Per the title, is Lemmy actually growing, or will it stagnate and fade into obscurity like many other similar discussion boards?
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’m working on a way to tell, but man, I’m bad at actually finishing projects.
Okay, logging off to work on it.
Don’t expect perpetual growth from the fediverse for one good reason:
It would cost more money.
Lemmy is self hosted and there are people who use their own personal money to host these things and have a certain amount of activity.
Doubling the users would double the cost but it would not double the usefulness for the instance owner.
Ideally growth would come in the form of new instances.
That has its drawbacks too though, federating with many, many instances will eventually cause strain.
I do want more growth via instances, but imo it’s more like a double edge sword than the salvation of a platform.
I think the premise is flawed. Most of us have been brought up in a world that preaches “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” That mindset is harmful in a whole host of ways. I have no idea if lemmy is growing or not, but it’s quite possible, perhaps even preferable, for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.
To add, a lot of sites that “Fade into obscurity” still have active communities, they’re just not mainstream anymore.
I would prefer if it grew because so many communities are dead. It seems that only political and shitposting instances have constant activity.
For me it’s still not a real Reddit alternative. Which sucks because I’m permabanned from Reddit.
Lemmy is slowly accumulating mass - I’d really love it if we gained a number of strong niche communities, but didn’t turn into a reddit due to mass influx.
I think the best thing of reddit is them having so many actually active niche subreddits. Many people saying Lemmy doesn’t need to grow don’t seem to care much about that which surprises me a bit.
Which communities are you into?
I like the political aspect of lemmy tho. Much more civil and decent, especially disallowing the usage of slurs. The major benefit with that it avoids the discussion being derailed into personal attacks and ultimately people forgetting about what the topic was.
Make a new account ?
Doesnt work. They ban your ip, MAC address, email, everything. They even have a tool that flags people that may be doing ban evasion based on behavior and communities that are joined by said account. You could get around it but it’s way too much effort just to use reddit.
They can’t ban a MAC address. They don’t have any way to find it.
Ah well I’m just parroting what I’ve read. I’m only superficially familiar with most tech stuff. I do know that the ban at least applies to the device, email and ip address for sure.
This is exactly on the nose. It reminds of articles I’ve read about the oldest continuously operating businesses in the world. Here’s an example: https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/management-leadership/japan-oldest-businesses/
Note that one thing in common between many of these businesses, some of which have been around for nearly 1,500 years(!), is that they are family owned and operated. In other words, they prioritized stability over rapid growth. I feel that there’s a huge lesson in this.
Correct. We don’t have need to be growing. 40k mau are nothing to scoff at and is bigger than most other online forums who can feel very busy even with 1000. So long as we’re getting as many users as we’re losing, we’re good. And the continuous enshittification of reddit will ensure there’s always people looking for a new home.
We need somewhere to go online to get away from the handful of mega-corps that have taken over the internet. With the US now full-throating fascism that need is greater than ever.
Cancer grows continuously. Obviously we should model everything on that.
for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.
I’ve been on somewhat niche sites which have lasted decades, with waves of people coming in whenever related sites screw up and trickles of people leaving when an alternative community becomes more popular. It’s a comfy, slow existence, which works for some communities, but not for ones like this which thrive on diversity and chattiness, rather than really well thought-out replies days apart from each other. On reddit-like sites, time penalizes how high a post goes (unlike a forum where years-long threads are very normal to see on a front page) so there is an inherent benefit in having consistent activity. That doesn’t imply boundless growth, but at least sustaining a decent level of activity. We’re not chasing ad revenue, growth for growth’s sake is not what we want or need.
But with that said, a community with no new visitors can only lose them. That can be a slow process, but it’s inevitable. Been there, done that. Again, doesn’t imply that pointless growth is a good thing.
That’s some serious copium, and the other replies are worse. “If you’re not growing you’re dying” is bullshit when you control a large portion of the potential market, but not when you’re a bit player. Being less popular than a manifestly shitty platform like Reddit is not a flex and not a sign of long-term health.
It’s not copium, it’s just an acknowledgment that I, and presumably many others, don’t care or need to care if it’s popular- it is already useful to me as is. In the same way, I’ve never given much of a shit about “the year of Linux on the desktop”; Linux has been useful to me as a daily driver for the past 28-ish years and neither my enjoyment of it nor its utility to me were in any way hampered by its failure to achieve supremacy of numbers.
It’s fine to use something other than the most popular service.
Now, if you think the purpose of federated social media is solely to supplant the corporate, centralized platforms, then I understand, but disagree with, your position.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
IRC is still around. Usenet is still around.
There’s no Google management team or Zuckerberg to pull the plug.
Lemmy can keep going indefinitely.
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!
or will it stagnate and fade into obscurity like many other similar discussion boards?
well it wouldn’t really play out like that, if Lemmy gets overtaken by a replacement (like Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks), it would be a transition not a death
a big thing we can look forwards to right now is if Pixelfed gets better support to interact with Lemmy/etc communities/groups then we can get a big boost in userbase, even if they aren’t using the Lemmy software we’ll still be seeing their posts and comments
I wish Mastodon would improve their compatibility with Lemmy too, but they don’t seem interested
From the perspective of someone who has been on Lemmy for a few years now, I’ll say that the amount of content here has become large enough for me to use Lemmy as a “daily driver” account. I don’t miss out on important news or updates by using Lemmy instead of Reddit…in fact it often feels quite the opposite
Yeah I moved during the rexit well before the major one, but when It come around. I don’t use anything else.
When I have run out of content on lemmy I touch grass haha
Agreed
👍
It’s mostly fine, but sometimes I still miss stuff. For example, I haven’t seen anything on the Spanish ski lift incident on here (it’s probably somewhere), but I bet that would have popped up for me on Reddit.
(And I think I have done a pretty good job of curating my experience here)
Same, reminds me of reddit pre-9gag days, and that’s just the way I like it
Hard agree. I see the same usernames over here also so I’ve can actually foster a conversation with people. Reminds me of when Reddit communities were good and not controlled by the corporations.
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 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 believe that the newest Lemmy versions count up/down voting as ‘active’
I’m pretty sure that votes count towards the MAU.
Wow… there wasn’t more posters during the election, people just posted more?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Hexbear? Really?
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.
after the grad and .ml, hexbear is the oldest lemmy instance it pre-dates federation by over 2 years
It’s very active, but also a lot older than many other instances.
