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 ✌️
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.
I wish I could view other instances as a guest. I love the voyager app so much but it doesn’t seem I can do this.
I don’t want ro set up loads of accounts just to browse.
I’m on lemm.ee which I think has de federated with a lot but still got the tankie subs. So I’ll be interested to know what I’m missing. Lemmy.world needs my email so that one can fuck off. Don’t know what else to choose.
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.
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.
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.
I am uncounted, but next month I will be active!
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.
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.”
Users active in the month. Likely only people who have posted or commented.
I wouldn’t be surprised if further enshitification leads to periodic bumps.
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).
