Lemmy doesn’t provide any analytics. Give this post a like and/or comment if you use this instance. I’m trying to gauge usage by humans.
I’ll let this census run for about a week to gauge usage.
Results might cause different changes to the services.
I’m doing this because the cost of running this instance is higher than most other instances due to reliability and disaster recovery implementations. I’m curious if I should back down many of these costs if we’re not used fully. I don’t see much activity directly in this instance.
I know that discuss.online wasn’t listed on join-lemmy.org for about a month due to a bug with the Lemmy crawler. They just recently fixed it with their redesign. We are now listed but no longer featured.
tl;dr; is this instance dying? Let me know if you’re here.
I stopped using discuss.online as my home instance after it was unavailable through Sync for a month. 😕
And to be honest, it hasn’t seemed like discuss.online has a plan for growth and long-term sustainability? Like others have mentioned in the comments, I would have preferred to find an instance outside one of the big main ones to use as my home base. But as I’ve been using lemmy I keep finding different ways it feels like even with federation, it’s just easier to be on one of the big instances – especially for better search and availability of content.
Besides that, not having any revenue model other than donations doesn’t seem sustainable to me. And the wide array of technical issues (e.g. integrating analytics if they’re not already included) that pop up from lemmy still being so early in development seems to be beyond what a single administrator can reasonably handle.
I brought on an additional admin to help me out. This site will last. In fact, I’m working on a massive improvement to the Lemmy space. I have several volunteers from Lemmy.world helping out, too. It’ll make many of your points less concerning once it launches in about a month. I’m not quite ready to share to a broad audience what it is.
That is a fair point about the searching and ease of use. It would have made sense if people spread their communities around more; however, everything is in one place, so why not go to that one place? Everyone is either self-financed or earning through donations. I assume some of the instances won’t last.
I have a desire to grow. I bought ads on YouTube and other services to try to gain traffic. The problem is communities don’t want to be on more minor instances, and people follow communities. There isn’t much I can do about it. I’ve tried to create interactive communities and find mods to grow them, but it’s not working. I plan to keep running it; I’m excited about what I will bring to the community. I want to see it all succeed.