Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
In the wake of [recent controversy surrounding Reddit's new API charging...
I'd love to see some stats on reddit engagement now. Anecdotally, I logged in just to look at my usual subreddits (the ones that are open) and they seem dead.
I use RSS to get feeds for subs that are not active in lemmy.
Many posts are dog shit level now. Either looking for help or just garbage.
Check out r/lemmino lol.
Yep. I feel like all of the high-value like high-quality posters are now here or elsewhere and are done with reddit. I used to post a ton on reddit, even across multiple accounts. Now I just post here. lol
The bots won't stop. And probably have increased. So it'll be tough to see without slices we'll never get
That's the punchline that makes me chuckle when I read how "little impact" the protests and migration have had.
Here's a little secret: Reddit mods can't know for sure which accounts are bots. They can suspect, but they're no easy, reliable proof. Reddit admins, though, know exactly which accounts are bots — they just prefer keeping that info to themselves.
For me, that triggers a great big "Hmmmm".
And they'll never differentiate them. If their investors know how much of their traffic was just bots they'd divest immediately
So I saw this on mastodon ... and it's a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.
There's a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the "old" platform has become since "we" left. In reality, it's not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this "hellscape deadness" is.
I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I'm writing this just in case it's healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that's actually changed, though you might not know if you've arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!
A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven't come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they'll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible "boos".
It doesn't matter what Reddit's doing or whether they're doing well. It matters if we're doing well ... as cheesy as that might sound.
I'm wondering how much of that is bots.
Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.
I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.
I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.
I made the mistake of reading comments on one thread (I moved here full time) on r/Iamatotalpieceofshit about landlords.
It's turned into a capitalistic hell hole, not only some of the horrible comments you read but also just need to look at the way the votes go, I felt disgusted tbh.
They bootlick way more than they admit they do.
I doubt it made a dent. 250k doesn't even register on the map of 100m active users.
I think that which 250k migrated will eventually end up making quite a significant dent. It isn't the technophobic lurkers that make up the Lemmy early adopters.
It's only about 50k active. The rest are all bots.
Basically this. I guess the people leaving Reddit are evened out by simply rounding the resulting values before rendering them into a graph.
Wish someone would create a bot to copy r/HyruleEngineering to the community here.
You can request that on lemmit.online if I remeber the name of the instance correctly
My local area sub is still pretty active, but I did notice that in the other subreddit the comments section is a lot more sparse.
They are probably confused about how to use an app that behaves like an ad carousel
I think having a link aggregator is going to be so great for the fediverse. It allows us to gather content from all over the internet and bring to to the often secluded fediverse.
It also means we can post links to fediverse discussions and draw people in.
Like lmmy.to?
Hopefully soon, along with an API for kbin (since I'm there and want it too lol).
Awaiting Boost for Lemmy, but I'm happy with Connect for now.
So far, all the lemmy apps I've used are in very early stages and quite buggy. Currently enjoying WefWef (PWA / web-based app) which I like the best.
Looking forward to Sync, though!
They’ve progressed very rapidly. Personally I don’t think we’re still in the “very buggy” era. I’m participating daily without major issues. There’s just a lot left to build.
I like how open it is, their git is pretty active and we get updates almost daily.
Not sure when you last tried Jerboa. It really shit the bed during the Lemmy 0.18 transition period but it's been working a lot better since Jerboa v38 and is quite smooth.
I just use the mobile web interface. Good enough for now.
I enjoy Connect, fast and works well!
started using Liftoff since today I'm quiete like it. better than Jerboa i used before and is almost "there" to where i would want it to be.
!memmy@memmy.ml is great on iOS
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !memmy@lemmy.ml
Memmy gang rise up 😤
Second. It's the one I use exclusively now.
Thunder has been amazingly stable for me. I've tried everything else for android and they all stagger with loading, while thunder is buttery smooth.
Voyager is great too but I find it struggles keeping its place if you scroll as much as I do.
Voyager definitely needs to add some loading/activity indicators and implement better separation between interface and data fetching. But it's definitely the cleanest UI I've tried so far.
Connect works well for me.
started using Liftoff since today I'm quiete like it. better than Jerboa i used before and is almost "there" to where i would want it to be.
started using Liftoff since today I'm quiete like it. better than Jerboa i used before and is almost "there" to where i would want it to be.
Memmy is working very well
I just wished the Lemmy API docs were better lol.
Yeah, that's a problem with a lot of FOSS passion projects. We devs kinda like writting code, but not really documenting it. Hopefully with the influx of devs helping that will improve
I don't think that is contained to FOSS passion projects ;)
I don’t really like all the LLM hype, but I’m hoping that documentation will eventually be generated by some open source model, with human verification
Maybe we'll eventually get the corresponding influx of tech writers.
I think that this line of reasoning becomes less and less tenable when things like Swagger exist.
It's like almost every piece of software, period.
I just wished the Lemmy API docs were better lol.
Finnegans Wake makes more sense than Lemmy API docs. Even calling it "documentation" is a stretch.
I literally had to clone the Lemmy git repo and read the source code to find the implementation of an API endpoint and see how it worked for a script that I was writing.
These days the standard is to create an API Doc out of a OpenAPI document generated from the code itself. Someone will probably contribute to it at some point.
Fediverse software API documentation is bad across all fediverse software.
Nah doesn’t sleep in the gutter.
He sleeps in his multimillion dollar bunker
Seriously: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
Someone should make a list of people who have invested in this... you know for reasons.
Oh yeah he's one of those guys. Of course.
Infinity
Infinity is becoming Infinity for Everything Threadiverse
Ribbit
Should be interesting to see how the fediverse in general handles more traffic, as we’ve seen with kbin and lemmy over the last month or so there are certainly some growing pains
at least we are making the most of our new space here, we all seem to be building something fun here
I don't think lemmy is still growing. I might be wrong but this graph https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
is trending down and i've seen a lot of smaller magazines/communities that haven't had any posts for 1-2weeks by now.
I try to help that problem at little but i doubt lemmy&kbin has 100k active users right now.
Lemmy will still be receiving stragglers. E.g. I only signed up yesterday! I only went on Reddit once every few weeks or so, and thus only just found out where my communities had migrated to. I’m sure there are many users like me who haven’t yet followed their communities to their new homes.
They might be using some smoothing, because all lines are noise-free. and the last point might just be an artifact. It looks like a constant growth
According to the graph it accounts for active users within the last 30 days. 30Days ago the reddit strike started and an influx of people started posting. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people haven't been here since. There was a lot of performance and other issues with lemmy&kbin at that time.
I think it is currently growing, as in more people will visit tomorrow than did today, but also it has shrank since a couple weeks ago when everyone was hyping it up as a reddit alternative and trying it out. Not everyone who came to try it has stayed.
A lot of people just want the endless scroll. No need to comment or post, just consume the posts. They would go back to Reddit for now because Lemmy is not a decade old content machine.
The dip is attributable to kbin which has some weirdness around active user counts, largely because they don't keep track of them, so I'm not surprised that their numbers might vary somewhat over time.
Otherwise, yea, it'd be accurate to say that the migration wave has come to an end. Mastodon went through multiple waves over the years so we'll see what happens from here. I for one am rather happy with how lemmy (and kbin) have turned out and am not desperate that a hole bunch more people come over.
My biggest concern is that there isn't more cross talk between lemmy and mastodon, and that's because the fediverse is yet to actually do a good job of making the boundaries between platforms thinner. There are many conversations going on in parallel that would be happy to connect but can't because the fediverse hasn't worked out a way to make that work well (yet).
EDIT:
My biggest concern is
n'tthat there isn't
A one-day minor downtick isn't a trend when it's been up day-over-day for a while now. I'm sure the user counts will ebb and flow over time, but as long as the community stays healthy and the big social media companies keep being greedy, I think this platform has a good shot at long-term viability.
Need to wait a bit I guess and look at the trends over a larger period of time instead of more granular time scales.
As I type, it says 130k active users (updated hourly)
I think that's normal. People will try out Lemmy but if they notice that the communities they frequent doesn't have a lot of content they'll just leave back to reddit.
We can hope for organic growth but it'll take a long time (especially with how big reddit is)
I think what you're seeing is stagnation or downtrends in certain communities, but still growth. As more people come to Lemmy they are finding the instance that works the best for them. lemmy.world has the biggest user base. They will continue to grow while others shrink as people want to be where the action is. This may fluctuate or change in the future.
Yeah, I see the same but the community sprawl was vast there in early June. There appears to be a pretty healthy base forming. Pruning dead communities does need to happen somehow though. A admin tool is gonna need to be likely.
Those were going to leave left by now, but there are several alternatives. Lemmy didn't take all Reddit refugees.
That’s OK. Lemmy doesn’t need to be huge and we have had a lot of apps developed for it and there have been a lot of donations to help the platform grow. I think it is large enough now to survive and will slowly grow over time.
Just wait for the next big Reddit mistake. People will come over to Lemmy again and it will be a better place than last time.
I think people are because of the latest trends in social media thinking that you need to be huge to be successful. While you do need a certain threshold of people, semi-anonymous social media really doesn't need to be that big. Just big enough to sustain enough little bit niche communities. That doesn't just need users it needs time. People have this habit of hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. And while I am not able to mod because IRL, I am still looking into niche communities here to see if I can help in some way as contributor. Just need to get through my imposter syndrome in that I don't really feel good enough for comment creator.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73 -- try this one instead. Click on the major instances and then check "active users this month" or "posts" or "comments" and you'll see that it's doing quite well in terms of the content snowball.
Estimated active users is about 70k on Lemmy. Not sure about kbin. However, active on Lemmy means posted or commented, so the lurkers should be higher.
Kbin probably only has around 20k active users, Lemmy has about 70k. And I'm not sure kbin federation is working perfectly either. If you're looking for more content I'd recommend making a lemmy account, it's possible that you're not seeing everything from your kbin account.
I’ve been using the Memmy app and it does a decent job of improving the experience for an Apollo refugee, makes the transition away from Reddit much easier
Go and find about about Voyager! https://vger.app/
So this was wefwef right, before it was rebranded as Voyager? Really impressive for a web app
Memmy is fantastic and the developer pushes updates to TestFlight almost daily.