How is the size of Lemmy's userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?

I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven't seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?

Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)

In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!

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[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 52 points 7 months ago (13 children)

At least from the nerd side of Lemmy, communities pertaining to technology, self-hosting, etc. — which I’d imagine to be the larger drivers due to how complicated it is to join compared to a traditional centralized setup (see also same hurdle for mastodon vs Twitter; which doesn’t gain adoption until Thread and BlueSky started to attract the less technical users), I’m seeing troubling signs of slowing down and shrinking.

If people actually want Lemmy in these areas to grow, it is important to be a lot more inclusive, and understand when to not participate in order to foster better community growth.

What I mean on the inclusive side is those FOSS advocates need to back off with the “You don’t understand FOSS, and go make your own instance” comments so other users don’t just bounce right off and leave after being bored with nothing to interact with.

What I mean by understand when not to participate is literally don’t participate in niche communities that doesn’t apply to you. So many Android users commenting irrelevant anti-Apple sentiments in Apple Enthusiasts community, for example. This is driving away actual users who are interested in discussions.

The charts don’t lie. Lemmy is shrinking, not growing. After getting a new lease on life with 0.19 due to what is essentially clever accounting, the community is still slowing down/shrinking. And for the nerdier side of the userbase, unless the community by and large start to interact more inclusively, the whole thing is sadly going to be just a small blip that’ll soon fizzle out.

[–] aaaa@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don't think it is.

Generally speaking, your average social media user won't care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.

Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don't want to see.

Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn't want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they'll just leave.

The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in

Also the sorting could be better.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think admins curating the feed is... Interesting but also kind of dangerous and it sounds like it could be very manipulative. But of course you could go to instances that don't do it but it might not be obvious.

That said, I agree the sorting could be better. The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I think admins curating the feed is… Interesting but also kind of dangerous

just letting the admins set defaults would be better than forcing these choices upon their users, which I think is was the above user was suggesting, which is kinda what Reddit does with having default subs

The active sort still showing 2 days old posts is not ideal.

why not? if they're getting new comments then they're still active

Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score [of the post] and time of the latest comment, with decay over time

it's like something inbetween Hot and classic forums-style sorting (New Comments sort in Lemmy)

but I do not think that should be the default sort method, instance admins can already adjust what the default sort method is

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