Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?
Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?
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!
Have a look here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
It's too early to say, as the method of accounting for 'active user' changed recently.
Seems to me like Lemmy is "consolidating". Some people are leaving but the community is deepening in norms, understanding, commitment and cohesion. This shows up as better content and discussions all the time. Spam is snuffed out quickly, more communities have better moderators. Our infrastructure is maturing and the software is getting better.
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.
I feel like the quality and quantity of posts and comments have drastically increased over the last month. Idk what happened, maybe it's just me but I'm glad this place exists. I'm having a blast! 💜
Im seeing more communities on my feed than ever. Even if it's shrinking, the ones who stay are active.
Just FYI, every "wave" of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff as people dont both signing in every day -- which is basically how people use reddit and other apps but with such a large installcount they're not as noticeable.
Stable, around 50k monthly active users
!lemmygrow could be a nice idea to help people find smaller communities (memes, tech, news and politics are easy to find, the rest not so much)
Reddit continues to mess up, so we can expect more people as the Reddit experience gets worse and Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks improve
Yeah it's probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .
Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.
On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .
I can't speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring "feels like" into this since that's subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I've been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.
The most telling thing to me is that I'm seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments' and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.
Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.
More recently though, it's more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It's also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don't exactly speed run through this page -- I check out the post titles, if it's an interesting topic, I'll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I'll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.
As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted "feels like" it's higher quality, but I'd counter that with the fact that what I "feel like" is that's not actually the case based on what I'm seeing in the new comments list.
Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19
Beehaw are still on 0.18.4. If/when they make the planned move to Sublinks, they'll effectively be on 0.19 in some ways I suppose.
I think there has been some influx where a lot of new users made room for themselves while pressing others to leave/defederate. Beehaw was the notable and initial example where the growth of people from reddit resulted in less interactivity.
I don't think quantity is necessarily the most interesting metric. Quality of discussion and other users is more interesting to me and it has been quite good so far for the communities I frequent.
yes
Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?
It looks like Lemmy has shrunk overall since our peak of 68k active users in July last year to our low point (since rexxit anyways) of 32k, but we seem to be attracting more MAUs now and have climbed back up to 51k.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by diversity, or at least what measure of it you're seeking, but if you mean instances, there's currently ~770 instances online, a bit over half of our peak in July. I'm not aware of any major instances that have closed down yet though, so I assume it's mainly small, single user instances that have shit down, as well as a few hyper niche ones with very few members.
Average users per instance has also been increasing and is getting close to the levels we were at in june when everybody was joining the same few instances. That peak was 690 users per instance, that dropped to a low of 321 in July, presumably because there was more of an emphasis on getting people spread out after initial influx of people who just needed to go somewhere.
There was something interesting I noticed in the stats, in Feb there was a major drop in total posts of almost 5 million. I don't know what exactly happened, but our total posts halved, so perhaps that's why nobody's been posting updates.
It's even more obvious on the 120 day graph
Overall, it appears we have shrunk compared to our peak during rexxit, but we have been steadily increasing in both active users and posts (excluding the major drop in Feb) since our low point a couple of months after rexxit. That's about what I'd expect, and quite good compared to most popular corpo sites which lose a lot more percentage of their MAUs after they've peaked. Threads lost something like 80% of their userbase a week after it launched. Also I don't think that peak during rexxit will be our biggest peak. We'll probably continue steadily gaining users until Reddit fuck up again and we get another influx, like what happened with mastodon.
FYI all these stats are fairly easy to find. I like FediDB because it's got a more friendly UI, but Fediverse Observer has a more plain UI, so is better for posting graphs and such. But that's the beauty of the fediverse, we can all access the same things through all sorts of UIs
Hello @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works,
Would you be interested in creating a community dedicated to community growth? Maybe something a bit more neutral like !communitygrowth so that it can be more inclusive to Mbin, Piefed, and in the future Sublinks?
I have a few theories I would like to discuss with other people interested in this topic
Shrinking I was Joking