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!
You must log in or register to comment.
Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?
It looks like Lemmy has shrunk overall since our peak of 68k active users in July last year to our low point (since rexxit anyways) of 32k, but we seem to be attracting more MAUs now and have climbed back up to 51k.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by diversity, or at least what measure of it you’re seeking, but if you mean instances, there’s currently ~770 instances online, a bit over half of our peak in July. I’m not aware of any major instances that have closed down yet though, so I assume it’s mainly small, single user instances that have shit down, as well as a few hyper niche ones with very few members.
Average users per instance has also been increasing and is getting close to the levels we were at in june when everybody was joining the same few instances. That peak was 690 users per instance, that dropped to a low of 321 in July, presumably because there was more of an emphasis on getting people spread out after initial influx of people who just needed to go somewhere.
There was something interesting I noticed in the stats, in Feb there was a major drop in total posts of almost 5 million. I don’t know what exactly happened, but our total posts halved, so perhaps that’s why nobody’s been posting updates.
It’s even more obvious on the 120 day graph
Overall, it appears we have shrunk compared to our peak during rexxit, but we have been steadily increasing in both active users and posts (excluding the major drop in Feb) since our low point a couple of months after rexxit. That’s about what I’d expect, and quite good compared to most popular corpo sites which lose a lot more percentage of their MAUs after they’ve peaked. Threads lost something like 80% of their userbase a week after it launched. Also I don’t think that peak during rexxit will be our biggest peak. We’ll probably continue steadily gaining users until Reddit fuck up again and we get another influx, like what happened with mastodon.
FYI all these stats are fairly easy to find. I like FediDB because it’s got a more friendly UI, but Fediverse Observer has a more plain UI, so is better for posting graphs and such. But that’s the beauty of the fediverse, we can all access the same things through all sorts of UIs
Are you able to track bot posts vs regular posts? I wonder if the major drop in posts was bots being stopped.
As far as I know, no
Nice graphs
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 !avatar@lemmy.world 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
Why do the graphs look so weird?
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.
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.
Hello @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works,
Would you be interested in creating a community dedicated to community growth? Maybe something a bit more neutral like !communitygrowth so that it can be more inclusive to Mbin, Piefed, and in the future Sublinks?
I have a few theories I would like to discuss with other people interested in this topic
I would definitely be interested. Good idea to make it more general than just !lemmygrow, though “community” is still a Lemmy(-ish)-specific term.
Some other name ideas:
- !fediversegrowth (if including Mastodon, Loops, etc.)
- !fedigrow (shorter version of the above)
- !threadiversegrowth (if limiting to link-aggregator discussion forums like Kbin, Sublinks, etc.)
- !threadigrow (shorter version of the above)
Thoughts?
Small heads up to see if you already have an instance in mind? You are on SJW, that could work, otherwise I usually like Lemm.ee because it’s well managed and a very neutral name. Lemmy.ca does a lot for new joiners too with !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
Haha, I was actually going to message you to ask if you had an instance in mind. I think we want a well managed and widely federated instance which is large, but not the largest. Any of the ones you propose sound good.
I just checked, Piefed calls them communities too, I guess Sublinks will probably do the same.
Fedigrow seems like a better name, communitygrowth seems a bit long, so I guess that could be the one? I’m afraid Threadigrow would be too confusing to people
Yeah, we also call them communities
!fedigrow sounds good to me! Short and general. More specific communities could be created later if needed.
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.
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
Gotta agree. A good discussion will pull me in more than lots of posts
Yes, but it’s predominantly if not all news and politics or political ideological soap box posts or posts about defederation drama and instance infighting.
Just after having used Lemmy for 3 years, all it really is, is a small platform, for people to create a space where they can freely be hateful and shitty and hostile to opposite political sides that they hate.
It’s so they can experience feeling powerful over who they hate. In a sense, it’s their way of serving ‘justice’ keeping people out, defederating, is purposeful and habitual. It makes sense to me honestly.
Keeping Lemmy small, it’s easier to control and to continue to be able to have a place where they hate who they hate.
It’s annoying when ppl try to deny that.
Just be honest about it. Be truthful, ppl appreciate honesty.
Growing Lemmy would not be ideal, bc different people with all kinds of different perspectives AND INTERESTS THAT ISN’T TECH OR POLITICS would make them a minority. That’s purposefully being avoided.
I found myself telling myself, “Go on reddit today, don’t go on lemmy. You need a break from all the extreme constant politics”
I don’t engage in politics online at all for a while.
But that’s all what is posted and talked about here. No one here even wants to have actual fun and be silly or have a good time enjoying themselves. What is the most irritating, is literally no one fucking engages if it isn’t political. That stuff gets ignored and down voted. This is a political place that is the issue.
There’s no light hearted fun silly cool niche interesting happy or positive shit here. Everyone is angry and political and people are not interested in that.
Tbf you are on an instance that federates with a lot of very political instances (like hexbear and lemmygrad). If you want less politics and a more curated feed, maybe go to an instance that defederates from such instances.
I’ve seen more than enough in your matrix chat with other admins to know you’re full of it.
Also
Don’t direct message me telling me to block your instance because you don’t want anymore down votes.
Who tf do you think you are internet boy ? I don’t care that you are an admin, I don’t fucking answer to you.
Well that escalated quickly…
We stumbled in midway through a quarrel
Haha I guess so
I don’t think quantity is necessarily the most interesting metric. Quality of discussion and other users is more interesting to me and it has been quite good so far for the communities I frequent.
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.
There seems to be more competition, not much for Masto, lots for Lemmy, or so it seems.
I was interested in Firefish but it seems to have fizzled out. Gotosocial looks to have promise.
IceShrimp is cool if you liked FireFish
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.
