Lemmy active users down, comments steady and posts up
So since the mass-exodus from Reddit we can see that the total amount of active users has gone down rather heavily: https://i.imgur.com/MeQok2F.png
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading? But one has to remember that back during the summer many of us created several accounts to settle at an instance, there were also problems with spam-bots of various kinds.
So active users in itself is actually not that interesting. At least not the comparison with the peak. Instead we can watch the total amount of posts, how is that looking?
Though the increase has gone down slightly. This number however is influenced by other parameters as well. There are several reposts bots and such that mass-post to different instances. But it's definitley a good tell it's not going down.
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so. What's interesting here is that the decline has plateaued, which could indicate that the userbase has settled and become somewhat consistent. This is great news.
All in all, it seems like Lemmy has settled into a rather comfortable spot, with a decent amount of users, posts and comments. That is very slightly decreasing. Ideally we'd like to see this trend reverse, and perhaps that might happen naturally with due time when things have settled even more. For Lemmy I'd reckon the growth will look a bit like this. Whenever Reddit does something horrific (and it will happen more), we'll see a mass-exodus with more users over here. Then it'll decrease for a bit, settle and hopefully we can rinse and repeat. Anyway - that's some irrelevant thoughts from me on the subject.
I checked it yesterday as I was suffering through a meeting that should have been an email and the content quality on reddit these days is appalling. I don't have an account anymore, so I was just browsing r/all, but still, it's very noticeable compared to a year ago.
The most noticeable thing when I went back to the site with a fresh account (unfortunately there are still a few real niche communities that I want to participate in that refuse to move) I was inundated with a bunch of right wingy content. New subs like “true unpopular opinion” parrot a bunch of shitty views disguised as “conversations”. Lots of racism, homophobia, and other terrible shit now there right in the open on the home feed.
As soon as I started seeing Reddit posts cited on mainstream news media like 5+ years ago, I knew Reddit was going to shit. Happens when a platform gets too big.
If an article sources from reddit, there is a high chance you can toss it straight into the bin.
Gaming "journalism" is full of that trash. "Players are upset with change X from game Y" and then cites an angry reddit thread and quotes posts as if it was an interview. Actual bullshit content.