Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.
It's been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy's crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I'm posting screenshots because they're a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.
Because I'm posting on lemmy.ca, I'll post quite a few related to this instance, but it's probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I'll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison -- biggest server, and original server.
First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.
First observation -- there's some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it's probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:
Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.
I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.
Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.
In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.
And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.
Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn't flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.
I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!
Personally I love Lemmy as is, and as long as it doesn't die out, I don't care if it goes mainstream. The mainstream has a lot of apathetic trolls and idiots - Lemmy feels like early reddit did, when it was just nerds, techies, pirates, and the servers were down every day - but Lemmy is better because we rallied around open source this time
Thanks for sharing this, this is really interesting.
My hope is that when Reddit announces their IPO, more people will start talking about wishing for alternatives. I hope this motivates a few people who checked it out and left and lots of new people to take a first look, and when they do I hope they find an already active community that produces enough content to retain more people and generate more content.
Looking at the rest of the data (especially the sustained linear increase in posts across the whole network), I'm increasingly skeptical that the drop in "active users" is really all that meaningful. Speaking for myself, when the big migration happened I created three accounts on different instances, but I've found myself only consistently using one of them. If a significant percentage of the rest of you did similar, that means there could've been what looks like a huge drop in the number of "active users" even though the number of actual people using the platform remained the same!
I’ve tried to go back to Reddit here or there, and I literally can’t do it. I only visit it for very select communities that don’t exist here.
The post frequency isn’t the same here, but the quality of the posts and the comments is so much higher. I’ve said this before, but current Lemmy reminds me of Reddit in the early 2010’s before it got shitty. One of the great things about early Reddit was that it was more mature, people tended to assume good intentions more often, and it promoted logical dialogue. That has VERY MUCH been lost in Reddit’s current incarnation.
Sweet post. To me this looks like the makings of a sustainable community and I remain pretty optimistic. Curious what the numbers for Kbin would look like.
I'm here because of the API stuff, I was a reddit sync user so when sync made their Lemmy app I joined.
Honestly Lemmy feels much more confusing than Reddit used to, I don't fully understand the federation stuff and different worlds or whatever, I imagine there's a lot of people confused about it like me.
I'm happy to stay and contribute but I think I need to figure out how to use this on my desktop because I only check Lemmy because of the sync android app.
Any tips on how to get started migrating my experience to desktop? Like I literally don't know what URL I would go to.
Witnessing Lemmy grow in real time is the best way to say it's natural growth. We had no clients, laggy servers, downtime and bare as bones communities.
It'll take years to get a decent chunk of Reddit users.
I think these numbers are really good. I was using Memmy client before and for some reason it always displayed lower than actual count of comments on posts, so I had the impression that activities were really dying down. I wouldn’t click a post to go to comments because I thought there were barely any, so I would scroll through everything so fast that for a while I stopped browsing altogether. Feels nice to be back - with a different account because lemm.ee started having a weird bug for logging in
That's nice. Reddit just needs to fuck up once again and we'll maybe double again in users, then lose half of those that joined and be at 50% from now.
Once Forgejo and Gitlab have ActivityPub, more services like Wordpress and Flipboard activate it, and kbin/mbin/lemmy/mastodon becomes able to interact with them, then we might see some organic growth. If we get to a point where people don't even know they're part of the fediverse yet interact with it naturally, then maybe we'll see explosive growth.
All in time though. There's no rush.
I want to see the hexbear numbers to compare. It is funny to me how people can't let go of the language of a product that needs to be sold for a community run website provided for free. Engagement, growth, click thrus, daily average users all don't really matter as long as the people running it enjoy what they are doing and the people who show up do too.
If it is not fun for you that is a real issue, but you're not going to make it fun by chasing the tactics to grow a able-to-be-monetized product like attracting a large amount of teenager activity for example.
I find the plateau quite puzzling (lemmy.world, but the total looks very similar):
There was quite a steep increase, and then it suddenly stopped.
I would rather expect it to slow down, than to stop that abruptly.
We're looking at a fairly large group of people making a decision to create an account on Lemmy. There are plenty of reasons to expect it to be fuzzy. Even if they all responded to one particular event in time, some would have done so immediately, others the next day, few more even later.
I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between.
My understanding is they started counting votes as activity.
The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest.
Makes sense that people who care enough to look into smaller instances would be more committed.