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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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 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.
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.
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.
Shrinking because it’s full of, and ran by commie dumbasses. Nobody likes you guys.
Yeah, we are really, really bad. You should leave before you start transmuting yourself into a tank and begin involuntarily rolling over capitalists.
Not to mention their jokes suck
18 days for this comeback was worse.
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
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.
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
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.
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