That doesn't seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it's that active. I would've expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.

[–] Mereo@lemmy.ca 79 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.

It's all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it'll attract and retain users.

[–] ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored. I think the reason for the downward spike not being worse is that the threshold to take part in Lemmy communities is higher than many social media sites, and invested time registering makes people more likely to stay.

[–] Ashtear@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Why I'm encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it's just a little bit.

One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.

[–] enki@lemm.ee 23 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.

Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I'm a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.