users (including bots) can then cross post it to other parts of the Threadiverse. "Lemmit.Online Bot" has made 20.1k posts in 7 days.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are also hyperactive comment bots out there too.
Lemmy.world doesn't synchronized with other instances. Every comments and posts lemmy.world users do are not seen by the other instances. Why? Lemmy.world is still on 0.17, and the other instances are on 0.18 for the majority
Are these real people or bots? So far lemmy and the fediverse have been great experience I like it and won't go back to reddit. Hope it's real people and we can enjoy this new fresh start!
I think you can somewhat assure that most of them aren't bots, since bots get banned fairly quickly by mods of instances and most instances have systems to make sure the bot will not pass through so easily
I’m enjoying it so much more with the app development. Devs trying to accomplish the goal of instilling the feeling of Apollo for us refugees coming. I just needed useful communities, with posts that people reply to with more and more information. Reddit still defeats lemmy there but I’m hoping it changes a bit.
This aspect is the most fun part to me. I came over on June 12th and it became clear really early that the devs and admins involved were pretty skilled and genuinely cared about the project.
Watching changes in real time and seeing people begin devoting their time to building the next big thing is very exciting to see.
For the people that have been in the Fediverse for years, sorry for flooding your cool hangout with new users but I'm confident the new attention will be a very good thing for ActivityPub.
Yeah I just found out about this project/the fediverse, been looking for several weeks for the best replacement to Reddit and this is by far the most promising. Also, as a self-hosting enthusiast, I'm liking this place more and more by the minute. With any luck increased visibility will continue to push activity & content. Power to the people.
It'll take a while for the volume to trickle down to the smaller more niche communities, but I have already seen the volume increase tremendously in the large ones. Let's enjoy the ride.
Agreed, I know there's arguments about bots and such in this thread but this is all good news. If we have these problems, it means we're doing something right.
That was the day I found lemmy. Joined the next day. It'll be interesting to see how the next few weeks play out when many reddit 3rd party apps shut down.
And now that I’m in the beta for Limbo / Liftoff, I’m loving it. The web experience was not great for me on mobile.
Servers still seem slow though. Posting a comment is slow. Loading images is slow. But I’m not going to complain about that when this kind of explosive growth is happening. Keeping things up at all is impressive.
[A line graph is shown depicting the number of users on Lemmy over one month's time. The horizontal axis lists the date of each reading, with an interval shown for every day. The earliest date begins at '2023-05-27' and the most recent date is given as '2023-06-25'. The vertical axis measures the number of users, with intervals marked at every 500,000 users, with an upper limit of 2,500,000 users. A blue line labelled 'users' shows the increase over time. The line remains flat at approximately 50,000 users from the '05-27' date mark to the '06-06' mark, then begins to gradually increase to approximately 125,000 users. At the '06-18' date mark, the line begins increasing exponentially, with the last marked date coming just shy of 2.5 million users.]
^I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^