How is the size of Lemmy’s userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?
I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven’t seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?
Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)
In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!
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Anecdotally, the communities I’m interested in are getting more active in a way that seems sustainable (as opposed to last year, when it was a always a single person posting some, getting no responses, and leaving). I’m pretty positive about the state of Lemmy and the wider threadiverse.
Same here. It might be that the overall number of Lemmy users may be shrinking, but some of the communities I’m in are getting to a more sustainable level of activeness compared to automn.
Than you for your posts on [email protected] by the way
Thanks to you too! I see you in a lot of communities lol
Yeah, trying to jeep them active ha ha
Have a look here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
I didn’t know there were almost as many Germans as Americans, the majority of Reddit users were Americans which has created Americocentric perspective on a lot of topics which from a European perspective was quite annoying.
I did not verify my thoughts but I think this could be because ovh has big datacenters in Germany and quite a lot of Europeans use ovh.
fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I’ve seen it confuse North-American admins).
I think one of the Lemmy devs is German too
Yes that’s me :)
Thank you for your work.
Yeah open source seems to be a big thing in Germany specifically for some reason
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Why do the graphs look so weird?
Fuck me, pie charts with 50 segments??? Maybe they look weird because pie charts suck if you have more than 2-3 things to show
And the rest on the page don’t display well on mobile
Youre right - feel free to make and share a better Version. I think the community appreciates forks and contributions :)
No, I’m just here to sit in my armchair and judge other people’s design choices.
But on a serious note, I wouldn’t even know how. I barely played around in R but the only semi-legit data viz stuff I ever did was in Tableau. And that was only with static data
Not super tricky, they’re using ChartJS and with some very minimal tweaks to the config (aka changing “pie” to “bar”) the data would look like this!
edit: does look a bit awkward due to the huge difference in values. A logarithmic scale would look better, but is much more confusing.
Still look less awkward than pie charts. And yeah, I wouldn’t use a log scale for a viz unless it’s going into a professional publication
OMG, Pareto analysis… so sexy.
It just gives current stats, not historical trends. I don’t think it is any answer to OPs question.
EDIT: I was wrong, it was an issue on my side.
If you scroll down it does give historical trends on comments, posts, monthly active users, etc.
What I meant is why do the graphs look so janky.
For example:
What happened in October 2023 that made so many users join?
and
What happened in February 2024 that made so many people stop posting?
Edit: March -> February
Sept/Oct '23 was the Boost lemmy mobile client release. A lot of people signed up and many of them bounced off shortly after.
0.19 counts active users differently; prior to 0.19, the count is only if the user posted, after 0.19, all interactions results in the user being counted as an active user. This inflated the active users hugely as all lurkers are counted.
The active users is dwindling. You can see the steep drop off prior to the change and a slow but continued decline after the update.
I do not know the reason for the number of posts falling off, but that doesn’t look healthy either to be honest.
Thanks for the post. Something on my browser only shows the pie charts and doesn’t let me scroll down.
The graphs are all interactive (touch to show labels, etc.). That can interfere with scrolling—try dragging at the edge or one of the pie chart titles. Fwiw, it scrolls ok on mobile safari…
I mean there is a a graph about active users over the last months, so I would argue it does regarding user activity?
So basically, had a massive spike during the reddit blackout in July last year. Dropped down to half by November and has since shown fairly steady (if measured) growth. I think that’s a good sign.
What just happened to the number of servers? Did the admins just decide they want to go with quality over quantity? Or does it have something to do with political conditions?
Probably lots of people trying to start another general instance that didn’t draw any users and then deciding to shut it down. FWIW I think we have instances enough (from a users point of view, I don’t think it matters much whether there are 100 or 1000 instances). We could be spread over the instances more evenly though.
Lemmy is growing. Not exploding, but showing steady growth. It’s interesting because Lemmy tends to grow in sputters. The good thing is though, is that the growth is organic and after a bit of friction, we get new people that stick around.
Yeah, from the graphs above you can see that the number of monthly comments is growing, such is the main thing I suppose
Honestly, we don’t need content creators as long as we have good convos, like an actual forum.
That’s the thing I find beautiful about Lemmy. Take for example yesterday, I had a simple question about some networking equipment and it was like being Captain America in the lift, there were punches and kicks from all directions. But the punches and kicks were kindness and knowledge. It’s crazy how nice people are. It’s like walking into a village starving and everyone gives you a piece of their dinner and you’re stunned because you now have a massive plate. The level of interaction is such a beautiful thing.
Yeah, the uptick in comments is definitely an encouraging thing. Makes the whole place feel more populated and less like a ghost town.
The sputters have mostly been when reddit fucks up. The first big one was their API ban. The next was when they were going public.
It’s too early to say, as the method of accounting for ‘active user’ changed recently.
Seems to me like Lemmy is “consolidating”. Some people are leaving but the community is deepening in norms, understanding, commitment and cohesion. This shows up as better content and discussions all the time. Spam is snuffed out quickly, more communities have better moderators. Our infrastructure is maturing and the software is getting better.
Theses stats are a bit weird to read and idk how trustworthy they are, but generally i would agree because even though total active user count might be stagnant, the comment and post numbers are steadily growing.
The total user count is meaningless. Look at the monthly active users. That gives a good picture. And those are the correct links and graphs.
(The total users mainly show how the Reddit exodus happened. Lots of people made an account and used it once. Thus the steep incline in users. But they’re not real, just zombie records. Also it’s heavily affected by instances moving, shutting down or doing maintenance. Also lots of people here have multiple accounts. And there is some degree of farming and bot activity…)
total active user count
Thats what i said, whether you filter by day or by month or whatever is a different question.
Hehe, now I get you. But I don’t think there is something like “total active…” 😆 It’s either the active users or the total amount… You just confused me by using both opposing words in a row.
yeah i see that does not make a lot of sense indeed.
We need to up our stats. Get some AI bots in here posting content!
/s
Let’s charge 8$/month for verification maybe add a checkmark so people know!
The Reddit strategy? Genius!
Thank you. I’m glad you could see my vision. Now please give me money for my new Lemmy IPO idea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546425 9 Months ago > 2M.
- And now 1929762 lemmies are living on 381 instances last update: 2024-04-01T05:51:03.779Z https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.
If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.
What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.
What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.
The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.
Yeah, it’s something I observed, too. I’m new here, coming from a STEM field myself - Many places give off a tech-elitist vibe, though.
Customization options for Firefox get reactions like “nobody needs this”. I like it here so far, but the tech-bubble is obviously super prominent here, and in many places it simply seems very “If you’re not a tech-y don’t talk to me because I know better”. It’s worrying because it will lead to people leaving again when they get the cliché reactions of “use Linux, don’t use Windows” or “ewww, Reddit”. People should be less hostile, but I guess that’s just a problem of the Internet in general and doesn’t just apply here.
I hope to see it succeed, though!
Open source culture remains the biggest problem with open source software, sadly.
It’s really a major problem. Every time I mention how a lot of open source software suffers from bad UX, I get a lot of down votes instead of agreement and calls to improve things.
But at the receiving end you’ll have a talented backend developer who has created something impressive, and who instead of being recognised and motivated for her work just receives a bunch of shit about the UX being awful. Which is not great either.
It’s a tricky thing to get right.
how a lot of open source software suffers from bad UX
Thought only I had this take in the whole world. Usually open source software are best but you have to spend some time picking the right one. Usually 5/7 would have great UI but only 1/7 would have the UX you might like.
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous and it sounds like it could be very manipulative. But of course you could go to instances that don’t do it but it might not be obvious.
That said, I agree the sorting could be better. The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.
I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous
just letting the admins set defaults would be better than forcing these choices upon their users, which I think is was the above user was suggesting, which is kinda what Reddit does with having default subs
The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.
why not? if they’re getting new comments then they’re still active
Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score [of the post] and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
it’s like something inbetween Hot and classic forums-style sorting (New Comments sort in Lemmy)
but I do not think that should be the default sort method, instance admins can already adjust what the default sort method is
Strong agree
I’m not quite as pessimistic, but I agree that inclusivity is important to keep in mind.
If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.
Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community
I’ve noticed similar behaviour as well, and it concerns me. There was a related post a few weeks ago on downvoting etiquette which received a surprising amount of pushback (+63/-108).
I think this is a side effect of Lemmy’s small platform size pushing users towards browsing by /all. I never browsed /all on Reddit, and I don’t think this the best way to regularly use Lemmy either.
Ideally, I think users should mostly stick to their subscribed feeds, and browse /all only occasionally to discover new communities they might want to subscribe to. (I recognize that what I think users “should” do is irrelevant when it comes to actual user behaviour.)
As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.
Do you have any ideas which could help make Lemmy more inclusive?
As the platform currently stands, we have a bit of a “chicken or egg” problem. Too many users browsing by /all can stifle the growth of niche communities, and the lack of niche communities can induce users to browse by /all. I’m not sure the best way to fix this, other than to hope that niche communities manage to grow despite uninclusive behaviour.
Promotion of communities to [email protected] and [email protected], and promotion of those communities to the wider audience
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Now I am surfing lemmy more than reddit, simply because lemmy load faster.
I surf it because reddits app is trash and even the desktop old.reddit site is starting to be put out to pasture by reddit. It’s just better here. I use boost for Lemmy and it’s been amazing.
I came over during the whole API debacle and then realized it will either be great for my mental health, or eventually Lemmy will have just as much content. So far my mental health has improved… the content has improved a little too
Yep, Lemmy right now reminds me of the very early reddit days, I’m sure in 15 years it’ll be completely different but for now it’s been great.
I feel like the quality and quantity of posts and comments have drastically increased over the last month. Idk what happened, maybe it’s just me but I’m glad this place exists. I’m having a blast! 💜
I think posting is probably the biggest thing you can do to grow the community. That and word of mouth - tell people about the fediverse.
at this point I think we might need comments more than posts, there’s lots of posts already but most of them are lacking comments
I think engagement is often driven when people see active communities though. Can’t have that without posts in communities. Sort of a chicken and egg thing ig.
I post in some communities where I’m the only person posting for weeks and nobody comments. I post in others where I’m just a contributor and people engage in the comments.
Gotta agree. A good discussion will pull me in more than lots of posts
I agree as well. If I just wanted a bunch news articles and images I could use RSS and
InstagramPixelfed. Comment discussion threads are the best part of platforms like Lemmy.
I went back on Reddit a couple days ago and the difference is insane. Lemmy post and comments feel like real people. Reddit post are literally the same shit post or questions asked 3 years ago and filled with comments that seem like AI or just someone not putting in any thought
I just came back a few days ago and have had the exact same experience.
I’m subbed to r/horrorlit and keep wondering if I’m taking crazy pills because it feels like 30% of the posts are some variation of “What’s the scariest/best horror book you’ve read?” They reword it or give it a slightly different spin but it’s essentially the same question over and over. And then of course the responses are always the same 40 books being mentioned repeatedly. I don’t understand why anyone who’s been on the sub for more than a month would keep upvoting the same question.
Im seeing more communities on my feed than ever. Even if it’s shrinking, the ones who stay are active.
Just FYI, every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff as people dont both signing in every day – which is basically how people use reddit and other apps but with such a large installcount they’re not as noticeable.
every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff
Also as they see how much propaganda and political extremism is on Lemmy.
Yup, I mean I’m pretty left, but the endless politics is probs bad for the platform in the long run. We need more “normie” and hobby communities if we’re gonna keep attracting new people.
Stable, around 50k monthly active users
!lemmygrow could be a nice idea to help people find smaller communities (memes, tech, news and politics are easy to find, the rest not so much)
Reddit continues to mess up, so we can expect more people as the Reddit experience gets worse and Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks improve
Yeah it’s probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .
Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.
On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .
I find your take on that data to be super weird, given that Lemmy has 10x the number of monthly active users than writefreely. We’re not going to be beating Reddit anytime soon, but we’ve got a decent little community going.
As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that’s somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.
Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.
I don’t have anything to add but I wanted to say those are all good points.
Sublinks and piefed don’t compete with lemmy, or at least, they don’t weaken the ecosystem since they are all inter compatible.
Having other projects which are similar to Lemmy is a great sign. It means users have more choices available and developers can experiment with different solutions. It’s really not a competition, because the existence of more compatible Fediverse projects will also benefit Lemmy, as there will be more users and more content.
Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.
What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).
I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most “thumbs up” on github).
With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.
Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.
Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.
New users for Piefed and Sublinks are most likely to come out of the millions of Reddit users, not out of a few thousand Lemmy users. So this will increase the size of the Lemmy network and lead to more activity.
Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.
Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn’t a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.
Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.
Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.
I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .
Uh, did you check what is being posted on writefreely instances? It is no link aggregator, there is no competition with Lemmy at all.
I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.
The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.
Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.
More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.
As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.
Hah weird I’ve been feeling the opposite - like, it feels like there’s more content on here than when I joined, ain’t that weird. Although maybe I’m using ‘stuff I like’ and ‘upvotes’ as a metric and you’re using “community and interaction” maybe? Would seem to make some kind of sense
Anectodally is getting a lot better recently. Quantity and quality is increasing and number of upvotes per post on frontpage is also increasing.
I think the opposite it’s shrinking. Less posts, lots of reddit repost bots.
I keep thinking of ditching Kbin for Lemmy, because Kbin is down more often than I’d like, and I presume Lemmy is healthier. However, I’ve gotten quite used to this place, and am not eager to start anew elsewhere.
BTW, at least in my experience, kbin fails to federate a lot of content properly, leading to communities and posts seeming A LOT emptier than they actually are
I just did this. Yes, leaving kbin.social was a bit of a pain since I had to resub to my communities manually, but it is a one-time cost. I think it has been worth it because I’ve been able to be way more active just because the Lemmy instance to which I moved is actually usable. The learning curve is not steep at all and the optional photon and alexandrite front ends are terrific. I’d encourage anyone to make the move.
If you’d like to try mbin https://fedia.io/ is a good instance. Run by Jerry from infosec.exchange.
Personally I support software diversity and Earnest seems like a nice person but Lemmy has a bigger development community and I wanted the mobile apps.
Can’t hurt to make an alt account on a lemmy instance as a back up even if you don’t end up switching full time.
I would suggest looking at other Kbin instances outside of kbin.social. or look to mbin, which is a fork that in told is more stable. I also haven’t made the jump from Kbin, but have been having similar issues with usability with it for awhile.
Yeah, Fedi really needs well implemented nomadic identies IMO.
