Fediverse

Another way of looking at it: Lemmy is retaining the engagement of the vast majority of new users who have joined recently.

Address some of the issues. Like not having multiple similar posts, on different instances with similar named communities.

Also to reach critical mass, we need to keep posting. Addition of new apps such as Boost will also increase popularity

To be expected. After any exodus and reaches a peak and dies down some. The real question will be long time retention and addition if new users over the course of a couple years, not months.

Something I realized on Mastodon years ago (well before the Twitter/X thing) is it quickly doesn't matter so much to me how many active users a platform has. A platform is good enough if there's some activity, and I like being there. Lemmy was already something I checked when I saw only a handful of new posts a day.

Anyway, that's just my perspective. I'm not too concerned about downtrends of active users.

I can't speak for losses, but I can say I visit almost every day. I get my news from here and feel informed.

How can we make it more popular?

Not by bots designed to increase content creation.

I'm a long time Mastodon user, and I've observed multiple cycles of user influxes (usually caused by some unpopular decision at Twitter) followed by slow but steady decline as these new users got frustrated, disappointed, attacked or something similar. Each wave however did leave a portion that stuck around. I can't tell you whether Mastodon or Lemmy will "succeed", but it's clear by now that both their respective user bases couldn't even agree on the definition of success.

This might sound like a negative, but if you look at corporate social media which has a pretty clear vision of what its own success looks like (is this fair?), it might also be partly positive. Also, while success might be hard to define and agree on in the Fediverse, I think that these networks are more resilient to total failure than traditional social media (though again, this statement hides some implicit assumptions).

Ultimately, I've learned to stop worrying about this. People will talk about what they want to talk about, and this will continue to change and evolve. Lemmy needs better moderation tools (as demonstrated by the recent CSAM attack), but I believe it will get them in time. If you want to talk about something different on Lemmy: do! Just post it, or create a community. It might not explode over night, but it might catch on.

Mastodon and now Lemmy are the only social media I actively use now (permanently deleted my Twitter account on the day the Tate interview was published "exclusively", but was less active there for years) , and I feel the better for it. I've observed tremendous progress in the Fediverse during the past six years and it's very encouraging in the long term.

Makes sense that not everyone trying out Lemmy would stick around

The same thing happened to Mastodon

It'll be fine 🙂

I can understand. After the initial excitement, the content is lacuster and scarse compared to reddit (due to lack of large userbase)

Just wait until the next Reddit fuckup.

We need to make Lemmy a more interesting and mature place for when it, inevitably, happens.

It's natural - reddit does something bad, people look for an alternative, join up then start losing interest either after a while either due to toxicity, seeing content they don't like, not having reddit features they used, or the low amount of content and start migrating back.

The user count will probably not stop dropping anytime soon, unless reddit does something again and blackout 2.0 happens.

It's also a naturally busy time for living organisms in the northern hemisphere. I've just got things going on, man.

On Reddit, I was mainly subscribed to a few niche subreddits. By reddit's standards, that's still like 100k subscribers. But over here, even though there might be 1000 people subscribed to those same niche communities, the 90-9-1 rule still applies. Either the community has one super-spammy power user trying to boost life into the community, or there's just no one actually posting anything.

I'm getting enough of a fix to stay on Lemmy and wade out the peace and quiet, but I do long for the engagement of 50k+ users on a truly niche topic. My willingness to stay on Lemmy has been helped by me starting to re-utilize off-site forums specifically to those niches. But I can totally understand how it just feels dead to a lot of the Reddit exodus.

I have a few alts that have gone inactive as instances become more reliable, I'm sure there's a bit of that

So, I've added Lemmy.world and Kbin to my social media browsing habits but they're not the only sites I spend my time on like in the old days with Reddit a decade ago. I would imagine it's the same for other users too.

I cannot go back to Reddit! No really they gave me a site-wide ban, I can't go back!

It's normal, people come and go, same on mastodon. We will have times where people join like crazy, just wait :)

We don't have to prove ourselves to any investors though, so slight decline is totally fine!

Lemmy needs proper moderation tools. Currently if someone posts an image you have to take like a dozen steps in a command line to delete it, and it doesn't delete from federated instances when removed by moderators.

So let's say you access lemmy.world through lemmy.film. Anything federated to lemmy.film through lemmy.world that's deleted due to content moderation will still appear on lemmy.film until it's deleted manually.

Couple this with an influx of malicious users and you've got a nasty situation on your hands that isn't sustainable for instance hosts while putting them at significant legal risk.

On the user experience end of things, people seem determined to flood the all feed with bot spam and it seems as though the more hostile tide of reddit users and plants sponsored by bad actors have showed up to play.

Lemmy's devs need to give some indication that they can even be bothered to glance in the direction of producing more robust moderation and federation tools if it's going to keep its momentum. User-level instance blocking would help a lot too.

Its not easy to search for communitys ....

I think this is also heavily related to the CSAM issue, because

A.) Its horrible to read about in the first place B.) Its makes users more reluctant to browse content in general C.) It makes users more reluctant to browse content at work or in public places

I think that scared off many users (it also scared me off a bit). I think if Lemmy finds a solution to fight this kind of stuff and gives users some reassurance that the problem is handled will bring many users back. I think the importance of content moderation and SPAM defense should be the biggest learning points of the first Lemmy loop.

It might be a good idea to see where it stabilizes before worrying about making it more popular. You can see how big the surge was. There was probably always going to be a dip.

What qualifies as an active user might also effect those numbers. Lots of people created an account on every instance because they didn't understand federation.

I think it's too early to comment on the user numbers increasing/decreasing. Let's see what it looks like in 6-12 months time.

I've seen a few posts complaining about Lemmy on Lemmy and Reddit. It's generally the same complaints; so these should be addressed.

My question is how has 4chan usage looked since reddit bullshit?

That's a difficult question, for starters people around here tend to misinterpret what you're saying accidentally or willfully, far more than my experience with reddit previously. Idk if it's because the place just filled with the worst of reddit or the dumbest of reddit, but it seems like reading comprehension is at an all time low.

Second, there needs to be clear divides between communities and their uses. When c/memes and c/linuxmemes have the same content, it's going to give new users the impression that this place is for a very specific kind of person and then they'll quit altogether.

Quality > Quantity

Even if it were half the size, but the same quality, I'd think that it was a success.

I can be a data point, after initial enthusiasm I find myself spending less time on lemmy - which is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, it's just that real life is getting precedence. Also this does not mean I left lemmy, will return again when the rough edges are sorted out.

I also feel like that's to be expected, I bet big companies see graphs just like this too. There was anger and hype for a lot of people to move to a new platform. Many did, but it didn't become the new habit for everyone. That's not a failure of Lemmy. In fact, I'd say this is an impressive metric, especially considering we do not know what defines "active". Is logging in what mark someone as active? Upvoting? Commenting? We should see this graph as a big win, especially during Lemmy's infancy.

I want to remind everyone that Lemmy has had a bot crisis, a while ago I did some research into botted instances and I estimated something like 40% of user accounts are bots. Although this was a while ago so I'm not sure if that is remotely accurate anymore

Many instances will have taken steps to start purging user accounts, at the scale of Lemmy, that downturn could be entirely explained by these bots being removed

Obviously some users will leave but i do feel it's worth noting this fact