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Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.
We have to wait until tomorrow?
There are also conscious efforts to weed out bots and other measures that try to remove potential cancer from spreading.
There was a post recently that outlined bot weeding efforts on a couple dozen instances that tanked user number by something like 1/5 - clearly visible on graphs.
Lemmy’s doing great. Even if plenty small communities are still not big enough here.
exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:
- spike
- drop off
- plateau
- spike
- drop off
- plateau above the last plateau
- etc etc
sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.
I’m not sure what else will be able to cause a spike again. Reddits behavior over the past month is pretty much as terrible as it can get. If people aren’t moving to Lemmy anymore, it’s going to take something apocalyptic to cause Lemmys usercount to grow again.
is pretty much as terrible as it can get
I believe in the power of human ingenuity.
exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who’s to say it can’t get worse? never let the hope die. lol
I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that’s when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.
Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there’s enough content here to consume and interact with.
Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it’s ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What’s interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that’s Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that’s centralized… I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.
I sometimes wonder if/when I’ll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.
edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn’t put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.
They still have the Big Red Button of killing off old.reddit that they have yet to push.
I’m actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝
I feel like people just want to hang out and talk about stuff. We don’t always need to be wowed by some crazy high quality content or new OC. We just want to hang out with friends and shoot the shit. Most of us are on here to distract us from whatever bullshit we should probably be doing instead.
At least it’s less likely for your boss to find you here on the Fediverse.
…for now *ominous background music*
Just emphasizing my upvote on your comment through my comment.
To be honest, I do the same thing. A couple of simple rules to keep the web entertaining:
- Filter everything that triggers you
- Ban porn
- Never, never look at comments on politics, religion and family. You’re like to want to erase humanity afterwards
Yeah it took a long time for me to finally curate Reddit to something I enjoyed using, I’ve started increasingly working on my filters and it just gets better and better here.
Like Reddit, I find trying to find communities I’m interested in a little difficult so I’m just defaulting to all and continuing to filter for now. At some point soon I’ll be able to just default to subscribed.
there’s always something of value to share at least on c/lemmyshitpost
Yup. Exactly.
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It’s a FOMO, bigger is better, kind of thing. I think some people came here looking for a replacement, which can’t happen, instead of looking for a community, which can.
It’s funny that you say that. Although it’s not I guess replacing Reddit in terms of scale, the browsing experience on Lemmy and that community feeling is actually an improvement for me.
So, I guess for me Lemmy is a more than adequate replacement. I don’t want all of Reddit here though, I think that would cause a whole lot more problems than it would solve.
Bigger is better, that’s why I got a big truck on big wheels and only eat corndogs whole while enjoying it a little too much.
It’s okay for it to die down a bit after a massive influx like we saw from Reddit.
In the long run though, if it isn’t growing it’s dying. Lemmy is still small. If it succeeds at what it’s trying to do, it should definitely grow.
It’s a little worrying that we can’t grow faster than the novelty-die-off rate. But not cause for alarm as yet.
I’m okay with it being smaller. I don’t think I want this to be Reddit-sized. I would like more users for sure but not that many.
Lemmy.world has been down a lot, I’ve been trying to use it but half the times I’ve logged on it’s been down. So that might be part of it?
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Having Sync default to Lemmy.world seems like a huge mistake to me. Poor Ruud
Between lemmy.world and sync having issues I almost went on reddit. Then I remembered this is the fediverse, jerboa and lemm.ee exist and I’m back and more active than ever.
I think it’s mostly lemmy.world issue, since (for some reason) is Sync’s default, instead of suggesting smaller instances.
Don’t you have an account on another instance? Lemmy.world was down a bit that one time. Lemmy.ca was down once briefly for me due to site maintenance.
Is there a way to export and import subscriptions between accounts?
What are the best instances to have an account? I’m new to lemmy and just have lemmy world.
I made a second account on lemm.ee - it’s big so has all the connections you could need and has amazing uptime.
I have a second account on lemdro.id. It’s smaller and mostly android focused but its my main account most days. If world is having issues I don’t even think about it I just switch over 😂
Think it depends on things like your interests and at this point in time the uptime associated with said instance.
Lemmy.ml but same problems there. I haven’t had time/energy to make another one and subscribe to everything again.
For real.
I’m not sure why they’re not using elastic servers. Maybe because of the cost. Idk how Lemmy server dudes get their money, but it can be expensive running a server with 5-7 million visitors per month.
As a lurker I mostly just vote. But gotta post every once in a while to add to active users stat!
I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me that you need to comment to be counted as “active”
Is this actually written somewhere?
I would have thought votes would count as a unique interaction to count towards being active
A stat for logged in users would be nice.
Yeah same, well here’s my active status for the month.
No worries, Lemmy is alive. Lemmy and Fediverse in general is better to grow organically.
quality over quantity
There’s also people that create multiple accounts in different instances and end up using just one.
I did this. I didn’t initially realize there is such a thing as instances (I thought I was joining Lemmy). Came from Reddit so didn’t expect this. Now I only use my Lemmy.world account, the other one is doing nothing (should probably get around deleting it at some point).
So far I’ve created an account at sh.itjust.works (first one), lemmy.world (main during most of my time here), lemmy.dbzer0.com (first attempt to migrate to another instance) and at lemm.ee, because I wasn’t happy with how lemmy.world admins run their instance (preemptively defederating Hexbear but not Meta).
I guess I should delete my other accounts.
Never heard of Hexbear (kind of new around here). Why were they defederated? I’m actually on Lemmy World.
For being a communist instance, here’s the announcement.
Oh wow. After reading the announcement I’m glad they got defederated.
Lemmy needs a middle logical layer to really take off. If a local server moderats it as such, the default view for say /c/technology shouldn’t be slit across a dozen instances. Instead it should be merged into one view.
Without it you have a bunch of largely stagnant communities.
What would be better is if similar Lemmy communities could, by mutual agreement, “federate” so that all posts show up regardless of which community someone is viewing. So if you were looking at lemmy.world/c/technology, you’d also see posts lemmy.ml/c/technology if they “federated” (probably a better term to use to avoid confusion with the fediverse in general, but that’s the one that came to mind).
It might be a good feature/option of a frontend to automatically aggregate same-name communities across federated servers. Bogus actors would either be downvoted or defederated off the feed.
Lemmy pretty much just needs tags. Like you can mark your different “technology” communities with the tag “technology” and a user can subscribe to this tag to view all posts from whatever communities have this tag (and they don’t have to call themselves strictly just “technology”)
Something like that I would imagine so no direct interaction between communities required.
It’s this plus uptime. Both come down to usability. Nobody wants to use a product that is confusing or unreliable.
Only Lemmy.world really has issues with uptime
Yeah, Lemmy excels at both those things.
For some the novelty of lemmy dropped pretty quickly. Most reddit users which make up a huge chunk of lemmy users would go days if not, weeks without commenting or posting. You kinda have to factor in that a lot of people are lemmy lurkers that will comment or post once they find something that interests them.
Also in my case I made several alts in the beginning (because I couldn’t decide on an instance and I like to have backups for when an instance is down).
Other users probably did the same, which results in a bunch of inactive accounts.
I have accounts on 5 different instances.
I pretty much only use two of them. A third one sees occasional use when sh.itjust.works is having problems, but that’s about it.
You kinda have to factor in that a lot of people are lemmy lurkers that will comment or post once they find something that interests them.
That’s me. I never interacted much on Reddit, so I’m trying to get in the habit of doing so now.
can’t maintain 90% uptime
why are we losing users?
I am not leaving unlesa somehow reddit pays me to go back to it. I am a man of conviction. I went back just because i got a notification of someone replying. Other than that, that’s it. I am staying here whether this takes off or not
I believe a lot of the new users’ influx was knee-jerk reaction towards it. Then people calmed down and went back to their old habits, leaving the fediverse with millions of dead accounts.
I enjoyed being a mod to a helpful community tho - but no, I’m no longer working for free so that spez can shine in the stock market: that’s exactly who I’m not, exactly against all my values.
The internet has changed so much.
Instance checks out :p
I’ve never had any downtime on my instance. Lemmy.world is under a lot of strain because it’s the largest, Sync has decided sign-ups should go there by default, and it gets the occasional DDoS attack.
I don’t understand why people have expectations from a young platform like it’s supposed to be the new reddit/facebook all of a sudden. I lived through the digg->reddit move and believe me, it was worse than what we see on lemmy sometimes. Let it grow and it will have a chance. Offer help when you think some communities aren’t correctly moderated or when you think you have better ideas. People usually will try to help (not all the time).
It maybe comes from an all or nothing mentality. I would have tremendous Schadenfreude if Reddit does indeed die, but the culture there changed and I don’t really care if all of Reddit migrated here. As long as Lemmy is active enough, I am content.
Only reason I would browse Reddit was because of the vast amount of information linked and posted to it. Given enough time and engagement from the Internet as a whole Lemmy will be bigger and better than reddit. We’ll get there but it needs everybody’s help.
I will say I’m already twice as active on Lemmy than I was on Reddit 🥳
The only reason many people joined is to hurt Reddit. If Reddit persists, us being here is kind of pointless.
People joined because they don’t like Reddit. It can still exist and this can exist too.
What’s the point of “hurting” reddit if you go back after some time? It’s like Stockholm syndrome, when you go back to your rapist.
Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of great discussions on lemmy and I hope smart people will stay here. I really don’t care about how many we are, I care about the quality of the posts and discussions. And yes, I know there’s a lot of shit on lemmy too, but I think I’m able to filter that shit: I learned on reddit.
I’m sticking with it for now. Reddit can piss off. The Spez shit was just the last straw for me after a lot of other disappointing shit in recent times.
Same. That plus the constant lying. They always remove something and then say “we’re working on something better” and that’s the last you ever hear of it. They’re disgusting liars.
Losing active users is normal. Same thing happened on mastodon over the years. A wave of people would join, then slowly leave again. Many of them would stick though.
Lemmy is incredibly active imo ^^
New users join, some leave, but the ones who stay are active. Lemmy feels very alive and that’s what matters.
“Image of a frog inhaling copium”
Yea, I needed a place to go after reddit, I found a place to go and I have a clean conscious. People still using reddit are the ones with the problem. Lemmy isn’t as massive as reddit, but it was never going to get as ginormous as reddit in that short of time. It’s fine for what I want. It feels a bit rough around the edges, but I’m assuming part of that is growing pains and it’ll grow into whatever it needs to be in time.
Dude I was away on vacation chill. :-)
How dare you. Do you want reddit to win?? /s
For the last month and a half, I have not used reddit at all. Lemmy has most of the communities that I was a part of.
But I get that, some niche subreddits still don’t have communities here on lemmy. A few of my friends, stopped using lemmy because it didn’t have the subs they were active in.
Those of us still using Reddit should casually name-drop Lemmy to remind people they have an alternative. If you make a reddit post put a link to the Lemmy post too
I want my active Starfield, The Wire, and The West Wing communities, but not bad enough to use reddit’s app. If I could easily use it just as a website I probably would, but that experience sucks.
