It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
EDIT: Dedicated discussion over here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573
Definitely
The small comms I’m subscribed to don’t show up in any sorting, I have to actually visit them to see there was a new post. I heard the devs are doing something to improve it, so hopefully that’ll make small comms more viable
A thing to look out for is that the microblog fedi (outside the big handful of instances that fill .world’s role there) is strongly in favor of stricter instance-level moderation compared to the more “individualistic” view a lot of the Reddit migratees tend to have. If we want people from the microblog fedi to participate we (collectively) need to up our moderation game. (And in my personal opinion instances like .world have grown too large to accomodate any reasonable expectation of moderation, except for select individual communities set up there)
Improved moderation tools would help, however are you familiar with the filtering/muting tools available on Mastodon/Firefish/Misskey? These, coupled with an ability by individual users to block entire instances, help relieve some of the need for more moderators to help by enabling individuals to essentially self-moderate/curate their experiences as desired.
I think both improved moderation and individual filtering/muting tools would help greatly both to encourage microblog folks to join in, and make the experience better for those already here.
I definitely think letting users block posts and/or comments from specific instances is way better than full defederation (maybe the instance admin could set a default block list for new users)
but now I’m thinking maybe communities should be able to block instances too
found a feature request for it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3022
This is a good point. Maybe indicates that recruiting to instances like beehaw.org would be more effective. Once they’re here though I think that is exactly the sort of community that would be likely to take on moderator positions.
The standard web UI also needs major improvements. Nobody logs in through an app for their first time and first impressions are critical. It needs to be easier to navigate and use without downloading an app so people will stick around long enough to get involved and have a good time.
I actually think the web ui is fine but we all have our own blindspots. How do you feel about Alexandrite and Photon? I had good initial impressions of Alexandrite but some minor issues with Photon. Instances could just make those defaults.
What issues did you notice in Photon?
Oh man this is what I get for running my mouth. I’m not sure if my issues are reproducible or if I can even remember well enough to go about trying to reproduce them. I know that’s not very useful and I apologize. I will say that I think a sans serif font option would be nice to have.
It uses your system font.
That’s probably just broken on my system then because it is definitely not using my system font. I’m on a chromebook if that’s useful at all.
Is it fixed on phtn.app? I pushed an update that hopefully fixes this. It uses system-ui so hopefully it isn’t broken
Thank you so much for your work
Yep fixed now!
Yeah I am a software dev and was even confused for a bit. Reddit has /r/all and things that make it easier to find subreddits, I still struggle with lemmy sometimes. Sync made it a bit easier, but I wish I could seamlessly browse all instances and their comments under 1 profile