Ya know. The fact that active users was going down made me feel like part of the 1% of stubborn assholes but ever since RiF went dark the only time I've been on reddit is when a Google search took me there because fuck spez. I'm in it for the long haul. I won't be going back. And ya know what? Fuck Google too. I've migrated to Firefox and DuckDuckGo since then too. Idk maybe it's just cause I am stubborn but I refuse to be a hypocrite.
I hope you're donating to the respective libreddit instance hoster, because unlike Reddit, they're not a multibillion corporation with a steady ad income to pay for their traffic
If you're not, then I suggest you use old.reddit.com with uBlock Origin
i hardly use lemmy compared to rif but i was under the belief reddit content is just better but the app sucks. i was wrong turns out it all sucks. rif just gave the shit a tuxedo.
nowadays i look at reddit and the content is asisine its all the same shitty headlines and weird ask questions "how much sex does the average woodchuck have during football season?"
it feels like Facebook. lifeless and like everyone is pretending
I assumed active users was going down partly because some of us created multiple accounts on different instances in the beginning to get a feel for it all, then ended up just using one
Really has felt like the thrediverse has been quite active lately. During the exodus we had a lot of posting about... the exodus. But now we have a lot of posting about actual topics and what feels like a pretty healthy community building save for a few instances that will probably get defederated before too long.
Same I find the engagement is raising. The threads here are more sincere. Sure it's not as active when it comes to some things but that's fine IMHO. Building an online community right takes time.
Blimey there's a name from the past. I remember painting a Citadel Miniature (white metal job) of a demon of Slaanesh. That would have been around 1986-7ish. Four armed thing and looked bloody nasty! That was before Warty-Forty really took off.
I moulded a little skull out of Milliput, with a tiny snake running in through the base and out of an eye socket. I separated a foot from the base and lifted it up a bit and stuck the skull under it. White metal is quite soft but you have to be careful. I spent quite a while modelling "grass" and such. The grass went from a dead looking green/brown around the demon to normal in a sort of circle of ruin.
Nowadays my eyesight can barely see a 00 brushes' bristles, let alone let me use one.
Commenting there seems to be like yelling into a giant void with everyone on the planet, here it feels like screaming into a smaller void with few other people who seem to be super cool.
TL;DR:
By default, Lemmy only counts posts and comments for active users. These instances also started counting the votes. According to Lemmy NSFW admin, there are 3 times more active users with lurkers.
Given all the different ways “active” is defined we may as well just collect all the meanings available.
Mastodon and Twitter etc, for example, count logging on as active.
While I can see the argument for voting, it is qualitatively different from posting/commenting. Knowing both, as well as log in numbers too might make sense. But muddying the waters is probably confusing … though it is interesting that any instance can define what it means by “active”.
I would say that voting isn't actually different from posting/commenting. It's a process whereby a user takes part in a discussion/topic/post. In an ideal world, everyone would post, but we shouldn't act like active people who don't feel like they have anything to say explicitly, aren't here.
Okay, that makes more sense, I was trying to figure out what had changed in the past week. I'm very curious to see how that data would look for other servers too. I think it's more logical to count users even if they don't post or comment, because they are still a critical part of the whole ecosystem if they browse and vote regularly. Even without saying anything, their thoughts and opinions help shape the content and discourse through voting.
And for that matter, weekly active users and daily active users would be two other interesting datapoints. You can see the daily and weekly users on the sidebar of instances, but I don't know of any tool/site that scrapes all of that info and displays it in an easily digestible format.
I think if you exclude those 2 days we're still on a very very slight downward trend, but once every instance adopts the new method it'll be interesting to see what the trend is after that, it could be that users get tired or posting/commenting and fallback to being lurkers
If you look closely, the downward trend actually stopped before the change in stats. We dipped below 33,000 in mid-November, but then started hovering above 33,000 for multiple weeks until the bump.
I came to Lemmy after Reddit's crackdown on third-party clients. Looking back, I'm pretty happy with how Lemmy is going and how it feels right now. The number of users decreased after the initial spike, sure, but it also stabilized at a respectable level. There are things I'm still missing, but the way it is definitely works for me.
Same situation for me. This is such a nice place compared to reddit. I still think it would be better if it grows some more, but one of the nice things about Lemmy is that it has a more "niche" user base
Yeah, same here. I'm not nearly as active here as I was on reddit, but there's not as much going on here and activity feeds itself. It's fine, I read more books.
I prefer quality over quantity, but more quality is always welcome. I'm not going back to reddit. The reddit alien is about to become the Borg of the shareholders.
Honestly, it’s not surprising. They seem very ban-happy there lately, with accounts getting banned over nothing. And I’ve seen a fair few subs getting the axe as well. When a site gets actively hostile to users and lets mods run their own little dictatorships, people eventually get fed up with it.
Lemmy isn’t Reddit, but at least it’s… also not Reddit :D
A large number of subs were forceful reopened, and the mods replaced with trash people who just wanted to have mod powers. The purge of people who gave a fuck, is done. I'm starting to see posts and news show up here on Lemmy before reddit. Which kinda makes sense, all the most active posters were forced out or quit and moved here.
I used to look to Reddit when big news broke because it was always on the front page within minutes. This past year there have been a few times that big news stories weren't even on the top few pages. I gave Lemmy a try, and it feels just like reddit from 2013. I love it. I'm home.
I never experienced reddit 2013 but reddit's front page is gone. They've swapped out r/all for r/popular on new reddit, videos and screenshots are everywhere instead of links and they've even renamed themselves to "the heart of the internet"
Was my first thought. /r/friends doesn't work on the mobile site now and that's the only thing I ever go to back to Reddit for anymore. That's one content stream I can't duplicate anywhere else.
I would use Lemmy more if people on here weren’t so toxic. It’s been bringing out the toxicity in me more than I’m comfortable with. Too many confidently incorrect people speaking on topics they have absolutely no experience in, complex discussion completely boiled down to platitudes without any nuance, and tribalism that rivals what’s on Twitter.
Mac and Windows users are immediately downvoted for not sucking down Linux’s balls in every scenario, a complete cesspool of discussion with regard to Israel and Palestine appears all over the most popular posts, straw men and bad faith discussion appears in every community (with rare exception), and deification of the popular faces in the orbit of any topic without any room for critical thought around their positions is the norm. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.
I was excited for the fediverse after watching the slow decline of Digg, /., Reddit, etc. but it’s obvious that the worst parts of those platforms are creeping up here too and there’s nothing to be done except wade through the sewage to get to things that are interesting and insightful. It’s a shame but Lemmy will never be as popular as the alternatives were. Techie incels rooted in here too early.
Edit: I’m now banned from /c/technology (or at least shadowbanned on one instance) for not accepting their arguments on piracy. This is what I mean. There’s no nuance here.
While reading your comment i became more and more convinced it would end with and don't let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998, the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
I usually debate throwing that in there and then I realize that, outside of Reddit, that thing doesn’t really work anymore. It’s not an original idea. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion. Outside of being a meme and an occasional source of a good chuckle, Lemmy is too young for something like that. There’s not enough good content here to justify repeated jokes and junk like “Oh no! He broke both his arms! Where’s mom?”
If that means that this is a bummer for you, then I think you need to reevaluate what you’re trying to get from Lemmy. It reminds me of the time when 2 years before the new millennium, the Undertaker threw his adversary, Mick, off of the cage in a match called Hell in a Cell and plummeted 16 feet through the table of the announcers giving commentary on the match. Although it may have been entertaining the first time it happened, it probably wasn’t as funny to the person that was dropped and probably why he never attempted it again.
I agree with the part of this sentiment.
drop the phone or press back and go next if it feels toxic enough
I think people don't know how harmful the internet can be especially when there sucked into it. doomscrolling can be one hella a drug. As you get sucked into all the latest headlines gossip and drama. Sometimes you might struggle to put the phone down. Due to all this
But I also disagree with this point
points don't matter. And you don't deserve anyone a debate
Isn't the purpose of the Internet to challenge debate and share ideas/infomation with other people.
Agreed 100%. I don’t use social media at all with Lemmy being the only exception and, as I stated in my original post, I’m not really having a good time here so I’m spending less and less of it on the platform. It’s incredibly unwelcoming here.
I can relate to your frustration about jerks and toxicity but I dont share the severity of it. At least I would not say it that way.
Yes, lemmy can get pretty bad (looking at you c/firefox) but that’s normal with niche stuff.
I moderate a smallish subreddit (2k peeps) and get regular questions if I can please ban the noobs that ask noob questions. I politely decline.
This place here is in its literal infancy and saying „its so sad that it will never…“ helps nobody.
Just report assholes, check if you made mistakes and if nothing else helps, make a new community based on that change. That is how we improve. Moaning and spelling doom is a bad strategy in every part of life.
How is /c/firefox a niche community? You’re just reinforcing what I’m saying. The biggest communities here are filled with the worst kinds of people. The ones that should be the most welcoming to entice new users and more discussion are the ones that are the least welcoming.
I do report assholes and I have made some communities but no one joins them when their first attempt at joining Lemmy is being downvoted repeatedly for saying “Windows 11 isn’t as bad as I thought it would be” in the tech communities and then never commenting again.
I’m not moaning and spelling doom. I’m pointing out that if Lemmy ever expects to grow to the point where it’s a realistic alternative to sites like Reddit, then the moderation and, by extension, the users need to lighten up and be open to discussion that may not agree with them.
On the other hand, since Lemmy is made up of a much smaller userbase, I've had a lot of success with just blocking users. When it's one user with 100 comments, it's a lot easier to solve the issue with the tools available to you as a user than on Reddit where you're more likely to have 100 different people making 1-3 comments each spouting blind rhetoric/useless exaggeration/unfunny meme responses. It's not big enough for people to bother too much with alt accounts or brigading yet either.
I do my best to stay away from posts with topics likely to attract that sort of crowd too.
In general while it's not as good as I hoped for, I find Lemmy/fediverse a hell of a lot better than what I left. People are going to be assholes wherever they think they can get away with it, and the best response is to starve them of attention.
Fair enough. I find that with the federation, blocking people just results in my feed being emptier than I’d like to be. It’s already pretty sparse. Removing even more of it just because someone was an idiot in a singular, particular topic seems like overkill for such a small space. We’re just barely getting over the hump where new content is showing regularly enough to where the front pages aren’t filled with the same posts for days. And, even then, it’s not great content.
Yes. Not only have I considered it. I’ve done it. The issue is that the Lemmy communities aren’t that big, even when you’re not referring to smaller instances and just sticking to federated communities, so blocking people just for dumb comments means you’re removing more and more of an already small user base.
It’s a solution to be sure. It’s just not one that I’d care to use right now when me blocking someone doesn’t actually help what I’m perceiving as the issue that is keeping Lemmy from growing.
I never went there, to be honest. All my newsgroups were programming/computer/game related or were piracy groups. I think, in general, newsgroups were better because there was a barrier of entry that was required to get there. Now that anyone can just download an app and spew whatever garbage they want in seconds, we have what we have.
I don't really see anything toxic. Unless you go to different instance which has certain reputations. I didn't realise I was in a tankie instance because I have all instances appear on my feed. I am still accustomed to Reddit just being managed in one site and occasionally stumble into communities full of morons. But since, Lemmy is still has not got much people, I can still spot communities that are toxic because I have seen them before, unlike in Reddit where multiple subreddits appear but serving one ideology or interest.
Reddit is so censored it's pointless. Almost all the comments seem like they're written by bots or gov guys with square haircuts who think this is what "those nerds" talk like
Bots are the ones running the show here too though.
Is this about hexbear and lemmygrad? These accusations have never made sense to me. They have been here long before it became popular and they had the same opinions back then. It makes no sense and is a waste of resources to have bunch of bots posting stuff when there is no one to read those posts.
They keep a/b testing and rolling out worse and worse mobile websites. They've gone and done it again. For any regular mobile website user that wasn't affected by the 3rd party app issue, or for anyone who switched from a 3rd party app to the website because it wasn't as bad as the 1st party app, well... Now it is. Now it's possibly worse.
So, we might hope for a prolonged period of organic growth now. Especially if Lemmy doesn't get flooded with meta discussions again.
I started using Lemmy since September 2022 I think, but I rarely open it, two weeks ago I was permabanned on reddit for report abuse, then semi-unbanned, so I deleted my account, and now I'm starting to use Lemmy actively, there are a lot more servers and users now and I found a new nice server.
I'm wondering if it'll be similar to people switching from (convenient & centralized) Compuserve and AOL to (difficult but p2p) email and web. That took years.
I'm glad to see this. I was mostly a lurker at the old place for over 10 years.
Creating posts and commenting at times was difficult and often they were deleted due to some rule or issue. The worst was when users would message to let me know the post had been deleted and they knew due to some other form of the site they were using.
In all my years of managing Forums before this period it wasn't that hard to create new topics and participate so I gave up.
I started lurking here at Lemmy then starting seeing this theme about user engagement going down and not enough content. When I would end up back at the old place after a Google search on something I could see the volume number differences between lemmy and there so I decided to try posting again.
So far it's been a lot easier especially in sh1tposting. I did run into a couple of hiccups but overall it's been a lot easier.
I'll enjoy it while it lasts as over time with more users things will change, at least for now the posts are not drowning in comments by the thousands yet. I can keep up with that. It kind of reminds me of my old forum days in the early 2000s.
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of activity, enough to replace Reddit, on the most popular communities and instances. Even my more niche communities such as [email protected] has had more activity lately. Although the niche ones have a way to go to be replacements for their counterparts on Reddit
Had to use the reddit app the other day.. That people can stand to be on there still is beyond me. I like it here on the fediverse and im not going back
I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don't remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn't federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is "word to mouth" growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn't really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
While many suppose that majority just moved back, they didn't! Less than half of users actually left Lemmy after an exodus, and now about what, 95% of users?..are actually from there.
Worrying that this is the CHUD invasion from parler or one of those pretend places to data mine hate and sell powdered eggs, lead pills and gold to mostly helpless idiots. Some comment sections have gotten noticeable shittier and less civil lately. We don't need growth for the sake of it.
I'm a boomerang. Reddit has the content, but it's largely focused on the larger subs which are the ones I want to avoid. I'll have to decide whether or not I want to run into obvious tankies (mayo) or try to spot misinformation campaigns (reddit).
And reddit is getting worse in every way. Reddit wants to turn into an ad platform and that's the way things are going. Lot's more locked comments and posts, totally unchecked misinformation and dooming.
On iOS through firefox the google login prompt can't be closed. This is what prompted me back, I started using Voyager again.
I might come back and search for another home server, create a new account and delete my old one. Start fresh.
One issue with Reddit was the extreme even obsesive moderation level. It was totally frustrating to post stuff in some subs, lot of new people just avoid it even experienced users like me.
On the other hand… there’s a lot of Lemmy threads with flame wars that should really be pruned from the post by mods. The flame wars bring a lot of negativity and noise that takes away from the actual discussion
I got a bunch of posts removed there too, but tbh I kinda get it. 99% have the same repetitive showerthoughts and the whole sub was by design, super low effort, meaning the garbage : quality content ratio was like 500:1 so they had to rely on brutish rules
dev'd an online course web app and website for a community college. users/activity was very cyclic. could see the hits going up every Sunday night as students tried to catch up before Monday class. usage normally dropped around weekends/holidays. maybe similar surges depending on time of day.
It's active users, not total users. I'm not sure on the exact metric, but users need to post, comment, vote or whatever to be counted for this statistic.
I was having difficulty with servers being down and nothing loading when I first deleted Reddit. Things finally seem stable so I've been a lot more active.
Recently it seems like the Fediverse is a lot more quiet than before. Even in the tech and privacy communities I follow things have been rather slow lately.
What I noticed is the server I used to login to disappeared all of a sudden so I guess all the users who were on that server couldn't login and leaving. Same is happening across fediverse.
Was it FMHY? Some instances that were created during the Reddit blackout went down to technical or logistical issues and decided to operate under other instances
Can confirm, I made an instance around the time that the blackout started - unfortunately the hardware it was running on was starting to experience some issues. It's still up and running, but for now I've made a fresh new instance on way better hardware - and this time without a subdomain 😅
I've seen this graph before. What is "Active Users Halfyear" and how is it different from "Active Users Monthly", especially since they both change and are measured... monthly?
Probably "number of users who were active this month" for monthly, versus "number of users who were active the last half year (6 mo)" for halfyear. Both can be updated monthly. A user who was active 3 months ago would be in the second group but not the first.