Not sure if this is the right place to post, but when the reddit protests were happening, I used Lemmy for a bit then decided to detox from “social media” for a while till now. Am I misinterpreting the activity here?
Users about halved in the ~3 months after the initial exile. It’s increased since then, but not yet to the point that it was at during the initial exodus.
Where the number at? I want to see for myself.
This is so depressing. I thought this was gonna be a cool little bubble. The bubble just pops… :(
I look at the reddit front page and everyone one in the comments are saying the posts on reddit are bot activity, which, at this point, I don’t doubt. Internet is dead. :(
It was an utter disaster in those first few months. I stuck it out only out of sheer stubbornness in not going back to Reddit. Lemmy.world was always down, federation was borked, it was just not ready for the big-time. Just what happens when your userbase balloons 30x inside of a month. Now we’re in a much better position to absorb new waves. The big thing is trying to get niche communities started on here - a bit of a arduous task. The mainstream communities are all pretty active at this point! And anything about Linux.
Lol I remember lemmy.world got hacked and they put some weird “FBI Seized This” stuff on it. Also Lemmy shitpost had some um… illegal images or so I’ve been told. What a wild start.
I love the piracy community. No need to fear corporate crackdowns for now. This place is awesome. Well awesome place for me to vent in, cuz of um… recent political events. :(
I dont want to talk to people on reddit, seems like its just bots. I like how Lemmy has bot fiter applications on many instances. Fuck the bots.
And even if you DO post in small communities, half the time it’s a toss-up as to whether anyone will see it.
I’m not sure about lemmy, but reddit was roughly 50% US users, so it was a good bet that if you timed posts for “early morning” US browsing or “after work” EU browsing, your post would do well.
Idk lemmy’s demographic breakdown, but it seems more generalized (imagine that, a diverse fediverse!) around the world, so it’s hard for me to tell when the most users will be active.
It’s still a cool bubble. The initial hype was bound to diminish, but it is still a cool little place. Has it’s own issues, but still. Here since the exodus, never looked back
The other thing is that I recall that kbin.social exploded and got a huge chuck of the exodus - but now that it’s been effectively dead for half a year, those users mostly seem to have vanished.
A fraction clearly did migrate to other mbin and lemmy instances. It seems like the rest did not return to spez’s site from what I’m hearing (“all the posts I’m seeing there are complaining that only bots are active here”) but I’m not sure where they went. But for example, one person I was following seems to have dropped off entirely from the fediverse and all social media.
I thought maybe it was just my imagination that it’s been really slow since Wednesday, but you can see it clearly on the charts at the bottom of the page there.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
be the change you want to see
I think activity spread out quite a bit. During the exodus everyone was posting into the same two and a half meme communities causing massive churn on the front page and giant threads, but now everyone has created and/or settled into their comfortable little corners so any particular portion of lemmy looks less active, while overall it’s larger.
The userbase is small but stable.
Not… entirely. In March we had 54k Monthly Active Users, while now we have only 45k, that’s a not-entirely-insignificant drop of 17% of users. Also, personally I’ve created some alts during that time-frame, so if others did similarly… the real drop could have been much larger.
Ofc, it could have been that people simply dropped their older alts and are now happy with fewer alts but the same number of people - but that gets to that very old argument that Galileo had with others about whether the moon was perfectly smooth (due to spiritual implications) or not: he observed that it was not, though others raised their objections and tried to counter with the notion that perhaps there were mountains on the moon… but that if so, surely the valley regions were covered with glass, so that the moon retains the property (again, for reasons of spiritual purity) of being a perfectly spherical object?
Ofc you can guess what Galileo said to that: surely there must indeed be glass on top of the valley regions, so that they fill in the height of the mountains with an equal height of the glass valleys, which we cannot see b/c they are made of glass, <eyeroll>, yes indeed “surely” that “must” be the case - but also, in addition to that, there is EVEN MORE glass on top of the mountains, height proportional to how tall they are, and while we cannot see that material either, that is what is causing the differences in shadows, which he could measure with his spyglass that he pointed upwards into the heavens.)
Moral of that fun story: we can conjecture such matters all day long, and how fun that would be for both of us! But at the end of the day, all we have are the facts and numbers in front of us, however imperfect they may be:-).
That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts? I am not 100% certain about that, or much of anything really, but pretty darn close b/c of how the “software” field seems to work on that site, with the other buttons like List and on a particular chosen instance to look at more details, the Main Data tabulation (and see e.g. https://mbin.fediverse.observer/piefed.social, click to expand the Main Data, and that JSON output has “softwarename”: “piefed”, but nothing at all with the text string “Lemmy” there).
The total number of Lemmy instances has also dropped 24%.
Although the total number of both posts and comments has gone up rather than down - so we see a lot more activity, from a significantly smaller number of people. I wonder how sustainable that is though, e.g. next year won’t be an election year in as many countries as this one was. Overall I am worried about the health of the Lemmyverse, though less worried than ever before about the health of the overall Fediverse b/c of the newer software alternatives that have and are still coming:-).
The drop is slowing down considerably:
| Month | Users | Change from previous month | in % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar | 53687 | N/A | N/A |
| Apr | 51298 | -2389 | -4.5% |
| May | 48832 | -2466 | -4.8% |
| Jun | 48472 | -360 | -0.74% |
| Jul | 47297 | -1175 | -2.4% |
| Aug | 47876 | +579 | +1.2% |
| Sep | 47227 | -649 | -1.4% |
| Oct | 45037 | -2190 | -4.6% |
| Nov | 44837 | -200 | -0.44% |
And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.
That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.
That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?
They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.
The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.
For people that enjoy using Arch btw Linux, we’re good yeah. Although occasionally some of us will die or whatever, and we need to have some level of growth or else accept that we will pretty much just shrink from now onwards. i.e., people talk as if we will go mainstream, or rather as if content will spring up magically from nowhere. If we want the small niches like Reddit has, we would need the userbase first. And to get that, we’d have to ditch our toxicity issues, make the UI more functional, and above all else make better moderation tools. Which I am doubtful will happen as the Lemmy devs seem happy with their current pacing and direction of changes - that’s 99% fine with me btw, as it’s theirs to do with whatever they please; though I am all the more happy to now see the likes of PieFed grow much quicker, even though it started out so very much further behind.
Fair point about PieFed being extremely tiny, and there are only 3 of them that are open to the public to join (https://join.piefed.social/try/) - though I am somewhat surprised to see the number of users for Mbin being so low. Yeah, I suppose they must be going back to Reddit, or perhaps Bluesky, or something else.
I am not sure how much to worry about the number of instances - on the one hand the long-anticipated 0.19.6 software release came out just today, which should fix the federation issues with Lemmy.World for many of them. On the other hand, smaller instances weren’t likely to want to pull down the entirety of the Fediverse to begin with, as an actual multi-user one (even if on the small side, like Discuss.Online or Aussie.Zone) would, plus once gone, wouldn’t we expect them to never come back, i.e. regardless of the software release today? So whatever turned them away… it would have been interesting to have known (though introverts would be the last to have offered such:-).
I tried not opening Lemmy the last few weeks because of the flood of American politics. I’m sure many people felt the same.
Do you use all or subscribe to things? I have a good list of communities and I honestly don’t see much if any politics
All, yes. And I have blocked most of the communities that call themselves “News” or similar, but almost only post US politics as news. Yet it still trickles down into other communities.
Try going the other route, and explicitly subscribing to content you enjoy. From what I read you aren’t alone, that all is a firehouse and it’s not all fun. Subscribed to me is a much chiller experience
People coming here to rant about Reddit isn’t activity.
