Lemmy active users down, comments steady and posts up

I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.

Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.

Lemmy has replaced reddit completely for me. Sure the content isn't exactly the same, but it doesn't need to to be successful IMO.

It takes time. Lemmy is still pretty niche and reddit just has a decade+ of accumulated lurkers.

The important part is that the best people from Reddit are here now.

(⁠ヘ⁠･⁠_⁠･⁠)⁠ヘ⁠┳⁠━⁠┳

Don't make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.

Look at reddit's stats, active users didn't drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.

Don't kill me for saying this but I feel like Lemmy has become slightly worse than when the mass exodus happened. I won't name names but there are so many copycat communities seemingly exclusively reposting the Greatest Hits from any given sub. It feels like we're trying to be reddit 2.0 instead of lemmy 1.0

There's also a discussion of this on hackernews, but feel free to comment here!

Anecdotal, but I bounced around between 5 accounts when I first joined, then settled into 2. One regular account and one for memes/NSFW.

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.

The arrival of Boost for Lemmy did it for me. So now it's a case of stumbling around and finding the communities I like, and beginning to post, and that always takes a little while.

My activity dropped because I can't enter a single thread that isn't about, big corpo, Linux, and how I shouldn't spend money.

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.

Yes. We banned a ton of fake accounts and servers.

You're right. Reddit was the same way during the Digg migrations. The first wave took place with the HD DVD code fiasco migration when some people setup their first accounts. It was a couple years later when Digg upset users again that the final big wave occurred. This is a great place for Lemmy as growing pains get worked out and development catches up to much needed moderation functionality.

As Cole and I say in reference to lemdro.id, it's a marathon not a sprint! !android@lemdro.id has also been steadily increasing in active and subscribed users.

I would add a strong subjective signal as well. That is, I am a pure lurker. Never posted on Reddit, don't intend to post here. I browse reddit to pass the time and to feel a connection to what is happening in the world. I set up lemmy during the summer and I have been very pleasantly surprised. I now surf both lemmy and reddit about equally. I'm finding that lemmy is always more enjoyable and increasingly more informative as well. It really feels like lemmy is well on the way.

Go Lemmy. I'm actually okay with how it is now. Lemmy feels like an exclusive club where the members are more inviting and accepting than Reddit ever was.

It's kind of crazy how much Reddit doesn't want people to migrate here. 5 months ago, they banned the mod of a subreddit for Lemmy migration and reinstated the community after backlash. When you search Lemmy in Reddit search, you see a few top pinned posts about how to migrate but everything else is low effort trash talk from people who have never used Lemmy. The entire Lemmy subreddit is dedicated to complaining about it- I'm sure Reddit is doing this intentionally. Keep spreading the word- Lemmy's growth starts with you! We have a brand new platform owned by all and the power to shape it into something great for everyone.

Imo almost a million active users is about the right place to be. Fuck being as big as reddit.

This is mostly good news, good to have a proper healthy Lemmy/Fediverse.

Side note been thinking of making my own instance after I move. Maybe I can cajole a few peeps into joining the fediverse.

The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so.

I've been a bit depressed. My bad.

Unfortunately, the software for both running and displaying Lemmy is still in beta. While it's still in active development, it's probably for the best that we stay niche because bugs and stability issues turn off a lot of people permanently from the platform. That's why I'm waiting until the Lemmy 1.0 release to really advertise, I don't think we're ready for that kind of growth yet.

Lemmy doing an excellent job overall. I'm here every day and enjoying the banter in the comments. Not been back to Reddit since Judgement Day.

The smaller scale is feature, not a bug. I don't want millions of cretins diluting the stock.

After twitter implements subscription for all users, prepare for twitter users moving to Lemmy.

Twitter new subscription tiers

I've said it before but active users isn't indicative of anything really, the early numbers were inflated due to:

• Bot instances before getting defederated

• People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)

• Early on there were a lot of small-ish instances that died off over time as people moved to more stable ones

Comments and posts are a much better indicator but it's still not entirely accurate since it's hard to tell how much of that is spam. I think it'd be nice if people stopped obsessing over graphs and just chilled out. I dumped Reddit a few months ago and it's been pretty nice here.

With proper image code:

Well it's steadily going up actually:

Another interesting factor is comments:

I recently came back to Lemmy from reddit to escape the batshit pro-Israel censorship happening on there right now and I have to say that the quality of the content and discussion has just gone up.

I just joined after taking a break from reddit because of its toxicity spread into some of the smaller subreddits was active in, or they just shut down entirely. Now I’m kinda lurking around to get a feel for the communities here and the culture of lemmy in general. I like it here.

I'm doing my part!

Reddit will continue to do things that push the users away. As apps and accessibility to Lemmy improve, hopefully quality posts and comments will continue to grow.

My feed did feel busy with content the past few weeks.

I don't appreciate being called stupid. Maybe I would comment more if people were nice to me

This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading?

These metrics are only relevant if you're fattening for an IPO.

After the repeated DDoS attacks on Lemmy world alot of the small communities died

Fascinating. Wonder how many more people are close to leaving other platforms and will end up here, what will be the next straw that breaks people's backs

Permanently Deleted

It's definitely a good outlook and very positive for the Fediverse as a whole.

I've been here for about a week. I found that the creator for sync for reddit finally finished sync for lemmy and immediately came in. As others notice I'm sure they'll be joining as well. Everything goes up and down so it's not surprising to see a slight decline. Looking forward to the growth!

Yeah, that's great news overall.

Complaining about the dip in active lemmy users is like complaining about the dip in Bitcoin.

"It's not at its all time high!"

Although it is WAY higher now than it was before its breakout phase.

Holy moly even though the graphes have a slight decrease - but that cause has been explained in the text - but those are still huuge numbers.

Holy moly there are a lot of guys on this platform! Nice to see!

Thanks for sharing and explaining mate!

I haven't been on Reddit since that time. I am really enjoying Lemmy especially now that I can use Eternity, the Lemmy fork of the reddit Infinity app I've used so long. It feels so familiar

Not terribly surprised, new platform that's still teething. I've said it before but we will go through multiple growth and contraction waves if we all care to stick around long enough.

Personally I'm liking the smaller community so far. Definitely could use some growth, but more people comes with a lot of problems reddit has.

Testing if my account still works

EDIT: I was excited about this place during the exodus, but it stopped working for me for a while. Couldn't use it from my phone. Technical issues got me to stop coming, but they don't seem to be an issue now.

Because the site goes down too often. I get it, not the developers fault. But it will take off only if there is more reliable.

This happens with every migration from a large platform. One thing that insulates the fediverse, I think, is that it's non-commercial nature makes it enshittification-proof. There are a lot of significant problems, but it's super attractive that some tech-bro dickhead won't blow up the platform to satisfy shareholders' insatiable profit-lust.

Reddit is now firmly on the enshittification path, so it's only a matter of time before another exodus wave.

I registered here for the first time about a year ago, when the exodus from Twitter to Mastodon and tried some fedivers apps. At that time this was empty, there were almost no instances, no communities, much less posts or comments. Today it is a live and active network, I think it is only a matter of time before with the current levels of activity and quality this grows, however , if someone believed that replacing Reddit with Lemmi would be quick, it is clear that he was delusional, it will take years.

I noticed that many people commented that there should be more engagement, 'just like reddit'. So, i'm wondering if some of these people left and will return later to see if it's more 'reddit like'. So, those might be people who don't necessarily want to post and comment themselves, but are waiting until they can get served with an endless stream of posts to scroll through.

Just thinking out loud here.

I had three accounts at one point, but lately I've only been using this one. The first instance I tried could never see any content because it was small. I then joined lemmy.world, and I could see plenty of content... when it wasn't down. But this instance seems to be working well for me.

I wouldn't be surprised if the active user count could have been explained by people trying different instances.

Woot! I'm more of a lurker but I comment occasionally (not necessarily smart or informed as they should be ones) and I would love to post in recreations of some of my favorite niche places, but running them is quite an investment...

I'm pumped I can still see star trek memes though.

Or a more logical inference is that bots are posting reddit posts here, leading to higher posts. While users are leaving, leading to fewer comments and active users.

Total number of posts isn't really a helpful data point I think. Like yeah of course it will go up, but is the rate increasing or decreasing? That's the more interesting number.

Do posts include bot posts? If so it'd be really interesting to see what that number looks like if you stripped out bots.

It's been a while since I've taken calculus, but if those charts are for total posts/comments, then I'd say that the derivative is more important and it sure looks like the rate of posts have gone down.

Praise the Stör

I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to model the min/max/ideal number of users (and ...ugh... "engagement") for a healthy online community? It'd be especially tricky for a federated service, but I'd bet there's some overall population size that puts the average user in contact with the right number of other people (lower than the Dunbar limit, I'd expect) to make it seem worthwhile to keep interacting.

Is there a way to stay logged in? I have to log in like every time I use it.

What a time to be alive

Awesome!

what happened may 2022? there was a slight bump.

Nice

The number of servers is also going down , i don't think comments and post are a good metric as it shows a total and not new comments/posts per month, so activity could still be going down.

What constitutes activity? I do not comment or post regularly but I vote on posts every day. Would I be considered an active user?

When do we commercialise for the owners? Can't wait to be exploited in novel ways.

Lemmy just needs to fix the transphobia issues in order to be able to grow to the next stage.

The decline in comments is all the mods banning people for supporting Israel.