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.
Every comment in lemmy is a genuine contribution.
What I hated most in reddit was chaining single letter comments to achieve what the shit. Makes me wanna barf.
Same. I don't miss that, or much, but I think we can all agree on missing the genius of Shittymorph. He truly had a way of gripping you into a comment and then suddenly it's nineteen ninety-eight again, and you finally look at the username. Truly entertained every time, was sad but understandable to see him retire.
His timing is incredible, I don't know how he does it. He stays away just long enough for the paranoia of getting pranked lulls, and then he hits you with the lols hammer. He got me a couple of days ago while I was lurking in one of the subs.
To a certain degree, yes...but I feel like Lemmy has a lot more posts with comments chiming in only to sound smart or contrary. It's super annoying, and I can't tell if it's better or worse than the constant in-jokes from reddit.
I feel like much of Reddit has the same problem to varying degrees depending on the sub (saw it all the time on r/Android and r/Apple, but didn’t see it at all on smaller/chiller subs like r/Tamagotchi). I don’t like seeing it on Lemmy either though, it’s not something the community or platform should positively reinforce
I fell into the habit of just hiding the top comment on every thread because it was usually useless. They either didn't read the article or would be making a bad joke.
I'm starting to feel concerned with the many new low engagement communities that are copy pasted from reddit. I think there is a lot of value in feeling like you are in the company of people as smart as or smarter than you. That there is the potential to discover something new or grow.