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Lemmy enjoys growth as developers pivot from Reddit amid API charging controversy
(alternativeto.net)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I don't think lemmy is still growing. I might be wrong but this graph https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
is trending down and i've seen a lot of smaller magazines/communities that haven't had any posts for 1-2weeks by now.
I try to help that problem at little but i doubt lemmy&kbin has >100k active users right now.
Lemmy will still be receiving stragglers. E.g. I only signed up yesterday! I only went on Reddit once every few weeks or so, and thus only just found out where my communities had migrated to. I’m sure there are many users like me who haven’t yet followed their communities to their new homes.
They might be using some smoothing, because all lines are noise-free. and the last point might just be an artifact. It looks like a constant growth
According to the graph it accounts for active users within the last 30 days. 30Days ago the reddit strike started and an influx of people started posting. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people haven't been here since. There was a lot of performance and other issues with lemmy&kbin at that time.
There is also always a flurry of people trying out accounts in multiple instances whenever there's a migration wave, so not only are we seeing people who dipped a toe in only to leave, or go back to Reddit, but we're seeing the effect of people understanding how the ecosystem works better and settling into a single active account.
I think it is currently growing, as in more people will visit tomorrow than did today, but also it has shrank since a couple weeks ago when everyone was hyping it up as a reddit alternative and trying it out. Not everyone who came to try it has stayed.
A lot of people just want the endless scroll. No need to comment or post, just consume the posts. They would go back to Reddit for now because Lemmy is not a decade old content machine.
As I type, it says 130k active users (updated hourly)
A one-day minor downtick isn't a trend when it's been up day-over-day for a while now. I'm sure the user counts will ebb and flow over time, but as long as the community stays healthy and the big social media companies keep being greedy, I think this platform has a good shot at long-term viability.
Need to wait a bit I guess and look at the trends over a larger period of time instead of more granular time scales.
I think that's normal. People will try out Lemmy but if they notice that the communities they frequent doesn't have a lot of content they'll just leave back to reddit.
We can hope for organic growth but it'll take a long time (especially with how big reddit is)
And it's understandable. Reddit had more than 16 years to build up the user base that it now has.
Also years of AITA or relationship_advice content to read when bored. Not to mention loads of amazing askreddit threads you can binge.
Content takes time to create.
I'd be happy enough with just new content TBH. Totally out of the loop on wrestling and movies without Reddit.
Time to go the sources Reddit usually has and post them yourself.
But the entire point of getting the info from Reddit is so I didn't have to do that. Why watch seven hours of wrestling per week when I could watch two minutes of highlights and read discussions of the events?
Those were going to leave left by now, but there are several alternatives. Lemmy didn't take all Reddit refugees.
Yeah, I see the same but the community sprawl was vast there in early June. There appears to be a pretty healthy base forming. Pruning dead communities does need to happen somehow though. A admin tool is gonna need to be likely.
That’s OK. Lemmy doesn’t need to be huge and we have had a lot of apps developed for it and there have been a lot of donations to help the platform grow. I think it is large enough now to survive and will slowly grow over time.
Just wait for the next big Reddit mistake. People will come over to Lemmy again and it will be a better place than last time.
I think people are because of the latest trends in social media thinking that you need to be huge to be successful. While you do need a certain threshold of people, semi-anonymous social media really doesn't need to be that big. Just big enough to sustain enough little bit niche communities. That doesn't just need users it needs time. People have this habit of hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. And while I am not able to mod because IRL, I am still looking into niche communities here to see if I can help in some way as contributor. Just need to get through my imposter syndrome in that I don't really feel good enough for comment creator.
Lemmy will still be receiving stragglers. E.g. I only signed up yesterday! I only went on Reddit once every few weeks or so, and thus only just found out where my communities had migrated to. I’m sure there are many users like me who haven’t yet followed their communities to their new homes.
I think that's normal. People will try out Lemmy but if they notice that the communities they frequent doesn't have a lot of content they'll just leave back to reddit.
We can hope for organic growth but it'll take a long time (especially with how big reddit is)
https://the-federation.info/platform/73 -- try this one instead. Click on the major instances and then check "active users this month" or "posts" or "comments" and you'll see that it's doing quite well in terms of the content snowball.
Estimated active users is about 70k on Lemmy. Not sure about kbin. However, active on Lemmy means posted or commented, so the lurkers should be higher.
The dip is attributable to kbin which has some weirdness around active user counts, largely because they don't keep track of them, so I'm not surprised that their numbers might vary somewhat over time.
Otherwise, yea, it'd be accurate to say that the migration wave has come to an end. Mastodon went through multiple waves over the years so we'll see what happens from here. I for one am rather happy with how lemmy (and kbin) have turned out and am not desperate that a hole bunch more people come over.
My biggest concern is that there isn't more cross talk between lemmy and mastodon, and that's because the fediverse is yet to actually do a good job of making the boundaries between platforms thinner. There are many conversations going on in parallel that would be happy to connect but can't because the fediverse hasn't worked out a way to make that work well (yet).
EDIT:
Lemmy has no way to follow a person, so it's impossible. Not sure where such thing sits on a roadmap or whatever, but I get the impression it isn't a priority, at all maybe.
Lemmy does federate decently with mastodon though, as you point out, so consuming lemmy content from mastodon can work, but isn't great. Following a community for instance provides all posts and comments, which quickly becomes a firehose. I imagine most don't do that for long.
~~Following lemmy accounts on the other hand, IME, works nicely, as only posts are federated over, which is a much more manageable feed.~~ EDIT: Sorry, this was wrong, comments as well as posts from a specific user do get federated across.
And replies all work well too, so once you've made contact with a thread on mastodon by replying, it will all behave naturally for the mastodon platform, which is quite nice to see actually.
There's also kbin, which tries to fuse the two platforms, but even there, you can't look at a feed of just the people you follow.