cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12971023
Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.
It's been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy's crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I'm posting screenshots because they're a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.
Because I'm posting on lemmy.ca, I'll post quite a few related to this instance, but it's probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I'll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison -- biggest server, and original server.
First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.
First observation -- there's some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it's probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:
Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.
As does lemmy.ca, below:
I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.
Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.
In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.
And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.
Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn't flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.
I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!
I've also been building a lemmy web client (Quiblr) and I can tell ya that these types bugs often come up due to API issues. Honestly, it can be difficult at times to know if it is actually an API issue or if it is an app bug. So app bugs go unresolved because they get written off as API issues lol The alternative is that you invest a lot of time trying to fix something, only to realize that it is out of your control
I think Lemmy's API issues will be fixed, but the growing pains are definitely there!
Bug reporting in general is kind of confusing for Lemmy users who aren't intimately familiar with it's development.
For example, filtering comments by date on user profiles just doesn't seem to work. You can sort properly, but try filtering them by day, week, month, etc, and it never filters them. It always shows all comments from All Time. But this sort of filtering works fine everywhere else. Happens on the three Lemmy apps I've used, and the web UI last I checked.
But I'm not sure where that bug is actually coming from, and I haven't seen any other bug reports about it. Is that an issue for Lemmy's dev, Lemmy's UI devs, the app devs, the instance admins, etc. I don't know who to submit it to.
I don't want to waste anyone's time making them bug hunt something that isn't under their umbrella.