Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there's a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).
Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.
I'm fairly sure Reddit has something similar so users don't keep seeing the same one popular community again and again.
For context, Reddit used to (5 years ago?) show multiple posts from the same community on /r/all, then they implemented a unique function that made it so only one post per sub was shown in the top X. This greatly improved /r/all. It was controversial and well documented.
It was weird at first but it really helped engagement and medium sized communities. I think if that PR makes it it would greatly improve Lemmy too.
I blocked the major meme subs (coms?) and my experience here has been much, much better. Free yourself of last year's memes and explore all the interesting links getting posted
Yes, those meme communities are very active and drown other posts from other communities. Unsubscribing them drastically improve my experience. I can sort by New now and see Posts from communities I subscribed to. And unlike Reddit, new posts got pretty good engagements here, perhaps because other people browse by New too.
It would be nice if you could block a community directly from the front page without having to navigate to it first. Whole instances would also be useful.
I disagree. While I do like that the discussions and top level comments are not nearly as homogenized as Reddit eventually became, I’m really missing the niche communities. I wasn’t subscribed to any large subs on Reddit, so my feed was basically just a curated list of discussions for my hobbies. No memes, news, pop culture, internet drama, or politics. Right now, that’s just not possible on Lemmy due to the low population.
The sorting algorithm fixes can't come soon enough IMO. Small subs are dead because they simply can't show up on the front page with most of the sorting algorithms that Lemmy has. That limits how much you'll see in your feed and also makes Reddit a better product (due to all the niche subs it has that actually show up on the front page).
Once 3rd party lemmy apps get up to snuff it'll be easier to switch. The .ml loss probably hurt us and for now a lot of redditors would rather complain than leave.
The one I use - memmy - frequently has issues with widgets that stop responding, and currently is glitching such that the upvote/downvote buttons are superimposed over the posts. Search results show all communities as having 3k subscribers even if there’s actually only single digits. If you highlight text to make a link, it overwrites the text with the empty link rather than making the text into a link. Mlem and Liftoff - the other two I checked - have their own issues.
I think we can also do a better job hiding the complexity of federations from novice users and cut down on the impact of bot-based crossposting by detecting that the lines articles are identical. I could see, for instance, discussions being merged on the client side.
I found reddit neither usable nor interesting before Alien Blue, and I suspect there are a number of potential users out there who would onboard or increase engagement here with a better UX.
I think it's as you say. Lemmy's growth is going to happen in waves, until it has reached a critical mass that sustains its own "weight", in terms of growth.
You have to remember that this is no commercial platform, with little advertisement, which is made by its own users. Growth is bound to be slow, at first.
Not only that, we want it to be slow. Being a server admin at the moment is racing from fire to fire. The Lemmy software needs to mature a bit before it will be ready for the less-technical users.
According to the Fediverse Observer, Posts and Comments are still growing day-by-day. It's definitely slower growth, but as long as it stays healthy and active it will continue to have growth spurts as the enshittification of the rest of the web continues.
Slow day to day growth is the kind you want to foster and plan on anyway. Cant rely on spikes and waves, but they are of course apriciated. The more content we make the more people will come over, for now it's really that simple from a user standpoint.
The exodus from reddit has stabilized and we've made this place our experimental home. That wave is over. We won't get another wave until some of the kinks are smoothed out. If we have fewer shutdowns and better apps then I bet we'll get steady growth. Also it might take a while for people to realize that lemmy is easier to use than mastodon, which gave federation a bad name for most normies.
Yep, I've migrated but my time spent browsing Lemmy vs Reddit has tanked. Less than 10% of my previous time. This is due to still waiting for a Sync for Lemmy release and lemmy.world having issues with session. I've been unable to log in consistently since the hack.
I'm on the sync for Lemmy private beta right now. You are in for a treat! 🤌 Google should approve the preload page any day now (ball is in their court). And then after that we're looking at maybe a week until public beta.
Actually I like having a "smaller" space. Reddit was already way too big, with an anonymous giant blob of users. I wouldn't even have bothered writing an answer like I do now, since it would have been buried under 100s of other posts and comments within seconds. Sometimes smaller and slower are positive features, at least to me.
The only issue with the smaller space is the niche instances. One of the things I loved about reddit was finding communities for hobbies and interests. With something small you are sometimes lucky to have 20 people in an instance and then even less posting or engaging with content.
Too small? Only a few communities and you can’t find your hobbies.
Too big? The place is overrun by normies who treat the platform like Facebook (posting unironic old people memes) or Instagram (running scams and OnlyFans ads). It also might become too difficult to moderate or the admins could get greedy and their own and advertisers’ profits before user experience (enshittification). All of these are happening to Reddit BTW.
However, we are too far from the “too large” problems and Lemmy instances’ size is generally kept in check by popular recommendations (join-lemmy.org, awesome-lemmy-instances) favoring <1k communities. So I think pointing average Reddit users to Lemmy is more helpful than hurtful, and I designed and helped build this banner at r/place despite having otherwise left Reddit.
Yup, I can be late for hours to comment on a post and can still get replies. If you’re late by an hour on a popular sub on reddit, you might as well not comment at all.
That's fine. Just do our things here, and when Reddit eventually shoot their own foot again, the next wave of refugees will have an alternative ready, unlike us a few months ago where there was confusion over where to migrate.
Kind of lucky the Fediverse version of Reddit worked out as the main alternative while Mastodon and Bluesky duked it out and then Threads came out of nowhere.
Also IMO the Lemmy apps are better than Mastodon... I admit I was one of the people who got too confused to get on Mastodon but I figured out Lemmy just fine.
The popular Mastodon instances seem to be more stable than the Lemmy ones though. I don’t think I’ve experienced any extended downtime on the Mastodon instances I’ve been on yet. Also, because of the race between the tons of lemmy apps being developed, they tend to have more bugs (on beta). I use Tusker beta for Mastodon and it’s been very stable compared to the Memmy and Mlem betas.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There's still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).
Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.
Might as well throw in my rant here, as I'm against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can't seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there's really only one group of people here right now.
I think we're going to be seeing new waves of Reddit users on a fairly regular basis. Steve Huffman likes to roll these things out slowly in drips and drops, and it is very unlikely that this move alone will make reddit significantly more profitable to run. If he wants to do an IPO soon then he's going to need to make some more choices that really annoy the users (banning porn seems like an obvious one, even though he's said something like he's fighting to keep porn on reddit). They're going to keep cracking down in dumb and obvious ways on things and redditors will abandon ship just as soon as something they care about gets in some way messed with.
Don't forget that redditors have left reddit in large chunks dozens of times in the past.
Lemmy, we, are not a corporation. In fact, exponential growth is BAD since the instance admins have to spend more money and work to keep it running. There is no financial benefit to chase the numbers. Let it grow organically.
Anyone who would've left Reddit has already done so, they may be a small increase when Boost/sync becomes available but I doubt we'll see much growth. No one has ever heard of Lemmy.
Depending on his share of the company (which may change after going public), he might be forced to resign. However, I don’t think that would reverse the process as he apparently surrounded himself with like-minded people (similarly, Neal Mohan continued Susan Wojcicki’s work as well)and the movement towards profitability at all costs and enshtiitfication is natural course of action for the company following its bottom line.
It will always be like that. If 100 people come here for the first time on one day its great if 10 end up staying till the end of the week and lurking and out of those 10 maybe 1 would end up staying for longer. Thats just how these things work.
Fortunately, this effect is stronger with Facebook’s Threads even though they likely paid celebrities to join. I think the anti-Zuck sentiment is going strong and Lemmy does not have major controversies around it. Also, if users pass the somewhat high barrier to join, they might be more likely to want to use the account once it’s been set up.
Technically, you can still create a dev app in your profile and get a free API key “for debug purposes”, and ReVanced-like patches for Android clients such as Infinity allow inserting such keys. However, there is no NSFW access and I imagine this loophole is getting closed soon.
Web scraping from old.reddit is another option used by clients such as Stealth. It is slower but maintains anonymity and NSFW access.
Reddit said during the 3rd party app backlash that old.reddit is not going anywhere...
...so it’s dead in 6 months?
(They reassured the Apollo dev of cooperation in 2023-01 so I’m extrapolating their credibility)
I agree wholeheartedly. Every time a online service becomes mainstream the capitalist enter the field and turn the service to shit. It happened to MySpace, it happened to Facebook, tumblr, Netflix and so many others. Now with the upcoming IPO of Reddit, the service needs to be ready for the milking
First, the most detailed statistics show "Active Users Monthly". That means, if you have any interaction (e.g. posting a comment) you will be counted as active for a whole month.
If you have a look when the decline first started, you'll see that it's right around one month after the Reddit blackout.
So what happened is that tons of people came to Lemmy during the blackout, tried it out for a few minutes, maybe posted a comment, and then dropped it again. They were still counted in the statistics until the 12th of July, which is when the drop starts in the statistics, because all these "single-day-users" are dropping out.
But: the drop from the highest point to now is only ~10% of the users. Other than that the user count seems to be kinda stable.
For more up-to-date numbers look at the post/comment counts, since they are daily. Here you see a linear, maybe slightly more than that, increase, which indicates a steady amount of interaction.
Btw, the number of total users is steadily decreasing, and that's a good thing. The reason for that is that there are lots of obscure instances with a handful of active users but 10k-90k of users who have never posted anything. These instances usually have open registration without captcha, so all these users are probably bots.
Since these instances don't actually have real users or content, they probably were just created by someone to try something out, so they keep getting closed, and with them, the bot accounts disappear.
Old.lemmy and liftoff app is what got me to finally stay. I think more people would join if they knew about the site update and that there are a bunch of apps for it now. Originally it seemed to be just one app and it was terrible.
I think there are 2 groups coming from reddit. 1- Users wanting a more niche community (think early reddit) 2- Users trying to turn Lemmy into present day Reddit. Theres a good amount of communities that are carbon copies of reddit subs. Personally I think that reddit has morphed into something toxic (Ive had a reddit account for 15 years). While its good to have growth, nobody wants to use a site that is so popular that Aunt Betty is chiming in with her love jesus memes.
I think that ease of use is the biggest hurdle at the moment. While yeah Mastodon has grown it's also improved quite a bit. The onboarding is much more streamlined versus six months ago.
Those barriers are getting better but are still there for Lemmy. Apps are starting to come which is fantastic but the users need to want to engage with the platform. Streamlined sign up, improved features and UI improvements will need to continue to evolve in order to grow the user base.
I wouldn't call it a matter of need. While I want to see Lemmy grow, I don't think that we should rely on outrage on another platform to drive our own activity in the long term. While the number of users joining has slowed down, it certainly hasn't halted.
All we can do is make Lemmy as solid and enticing of a platform as possible, and leave those on Reddit to choose between supporting a platform they don't like and leaving. We shouldn't be responsible for forcing their hand, but we should be responsible for maintaining a healthy community here.
I think even something like a indie video game developer hosting a forum on Lemmy instead of Reddit would do wonders for making Lemmy "mainstream". Or even a youtuber, streamer, or some other content creator at that. But of course, it's not something I'd go out of my way to do; just something that I think will happen in due time.
If it doesn't, I'm okay with that. The level of engagement I have here is very satisfactory to me. Reddit could be way too overwhelming. That Lemmy is small is kind of refreshing.
One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn't require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren't any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.
I agree about the user interface, but the rest I'm not too sure about. If you recommend new people just join lemmy.world then they really won't need to know very much about the Fediverse. The front page will work as expected, the Hot sorting algorithm will work okay and their instance will already be connected to most communities due to its size. However, you're furthering centralisation then, which is the dilemma.
Knowledge of the Fediverse and tolerance of clunky operations are mostly needed if you join a smaller instance. Learning to find smaller communities by searching for [email protected] (which doesn't work in all apps and sometimes needs to be done more than once) for example is not a good experience for newcomers, particularly those not tech-savvy. And sorting by Hot does not work well on a small instance.
Ideally the onboarding process could integrate lemmyverse.net somehow and give new users a suggested list of popular/active communities to start off with, so they can immediately find some places where discussion is happening without drowning in the memes of /All.
Yeah. A good app is Thunder but still lacks key functionality like editing comments or proper Markdown rendering.
Also, if I see a link to another Lemmy instance’s post, I have no idea how to log in with an account on another Lemmy instance or another Fediverse service. Integrating OAuth-like Sign in with... functionality into ActivityPub would help a lot, especially if you get automatically logged into all instances whitelisted by your instance’s admins. However, that would require either a centralized server (which erodes Fediverse principles), cross-site cookies (which likely don’t exist for obvious tracking reasons) or a browser extension (which is browser-specific and an entry barrier for users, and could introduce security vulnerabilities).
anecdotally; the lack of content and relatively steep learning fediverse learning curve compared to reddit both make it easy enough to understand why lemmy & the fediverse haven't reached into the millions of users yet.
i'm a reddit refugee and i've handcuffed my ability to participate in reddit because i'm still angry about the api changes. i also work in technical, but i still struggle to understand all of lemmy's (and the fediverse's) quirks. both result me me still spending more time on reddit as an unregistered lurker than with lemmy as a member who can participate.
also we can see how it turns out the ones who migrate to lemmy is really a tiny minority, majority of people still using reddit like usual and most people dont want to use 2 website to just browse stuff they can already do in reddit
that makes sense to me because reddit has all of the content that lemmy has plus a LOT more.
i suspect that i will have to rejoin reddit so that i don't miss (my) world shaking events like the recent red hat shift that lemmy completely ignored.
I think that growth is not going to happen passively. These comercial platforms are deliberately pushed and advertised and there is always some new content whenever you open the app.
Fediverse, lemmy whatever may have the better model in theory but that is not enough to create buzz or to reach a critical mass of users.
"Hello here is the better model now come here, why aren't you here? " is not guaranteed to work.
I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.
What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There's not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.
If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn't matter we'll see some growth by enticing other users because it'll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there's no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.
Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I'm not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.