Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users

I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.

Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.

- I wish there was a way to migrate all my subscriptions, cause then I would probably change instances to ease the burden on my current instance.
- I appreciate World's transparency but it's been a lot nicer on lemm.ee for me. Not having a way to kill time when I need to isn't the end of the world but definitely annoying.
- I have also recently moved and it makes me wonder, will users moving to other instances affect the graph?
I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
- Of course it's not about centralisation per se, but the problems that a centralised platform does not have to deal with.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
- Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse 'All' it really isn't any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
It's not that users want to centralize everything. It's Lemmy's design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.
1. Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
- Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
- Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
- In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a "moderated" feed (with communities selected by admins). The "local" feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it'll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that's more lively.
1. For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
- This is the big one to me. It's much more difficult to search for specific content if it's isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.
  If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.
You also don't have the content of Reddit. It doesn't take too long to scroll through all top six hours and get to the single digits of upvotes.
- Kinda cozy though, if you pay attention you kinda see who's active.
  Like you, only user on my instance who has more comments than me.
It's hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It's smart to go to a smaller instance but it's also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That's why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
It's that everyone wants to create the same community on different instances.
I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don't want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
I think it's also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that's the way it always worked on reddit.
So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That's just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
Same shit happened with the 'temporary' mass migration to Signal.
- Signal
  Interesting what do you mean? I use signal but I can't get anyone other than my ex wife to use it with me. It is so much nicer than google voice or the texting app, regardless of the end to end encryption.

That doesn't seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it's that active. I would've expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.

Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
It's all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it'll attract and retain users.
- And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored. I think the reason for the downward spike not being worse is that the threshold to take part in Lemmy communities is higher than many social media sites, and invested time registering makes people more likely to stay.
- Why I'm encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it's just a little bit.
  One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.
Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I'm a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
- the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
  Truer words were never said.
- I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I've tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.
Am I being retained?!??
- Sigh... You're free to go sir. Have a nice evening Mr sovereign user.

until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.

This is honestly it.
I like the site, I want to use it, I want to encourage others to use it, but I'm getting tired of only talking about the same things here.
Maybe we need to start encouraging people to post rather than just expecting them to.
- we don't need more memes, we need people to start going to the games, movies, shows, and hobbies they like and making posts.
- I'm in the process of making some stuff, I just worry that the community I post it to on lemmy isn't big enough to get the word out community-wide.
  For context, I've been working on a very long dogelore thing. But in the same way, I feel like this hurts any bhj or mtcj stuff I might do. The community on lemmy isn't big enough to get traction, so what's the point?
  I'm not going back to reddit, and discord is annoying, so it's just a little discouraging.
It feels like it's mainly talking one way or another about Reddit, or describing how one of the 3P apps is now available for Lemmy. The content is super stale, but it will grow. Fuck, Reddit back in the day was not exactly the thriving metropolis it was maybe six or so years ago. And reddit peaked and came down to how it exists today. So it'll take time.
That being said, I don't check Lemmy anywhere near as frequently as I did Reddit, and mainly because the subs I frequented most have smaller footprints here for now. Which is what you said, but in fewer words.
For what it’s worth, memes have helped me stay. I doubt I’m the only one.
They’re quick and easy to browse and some get a bunch of topical comments and links to other relevant communities.
It’ll take a while to reach a level that’s known in the public eye like Twitter and Reddit, but the low-hanging fruit helps keep people interested while more niche communities are forming.
- We don't want to be in the public eye. Let's enjoy what we have while it lasts
Also, liftoff kinda sucked, but I just figured out some features of Sync, and it's fucking beautiful.
- Lol what? Liftoff is fantastic, and FOSS. Are we blaming liftoff for the downward trend/lack of growth? Cause the oh-so-amazing Sync does not seem to have reversed it, to spite all the claims I keep seeing.
- I’m still using wefwef. What am I missing?
Yeah, I really want r/sysadmin on here.
They have a Discord but Discord is so incredibly annoying to use for this.
P.S. change the sort mode to hot or top (x hours) to get more content. The default of active sucks.
- hot is completely useless because its filled with content that's less than an hour old with virtually no comments. its very poor quality content.
The two biggest ones I know of are startrek.website for trekkies and blahaj for all things trans/lgbtq. But even those don't see to have much activity. We need better advertisement to smaller communities somehow.
- its not about the instances, those are actually hindering growth by dividing communities across instances and defederating them. lemmy is basically several copies of reddit in a trench coat pretending to be a social network.
I will say I was looking for some opinions on new Internet browsers.
Posted on Reddit and here.
Already got responses on lemmy, but my Reddit post is just being ignored.
- Also, Lemmy posts tend to get real conversations going rather than reused meme templates.
- If you're interested in the right (tech) topics I can see Lemmy being better yeah
Which site?
Lemmy.world? Lemmy.ml? Lemm.ee? Programming.dev? Lemmy.ca? Lemmy.nz? ...
I think I've blocked the biggest meme sub or two. Helps a lot with that.
I've been posting on the HP and Tolkien communities and begun modding them too. I'd encourage people to post, and if necessary take up a little responsibility too.

Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.

We have to wait until tomorrow?
There are also conscious efforts to weed out bots and other measures that try to remove potential cancer from spreading.
There was a post recently that outlined bot weeding efforts on a couple dozen instances that tanked user number by something like 1/5 - clearly visible on graphs.
Lemmy’s doing great. Even if plenty small communities are still not big enough here.
exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i'd guess you could expect it to look something like:
- spike
- drop off
- plateau
- spike
- drop off
- plateau above the last plateau
- etc etc
sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
- I'm not sure what else will be able to cause a spike again. Reddits behavior over the past month is pretty much as terrible as it can get. If people aren't moving to Lemmy anymore, it's going to take something apocalyptic to cause Lemmys usercount to grow again.

I'm to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.

Even lurkers are still part of the community.
I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
It's quite nice being part of a small community now. Even just an up/down vote from you will be worth more here. It's great.
- I used to be a reddit lurker. I would go into a thread for a post and look for the thing I would have posted, and upvote it.
  I can't do this on Lemmy, I actually have to write stuff now I guess, otherwise it doesn't show up. I don't like it.
  Feels weird man.
I try to comment when I can. Even if it's not insightful. A small compliment keeps a community going.
- Hell small compliments keep people going let alone an abstract sense of community
- I try to browse and upvote in new also
I’m to tired to make quality posts.
There's room for shitty posts too. 🫂
Get out of my head!
How mildly opinionated of you.
Thanks for pointing that out! High quality content takes time to craft. It's being skilled and/or knowledgable, being able to convey that across on a digital platform (where basically everyone's anonymous and of unknown backgrounds), and being engaging while you're at it. It definitely can be demanding for some.
Beans on toast are better than vegemite on toast!
- Noodles on toast is better than both

I'm actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝

Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.

I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.

I feel like I'm witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect...

Yes, most people give up as soon as something does not work first time.
Maybe there are enough of us to be enough abd to fix those annoying little things that make lemmy complicated to use.
A lot if issues got resolved, apps are here,it is getting better fast.
- I doubt it - too many people with different preferences they aren't willing to let go, I'm afraid.
  If you're asking me, it's "good enough" the way it is. I'd gladly have some more content filters, but even without them I perceive it as a platform with enough potential to consider it good.
I think those issues will be solved though. Apps will increasingly make onboarding simpler so Lemmy will be as simple to use as Reddit.
At that point really its just a case of waiting for Reddit to fuck itself, which it absolutely will do eventually via corporate greed, and there we go, all the Lemmy content anyone could ever need.
- I don't think Reddit will fall, sadly.
  It harbors too many people, who go there for a specific content and don't care about the internal dramas, or who leads the place and what he thinks about the userbase. In addition... Eh, it hosted Obama, Arnold, plenty of actors, celebrities.
  My assumption is that it will simply evolve into something different, but no less popular.
  After all, Facebook was caught redhanded on such abominable practices that it should be burnt to a crisp long time ago, and yet it's still there, led by that automaton, what'shisname...
One thing that bugs me is people asking for/using tools that replicate the look and feel of Reddit instead of learning the ropes. I left Reddit, I don't want another one. I get it, familiarity is comforting, but when the user base is a fraction of the other platform, no UI or app will ever give you the same experience. I say move on, get out of your comfort zone and participate.
- Amen to that.
  I don't imagine staying on some site that resembles a drowning wreck, because "I got used to how things work here".
I’m just here because I like the pretty 3rd party apps.
I think I am on shitjustworks.. i don’t know how big my instance is I just chose it because it has a cool name.
It has gone down a few times and at first my reaction was to go to is it down dot com to see if the problem was with my app… but then I had the realization that ohhhh, it’s just my home server is down… I thought about making a separate account on another instance but instead just decided to do something else with those few minutes I would have spent here….
No big deal…. It’s happened a few times in the couple months I’ve been here, but it always works eventually… I really like this platform, and the philosophy behind it, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand all the inner workings and how the instances work together, but I don’t feel like I need to.
But I can see how people who understand it even less than I do might get frustrated and so that is going to be a limiting factor with new growth here I would assume…

This alone will make a huge difference with other platforms that will hide that info under seven wraps an report any and all accounts as active users.
- Reddit with their "subscriber" counts
  Who cares your community has 100000 subs. 90000 of them are duplicates or gone.
I really just want to lurk.
- You made a comment just now. You're not lurking according to the how they're categorizing a lurker.
  Honestly, how about this? Every single lurker, commit to making at least one post or comment a day. Call it a social experiment
This is me, lurking 👀

I'm not too worried. Graphs dont only go up. :)

Graps are delicious and I love the wins they make.
- :) I erased any evidence of any misspelling that may or may not have taken place here tonight.

Joined today. I’ll likely just lurk in the background…

They said while commenting...
Used to say that too,but now Im commenting too.
I thought so too but I don't mind leaving a comment or making a post here and there.
even if it's stupid it's still something for ppl to downvote lol let em think of something better. or make content mocking mine
- If you comment on posts you think are under-rated and upvote, you'll push them up the activity queue and it'll reach more people.

Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

Also, instance hopping and users registering on multiple instances before picking only one/being active on only once may be an explanation.

Also worth noting is Lemmy only counts posts/comments as "active users". Lurkers who only read and up/downvote aren't counted.
- That's interesting, I would expect people who vote to be accounted
- wow, I lurk so much more than I post stuff.. one would think they would track this
- I think this is the biggest factor. Most people only lurk. How many people signed up and only lurk?
- In this case, I have a theory. I remember a month ago people were posting a lot on Reddit and the !reddit@lemmy.ml community was extremely active. It was like group therapy for refugees. But now the new reality is setting in and people are actually having real and meaningful conversations, which means more lurkers.
  So it doesn't mean that active users are down per se, it's just that it's stabilised because people are mostly over Reddit.
- I wonder if lurkers were counted in reddits active user data

Lemmy.world has been down a lot, I've been trying to use it but half the times I've logged on it's been down. So that might be part of it?

I'm generally a lurker so here. I posted.

Me too. Gotta keep them numbers up though.
- Indeed. Up they go.
Okay okay, I'll join you in commenting.
I suspect doing this on posts with less upvotes will push them up the queue, so if you see any under-rated posts go upvote and comment on them.

As a lurker I mostly just vote. But gotta post every once in a while to add to active users stat!

No worries, Lemmy is alive. Lemmy and Fediverse in general is better to grow organically.

Some people might have made multiple accounts and chosen one possibly?

My guess is a lot of people came in saw that Lemmy was kinda dead a lot of the time but suspected it would continue to grow so they left it temporarily to go back to reddit while they waited for Lemmy to catch up
- But if everybody things that, it will never grow
Yeah i did something similar, though mostly bc i was confused about the whole instance thing. Made three or four accounts over the first few days. I kept forgetting the password, or didn't really understand what an instance meant, or how to log on via Connect. Now that's done with, I just stick to one account
I did it too. I had like 4 or 5 accounts and used 2 or 3 actively until recently if my main instance went down. Now I'm just using 1.
- I'm moving to lemm.ee personally for similar reasons. I'm keeping the dotworld account as backup and may be creating communities here.
This is me. I bounced between a couple of instances before I settled on lemm.ee; I also am generally a lurker because I don't want to comment or post unless I know that it will generate quality conversation.
- I'll personally post as long as it's relevant. Ideally it's an interesting comment but not always. I stay away from reddit-type inane comments with no substance, though I'm sure they have their place here as well.

For some the novelty of lemmy dropped pretty quickly. Most reddit users which make up a huge chunk of lemmy users would go days if not, weeks without commenting or posting. You kinda have to factor in that a lot of people are lemmy lurkers that will comment or post once they find something that interests them.

There's also people that create multiple accounts in different instances and end up using just one.

I did this. I didn't initially realize there is such a thing as instances (I thought I was joining Lemmy). Came from Reddit so didn't expect this. Now I only use my Lemmy.world account, the other one is doing nothing (should probably get around deleting it at some point).
- So far I've created an account at sh.itjust.works (first one), lemmy.world (main during most of my time here), lemmy.dbzer0.com (first attempt to migrate to another instance) and at lemm.ee, because I wasn't happy with how lemmy.world admins run their instance (preemptively defederating Hexbear but not Meta).
  I guess I should delete my other accounts.

Lemmy needs a middle logical layer to really take off. If a local server moderats it as such, the default view for say /c/technology shouldn't be slit across a dozen instances. Instead it should be merged into one view.

Without it you have a bunch of largely stagnant communities.

can't maintain 90% uptime
why are we losing users?

I don't understand why people have expectations from a young platform like it's supposed to be the new reddit/facebook all of a sudden. I lived through the digg->reddit move and believe me, it was worse than what we see on lemmy sometimes. Let it grow and it will have a chance. Offer help when you think some communities aren't correctly moderated or when you think you have better ideas. People usually will try to help (not all the time).

I'm sticking with it for now. Reddit can piss off. The Spez shit was just the last straw for me after a lot of other disappointing shit in recent times.

It is expected that there are corrections in numbers after a huge spike. The bigger goal will be to sustain this community.

I'm pretty sure it's kida going already, even when the post only had 200upvotes and 10 comments they where good posts and the comments made up in quality for what they lacked quantity

Reddit is going to keep trying dumb methods to monetize or annoy their user base. Digg did a similar thing. The people will slowly get more and more annoyed and the content here will increase. It’s just a waiting game and federated services are the future.

Ads are coming. (Well, more ads.)
- Old.Reddit will be killed too. I know they said it’s not going anywhere but they have shown to be full of shit in the past.

Dude I was away on vacation chill. :-)

New users join, some leave, but the ones who stay are active. Lemmy feels very alive and that's what matters.

Sites like reddit, Instagram, and twitter make the cognitive effort to go from signing up to using the app as low as possible. The users' experience is considered from before they even have an account. They make sure you don't ever see a blank page or feel like you're battling the app to find content.

Lemmy actively puts roadblocks in the way. Server choices, the hoops you need to jump though for server memberships, and highly fragmented communities all but ensure that people will face issues when signing up.

Sadly, a lot of users here feel that because they had to overcome them, so should everyone else. Until that changes then the self-defeating cycle will continue.

For the last month and a half, I have not used reddit at all. Lemmy has most of the communities that I was a part of.

But I get that, some niche subreddits still don't have communities here on lemmy. A few of my friends, stopped using lemmy because it didn't have the subs they were active in.

It'll hit equilibrium eventually. Not like this is something unusual for a platform that's making the rounds as the new and exciting thing.

My biggest issue is that at least two out of three times I go to browse/post/comment on lemmy.world, the server is down. I have no clue the actual up time, maybe I am just unlucky. But I am considering migrating my main account to another server.

My alt's server has never experienced this much issue. Hopefully the devs add a migrate function.

Might as well post here as my first one. Hi, Lemmy. :)

Yo, there's two of us!
Welcome aboard!

Because you like numbers i reply. Now it's going up by one active user

Joined few days ago after sync released, thou I'm boost user at reddit before I will stay here no matter what. I'm already done with reddit and their trash app.. Can't wait boost for lemmy to release.

Try infinity dude. It's alpha but tyyyyyyyte

I'm just gonna leave this post here, for statistics.

Joined Lemmy today and find it kinda refreshing and reminding me of the old days when web was small yet varied.

Also really dig the web interface, especially the vaporwave-light theme :D

There is a continuous decrease in number. That incident should be seen as a reverse spike.

The problem with lemmy is that it's not 100% stable. I like it more than Reddit but at least 20% of time lemmy is overloaded, down, not refreshing or else.

“Chart go down” isn’t necessarily bad.

For example, this could be due to general disinterest, or it could be from troll removal/defederation too, no?

Sadly, there's just not a critical mass of users in most of the communities I'm interested in. I pop in here every once in a while to see what's going on, but it's currently lacking the diversity of content that you get on Reddit. I'm still rooting for it to succeed.

there were 3-4ish communities on that other site that i was pretty active in that are ghost towns here and there is a zero to none chance that they will migrate over. i still go over there for those communities.
that said, for the mindless amusement/newsanddoom scroll lemmy is fine and i do find myself more active here in the general community. it's just those niche communities haven't hit the numbers they need to be self-sustaining.

With the fediverse known for its opposition to infinite growth, this feels ironic

These are natural growing pains of any new platform. A lot of people will come over, check it out, and then go back to Reddit.

I'm on the fence about sticking around. I don't see myself going back to Reddit, so I'll probably just leave and be productive.

Hard for me to be active when my home server is down most days 😂

Yup lemmy.world is down literally every day for me. I mean seriously, look at this:
And when the smaller instances I am on can't handle mobile browsing. It's annoying when you press back and it takes you all the way back instead of just where you were.

Maybe it's just my feelings but conversations and participation is booming. I rather a small and active community than a millions of users who lurk.

Communities are getting seeded so when next wave comes, we will be ready. Build decentralized economy won't happen over night.

I just swap between lemmy.world and lemm.ee whenever one of them goes down. They're the first two options on the app I use lol

I keep forgetting you have to comment or post to be considered active

Upvotes don't count?

It's natural progression once initial hype wears off. As long we manage to keep core amount of users it should grow slowly over time.

It's way better than the relative numbers of Threads. I expect a decline of active users, since a lot of Reddit users registered to a Lemmy instance expecting a similar experience that couldn't be fulfilled. It will stabilize and grow up again with peaks when, for example, old.reddit.com is ditched.

Here! I'm another active user!

same here ;)
- annoying that only posts and comments count :/ I'm your classic lurker and up/downvoter

I was an early Reddit adopter and can remember how lonely it felt back then. It took years but it got better in ways and worse in others. I believe in Lemmy because it isn't susceptible to the pressures of a company trying to be profitable. Sure it'll have its own challenges but I've personally had enough of idiot CEOs running social websites into the ground.

It’s normal. Chill. Not like Threads that lost 80% of its active users.

Lemmy has already hit equilibrium as far as I'm concerned if your on lemmy world I suggest changing instances my instance midwest.social was down alot in the beginning when lemmy was getting alot of new sign ups but has since then been updated a few times and been rock solid since now it only occasionally goes down for maintenance

A big issue was loosing all the .ml lemmy instances. I lost mine and had to create a new account. lemmy.ml is the only one that's still up.

What happened there? Still trying to understand lemmy
- The government of Mali (who controls all .ml domains) wanted their domains back. This forced the closure of any website using that domain and for them to reopen on a new domain.
- Something about Mali claiming ml domains or something

The big problem with lemmy is that some niche communities did not migrated so when you Look for example for fairphone news you Look to reddit beacuse lemmy dosent have equivalent. Likewise i havent seen something similar to r/tailsof. You know the niche communities that were the bread and bucket of reddit with the few exceptions ( programers and Linux communities fully migrated and are obviusly standing out beacuse those pepole are always first to move to opensource alternatives )

Sync's already had over 10k downloads, but the ability to post (apart from comments) hasn't yet been added. Once that happens I imagine there'll be a decent spike.

I think that app choice makes a difference, too. I would guess that most people on mobile picked one or two apps to try, and if their picks weren't great (or the user was too impatient to wait for improvements) they called the whole experience shitty and bailed. Those of us committed to the move hung on and waited for our apps to get better.

In my case, I grabbed every ios app I could find and tried them all. Some were not so good, some were good and improving at a lightning rate. Living through those growing pains is worth it to me, especially when the improvements are crazy fast. I'm mostly using Memmy now, and I'm really happy with it. I only have one tiny, unimportant issue with it involving text selection, but it's nothing compared to how good they've made this app so quickly. Memmy is a large part of why I stick around.

I tried only Jerboa and that's what I stuck with. It loads fast and has every feature I want. Compare that to the official Reddit app, which is a slog on even high end devices. Seriously, what are they doing that it loads SO SLOW?
- If you have the opportunity now, download Sync for reddit. It's out now and it's a wonderful experience!
  EDIT: Sync for Lemmy

The novelty has worn off. Contributions are going to fall to the baseline for this platform. Question is, is the Lemmy space going to expand from that point?

Lemmy put my 1st post here

This is an expected statistical artifact given the "last month" aggregation and a huge influx of new users of which many don't stick around. I am saying they don't stick around, because that's generally just what happens with a lot of new users (e.g. they checked it out, decided it's not for them) and also due to the federated nature they might have switched accounts and similar things. Then the bit about "last month" aggregation: Have a look at the "Active 6 months" graph - it's still trending upwards. Those are likely a trailing average aggregations, so a maximum is reached when that 1-month-window starts (roughly) at the beginning of the huge user influx. For the 6-month window that hasn't happened yet, so still going upwards. Assuming nothing changes (similar amount of new/leaving active users) the graphs gonna be interesting in the next few weeks: After the initial wave of influx the balance was most likely negative (more users from "the wave" dropping out again than added users afterwards), however I'd hope it's gotten positive since then. If that's the case the graph should start trending upwards 1 month after the balance became positive. It's unclear when that was the case, but some towards end of July might be a reasonable guess? The same graph with a smaller window could shed some light on that (or just expose useless noise ¯(ツ)_/¯ ).

Another sign I'd consider good: The active user ratio is trending upwards.

Disclaimer: I don't know how the data is aggregated, nor how exactly "active" is defined - the gist of the above very likely applies though. I was too lazy to look it up in the code - if someone knew how these graphs are aggregated and were so kind to let me know, that'd be appreciated :)

I think people who've only ever known reddit/instagram/twitter will find it dull, but this is still a relatively active place with quality users and mods.

The bigger and more reddit-like it gets the harder it will be to moderate and the more expensive it will be to run. Things are fine right now.

quality users
[citation needed].

I would also note that some instances with the ml ending like fmhy.ml got wiped out of existence a few weeks ago because Malaysia forcefully took back that domain suffix back. I was on there and had to make a new account elsewhere after I saw it wasn't going to come back up.

As a new user, I kind of can’t get over the idea that bots just seem to scrape links and repost them here.

That seems to be most of the contributions to communities to me.

Unpopular opinion: bots might be a good thing for now.
I’m speaking from a growth perspective. Assuming users want to use social media to…socialize… you need active users and constant content. New social media platforms have a lack of users and content. Bots can bridge that gap until enough users are contributing and using the platform.
If you really think about it, it comes down to a platform using bots effectively. Let’s say the bots will only submit content when user submitted content falls below a threshold. Maybe it will auto generate threads for breaking news.
What if bots are used to ask questions and further conversations, like a social lubricant. Employed in a way to pull more useful information from users or to keep people engaged.
This all hinges on the ability for a bot to appear real.
This sounds super fucked when you think about it. I’m not a fan of bot content. If you didn’t know it was a bot, what difference would it make? LLM might be able to make it engaging and natural.
- Imho that's a horrible idea. A large part of content on the instance I'm on has become bots just reposting news articles without any own contribution, no discussion, nothing.
- The go-to counterpoint being that people come to social media to socialize with other humans. The moment another "human" hits me with "As an AI...." or are otherwise unmasked for any reason is the exact moment I lose a little bit of faith in the platform.
  It's not enough faith to make me stop using it the first time or even the fifth, so long as the promise of almost always interacting with another person is dangled in front of me. But that little bit can't be regained and eventually it's going to hit zero and I will leave.
  I already have chatbots if I want to talk to myself. Talking to the cat makes me feel less lonely than chatbots do, and given the choice between the fedi forever remaining niche or retaining the bot "activity" of reddit....I'd just move to tildes.
  The only halfway good argument is the use of a breaking news bot, but I've found I tend to get tired of those very fast for the same reason. They just make me sad and irritated, and I end up blocking them. If the news is interesting enough, I expect humans will spam it.
  If they could be programmed to only post when user interaction falls....maybe, in theory, but that feels more insidious to me than anything else. The idea of a company pumping their numbers will never make me like them, and if bots are already posting stuff, why do I have to interact in order to get content? They're already doing it. 🤷‍♂️
  If I'm lurking enough to trigger the theoretical user activity bot, I'd also be fine lurking while "other users" (the bots) give me things to look at, and they'll never go dormant.
- @Burp Agreed, bots might not be the best content, I'm not a fan, but if it drives engagement then does it really hurt at the moment?
  @LambLeeg @Strangle
Bots are on every social media platforms.
- Doesn't make them good or necessary just because they're common. When I see bots, I tend to block them pretty fast regardless of contribution, and my experience has been pretty damn nice here in very large part because the bot users are (to my knowledge) mostly or entirely dormant.
  Nobody wants to interact with a known bot, or post where that's the main contributor. The bot is never going to engage with them, and it somehow feels worse than posting into the void.

I will admit, I was hard into Lemmy at first, but then gradually slipped back into the Reddit habit. This is my first visit to the site in a few weeks.

Growth is not always consistent.

The number of users are just stabilising. This is expected after a sudden spike in users.

How much is Threads down in DAU?
- Their daily active users declined by 82 percent from its peak https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/threads-user-base-has-plummeted-more-than-80-metas-app-ended-july-with-just-8-million-daily-active-users-/articleshow/102435552.cms
- I think a better comparison would be mastodon after the twitter acquisition, but I would agree everything always has a huge surge at first and then there is a drop.

Could be something to do with frequent outages. Every now and then I will have error jump out. I then give up for a day and then try using tomorrow.

Can bot cleaning explain this?

That decline is slower than I expected. It shows that more people stay than not

Once Boost for Lemmy releases, 10, 000% growth will occur over the coming weeks afterward 😉 (IYKYK)

Sync is already out and their user base is higher than boost

People always tend to bounce back to the bigger platform.

How I like to deal with this is to use two or more platforms of the same kind.

Occasionally open Reddit, and occasionally Lemmy. Occasionally checking Fedi, and occasionally going on Twitter.

It may be disorienting at first, but it's better to get used to going on many websites than sticking to just two.

Because every post is just Lemmy users jerking themselves off raving about how much cooler they are than Reddit.

It's so fucking cringe I I can't scroll more than 5 minutes without giving up.

Bruh all you've contributed so far are a couple snarky comments yourself. You're not really in a position to be criticizing what others are posting. It's a new site, you gotta grow the communities you want to see. If that's not something you want to be part of then check back in a few months. You don't like the programming, get up and change the channel.
This comment is so ironic seeing as how I didn't see a comment like you are saying besides yours. Come on. We're all here together. Get over yourself.
I don't see that on my front-page. You need to curate your own experience on Lemmy just like you do on Reddit. Plenty of Lemmy isn't metaposting
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active&nsfw=null - list of communities in Lemmy
https://lemmy.world/post/2216085 - list of casual communities to subscribe to to get you started.
if you browse c/all you're going to see a lot of annoying trash you aren't interesting in, same as Reddit.
Don't go to !memes. Thats all really. Block the community because thats where 99% of the circlejerk comes from (and app shaming somehow??)
Block memes and politics if you must - I blocked the latter and my experience is superb.
The important part is that you still found a way to feel superior.

It's because Reddit is still alive and well and Lemmy just doesn't offer enough to be a serious alternative (yet)

This is how the Digg to Reddit migrations worked. Initial wave wasn't a death blow but things will keep maturing on Lemmy. By the time Spez upsets people again on Reddit, we will likely see another big wave - hopefully moderating tools are improved enough by then.
- Digg and Reddit were roughly equivalent platforms, it wasn't a David and Goliath situation. Killing reddit will be a long hard road, but have we considered there are lots of people (maybe even most of them) that we would prefer that they stay on reddit?

This is normal. We've gotten a big enough surge where we have consistent content now. Lemmy was a bit rough when the migration started, but hopefully improvements will go a lot faster now. We're definitely missing a lot of core features and polish still. But Lemmy is a long term social network that is grass roots. All we need to worry about is creating a sustainable community now, and polish up the experience to newcomers so we can sustain the next exodus and be more of a viable platform.

Not surprising that the initial hype from the Reddit meltdown is wearing off, the question is how much momentum can be retained and how to attract users organically.

The very gentle slope towards normalization is quite good, actually.

Being new to Mastodon and Lemmy I personally struggle to figure things out. Just finding a brief summary on how Lemmy works in contrast to reddit has, so far, yielded no helpful results. While I think for me this is just a matter of sticking with the services I can imagine that a lot of people would check in, struggle and check out again.

The, let's call it infrastructure, of Lemmy and the way registration works due to the fediverse is quite different to what most people are used to.

Thats the case for most new platforms you get a surge of users and then some titer off and stop using the platform. But don't look at the small dip look at the massive growth compared to a few months ago.

Lurkers not counting probably has something to do with that.

Still a massive increase compared to a few months ago.

It needs a solid app like Apollo was for Reddit to help it keep active users.

Voyager (apollo clone) just launched it’s app on android and ios. And we also have memmy, which is great. So I think we’ve got that covered.
Sync and Infinity just launched...
- Sync is what made me finally use Lemmy regularly.
- Unfortunately those are android clients. Apollo was an iOS client. Voyager looks pretty good though…
I just installed Infinity for Lemmy and it looks pretty good so far. It's still at Avery early stage, but it has the nice look & fell of Infinity for Reddit.
Liftoff is pretty slick, tho.

@LambLeeg I swear we have this this at least a copule or few months of someone getting anxious there's a sight dip of active user on the Fediverse and eventually it goes up again.

I woudn't worry too much about the graph and just try to vibe here instead.. 🤷‍♂️

take my monthly comment

I'm active with comments, but not posts. That's all I can offer.

Me too. What's your reason not to create posts? I don't do it much because I'm anxious about the possible low quality of my contributions.
- I just have nothing I want to post. I was on reddit for 8 years and only made like 10 posts in total. Just can't be arsed.

Just like a whale, scraping off barnacles, for greater speed and efficiency

I couldn't figure out how to log on here with my other Fediverse creds. Rather than, like, Google or something? I just created new accounts for each instance. I'd say it's a boon for anonymity, but I used the same username, soooo

What are people saying to be calm for? Nobody way raising alarm

I feel like it's one small community instead of an interconnected larger one, unfortunately.

I'm doing my part!

Yeah cuz the shot is down constantly. I have 2 apps and one usually doesn't work.

A platform can always be improved, always. Lemmy is alpha software now and the growing problems we had in the beginning may have annoyed some users.

I think the most important thing is to keep making improvements to attract new users. I'm already finding the content infinitely better than it was a month ago.

Still better at retaining its users than Threads.

People on vacation in July and august too maybe ? Might have a slight rebound later

I will use Lemmy more when Sync will fix hiding posts. And no, I'm not gonna use "remove read"

Interesting data considering the climbing daily post/comment(?) numbers I saw yesterday.

Thank fuck, I was worried my hosting bills were going to keep escalating... xD

I've been wondering what Lemmy was like until Jun 2023. Quite cozy I guess.

Very boring. You got 3 replies on your posts if you were lucky.
- Things are good. Why are people obsessing over usage numbers? It's a fantastic place to be, away from big tech!
All/New was the only way you could get an entirely new feed a couple times a day.
There was still some lore and beefs between servers (like with wolfballz, a right wing community taken down for hatespeech, or hexbear that became incompatible and headed their own way). Feddit.de has a still a bunch of old federated servers cached that came into and went out of existence.
Between Lemmy.ca (I joined there in March) and Beehaw, there were 10 people posting regularly as in a handful of posts a day. Lemmy.ml had a mix of general news and user "Yogthos" posting pro-China news/propaganda.
It was a quiet but nice little place. The admins running the instance would often be quick to reply and give you detailed answers whenever you needed them. Now many have their plate full with moderation actions and keeping their site up.
!Programmerhumor@lemmy.ml was one of the first communities to me that seemed based off a Reddit subreddit theme.
We knew the change winds were coming, slowly at first in May, then suddenly exploded after May 30th. Beehaw grew from 700 users to 14000 in less than two weeks (during the time the Reddit protest was being organized). That was a crazy change for Fediverse people, new people everywhere, minor trolls popping here and there, Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works being born, admins working overtime to accept new members. All very exciting.
Second half of June there was some trouble. Beehaw defederated because they couldn't keep up with moderating users from instances with open signup processes (and I suspect it was triggered by a troll making a hateful post about his dick on the LGBTQ sub).
Then there was a torrent of accounts made on some instances that originally had one or two users. They had no comments or posts and had a username with a random word and a bunch of numbers. All of a sudden the instances with the "most users" were these completely inactive instances.
CAPTCHA was better implemented, and dbzero helped create a filter to monitor and defederate instances with hugely disproportionate number of accounts compared to activity.
There's your mini-history lesson for Lemmy.

Still waiting for the ability to block instances as a user.

Doing my part...

@infyrin imo you're contributing to Lemmy just by being here, lurking is perfectly fine, you don't have to actively participate.
@LambLeeg
You say this, but people have the right to be lurkers if they want. No one is forced to keep a community going.
Moving one over here was fairly hard for this reason. I admittedly should be keeping it up still, but where realizing I had nine whole subscribers made me really happy (there are tens of us!), realizing nobody was ever going to make a move of any sort even to comment and that I was going to continue carrying this entire community by myself has made me very discouraged.
I know most people are content to lurk while they look for something that's interesting enough to post/interact with. I do that too. But come on, guys. Don't do me like this. Nobody goes online to sit and talk to themselves.

Lurker mainly but looking to get more involved!

This is not a bad thing. Lurkers have always been a significant part of the user base in all social media.

Posting smth so I count as an active user again

Its actually very good

I mentioned this in another thread but I think it's regression to the mean

At least there's something to do here. Mastodon almost always feels like a ghost town to me. I only really keep it on my home screen because I like the icon.

it can very much depend on your instance, do you look at the 'all' option and or do you just stay on your instance?

I can use Lenny with Lenny sync on my phone without issue but when I try to use my browser on my laptop I can't login. It's the same instance, save credentials.

To be expected. I like it but it's still quite an immature platform overall. There's lots to be done to make it easier for an average user.

The number of posts per day keeps growing though.

We'll see how it goes, hopefully it keeps growing, but a user loss seems to be quite common after the initial wave of new users for new platforms

Well, everybody kinda knows each other a little bit here, whereas on reddit unless you are one of those accounts nobody even bothers reading your username.

Lol

Well I'm here and I like it. So there.

A good part of that can be explained by the low time resolution of the graph. 1 month.

Let's assume 1 month ago, 100 new people signed up. Let's say 20 of those made a comment or post, which is the requirement to be counted as an active user.

Many of those 100 didn't stay for various reasons. Of the 20 'active' users, only 15 were coming back the next day.

But the graph still counts 20 active users for a whole month. Only 1 month after a user last commented or posted, this user is no longer counted as 'active'. So now we see a drop of -5 (all numbers made up).

I think it's perfectly normal that not everyone who signs up makes a post or comment. And that not everyone who tries out something new will stick around the next day, or the next week.

With a large number of new signups, which we had in the last months, it can be expected that another a large number is only active for a short time. Due to the low resolution, we probably see what happened 1 month ago.

Number of active users slightly dips after exponential growth, surely the platform is dying, lets run around in circles and scream that the sky is falling.

Why don't we, instead, sacrifice u/spez to the gods, so they have mercy of us?

Lemmy didn’t take off like all my other moves and that’s ok. Can’t stand what Reddit stands for. I won’t ever contribute there but I’m forced to visit to get commentary I need to see on the war and other niche topics.

The robots have filled the content problem but not the commentary problem. And no, I don’t want bot commentary.

Interestingly I've actually seen comments go way up in the last month despite the user count going down.
- I expect it is natural that there is a tipping point, where there is enough content that it becomes engaging for others. It's like going to a house party. The first few people to arrive at the party awkwardly stand around and might leave early. Once there is the right number of people, the group dynamic shifts and the entire energy of the party is elevated. The Exodus brought a lot of curious visitors, but everyone was standing around. Now there's engaging content and comments are growing. Some of those who stopped by in June will likely come back at some point if they left early -- I did the same thing in the early days of Reddit. I think there's been a large enough influx to kick things off and I expect things to continue to grow, but the active user count was probably inflated significantly over the past couple of months and will be resetting to more reasonable numbers.

Been posting on masto since lemmy.world keeps getting outages. New posts seem infrequent on the sorting algorithms. I'm sure once the hardware hiccups die down it will stabilize

I'm just incompetent all around 💁

Those are pretty good numbers

Lemmy feels, some days, like its bots all the way down. Just reddit repost bots everywhere.

I feel like this was a lot of lemm.ee for a while, which is why sunarus is clamping down on that.
Lots of other communities out there though!

Yeah this was always going to happen after a big rush. On any website a certain % of users that sign up won't like it and will move on. If you have a steady influx of users, you wouldn't notice it, but because of lemmys explosive growth due to reddit shitting its pants, then just like we saw a tonne of people leave at once, were now seeing a tonne of people leave at once, and now that that explosive user growth is normalising, for a short time we will see an overall decline in users until the amount of leavers normalises as well.

If were still losing people in a month, then we should be worried.

Average mass is too mid to come out of their "none is here" mindset for most superior alternatives.

Can someone normalize facebooks active use chart over the same time range?

Some of those will be bots or trolls or just shitheads in general so no great loss

I'm very interested to see where it settles. It should give in indication of what percentage of people are able/willing to use lemmy in it's current state.

The fediverse is such a cool project but it can be pretty rough from a usability standpoint.

quality over quantity: trash users can find their way out

¿Se consideran como activos los que solo entran para leer y votar? Pues no comentan pero rien y no paran de reir. No hay que fiarse tanto de los números sino mas bien de la naturalidad, neutralidad y originalidad de respuestas.

Are those who only enter to read and vote considered as assets? Well, they don't comment but laugh and they don't stop laughing. You should not trust the numbers so much but rather the naturalness, neutrality and originality of responses.

Maybe that's because it's a terrible platform full of self-important geeks and incels?

Why are you here then? Shoo
You are getting heavily down voted but honestly there is some truth to it, just may be phrased less extreme. There are too many people here who are really stuck in their techie bubble and seem to have little to no understanding of what the general population actually wants or likes or needs.