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Are we growing though?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we're seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we're truly "decreasing" vs. merely flat, but either way I don't see us increasing.
And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn't dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I've ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.
Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.
And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don't see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)
Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be "Lemmy"/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there's great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.
I wasn't really looking at the MAU stats when I made this; it just felt like it's been more actively lately (both good and bad). Unfortunate the numbers are actually trending downward.
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election
Possibly. I've gone into self-imposed
socialmedia blackouts during election season many a time. Sometimes you just need a break.Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local ... people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us
Yeah. I have felt for a while that
mlbeing the official or at least de facto flagship instance is doing more harm than good. I'm not going to tell them how to run their instance, but I am sad and frustrated that it seems to turn so many people away under the impression the whole fediverse is like that.I'm cool with Fedizens 😀.
Yeah like to label it as "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers" seems not entirely... complete in its description.
Blaze is doing amazing work advocating for Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives etc., and these days recommends Lemm.ee, one of the largest instances that also defederates from virtually nothing so that very little to no content is missed by the user. On the other hand, some content users very much would rather have been presented to them as opt-in rather than have to opt-out of it. i.e. if one of the major things that instance does is to make fun of the capitalist democratic Western society, then it is perhaps understandable if - regardless of truth or falsehood - people, especially normies, living inside of that same capitalist democratic Western society do not appreciate the jokes? Especially those calling for literal murder, or when an admin there tells someone to kill themselves. Duh, of course people are going to be turned away by such.
At this point it's like a rite of passage, to learn how to become a responsible Fedizen: learn who and how to block (not necessarily in that order:-).
We’re doing our part!
And that's important, plus all that anyone can ever do:-).
In fairness, there's still total net growth of some 6000 MAU since February
How do you see the past numbers there though, without conflating the Mastodon users that says that we have ~1 million MAUs?
This one likewise says 43k MAUs right now, though I don't recall how many we had in February. The other site only shows as far back as June, 48k MAUs. So that's a drop of 5k MAUs since June.
Assuming the numbers are comparable across the two sites like that - and they seem to agree as far as we can tell - it looks like the numbers went up sometime between February and June, but since then we've lost almost all that we gained.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it's just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
The link should take you to the Lemmy page.
Some ~30% net MAU growth since December of last year is nothing to sniff at.
i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it’s just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)
Most people who left from Reddit after The Great Exodus did so in the first 3-4 months, though.
Thanks, that longer view does change the narrative a bit. Yeah the Rexodus was the big influx, maybe if they finally kill off old-reddit there could be another but who knows. Then again in the OP it describes "growing", whereas the reality seems more like at one point almost a year ago we grew, especially that sharp spike between February and March, but ever since and currently we are actively shrinking. I guess both are true, depending on whether you take the yearly or half-yearly POV.
Yeah, there's definitely no explosive growth currently. Might be that some communities here are getting more 'solid', though, and feel more active.
"More activity" rather than "more users" - yeah, not explosive but definitely growth I like how you phrased that. I think it means that niche interests are not more likely to happen - that needs more users in particular - but browsing here may be more enjoyable with the higher level of engagement.
So denouncing genocide is now "political extremism"? If posts like that are scaring people away, that's good, we don't need them here.
don't offend the majority if you want guests to stick around. you can denounce genocide without convicting all of western civilization.
Exactly. The whole "everything the other side does is evil while my side can do no wrong btw" isn't helpful or going to lead to any change at all. Worse, these attempts to "control the conversation" would (if paid attention to) actually lead to increasing those evil deeds, bc leopards always eat people's faces off aka reveale their true spots... eventually. e.g. blaming liberals for genocide will only lead to Republicans winning who have actively and outright stated that they will do even more genocide, plus far more than that besides.
And I don't blame normies - who wants to join a place that features such "alternative facts" and "alternative logic" on a daily basis? Yes you can go to some trouble to opt-out, but not easily, and they don't know how, or even that it's possible to do so.
None of the west's enemies are afforded the same generosity. Maybe we don't want the majority of guests to be a bunch of mindless parrots who only care about human rights when mainstream media from "their side" tell them to care (as an excuse to project power globally). It ends up permeating all discussions, even ones that aren't directly about politics and you end up building an echo chamber. It shapes how you see the world, for example, you took a post talking specifically about western leadership to be about "convicting all of western civilization" as if the victim of the genocide is actually the west.
I'm curious, where exactly do you draw the line with your reasoning? You can denounce dumping oil into the ocean without convicting all of Shell? You can denounce the invasion of Crimea without convicting all of the Russian military? You can denounce murder without convicting all murders? Why not skip this alltogether and denounce all bad things without convicting all good things, that makes the game of ethics a whole lot easier.
"western civilization" is not a majority. It's a minority who has been dominating the discussion for way too long, and people are tired of listening to the hypocrisy.
Tact for Propagandaist Dummies is not a book I'm inspired to devote investing time into.