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 don't use any social media except for Lemmy. It used to be only Reddit but jumped ship after the API changes. I'm enjoying Lemmy for the most part. Commenting is better because it gets more traction compared to Reddit. Unlike others I actually enjoy having all the varying opinions from "problem" instances. It makes it feel less like an echo chamber, which Reddit was bad for.
My only issue is because it's so much smaller than Reddit, there isn't as much content or niche communities. I miss some of the subs I used to frequent on Reddit. Some of them were made into communities here but barely have any activity, like one post per week. I guess at the end of the day it's a good thing cause I spend less time on Lemmy than I used to on Reddit.
My problem with niche communities, and most of Lemmy's content in general, is that people are using the most weird, random, out-there sources for all of their topics. It more often than not that I see some strange, clearly biased source, over more reliable or professional sources.
I'm fully aligned here. I'm at the point where I lurk every day, but I remain wishing the niche communities were around. Obviously, I should be contributing myself, but...
The best part I enjoy is being able to open this website without all the dark patters pushing me to install some dumb app just because they can scrape the data from my phone more easily.
Yeah, but if I have a clarification question or want to further discuss it, the bot is not gonna answer me. It doesn't have the same feel to it for me, I dunno. But it's a start I guess.
I am starting to be a bit bottlenecked by the amount of subreddits that we need to track. I am planning to let people import their own API keys and/or private JSON feeds to help fetching more data. Would you be interested in joining it?