I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
I think these things oscillates a lot.
Ah the twice yearly post asking if Lemmy is dying.
Ah the twice yearly post
When I run out of stuff to see on Lemmy, I touch grass. Simple as.
I feel way more in control of my online experience when endless scrolling isn’t possible.
This is why I haven’t touched grass in a while. I see so much content on here than when I first started
This might seem like a clever way to say “sour grapes” to me. Saying that “little content is good because it avoids endless scrolling” is as weird as saying “living in the desert is good because it helps me control my diet”.
To address the point: activity seems very much slowed down, and we have two years since the Reddit “exodus” and very little progress to show. We are yet to convert any significant significant community, most people just accepted the status quo and you can bet that the few active people around here still rely on Reddit to find content and repost here.
Aside from this meta-discussion about Lemmy and the Fediverse, there is basically no native group or community emerging.
subbed.
Not for me but im looking more for discussion over like links and such.
It’s summer, a few active posters are busy with either kids or time off
!fedigrow@lemmy.zip has a weekly thread for active posters, it used to be more active in June
It’s fine, people will probably come back in September
!
It’s funny though, because someone else said activity spikes in the summer because kids are out of school.
I saw it, but I’m not sure it’s correct as the graph in that comment shows a dip rather than a spike
Also, most of the kids today are mostly on Tiktok or Twitch rather than text-based forum, be it Reddit or Lemmy/Piefed
I doubt people on lemmy are below the age of 20, give or take.
Even 30 to be honest
I don’t know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it’s growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn’t grow too much except when a scandal happens.
Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
“Total users” is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren’t using lemmy anymore.
“Monthly active users” is the only meaningful metric, and it’s fluctuating and currently going down.
“Activity growth” doesn’t actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you’d expect linear “activity growth” and with growing activity you’d see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
But in a way you can be happy that it doesn’t grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances’ admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.
If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.
The user you are replying to has specifically sourced lemmy.world data there, which is not going to give you an overall for the wider fediverse.
This here is a better source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
That’s all of lemmy over the last 1000 days.
Most important takeaways:
- Active users tend to only grow during special events (usually “Reddit pulls some new shit”) and then declines slowly as people fade back out.
- When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
- Number of active servers is in a strict decline. Apart from the initial rush, smaller instances seem to go down and don’t get replaced. Most users seem to prefer to use big instances.
- Comments again shows the total number of comments available, not new comments coming in. As you can see, the angle of the curve gets slightly flatter over time, meaning that activity drops. It also shows well that when instances get closed down lots of content just disappears.
- Posts also shows a similar decline, though even stronger than comments.
When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
I suggest you look at the piefed activity indicator for more context here.
A big chunk of the lemm.ee base went here, and its gaining servers where Lemmy is losing them.
Yeah, that makes sense. Though still Lemmy.ee’s closure is a drop of ~4500 monthly active users while piefed only totals ~1700 monthly active users in total.
Oh yes, it has some impact - but the slow decline of Lemmy instance activity has to be contextualised with whats going on Piefed (and to a lesser extent: Mbin)
Kbin exists as well, unless something changed since the last time I looked.
But one thing is for certain: The whole field isn’t growing right now.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn’t find the whole Lemmy in one place so it’s also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
Here’s all of fediverse: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000
Also remember, though it says ‘daily’ in the title, that only refers to that the stats are grouped by day. They are still total numbers (e.g. total number of posts that are available on that day, not number of new posts created that day).
Lemmy has the big issue that each instance needs to cache the whole content of each community any user of that instance ever subscribed to. Since Reddit-style platforms only make sense if there are huge communities that means that the biggest communities have most of the traffic while being subscribed to by most instances. That means that most instances have copies of most content.
Same goes with moderation. Since every instance holds a copy of the content, each instance’s operator is liable for illegal content stored on their server, and most instance operators also want their moderation guidelines enforced across the whole instance, even for content coming from other instances, so each instance needs to moderate all content. Content moderation on one instance is not propagated to other instances (unless the moderation happens on the host instance of the community), so you end up with moderators of dozens of instances each having to individually e.g. delete the same post.
This is already such a strain that e.g. Lemmy.ee got shut down because it was just so much work and money doing all of that, and that’s with a miniscule amount of ~40k monthly active users across all of Lemmy. Compare that to the 1.2 billion monthly active users on Reddit. If we only got a tenth of a percent of all Reddit users over to Lemmy, the whole system would come crashing down.
That link is just hanging for me.
I’ve definately noticed it too. I’ve tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day’s all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.
I said that in July instance admins said it’s often quieter over summer
I’d expect that, although I’ve noticed this trend continuing (and seemingly getting worse) for months now.
That was what got me making this post.
I don’t think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
I do think we face a real inertia right now where the general public has become convinced corporate social media sucks because people suck not because corporations suck and we need to refute that misconception if we want the fediverse to have a vibrant future.
It is really frustating how evidently unhappy most users of corporate social media are about their social media use, yet they show no signs of stopping and when you start to provide an alternate vision of social media they immediately shortcircuit to “social media is bad, I don’t want more”.
I do think if we don’t start pushing back with an affirmative positive vision of why social media can be good we may see a period of depressed growth but I don’t see that happening yet personally.
I don’t think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
Maybe for English and a handful of major European languages, but there’s no way I could recommend the Fediverse (at least the Threadverse; I don’t hang out on Mastodon) to an Arabic or Japanese speaker. In that area it’s still severely lacking.
Good point, my bad I was unconciously assuming we were talking about the english speaking part of the internet, but yeah definitely.
For Japanese speaking people there is Misskey - it is FOSS and uses ActivityPub.
Yep! I’ve been trying to find someone to do a non white make up post for !Womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone I’ve got nowhere
I feel the same
Same amount of posts, more comments. I’d wager on growing.
The stats say the userbase is increasing, but it also feels like there’s been a lot less content being posted recently.
Seems the same
I’m actually coming back to Lemmy. I left reddit, but then went back to it with limited participation. And now it’s truly a cesspool. Lemmy may not be a perfect replacement, but it feels better. I should have never left.
There’s way less content here but the content that is here is way better, and the level of intelligence and civility on display is night and day vs Reddit.
Sorry to hear your experience was so bad, but welcome back.
The situation with bots and trolls on Reddit is horrific. Do you remember that time a few years back when Russia disconnected their whole country from the Internet? That day there was a dramatic decrease in assholes and trolls. Like, night and day, it was unmistakeable and widely commented on.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
Good point. Also worth noting that, since Lemmy isn’t owned by a company trying to make a profit, there’s no incentive to put up with outrageous jerks who drive up engagement.
Could be your instance not federatinv with everything.
I blocked half of fedi as such as DNC whores over at lemmy wrld and shepooh cock riders on ml
Still get a decent trickle.
I think I’ve just reduced social media participation in general.
I still browse a lot but with so much AI bollocks and rage bait and engagement farming and any other manner of “fake stuff pretending to be real stuff” going on it just doesn’t seem worth it to actually participate much.
Best case: I get some upvotes, and my comment is stolen for training an AI
Worst case: I get no upvotes, and my comment is stolen for training an AI
