Per the title, is Lemmy actually growing, or will it stagnate and fade into obscurity like many other similar discussion boards?
I’m working on a way to tell, but man, I’m bad at actually finishing projects.
Okay, logging off to work on it.
I ran a BBS back in the day with like 200ish? users. Engagement was way more valuable than growth. More people makes things harder, not easier. More engagement from less people is easier to manage, and leads to better communities.
Lemmy feels the same.
Lemmy is for discourse. I’d rather see the healthy and interesting back and forth of an OP and commenter than 5K up votes.
I moved here during rexit and love it, but Lemmy isn’t popular in my country. That’s the reason I need other communities for local news and why Lemmy is not my everyday comunity.
Same I’d like to see the south African community on here grow
Do you speak Afrikaans? I’m an American who has a weird fascination with the worlds coolest Germanic language.
According to fedidb.org, Lemmy has plateaued at around 43k active users over the past year.
If you ask me, though, it doesn’t matter. The Lemmy ecosystem is active and healthy.
I was about to agree with you and then add that people like me who more lurk and upvote may count as inactive because we don’t comment or post much. I just noticed that the chart only shows up to November of last year. I suspect several new people such as myself have finally found Lemmy given all that is going on and we’ll see that in the charts in a couple months.
I believe that the newest Lemmy versions count up/down voting as ‘active’
I am also more of a lurker, but try to comment occasionally to get into the statistics. (Done for this week!)
Lurkers unite!
At the back of the community.
Where we watch and only occasionally post the odd comment… When we feel like it. Maybe tomorrow.
I’m pretty sure that votes count towards the MAU.
Wow… there wasn’t more posters during the election, people just posted more?
Does it have to?
Maybe a bit would be nice, but I don’t want it to grow as big as Reddit got.
I mean it always will grow a little bit over time
I would say yes, because as is the real niche communities dont have the size for larger discussions.
Mainstream communities e.g. about global news already have a decent size. And in many ways it doesn’t make much of a qualitative difference if there are 500 or 10.000 predictable comments. But many smaller communities are still mostly propped up by a few power users providing the majority of content which is not ideal for many reasons.
So from what I’ve seen on Lemmy over the last year is that the quantity of posts and variety of topics feels like it’s going up. I certainly enjoy engaging on here.
Will it stagnate? I’m not sure. It might be that the monthly user levels stabilise but thats not the same as stagnate. If people are engaged and enjoying their time then it has value.
My feeling is that Lemmy will slowly grow over time. I don’t see it becoming a huge platform like Reddit anytime soon. Its feasible but it feels like for now it will remain niche.
But I also dont want to it suddenly become huge. I was on reddit for a long time and I saw it evolve from being something small and interesting to a behemoth and enshittification to make money. Small is sometimes better, and small or stable in no way means stagnation.
I agree, it’s improved quite a bit from over a year ago. I hope it doesn’t get too big. I personally like only logging in once every two days and being able to see everything important. Less content makes it much less addictive than reddit was.
What we really need is for people to put up topic focused sites and promote them as their own thing, not jusy “lemmy”. So many specific interests still have very active forums dedicated to them, populated by the kind of people who want to ask queations aboht and discuss the things they have interest or expertise in, but who aren’t into things like Reddit.
The fediverse is perfect for places like that. Places where you can focus on your primary interest, but also look over the fence. But all anyone wants to do is put up general interest sites and whine about there being more than one “gaming” forum.
So many specific interests still have very active forums dedicated to them, populated by the kind of people who want to ask queations aboht and discuss the things they have interest or expertise in
I hope these types of sites eventually switch off of software like phpBB and move to software like Lemmy/Mbin
Maybe someone should make a database migration tool so posts/comments/users can be retained
The quality of discourse is better since a year a go by a lot. Some home brew drama too.
It feels lived in now. The active users engage more. Growth for social media comes in burst anyways.
Reddit needs to do something bad again. Tiktok enjoyer is not the target audience for apub protocol based social media.
One thing is that kbin/mbin/piefed/etc…etc… interact with lemmy all the time. Its getting a bit hazy if “lemmy” the platform is growing or if the entirety of the fediverse is growing and others are communicating with the software. We are now seeing quite a few accounts from all over the web interacting with lemmy communities. Is that a new “user” according to the stats? Or is that person a one off from mastodon?
What I a seeing is a general increase in discussion on the platform and increase in posts from all over the fediverse. Which is awesome!
It seems to be on a healthy state, there are some communities that I would like to have more content. But that’s also on me to share and contribute to the communities I would like to see.
Being a bystander on reddit for so long it’s a bit difficult to change that mindset, but I’m trying to share a bit more
Me too! Sometimes I forget that I can participate in the discussion and even post cool stuff I’m doing. After all, that’s the whole point of this kind of community.
I feel like the content is becoming more robust and the userbase is keeping up. I think it’s going to be super necessary pretty soon down the road.
I moved to Lemmy during the reddut exodus itsjustt become better overtime I don’t miss reddit at all. Also lots of fellow Linux and free software nerds over here and I like that.
Heck yeah!
I can be very critical of the fediverse, especially where I want it to do better, but I think stagnation isn’t the right word I think ‘maintaining’ fits more. The fediverse isn’t beholden to the grow or die model capitalist projects need and it remains a space that is unique enough to warrant people coming back here, or coming here for certain reasons or content or whatever. I think the model to hope for would be continue maintaining and being ready for when the next group of people get fed up enough to follow through and come here (fediverse in general)
I find it kinda concerning how the number of instances is shrinking and number of users per instance is going up. IMO it should be part of the fediverse design to incentivize decentralization to avoid a gmail situation.
Also worrying is that the number of Active Users is trending constant or slightly down, but the number of posts over time is climbing dramatically. To me, this could be a sign of inauthentic behaviour on the rise.
Hexbear? Really?
after the grad and .ml, hexbear is the oldest lemmy instance it pre-dates federation by over 2 years
This is just absolute number total posts and they’re a shitposting heaven that existed for 4 years before the big reddit exodus. In monthly posts they’re still in the top 10 iirc but not 2nd
Ahh that makes sense. I thought it was a troll instance from all the Redditors
More the opposite, Hexbear is just a Leftist community that started from a much earlier exit from Reddit.
It’s very active, but also a lot older than many other instances.
Total post doesn’t really tell us much. Of course there’s going to be more posts over time. Hell there are Bots that post things. That number is going to go up as long as the servers exist. There could be no human users on here and those are going to go up.
When you sort by monthly active users, this is what you get:
What really jumps out to me is the fact .ml’s active users equals the total users. Not too sure what to make of it. I’d assume the mod’s delete nonactive accounts after a set amount of time or it’s just relatively small based on total users but everyone’s visiting at least once a month.
It’s pretty obvious that .ml runs a custom version of the code because they are engaged in all parts of sketchy shit
This instance is the vanguard instance of Lemmy. AFAIK, all development is tested here and any improvements and new code is introduced first in lemmy.ml and it it succeeds is then spread. Lemmy.ml encourages everyone to use a different instance, because they lack of infrastructure fire a big community. Ideally, we should be mostly old accounts.
There’s a couple weird things about this re: lemmy.ml data - for instance, the fedidb entry for them specifically shows 147k total posts, but they don’t show up in the top 10.
Not sure what to make of that either.
sh.it.heads: “We’re number 5! We’re number 5!”
(me. I’m probably the only one chanting at this fact)
You’re server’s #3 when it comes to monthly active users too!
Genuine opinion: Who cares?
Who cares if what we enjoy is changing, at all. It’s kinda like if you go to a bowling alley, to go bowling. Do you show up and decide to bowl if there’s other people bowling or not? I’m gonna go bowling regardless, that’s why I went to the bowling alley.
No and I want it to stay that way
