From 2,997 active users across all lemmy instances at the beginning of June, the number increased to 52,797 by June 30th. Source.
An active user on Lemmy is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Source. That means lurkers are not counted as active users.
We’re really building something here!
Registration and discovery needs to be simplified tremendously for long term viability. But it’s a good start.
From the outside looking in, the whole model seemed needlessly complicated. So it’s like there’s a LOT of reddit.coms over here? But they’re all the same? But also different? What’s the difference? Which one do I sign up on?
But then I get here and realized it doesn’t really matter that much, since you can more or less use all of them regardless of which one you sign up for.
Something about the way users try to communicate what Lemmy/Fediverse IS, is the complicated part. It’s like everyone wants to jump straight to the more technical details behind how the model works; which probably scares off a lot of the people who just want a place to pop in and talk about their hobbies.
I just told my fairly tech-unsavvy partner the email analogy:
You sign up on Google, I sign up on yahoo, my bro-in-law runs his own from a server in his house. We can all email each other and the email looks mostly the same no matter who reads it, but yahoo isn’t Google isn’t my bro-in-law.
She immediately got it and has an account on some instance and has subscribed to a bunch of places.
Yep, it’s email but with a nice interface and open ‘threads’ which we can post on.
Yeah, this scared me off for weeks because I didn’t want the hassle. Turns out it’s way easier than those dorks were making it seem!
Exactly. People last week were adamant about needing to spread out new users across different instances. I understand the rationale, but let’s be honest, casual newcomers don’t really pay much attention to that. They just want to see a website a lot of content before signing up.
Did we not learn from mastodon? The federation concept should be introduced a bit later after they’re comfortable.
yeah the people running this show need to understand that normies dont care about server hosting. they just want a feed with cat pics
Yeah, there should be simple “how and where do I sign up and find my favourite communities”. I feel like there is lots of tech talk here because lots of tech stuff needs to happen before these sites are ready for the full moderation suit and for supporting the most basic aspects of Reddit communities (like flairs)…
Yeah I think it might be better to explain it like if anyone could boot up their own reddit and link to other people’s reddits. Some are popular, some aren’t, some don’t want to be huge because they want to be niche like some subreddits did. We may have subreddits with the same name but it’s ok because people can tell based on which Reddit it’s on. Also they’re called instances not reddits and communities not subreddits.
Agreed. I feel like the apps in development are trying to make the signup process a bit easier though, so we’ll see how that goes.
I’m currently using the beta for Memmy on iOS. I think it’s prepping for an App Store release today. It’s a good foundation and has promise.
Most of the devs that worked on 3rd party reddit apps are remodeling to support lemmy. So we are about to get some really good quality apps in the next 4 to 6 weeks.
I keep seeing people say this but honestly registering is really easy. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to create an account after leaving reddit
Well, sure, anyone posting here at the moment figured it out. But I’d bet there’s tons of people interested but intimidated.
You literally click the sign up button, fill out the form, get an email saying your application was accepted and then log in. What is complicated about that?
Genuine question.
I keep seeing this said about lemmy but kbin was identical to any other site. So I looked up what the process is for lemmy and, aside from like 2 glitches to look out for it was exactly the same.
Please tell me what is difficult.
My issue was I didn’t know where to go to sign up. It took me a little time to understand the fediverse, then I had to figure out what instance I should sign up for. After that I started hearing some instances weren’t accepting new accounts but didn’t know if that was a thing everywhere or only one instance. I consider myself above average compared to the general public when it comes to my capabilities with the Internet and computer tech in general, it’s never taken me days to understand stand how to sign up for a website like this before.
It does seem simple now that I’m here and understand things better. It’s just a learning curve; this is unique to any website\forum\whatever I’ve played with before.
You have to consider that your technical proficiency is not the same as everyone else’s.
I think you’re right insofar as onboarding is concerned. Once you’ve registered, though, Lemmy is relatively straightforward to use. Changing your user settings to display posts from ALL federated Lemmy instances on your front page helps with discoverability. That should be the default setting, but it isn’t. That setting is associated with the “Type” parameter (found just below “Theme”). It isn’t terribly obvious.
And sadly, the software seems to be little better than proof of concept quality. It seems poorly architected for functionality, usability and scalability.
UX is on par or better than reddit back when I joined. Mobile apps are certainly better.
Similar experience to reddit and apps, albeit slightly clunky.
Don’t get me wrong - I think it is a good start, but there are some significant concerns:
- My biggest UX complaint is that the method for connecting to a federated community is just…wrong. Do something completely unintuitive (paste a glyph / URL in search), get an error (not found), wait a while and hopefully it will start working. I can’t fathom who thought this was a good idea, and I’m shocked that apparently Mastadon does it the same way. We’re losing a lot of interested users at this step.
- UX issue #2 - which may be fixed in .8, can’t say - is that there is basically no error handling. Any server error or user error results in the spinning wheel of death. Sometimes refreshing fixes it, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, did you know there is a 10k post limit? If your post exceeds 10k - you guessed it - spinning wheel of death. Try to sign up with a user ID that’s already taken? Spinning wheel of death. Log in without verifying your e-mail? Spinning wheel of death. You get the idea.
- I’m not an admin, but apparently that the software isn’t really designed for cluster scaling. I think the assumption is that more instances solve scaling. It doesn’t.
- Functionality wise, there is very little control for mods. Pin, delete, ban. Edit the sidebar. That’s it.
These are problems that can be solved, but the next step will be to see where development leadership steers the platform. It is how these problems are solved that will decide whether Lemmy or Kbin becomes the leading platform.
I disagree. At first I was frustrated that people were having so much difficulty with such a simple process, but after a while I adopted the mindset that if they’re too stupid to figure out something so mundane then I don’t want them here anyway. 🤷♂️
Yeah. I don’t want just tech savvy people here. I want people with non-tech hobbies like gardening and home improvement to join too.
Image Transcription: Line Graph
[A line graph is shown depicting the number of users on Lemmy over one month’s time. The horizontal axis lists the date of each reading, with an interval shown for every day. The earliest date begins at ‘2023-05-28’ and the most recent date is given as ‘2023-06-26’. The vertical axis measures the number of users, with intervals marked at every 5,000 users, with an upper limit of 50,000 users. There is a green trend like and a blue trend line graphed from plot points at every horizontal interval. The green line is labelled ‘Active users monthly’ shows increase over time. The line remains flat at approximately 1,000 users from the ‘05-28’ date mark to the ‘05-31’ mark, then begins to gradually increase to approximately 10,000 users, starting to show a trend similar to the beginning of an exponential growth curve. At the ‘06-11’ date mark, the line begins increasing at a relatively steady rate, with the last marked date showing just over 45,000 users. There are two points in which the line shows an apparent indication of levelling off in user count, before then showing a sudden increase in users again, with neither of these points significantly impacting the overall upward trend. These points are at the dates ‘06-16’ and ‘06-21’. The second graphed line, the blue line, is labelled ‘Active Users Half year’ and starts at approximately 3,000 users, but follows an almost identical trend shape as the green line as it increases approximately parallel to it. The blue line ends at around 48,000 users at the final graphed point.]
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
The most wonderful part of this, for the unfortunately uncoordinated like me:
scrolling and accidently clicking a random card is now always a random post and not an ad launching a browser window I immediately close and curse.
It’s amazing how bad it got for awhile out there.
Don’t worry, I’m working on a solution to this. My proposed Lemmy client will auto-inject ads into your feed so you can really recreate the Reddit experience.
I can’t wait for this place to blow up. Definitely missing some of my niche subs but hopefully they will appear at some point!!
I can’t wait for this place to blow up
Not literally though. But I have to say it’s giving me nostalgic feeling of old reddit when it would struggle to keep up with inflight of new users/activities.
The community here feels significantly more wholesome than Reddit in recent months. It’s nice seeing a lot of meaningful conversation without hate and spam.
I don’t want to sound like a cynic but so was reddit in its early years. We were all rallying for a cause on the great digg migration. It felt great to be part of that movement (or whatever you want to call that). I do hope Lemmy keeps this spirit up for as long as it can.
Any examples? Why not start them yourself… Im sure others are thinking the same thing and searching for them. Especially now
I think you just go to the top of the page and click “Create Community.”
Im brand new here as well, but my guess would be to start posting stuff about whatever your topic is, links etc so people who run across it have something to participate in. I imagine its kind of a labor of love in the beginning but if its not super niche I’m sure you’d show up on searches.
What are you looking to make? It may already exist on another instance and you can just sub there if it already has users.
I’m a little hesitant for big growth, came with the first wave of Redditors back when the news was fresh, but I’m trying to be optimistic. More people means more content, after all.
I also miss the niche subs, and ngl also my snoovatar, he was a nice little guy.
That will be interesting to see how this graph behaves after 1st july
