It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
I went back to RSS and my niche community is on instagram/threads. Not the same as it was on Reddit, of course, but I’m having what I want in terms of news and content at least. Right now Lemmy has nothing for me, that’s the truth.
When they remove old.reddit it’s over for me - there is no browser I’ve tried that new.reddit hasn’t managed to crash within a few minutes of using it.
But I’ll stay on old.reddit for as long as possible… there are just too many nazis and fascists waiting in the wings to hijack the communities I’ve put a lot effort into. It’s better to just milk them for as long as possible.
Numbers will go up again once the reddit infinity client stops working.
Bizarrely it feels way more active, the people leaving were never going to contribute anyway and that’s fine. It seems to be stabilizing at a good amount of content per day.
From the statistics that seems to make sense, only total/active users is seeing a drop everything else was still rising at the “normal” rate
Some of this may also have to do with the user creation exploit that popped up a while back.
There is no infinite doomscroll on Lemmy and that’s what I used to do on Reddit. Now, I just read the top headlines and touch grass :)
There is a middle ground between “infinite doomscrolling” and just barren. I miss a lot of communities I used to browse on Reddit and they aren’t taking roots here. Losing more people isn’t a good sign.
What are those communities you miss?
A variety of fandom and franchise-based communities, some artistic communities, some more specific sub-communities like Patient Gamers which exists but it’s pretty slow.
Patient Gamers which exists but it’s pretty slow.
Sounds about right
Very patient for sure
Yep, I’m finding about half of my Reddit usage satisfied. I’ve got all the technical talk I want, but no gaming or writing communities.
That will change soon enough.
The reason I’m still here instead of there is that I absolutely can’t use their official app. I just can’t. It’s so awful. Lemmy isn’t perfect but at least it isn’t that. So I do spend less time doom scrolling and that’s probably good for me.
@lagomorphlecture @Oppawaifu what is the best lemmy client you think? or overall [[fediverse]] client?
Client as in app? I go back and forth between Connect and Voyager. They both have some benefits and drawbacks but overall I really just want something super simple and plain. I used RIF for so long and it was just to the point and functional. I never had a single issue with it. The lemmy apps will improve though. They’ve been developed fastly and furiously (haha) but it usually takes a little more time to put something together that’s really good.
Interesting to see you don’t like Sync (I don’t either, but people seem to like it overall)
I actually haven’t tried it but now I’m going to so I know if I dislike it or not. I can’t be in the dark on this!
Enjoy ha ha
First impression is that the UI isore customizable and I can get closer to RIF which looks way better to me. I haven’t even logged in yet though but at first glance I don’t hate it. I guess I need to check liftoff too though.
I used Reddit Sync for about a decade before switching to Infinity for Reddit, tried giving Sync another go after the Lemmy version released and it just felt wrong whereas the Lemmy fork of Infinity is a joy to use (and is FOSS)!
I prefer Infinity too, but was a huge Infinity fan so I guess it makes sense
Yep a month ago the only Lemmy app was Jerboa. Now there are so many and they keep improving. My favorite right now is Liftoff.
Precisely. And maybe bring the grass to Lemmy a little bit
E: see my posts
I agree, I finish up my daily feed (at the moment I am subscribed to 628 communities).
Same here, I actually have a much healthier relationship with social media when on Lemmy vs Reddit. That might change as Lemmy grows in user content but for now I’ll enjoy the quieter experience
I’m loving it here but yeah hope there’s a bit more engagement. I think the main thing people need to focus on is building up the more common communities. From there we can slowly branch out as more people join. If we spread out too thin we’re just going to get graveyard communities.
As we grow we can focus on expanding and getting more of those niche communities going .
I do not think people understand. Lemmy is not going to become a forum guzzling behemoth like Reddit. Nothing will. The userbase will expand over time, as people on Reddit start getting fed up, and at some point there will be a combination of aggressive censorship (if IPO goes through) and privacy intrusive authentication. Many hobbyists do not like it, and are only quiet because they can make unidentifiable accounts, even if it requires official Reddit apps or websites to access.
People do not even understand how platforms work. Lemmy has become a non-mainstream, sane platform with federation that is not a shithole like any other previous alt-right failed Reddit clones. There is plenty activity for what are initial days, as users figure out the signup part and the cultural differences between Lemmy and Big Tech social media like Reddit. As a long term Reddit user, Reddit has been becoming shittier by the day, and is largely used due to decades of valuable posts and comments, and niche hobby communities. Ones that exclusively use frontpage are worthless audience and overlap hugely with Tiktok and Instagram users.
I think this is a fundamental property of social media. It’s a basic catch-22 - you need new users to attract new users. Sometimes a seismic shift will occur like the migration from MySpace or Digg, but neither of those websites were as big as any of the big social media sites are now, so the gravity well wasn’t nearly as strong.
People will just normalize the new anti-user features and get used to them.
Yeah people act like Reddit has some inevitable death date because Digg did, but the reality is we are getting further and further away from a time in which a big social media entity actually DID die. I mean people say Facebook is old and washed but it’s still growing in users and has been non-stop for over 15 years. The only one that has died since the end of Digg was Vine, and that was partially just because its owners didn’t really care about its fate anymore.
The only one that has died since the end of Digg was Vine, and that was partially just because its owners didn’t really care about its fate anymore.
Vine was killed by facebook & its regulatory capture. Otherwise it would’ve killed facebook and we never would’ve gotten tik tok (for better or worse).
FB, the gram and now twitter are dying. Just because they still exist doesn’t mean they’re not on their way out. Anyone with accounts on the first two can tell you that the number of active users on their feeds has been the same people for 5-10 years and are dwindling (and the feed of the third is lmao since boosting paid user content). Their traffic numbers might look fine but that’s because they lie about those numbers and they make it impossible to delete accounts.
Most importantly, it’s been 15 years since any of these companies couldn’t get free financing. Often a focus on profitability results in misplaced user-hostility over short-sighted moves, which is what killed a lot of companies in 99 and again in 2007. We just haven’t had a financial climate that requires it since. Hilariously this climate would make it a perfect time to take twitter private to push it past the other two and tik tok but it got bought by the worst failson the world has ever seen.
Don’t mistake still existing for not being dead. Digg.com still employs dozens of people, that doesn’t mean its been a useful link aggregator for the last 12 years.
It’s a basic catch-22 - you need new users to attract new users.
This is the best thing about federation.
If the Fediverse became really popular and I created a new alternative to Lemmy/Kbin that was significantly better than both, it would be way easier to gain the momentum required to become a real player in the field compared to trying to compete with Reddit when most people aren’t in the Fediverse yet.
Tankies and American democrats are scaring away the hoes. Source: I’m a hoe that has barely been coming here lately. There’s not enough people here for niche communities to thrive, and the front page has been getting worse and worse. Today I saw this post on the front page, pretty close to the top.
I’d like to be clear that I don’t care who americans voted for 7 years ago, but that’s not why I don’t think I should be seeing this. It’s just, sheesh man. THIS is what the community wants and thinks is important in 2023? I’m trying to find a niche amongst THIS?
It’s very similar to my problem with Gemini and every other “alt tech” platform I’ve tried to join. Worst case scenario it becomes a sewer for everyone who got banned from other sites for political extremism. Best case scenario, you end up with nothing but the demographic of upper class americans who do nothing but sit on their computers all day, which is not my scene either.
I’m starting to wonder if I should just leave the internet altogether.
The problem is that Lemmy never hit that critical threshold of users where I can just stop using Reddit.
Like one of my favorite subreddits - gaybros and askgaybros - zero activity on the fediverse, so I’m going back to Reddit for that.
Too many agro tankies
Maybe it’s because the content here just isn’t as vast. I’m nkt going back to reddit for awhile, but there’s so little to see on lemmy to me. Despite numerous subscriptions, I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same. Sometimes this place feels like a hive-mind. Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
Noted! Good feedback.
Every time I peek into reddit, it’s just a dumpster fire of toxic comments screaming at each other with strawman arguments and reeing that videos are fake. It’s exhausting.
I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some “hot” category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.
Hot exists, doesn’t it?
In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.
Not to say it’s all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.
I vote for sorting by new comments… I’m generally entertained with this setup
Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the “Hot” feed? I’ve been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn’t read anything about it being corrected… yet.
I don’t remember if it was fixed in 18.3 or 18.4, but it has been for a while.
Worth giving it a try, even if your instance is still 18.3
Ooo! I will, thanks!
Not that Reddit wasn’t, but it depended on the sub. Now it’s shaped by instance and everything here just feels stale
Been saying this for months. No one seems to understand what made reddit grow, and it is ironically very much like /r/place when you get down to it:
Reddit was a singular canvas that all users worked on together. Posts, comments, and voting shaped the site as a whole. The front page of Reddit was the result of it’s userbase, and it’s userbase was diverse. Because Reddit forced all users, of all backgrounds and ideologies, to exist together in the same space, and work on the same canvas, it created something living and varied.
You may not have ever gotten along with people from a certain subreddit in th comments, but I promise, the two of you worked together at one point to get a post to the front page or a comment to the top, and you didn’t even know it. Thos little moments where diametrically opposed people shared a liking of something by how they voted. On the surface, everyone bickered. Under the hood, they were all unknowingly agreeing and cooperating all the time, and that was what powered reddit’s engine: it’s diverse userbase’s activity.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
That’s why gated communities like Tildes and all these curated instances will never reach Reddit levels: they are starving the engine.
The phrasing here kinda implies this is a bad thing and everyone should be focused on 🚀 constant growth 🚀.
Tildes in particular has an extreme focus on quality over quantity and has some really interesting ideas on moderation (that haven’t been implemented due to lack of time on Deimos’ part). The site is still considered an alpha after all this time.
I see very few memes and far too much political content.
This is what is turning me off from lemmy, worst of it I see a lot of shitty political memes, it wasn’t this bad at the beginning of the reddit exodus.
And then there isn’t seem to be a neutral instance, I was in world and then they banned the piracy community, I moved to lemm.ee and all I see is stupid hexbear posts, I appreciate that they don’t defederate willy nilly but Lemmy urgently needs the block instance feature from user level.
In the meantime there are some apps that “block” instances. Connect has it, but it doesn’t fully block the instance, more like it shows up in the feed with a content warning that the message is from a blocked instance and you can choose to view it if you want. I also do think lemm.ee will defederate from hexbear pretty soon. The admin has had personally horrendous experiences with their users and that meta thread about it was a dumpster fire of hexbear users making unrelated political comments and blocking the actual instance users from having a discussion. It got locked at almost 2000 comments so I’m sure he’s still digging through that toxic waste to make his decision.
I see very few memes and far too much political content. Of that political content it’s all the same.
That’s funny because the meme subs still far outpace posting from politics subs for me, and I mostly see memes.
In fact, a few weeks ago, there were lots of complaints in meme comments of how the only thing they saw on the site was memes.
Even the memes are pretty stale, definitely not dank. Many of these memes are reposts of stuff I saw years ago on Reddit.
Political memes are so stale these days.
Memes may be thriving but niche interest communities can’t even get off the ground.
So just like reddit 14 years ago when I first left Digg for greener pastures. When I joined, it was years before my local city subreddit sprang to life, and for years, it had around 1000 active accounts and only now has over 10k accounts.
Man, if the people on reddit back in the day had sat around complaining about lack of content like this, the site would have died. Instead they started making fucking content.
It takes time for communities to grow, and it feels like a lot of the folks who left reddit only ever knew reddit as a ready-made-community filled with thousands of people already. As in, they were latecomers and missed all the slow growth.
Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.
I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore, and I definitely do not appreciate to have the deficiencies of this place thrown on my face as if that’s my responsibility. It’s not exactly welcoming or motivating.
Well, considering we are in a post about the userbase shrinking maybe the situation is not quite the same.
Reddit admins literally ran bot accounts to fill content on reddit and make it seem more active at first. The users who came from Digg had similar complaints, and reddit userbase fluctuated at lot in the first few years. It’s actually exactly the same (minus the admins using bots to make it seem more active).
I also don’t have that kind of time and energy to get a whole community running just for the kicks anymore
No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.
Eh, remains to be seen. The pacing of the internet today is very different.
No one is asking you, specifically, to do it.
Then don’t get on my case for not liking the lack of content, geez!
Sorry, I just think it’s a dumb, entitled complaint. I’m not asking you to do anything other than stop whinging.
Maybe we should ask spez to come over and help generate engagement :P
Maybe I need to be on ml then. I feel like world is just full of the same.
Try out Kbin, as well. Personally I have none of the usual Lemmy complaints
Are there any decent iOS apps for kbin yet? I almost never browse these sites on desktop (hence why I have completely left Reddit since Apollo died).
Currently using Memmy on iOS which is great.
Kbin doesn’t have an api yet, so apps aren’t supported (there are some in the works though for when the api goes public). In the meantime, you can install the pwa through a browser.
The PWA is very decent for a basic browsing experience. There are a few in the works, most notable being Artemis which is now in public beta I think. It uses the new Kbin API which is also in beta.
For now, the app can only be used with the artemis.camp instance, but soon Kbin.social and the rest Kbin instances will use the API and be usable with the app as well. It is inspired by Apollo btw
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to check it out!
Kbin is a nice alternative. Content cycles out of Hot a lot faster on here.
You also get microblogging support on here, so you have access to the Mastodon side of the fediverse as well without having to copy and paste links.
I quite like beehaw and their communities, and yeah, you’re missing out on those if you’re on world, from what I understand. (Fairly sure they’re still defederated.)
I personally like lemmy.ml, but I know it’s not for everyone, and the admins would prefer to keep it a smaller instance, I think. I’m only here because there weren’t as many federated servers three years ago when I made an account.
You also might check out !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, they flood my feed with good memes.
Hexbear was never federated with world and Im not sure lemmygrad was either, and as I recall they defederated from explodingheads.
196 is amazing
Just gotta follow The Rule
I blocked 196 because it was just shitty memes being spammed
I see very few memes and far too much political content
Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They’re practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.
You should block the meme communities if you dislike it, keep the communities with contributions you like.
These numbers are not descriptive. Check out the daily stats.
- Active users per day has already stabilised.
- Active users half year is still climbing so we have people coming in.
- Shitposts per day are growing exponentially.
- People are still leaving from the Reddit influx. Lemmy just wasn’t for them.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120
Good. I hope all the r/all reddit drones leave and maybe we can have actual discussions.
I can tell you the drop in active Lemmy users was NOT from hexbear and lemmy.grad. Those trolls are worse than the_donald was on the other platform.
undo the maximalist==better preconception.
(**not directed at op or NE1)
less users has pros and cons (imo).We are now at 43k, so definitely not maximizing
