Not sure if this is the right place to post, but when the reddit protests were happening, I used Lemmy for a bit then decided to detox from “social media” for a while till now. Am I misinterpreting the activity here?
Users about halved in the ~3 months after the initial exile. It’s increased since then, but not yet to the point that it was at during the initial exodus.
Where the number at? I want to see for myself.
This is so depressing. I thought this was gonna be a cool little bubble. The bubble just pops… :(
I look at the reddit front page and everyone one in the comments are saying the posts on reddit are bot activity, which, at this point, I don’t doubt. Internet is dead. :(
It was an utter disaster in those first few months. I stuck it out only out of sheer stubbornness in not going back to Reddit. Lemmy.world was always down, federation was borked, it was just not ready for the big-time. Just what happens when your userbase balloons 30x inside of a month. Now we’re in a much better position to absorb new waves. The big thing is trying to get niche communities started on here - a bit of a arduous task. The mainstream communities are all pretty active at this point! And anything about Linux.
Lol I remember lemmy.world got hacked and they put some weird “FBI Seized This” stuff on it. Also Lemmy shitpost had some um… illegal images or so I’ve been told. What a wild start.
I love the piracy community. No need to fear corporate crackdowns for now. This place is awesome. Well awesome place for me to vent in, cuz of um… recent political events. :(
I dont want to talk to people on reddit, seems like its just bots. I like how Lemmy has bot fiter applications on many instances. Fuck the bots.
Oh yeah, there were a whole bunch of issues early on. I’d completely forgotten about that particular incident. I think some of the instances had to wipe several weeks of their image caches over it. I forget what the exact solution was, but apparently there’s some technical aspect to preventing such things that’s been implemented now.
dbzer0 is kind of ‘the’ piracy instance. Run by an anarchist, a good egg, db0.
.world here is kind of the ‘normie’ instance, very left-wing by US standards, but centrist by European standards.
And even if you DO post in small communities, half the time it’s a toss-up as to whether anyone will see it.
I’m not sure about lemmy, but reddit was roughly 50% US users, so it was a good bet that if you timed posts for “early morning” US browsing or “after work” EU browsing, your post would do well.
Idk lemmy’s demographic breakdown, but it seems more generalized (imagine that, a diverse fediverse!) around the world, so it’s hard for me to tell when the most users will be active.
The other thing is that I recall that kbin.social exploded and got a huge chuck of the exodus - but now that it’s been effectively dead for half a year, those users mostly seem to have vanished.
A fraction clearly did migrate to other mbin and lemmy instances. It seems like the rest did not return to spez’s site from what I’m hearing (“all the posts I’m seeing there are complaining that only bots are active here”) but I’m not sure where they went. But for example, one person I was following seems to have dropped off entirely from the fediverse and all social media.
I migrated from kbin. My experience on the instance I am using has been different, but I wasn’t a big user before. I actually feel like there are more posts on some major areas now than a year ago summer, but I dont know about wholesale usage.
We get a few 100+ proper discussion threads daily and people sharing goof information a lot of times. Kinda like what reddit used to be.
Early on all was getting spammed endlessly with meme reposts.
Thanks for sharing. I was never actually a reddit member, but I was a long time viewer. I probably don’t really know what reddit was like. Not as a member. I still use that one forum, but mostly I view here.
I thought maybe it was just my imagination that it’s been really slow since Wednesday, but you can see it clearly on the charts at the bottom of the page there.
May be all the propaganda bots going offline?
we are not relevant enough for propaganda bots lol
It’s still a cool bubble. The initial hype was bound to diminish, but it is still a cool little place. Has it’s own issues, but still. Here since the exodus, never looked back
I appreciate people like you.
Thanks!
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
be the change you want to see
Why is it depressing? Plenty of quality conversation to engage in, less bots so far. Feels more like the forum days, I love it.
The userbase is small but stable.
Not… entirely. In March we had 54k Monthly Active Users, while now we have only 45k, that’s a not-entirely-insignificant drop of 17% of users. Also, personally I’ve created some alts during that time-frame, so if others did similarly… the real drop could have been much larger.
Ofc, it could have been that people simply dropped their older alts and are now happy with fewer alts but the same number of people - but that gets to that very old argument that Galileo had with others about whether the moon was perfectly smooth (due to spiritual implications) or not: he observed that it was not, though others raised their objections and tried to counter with the notion that perhaps there were mountains on the moon… but that if so, surely the valley regions were covered with glass, so that the moon retains the property (again, for reasons of spiritual purity) of being a perfectly spherical object?
Ofc you can guess what Galileo said to that: surely there must indeed be glass on top of the valley regions, so that they fill in the height of the mountains with an equal height of the glass valleys, which we cannot see b/c they are made of glass, <eyeroll>, yes indeed “surely” that “must” be the case - but also, in addition to that, there is EVEN MORE glass on top of the mountains, height proportional to how tall they are, and while we cannot see that material either, that is what is causing the differences in shadows, which he could measure with his spyglass that he pointed upwards into the heavens.)
Moral of that fun story: we can conjecture such matters all day long, and how fun that would be for both of us! But at the end of the day, all we have are the facts and numbers in front of us, however imperfect they may be:-).
That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts? I am not 100% certain about that, or much of anything really, but pretty darn close b/c of how the “software” field seems to work on that site, with the other buttons like List and on a particular chosen instance to look at more details, the Main Data tabulation (and see e.g. https://mbin.fediverse.observer/piefed.social, click to expand the Main Data, and that JSON output has “softwarename”: “piefed”, but nothing at all with the text string “Lemmy” there).
The total number of Lemmy instances has also dropped 24%.
Although the total number of both posts and comments has gone up rather than down - so we see a lot more activity, from a significantly smaller number of people. I wonder how sustainable that is though, e.g. next year won’t be an election year in as many countries as this one was. Overall I am worried about the health of the Lemmyverse, though less worried than ever before about the health of the overall Fediverse b/c of the newer software alternatives that have and are still coming:-).
The drop is slowing down considerably:
Month Users Change from previous month in % Mar 53687 N/A N/A Apr 51298 -2389 -4.5% May 48832 -2466 -4.8% Jun 48472 -360 -0.74% Jul 47297 -1175 -2.4% Aug 47876 +579 +1.2% Sep 47227 -649 -1.4% Oct 45037 -2190 -4.6% Nov 44837 -200 -0.44% And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.
That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.
That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?
They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.
The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.
For people that enjoy using
Arch btwLinux, we’re good yeah. Although occasionally some of us will die or whatever, and we need to have some level of growth or else accept that we will pretty much just shrink from now onwards. i.e., people talk as if we will go mainstream, or rather as if content will spring up magically from nowhere. If we want the small niches like Reddit has, we would need the userbase first. And to get that, we’d have to ditch our toxicity issues, make the UI more functional, and above all else make better moderation tools. Which I am doubtful will happen as the Lemmy devs seem happy with their current pacing and direction of changes - that’s 99% fine with me btw, as it’s theirs to do with whatever they please; though I am all the more happy to now see the likes of PieFed grow much quicker, even though it started out so very much further behind.Fair point about PieFed being extremely tiny, and there are only 3 of them that are open to the public to join (https://join.piefed.social/try/) - though I am somewhat surprised to see the number of users for Mbin being so low. Yeah, I suppose they must be going back to Reddit, or perhaps Bluesky, or something else.
I am not sure how much to worry about the number of instances - on the one hand the long-anticipated 0.19.6 software release came out just today, which should fix the federation issues with Lemmy.World for many of them. On the other hand, smaller instances weren’t likely to want to pull down the entirety of the Fediverse to begin with, as an actual multi-user one (even if on the small side, like Discuss.Online or Aussie.Zone) would, plus once gone, wouldn’t we expect them to never come back, i.e. regardless of the software release today? So whatever turned them away… it would have been interesting to have known (though introverts would be the last to have offered such:-).
People coming here to rant about Reddit isn’t activity.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48
65k Monthly Active Users (MAU) in July 2023, 33k by November 2023, 44k now.
Ah so its not that bad, I was under the impression by your comment that it died like at 1k or less people lol
There’s a difference in how active users are counted now, too, so that skews the numbers. An active user used to be a user who posted or commented. Now voting makes a user active.
Really interesting that MAU number has been declining for past 3 months, but number of posts and comments has been balooning.
(The USA election surely - also talked about by people outside of the USA, e.g. I saw quite a few posts on lemmy.ml about it…)
I tried not opening Lemmy the last few weeks because of the flood of American politics. I’m sure many people felt the same.
Do you use all or subscribe to things? I have a good list of communities and I honestly don’t see much if any politics
All, yes. And I have blocked most of the communities that call themselves “News” or similar, but almost only post US politics as news. Yet it still trickles down into other communities.
Try going the other route, and explicitly subscribing to content you enjoy. From what I read you aren’t alone, that all is a firehouse and it’s not all fun. Subscribed to me is a much chiller experience
This is exactly it. I glance at All on Lemmy for maybe 2% of my time here, primarily to see if I can discover a new community that I didn’t previously know about to add to my collection.
But it’s true. The real Lemmy experience is in your subscribed communities.
Amazing way to approach it!
Just a wee bit afraid there would be just porn left after applying the “subscribe to me” rule 😉
A lot of that initial rush of users went back to reddit for one reason or another and I think lemmy is reaching equilibrium between where it was before the protests and the mass in rush during
Nah it’s been pretty busy. I don’t browse all and only sort by scaled and if I ever ran out of content I think I would be the problem haha
I’m subbed to a ton of stuff and my feed dries quickly. Even if I do browse all. I’m also new to the platform, so I’m probably doing something wrong?
Try using the “scaled” version while browsing all, it lets all the small stuff pop up too. Just be ready to religiously block communities without hesitation to get things curated how you want
Combining: bans, blocks, defederation, differing lemmy versions and federation bugs / glitches, you end up with a different view (sometimes for better or for worse) than someone on another instance
Going to new, or staying on hot?
Tried both. I get marginally more content via new. A lot of it is what’s in hot but in a different order. I’m on boost for lemme if that matters.
I feel like you’re just not subbed to enough stuff. That said I don’t spend more than an hour on here/my phone per day.
You were right. I found the trending sub channel and found a swathe of content.
I’ve found that sorting by New Comments is the best way to have a steady stream of interesting stuff on my feed at any given time.
I think activity spread out quite a bit. During the exodus everyone was posting into the same two and a half meme communities causing massive churn on the front page and giant threads, but now everyone has created and/or settled into their comfortable little corners so any particular portion of lemmy looks less active, while overall it’s larger.
I’m not sure about overall activity, but I do know my feed is active enough that i can’t read ALL of it unless I spend like an hour or more per day on here, and that’s plenty active for me.
I’ve found my participation slowly declining here on the Fediverse, and ramping back up again on Reddit. I think I’m never going to stop coming here entirely, there’s plenty of neat links that come along to explore, but the main thing that’s causing decline is that IMO the communities here are a lot “bubblier.” It’s probably inherent in the simple fact that they’re small, and that they’re populated by a very self-selected fragment of social media, but the result is that if I “say the wrong thing” I get pummeled with downvotes and snide comments a lot easier here. Makes it less interesting to comment at all. Some of Reddit’s communities are pretty insular too but at least there are enough of them that I can find ones to my taste.
As a major example that comes to mind, all of the technology communities I’ve found here seem to be quite strongly anti-AI. I have an interest in AI, but when I click through to the comments on stories about AI topics it’s often nothing but rants about how awful it is. And if I say anything - even to correct a factual error - I get piled on. So lately I just sigh and move on.
As a major example that comes to mind, all of the technology communities
I’ve blocked most of them a while ago. Still seems strange that there is no AI enthusiast community somewhere, that should definitely exist
Lemmy’s got some cool communities like !truecomics@midwest.social that don’t exist on Reddit, so I’m happy
Back then, !selfhosted@lemmy.world was one of the most active communities, LOL. There might be somewhat fewer people here right now, but at least the content has diversified somewhat since we settled in.
(Not that I dislike self-hosting, mind you. In fact I wouldn’t mind if that community were a little more active…)
People didn’t find what they wanted and/or went back to what was stable and familiar. I still am avoiding using reddit for anything except the subs related to people living in Japan (the community didn’t move over; a couple did but there were basically no posts very quickly) and when it shows up in some search result and nothing else has worked.
Maybe I have been a little less active, but that is because Sync for Lemmy is too broken to use.
My two best alternatives are Boost (currently using it) then Summit for Lemmy :)
Voyager has been working well for me.
It is great, but it never feels smoother than Summit, Boost or Sync :/
Especially while scrolling, swiping back posts or going to your subscriptions.
Try out Jerboa as well! Did it on day 1 of the exodus and had zero problems.
I can’t use Lemmy without mark as read on scroll and clear read posts (client side), are those both features on Jerboa?
Unsure, never heard of those.
which protests? there have been many.
Y’all know which one, the one that brought most of us here.
June 12, 2023, nothing happened on the front page, it was a peaceful day, there is no protest, carry on, internet user.
(It was June 12 right? My post-covid memory has been a bit blurry)
Edit: typo
us?
Us as in Lemmy Users who came from reddit
maybe, he’s not one of “us”.
