How is the size of Lemmy’s userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?
I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven’t seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?
Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)
In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!
Have a look here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
I didn’t know there were almost as many Germans as Americans, the majority of Reddit users were Americans which has created Americocentric perspective on a lot of topics which from a European perspective was quite annoying.
I did not verify my thoughts but I think this could be because ovh has big datacenters in Germany and quite a lot of Europeans use ovh.
fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I’ve seen it confuse North-American admins).
Fuck me, pie charts with 50 segments??? Maybe they look weird because pie charts suck if you have more than 2-3 things to show
And the rest on the page don’t display well on mobile
Youre right - feel free to make and share a better Version. I think the community appreciates forks and contributions :)
It just gives current stats, not historical trends. I don’t think it is any answer to OPs question.
EDIT: I was wrong, it was an issue on my side.
If you scroll down it does give historical trends on comments, posts, monthly active users, etc.
What I meant is why do the graphs look so janky.
For example:
What happened in October 2023 that made so many users join?
and
What happened in February 2024 that made so many people stop posting?
Edit: March -> February
What just happened to the number of servers? Did the admins just decide they want to go with quality over quantity? Or does it have something to do with political conditions?
Probably lots of people trying to start another general instance that didn’t draw any users and then deciding to shut it down. FWIW I think we have instances enough (from a users point of view, I don’t think it matters much whether there are 100 or 1000 instances). We could be spread over the instances more evenly though.
Anecdotally, the communities I’m interested in are getting more active in a way that seems sustainable (as opposed to last year, when it was a always a single person posting some, getting no responses, and leaving). I’m pretty positive about the state of Lemmy and the wider threadiverse.
Same here. It might be that the overall number of Lemmy users may be shrinking, but some of the communities I’m in are getting to a more sustainable level of activeness compared to automn.
Lemmy is growing. Not exploding, but showing steady growth. It’s interesting because Lemmy tends to grow in sputters. The good thing is though, is that the growth is organic and after a bit of friction, we get new people that stick around.
Yeah, from the graphs above you can see that the number of monthly comments is growing, such is the main thing I suppose
Honestly, we don’t need content creators as long as we have good convos, like an actual forum.
That’s the thing I find beautiful about Lemmy. Take for example yesterday, I had a simple question about some networking equipment and it was like being Captain America in the lift, there were punches and kicks from all directions. But the punches and kicks were kindness and knowledge. It’s crazy how nice people are. It’s like walking into a village starving and everyone gives you a piece of their dinner and you’re stunned because you now have a massive plate. The level of interaction is such a beautiful thing.
It’s too early to say, as the method of accounting for ‘active user’ changed recently.
Seems to me like Lemmy is “consolidating”. Some people are leaving but the community is deepening in norms, understanding, commitment and cohesion. This shows up as better content and discussions all the time. Spam is snuffed out quickly, more communities have better moderators. Our infrastructure is maturing and the software is getting better.
Theses stats are a bit weird to read and idk how trustworthy they are, but generally i would agree because even though total active user count might be stagnant, the comment and post numbers are steadily growing.
The total user count is meaningless. Look at the monthly active users. That gives a good picture. And those are the correct links and graphs.
(The total users mainly show how the Reddit exodus happened. Lots of people made an account and used it once. Thus the steep incline in users. But they’re not real, just zombie records. Also it’s heavily affected by instances moving, shutting down or doing maintenance. Also lots of people here have multiple accounts. And there is some degree of farming and bot activity…)
total active user count
Thats what i said, whether you filter by day or by month or whatever is a different question.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546425 9 Months ago > 2M.
- And now 1929762 lemmies are living on 381 instances last update: 2024-04-01T05:51:03.779Z https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.
If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.
What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.
What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.
The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.
Yeah, it’s something I observed, too. I’m new here, coming from a STEM field myself - Many places give off a tech-elitist vibe, though.
Customization options for Firefox get reactions like “nobody needs this”. I like it here so far, but the tech-bubble is obviously super prominent here, and in many places it simply seems very “If you’re not a tech-y don’t talk to me because I know better”. It’s worrying because it will lead to people leaving again when they get the cliché reactions of “use Linux, don’t use Windows” or “ewww, Reddit”. People should be less hostile, but I guess that’s just a problem of the Internet in general and doesn’t just apply here.
I hope to see it succeed, though!
Open source culture remains the biggest problem with open source software, sadly.
It’s really a major problem. Every time I mention how a lot of open source software suffers from bad UX, I get a lot of down votes instead of agreement and calls to improve things.
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous and it sounds like it could be very manipulative. But of course you could go to instances that don’t do it but it might not be obvious.
That said, I agree the sorting could be better. The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.
I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous
just letting the admins set defaults would be better than forcing these choices upon their users, which I think is was the above user was suggesting, which is kinda what Reddit does with having default subs
The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.
why not? if they’re getting new comments then they’re still active
Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score [of the post] and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
it’s like something inbetween Hot and classic forums-style sorting (New Comments sort in Lemmy)
but I do not think that should be the default sort method, instance admins can already adjust what the default sort method is
I’m not quite as pessimistic, but I agree that inclusivity is important to keep in mind.
If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.
Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community
I’ve noticed similar behaviour as well, and it concerns me. There was a related post a few weeks ago on downvoting etiquette which received a surprising amount of pushback (+63/-108).
I think this is a side effect of Lemmy’s small platform size pushing users towards browsing by /all. I never browsed /all on Reddit, and I don’t think this the best way to regularly use Lemmy either.
Ideally, I think users should mostly stick to their subscribed feeds, and browse /all only occasionally to discover new communities they might want to subscribe to. (I recognize that what I think users “should” do is irrelevant when it comes to actual user behaviour.)
As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.
Do you have any ideas which could help make Lemmy more inclusive?
As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.
Promotion of communities to !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, and promotion of those communities to the wider audience
