Number of (active) Lemmy users seems to stabilize and I think this is a great thing. Indeed we got a lot of users when reddit shutdown its API (I was among them despite being a long time oss user), many have left, but the community seems now to stabilize to ~ ½ of the big grow in june '23. I think this is very nice for lemmy, we can be proud of this project.
The stats come from: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
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I’m from a time on the internet when a sizable forum had a few thousand people registered and a few hundred active users. For people who want a 1:1 replacement for high volume, endless scrolling social media I guess any decline is bad. But frankly I am extremely “retvrn” about the pace and size of the old internet, so I’d still be happy with even fewer users, lol.
For me it’s more about something with the potential to undermine the deathgrip of facebook, twitter, etc from our societies, in an attempt to partially address the steady increase in utter braindead stupidity and mindless vitriolic hatred stemming from profit-driven algorithmic control of our broader information ecosystem.
That requires the eventual growth of a decentralized sister ecosystem of sorts, able to act as a viable competitor. So, to compete with the giants, that’s basically a fairly significant chunk of everyone. On Earth.
Fortunately you can always just defederate the highest population centers, I imagine that would become very common eventually. Especially if they tried monetization or something, which would probably not be unheard of with larger userbases.
All that said, I do feel you and also personally like smaller communities. But I’ll just move to one once World gets too big.
I completely agree with that, while at the same time just moving everyone that’s on Facebook/Xitter/Reddit/etc onto here just sounds like an absolute nightmare. 😂 I’m here to get less of that shit, the same way the internet in general was an escape for me before the age of mass social media.
In an ideal world I would love for mass social media to be broken up by the fediverse, just preferably where I don’t have to see it. That’s why I’m on Blahaj ✌️
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Ostensibly they were often themed around one thing, but the ones I hung around had most of the activity in general conversation subforums rather than niche interest ones. In that way I don’t feel it’s dissimilar to lemmy.
I set up multiple profiles on different instances as there were quite a few downtime events when I started. Now things are a little more stable and I only use two. I wonder how much of that decline is from redundant profiles going dark without actually losing the user.
… good point. I have a lemmy.ca alt for this exact reason.
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I chose mander.xyz and feddit.nl partially because neither require an email address. I haven’t really kept track of who all they have and have not defederated from. I think both don’t defederate much. I use the block feature in Connect liberally to remove the communities I don’t care to see, like the tankies.
Take those graphs with a grain of salt. There are several websites that track activity and all of them show different results. I also assume that almost every lemmy update affects these graphs, since things did break quite a few times.
This is from the official lemmy site join-lemmy. It says 820 Servers, 41k Active users
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This is from fedidb (same site the screenshot from the post comes from). 923 Servers, 39,832 Active Users and 433,819 Total Users
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Then we have fediverse.observer. Based on that graph, monthly active users are growing. 845 Servers and 43,631 Active users and 1,944,442 Total Users
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And finally we have lemmyverse. Which uses the method to find the “sus” servers and users, so 863 Servers and 1,741,848 Actual Users
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To me personally it seems like the content is becoming more regular and better in quality overall. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah of course, it depends on the method and lot of things. Anyway, I agree with you, I’m happy with the content and the spirit of the users (less trolls and haters than on reddit or commercial social networks, more like the internet users I knew late 90s or beginning 2000s).
What defines an active user?
Up through Lemmy version 0.18.5, “active” meant posting or commenting within a specified timeframe (past month, past year, etc.). Starting with version 0.19.0 voting also counts as being active.
Starting with version 0.19.0 voting also counts as being active.
aka, the lurkers 👀
I’ve always upvoted both posts that are on topic to the community and always to people who take the time out of their day to reply.
It’s like common courtesy to me and votes are like free confetti anyways.
So I suppose the OP’s figures are, off.
Yep, there must be lots of uncounted lurkers. If you look at the active user charts at The Federation there was a spike in December when 0.19.0 released. I expect we’ll see more spikes as additional instances upgrade to 0.19.
I am uncounted, but next month I will be active!
Interesting. It’s not really relevant to this graph because it only shows one instance but I’d be curious to see what percentage of Lemmy’s total active users are people with multiple accounts on different instances
I suspect abandoned alt accounts are a huge reason for the long, slow decline in user numbers. These graphs should be titled “active accounts,” not “active users.”
Different sites use different ways of calculating but often a user is considered active if they posted anything in x amount of days.
Users active in the month. Likely only people who have posted or commented.
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imo biggest thing to watch going into this year is whether or not the groups rework on Mastodon (currently listed as in-progress on their roadmap) improves federation between the two communities. At this point, how well a service federates with the larger network is probably the single most important aspect with regards to establishing natural growth. Not surprising as the strength of the fediverse is fundamentally interoperability.
Im not sure how up to date that roadmap is, but the pull request for group support in Mastodon has been open for 1.5 years now. And for reasons I dont understand it was made intentionally incompatible with Lemmy. So dont get your hopes up.
Roadmap is updated recently. They did a poll to establish priorities given the recent surge in users sometime around November.
Coming back to this topic after some time. What do you think about the private group criticism of FEP-1b12? Is this resolvable without leaving the standard set by FEP-1b12? My first instinct is yes, but I imagine you’ve given this a lot more thought than I have.
Private groups are definitely possible, in fact we are planning to implement them in Lemmy soon. I already made a pull request for local only communities which is a first step in this direction.
Many had and have multiple accounts due to federation shenanigans. The actual userbase might have actually grown despite significantly lower numbers compared to the peak.
It took me a while to find an instance that I liked. I’m sure I counted as multiple active users until recently.
In reality, I’m the same one human who has been accessing the same servers.
Fuck this means I should start finding things to post, doesn’t it?
Or does commenting count?
Those beans ain’t going to post themselves. Get to it.
Ooof… That is terrible. Only decline. I expected it to grow at least slowly, but this is just sad. And makes the dozen (niche even) duplicate sublemmies even worse. One sublemmy for every person to take to themselves.
One nice part of this is that the current level means that the next big event causing a wave away from Reddit will hold onto more people, since there’s content here for them to see and read. When the last big batch came over 6 months ago, it was pretty bare and a lot of people left immediately.
Oh well, just wait till inevitably reddit does something stupid again and those numbers will go sky high again.
Also, if twitter where to fail eventually and a lot of people join mastadon, I think the amount of people using lemmy would also go up because people get familair with the fediverse.
There was a huge surge of people on reddit creating accounts driven by the API saga, it wasn’t natural growth. The normal expectation is that most people would only stick around a short time. Having 50% remaining after the peak is honestly impressive! I’d expect it to continue falling for a while but eventually it should start to rise when natural growth exceeds the attrition from that event.
Eh it’s only just stabilized, now is exactly when we’d expect efforts for natural growth to become active. Worth noting, at this point growth probably comes from Mastodon not Reddit.
Do the instances not interact with each other? Is it like playing a game in a different server and youll never see your friends in the game? Idk how it works
No, that’s not how it works. Instances absolutely interact, that’s the whole idea of federation. It can get more complicated than that if you want to get into the details of how it works, but that knowledge isn’t in any way necessary to just use the platform.
So all lemmy servers can communicate with eachother, unless a server decided to “defederate” with another which cuts the connection.
Futhermore, mastodon and other fediverse projects can also communicate with lemmy and back, but since the format of the posts and comments is a bit different this might take some work for the devs to get working completely correctly.
They are (mostly) federated, which means that users from one can see what’s on the others. There are a few exceptions to this, primarily for extremist content which are not federated with most of the other servers.
All four of the replies to your comment (as of now) are from users on different instances.
While the other replies are not incorrect, what they describe is users on Reddit posting on different subreddits.
What I am talking about are lots of niche subreddits (many even about the same topic!) thus that out of the few people that are here, there is simply no content, let alone discussions of the present content.
I wouldn’t be surprised if further enshitification leads to periodic bumps.
