Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users

I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.

Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.

That doesn't seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it's that active. I would've expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.

until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.

Some dropoff after initial hype is normal. Now we just continue as usual until reddit pisses people off again.

I'm to tired to make quality posts. Props to the people that can do that every day. Best I got is a few mildly opinionated comments.

I'm actively lurking, I just have nothing of value to share 🌝

Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.

I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.

I feel like I'm witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect...

FYI, Lemmy doesn’t count lurkers as active users. Here’s how Lemmy counts active users:

An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

I'm not too worried. Graphs dont only go up. :)

Joined today. I’ll likely just lurk in the background…

Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

Also, instance hopping and users registering on multiple instances before picking only one/being active on only once may be an explanation.

Lemmy.world has been down a lot, I've been trying to use it but half the times I've logged on it's been down. So that might be part of it?

I'm generally a lurker so here. I posted.

As a lurker I mostly just vote. But gotta post every once in a while to add to active users stat!

No worries, Lemmy is alive. Lemmy and Fediverse in general is better to grow organically.

Some people might have made multiple accounts and chosen one possibly?

There's also people that create multiple accounts in different instances and end up using just one.

Lemmy needs a middle logical layer to really take off. If a local server moderats it as such, the default view for say /c/technology shouldn't be slit across a dozen instances. Instead it should be merged into one view.

Without it you have a bunch of largely stagnant communities.

For some the novelty of lemmy dropped pretty quickly. Most reddit users which make up a huge chunk of lemmy users would go days if not, weeks without commenting or posting. You kinda have to factor in that a lot of people are lemmy lurkers that will comment or post once they find something that interests them.

can't maintain 90% uptime

why are we losing users?

I don't understand why people have expectations from a young platform like it's supposed to be the new reddit/facebook all of a sudden. I lived through the digg->reddit move and believe me, it was worse than what we see on lemmy sometimes. Let it grow and it will have a chance. Offer help when you think some communities aren't correctly moderated or when you think you have better ideas. People usually will try to help (not all the time).

I'm sticking with it for now. Reddit can piss off. The Spez shit was just the last straw for me after a lot of other disappointing shit in recent times.

It is expected that there are corrections in numbers after a huge spike. The bigger goal will be to sustain this community.

Reddit is going to keep trying dumb methods to monetize or annoy their user base. Digg did a similar thing. The people will slowly get more and more annoyed and the content here will increase. It’s just a waiting game and federated services are the future.

New users join, some leave, but the ones who stay are active. Lemmy feels very alive and that's what matters.

Dude I was away on vacation chill. :-)

For the last month and a half, I have not used reddit at all. Lemmy has most of the communities that I was a part of.

But I get that, some niche subreddits still don't have communities here on lemmy. A few of my friends, stopped using lemmy because it didn't have the subs they were active in.

Sites like reddit, Instagram, and twitter make the cognitive effort to go from signing up to using the app as low as possible. The users' experience is considered from before they even have an account. They make sure you don't ever see a blank page or feel like you're battling the app to find content.

Lemmy actively puts roadblocks in the way. Server choices, the hoops you need to jump though for server memberships, and highly fragmented communities all but ensure that people will face issues when signing up.

Sadly, a lot of users here feel that because they had to overcome them, so should everyone else. Until that changes then the self-defeating cycle will continue.

It'll hit equilibrium eventually. Not like this is something unusual for a platform that's making the rounds as the new and exciting thing.

My biggest issue is that at least two out of three times I go to browse/post/comment on lemmy.world, the server is down. I have no clue the actual up time, maybe I am just unlucky. But I am considering migrating my main account to another server.

My alt's server has never experienced this much issue. Hopefully the devs add a migrate function.

Might as well post here as my first one. Hi, Lemmy. :)

Because you like numbers i reply. Now it's going up by one active user

Joined few days ago after sync released, thou I'm boost user at reddit before I will stay here no matter what. I'm already done with reddit and their trash app.. Can't wait boost for lemmy to release.

The problem with lemmy is that it's not 100% stable. I like it more than Reddit but at least 20% of time lemmy is overloaded, down, not refreshing or else.

I'm just gonna leave this post here, for statistics.

Joined Lemmy today and find it kinda refreshing and reminding me of the old days when web was small yet varied.

Also really dig the web interface, especially the vaporwave-light theme :D

Sadly, there's just not a critical mass of users in most of the communities I'm interested in. I pop in here every once in a while to see what's going on, but it's currently lacking the diversity of content that you get on Reddit. I'm still rooting for it to succeed.

“Chart go down” isn’t necessarily bad.

For example, this could be due to general disinterest, or it could be from troll removal/defederation too, no?

These are natural growing pains of any new platform. A lot of people will come over, check it out, and then go back to Reddit.

I just swap between lemmy.world and lemm.ee whenever one of them goes down. They're the first two options on the app I use lol

With the fediverse known for its opposition to infinite growth, this feels ironic

Hard for me to be active when my home server is down most days 😂

Maybe it's just my feelings but conversations and participation is booming. I rather a small and active community than a millions of users who lurk.

I'm on the fence about sticking around. I don't see myself going back to Reddit, so I'll probably just leave and be productive.

I keep forgetting you have to comment or post to be considered active

It's natural progression once initial hype wears off. As long we manage to keep core amount of users it should grow slowly over time.

It's way better than the relative numbers of Threads. I expect a decline of active users, since a lot of Reddit users registered to a Lemmy instance expecting a similar experience that couldn't be fulfilled. It will stabilize and grow up again with peaks when, for example, old.reddit.com is ditched.

Here! I'm another active user!

A big issue was loosing all the .ml lemmy instances. I lost mine and had to create a new account. lemmy.ml is the only one that's still up.

I was an early Reddit adopter and can remember how lonely it felt back then. It took years but it got better in ways and worse in others. I believe in Lemmy because it isn't susceptible to the pressures of a company trying to be profitable. Sure it'll have its own challenges but I've personally had enough of idiot CEOs running social websites into the ground.

The big problem with lemmy is that some niche communities did not migrated so when you Look for example for fairphone news you Look to reddit beacuse lemmy dosent have equivalent. Likewise i havent seen something similar to r/tailsof. You know the niche communities that were the bread and bucket of reddit with the few exceptions ( programers and Linux communities fully migrated and are obviusly standing out beacuse those pepole are always first to move to opensource alternatives )

Lemmy has already hit equilibrium as far as I'm concerned if your on lemmy world I suggest changing instances my instance midwest.social was down alot in the beginning when lemmy was getting alot of new sign ups but has since then been updated a few times and been rock solid since now it only occasionally goes down for maintenance

It’s normal. Chill. Not like Threads that lost 80% of its active users.

The novelty has worn off. Contributions are going to fall to the baseline for this platform. Question is, is the Lemmy space going to expand from that point?

Sync's already had over 10k downloads, but the ability to post (apart from comments) hasn't yet been added. Once that happens I imagine there'll be a decent spike.

I think that app choice makes a difference, too. I would guess that most people on mobile picked one or two apps to try, and if their picks weren't great (or the user was too impatient to wait for improvements) they called the whole experience shitty and bailed. Those of us committed to the move hung on and waited for our apps to get better.

In my case, I grabbed every ios app I could find and tried them all. Some were not so good, some were good and improving at a lightning rate. Living through those growing pains is worth it to me, especially when the improvements are crazy fast. I'm mostly using Memmy now, and I'm really happy with it. I only have one tiny, unimportant issue with it involving text selection, but it's nothing compared to how good they've made this app so quickly. Memmy is a large part of why I stick around.

Lemmy put my 1st post here

I think people who've only ever known reddit/instagram/twitter will find it dull, but this is still a relatively active place with quality users and mods.

The bigger and more reddit-like it gets the harder it will be to moderate and the more expensive it will be to run. Things are fine right now.

Growth is not always consistent.

This is an expected statistical artifact given the "last month" aggregation and a huge influx of new users of which many don't stick around. I am saying they don't stick around, because that's generally just what happens with a lot of new users (e.g. they checked it out, decided it's not for them) and also due to the federated nature they might have switched accounts and similar things. Then the bit about "last month" aggregation: Have a look at the "Active 6 months" graph - it's still trending upwards. Those are likely a trailing average aggregations, so a maximum is reached when that 1-month-window starts (roughly) at the beginning of the huge user influx. For the 6-month window that hasn't happened yet, so still going upwards. Assuming nothing changes (similar amount of new/leaving active users) the graphs gonna be interesting in the next few weeks: After the initial wave of influx the balance was most likely negative (more users from "the wave" dropping out again than added users afterwards), however I'd hope it's gotten positive since then. If that's the case the graph should start trending upwards 1 month after the balance became positive. It's unclear when that was the case, but some towards end of July might be a reasonable guess? The same graph with a smaller window could shed some light on that (or just expose useless noise ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Another sign I'd consider good: The active user ratio is trending upwards.

Disclaimer: I don't know how the data is aggregated, nor how exactly "active" is defined - the gist of the above very likely applies though. I was too lazy to look it up in the code - if someone knew how these graphs are aggregated and were so kind to let me know, that'd be appreciated :)

Could be something to do with frequent outages. Every now and then I will have error jump out. I then give up for a day and then try using tomorrow.

As a new user, I kind of can’t get over the idea that bots just seem to scrape links and repost them here.

That seems to be most of the contributions to communities to me.

Can bot cleaning explain this?

I will admit, I was hard into Lemmy at first, but then gradually slipped back into the Reddit habit. This is my first visit to the site in a few weeks.

I would also note that some instances with the ml ending like fmhy.ml got wiped out of existence a few weeks ago because Malaysia forcefully took back that domain suffix back. I was on there and had to make a new account elsewhere after I saw it wasn't going to come back up.

People always tend to bounce back to the bigger platform.

How I like to deal with this is to use two or more platforms of the same kind.

Occasionally open Reddit, and occasionally Lemmy. Occasionally checking Fedi, and occasionally going on Twitter.

It may be disorienting at first, but it's better to get used to going on many websites than sticking to just two.

Once Boost for Lemmy releases, 10, 000% growth will occur over the coming weeks afterward 😉 (IYKYK)

The number of users are just stabilising. This is expected after a sudden spike in users.

That decline is slower than I expected. It shows that more people stay than not

Thats the case for most new platforms you get a surge of users and then some titer off and stop using the platform. But don't look at the small dip look at the massive growth compared to a few months ago.

Lurkers not counting probably has something to do with that.

It's because Reddit is still alive and well and Lemmy just doesn't offer enough to be a serious alternative (yet)

The very gentle slope towards normalization is quite good, actually.

It needs a solid app like Apollo was for Reddit to help it keep active users.

Being new to Mastodon and Lemmy I personally struggle to figure things out. Just finding a brief summary on how Lemmy works in contrast to reddit has, so far, yielded no helpful results. While I think for me this is just a matter of sticking with the services I can imagine that a lot of people would check in, struggle and check out again.

The, let's call it infrastructure, of Lemmy and the way registration works due to the fediverse is quite different to what most people are used to.

Not surprising that the initial hype from the Reddit meltdown is wearing off, the question is how much momentum can be retained and how to attract users organically.

Because every post is just Lemmy users jerking themselves off raving about how much cooler they are than Reddit.

It's so fucking cringe I I can't scroll more than 5 minutes without giving up.

This is normal. We've gotten a big enough surge where we have consistent content now. Lemmy was a bit rough when the migration started, but hopefully improvements will go a lot faster now. We're definitely missing a lot of core features and polish still. But Lemmy is a long term social network that is grass roots. All we need to worry about is creating a sustainable community now, and polish up the experience to newcomers so we can sustain the next exodus and be more of a viable platform.

I feel like it's one small community instead of an interconnected larger one, unfortunately.

Still a massive increase compared to a few months ago.

@LambLeeg I swear we have this this at least a copule or few months of someone getting anxious there's a sight dip of active user on the Fediverse and eventually it goes up again.

I woudn't worry too much about the graph and just try to vibe here instead.. 🤷‍♂️

Number of active users slightly dips after exponential growth, surely the platform is dying, lets run around in circles and scream that the sky is falling.

Just like a whale, scraping off barnacles, for greater speed and efficiency

I'm active with comments, but not posts. That's all I can offer.

take my monthly comment

I'm doing my part!

I couldn't figure out how to log on here with my other Fediverse creds. Rather than, like, Google or something? I just created new accounts for each instance. I'd say it's a boon for anonymity, but I used the same username, soooo

What are people saying to be calm for? Nobody way raising alarm

Interesting data considering the climbing daily post/comment(?) numbers I saw yesterday.

Thank fuck, I was worried my hosting bills were going to keep escalating... xD

A platform can always be improved, always. Lemmy is alpha software now and the growing problems we had in the beginning may have annoyed some users.

I think the most important thing is to keep making improvements to attract new users. I'm already finding the content infinitely better than it was a month ago.

I will use Lemmy more when Sync will fix hiding posts. And no, I'm not gonna use "remove read"

Still waiting for the ability to block instances as a user.

People on vacation in July and august too maybe ? Might have a slight rebound later

Yeah cuz the shot is down constantly. I have 2 apps and one usually doesn't work.

Doing my part...

At least there's something to do here. Mastodon almost always feels like a ghost town to me. I only really keep it on my home screen because I like the icon.

Still better at retaining its users than Threads.

I've been wondering what Lemmy was like until Jun 2023. Quite cozy I guess.

Posting smth so I count as an active user again

I mentioned this in another thread but I think it's regression to the mean

To be expected. I like it but it's still quite an immature platform overall. There's lots to be done to make it easier for an average user.

I can use Lenny with Lenny sync on my phone without issue but when I try to use my browser on my laptop I can't login. It's the same instance, save credentials.

This is not a bad thing. Lurkers have always been a significant part of the user base in all social media.

Lurker mainly but looking to get more involved!

The number of posts per day keeps growing though.

We'll see how it goes, hopefully it keeps growing, but a user loss seems to be quite common after the initial wave of new users for new platforms

A good part of that can be explained by the low time resolution of the graph. 1 month.

Let's assume 1 month ago, 100 new people signed up. Let's say 20 of those made a comment or post, which is the requirement to be counted as an active user.

Many of those 100 didn't stay for various reasons. Of the 20 'active' users, only 15 were coming back the next day.

But the graph still counts 20 active users for a whole month. Only 1 month after a user last commented or posted, this user is no longer counted as 'active'. So now we see a drop of -5 (all numbers made up).

I think it's perfectly normal that not everyone who signs up makes a post or comment. And that not everyone who tries out something new will stick around the next day, or the next week.

With a large number of new signups, which we had in the last months, it can be expected that another a large number is only active for a short time. Due to the low resolution, we probably see what happened 1 month ago.

Lemmy didn’t take off like all my other moves and that’s ok. Can’t stand what Reddit stands for. I won’t ever contribute there but I’m forced to visit to get commentary I need to see on the war and other niche topics.

The robots have filled the content problem but not the commentary problem. And no, I don’t want bot commentary.

Been posting on masto since lemmy.world keeps getting outages. New posts seem infrequent on the sorting algorithms. I'm sure once the hardware hiccups die down it will stabilize

Well I'm here and I like it. So there.

Well, everybody kinda knows each other a little bit here, whereas on reddit unless you are one of those accounts nobody even bothers reading your username.

Those are pretty good numbers

I'm just incompetent all around 💁

Can someone normalize facebooks active use chart over the same time range?

Lemmy feels, some days, like its bots all the way down. Just reddit repost bots everywhere.

Average mass is too mid to come out of their "none is here" mindset for most superior alternatives.

love that last point about topical meta-communities. could be the answer to niche communities fragmented across several instances

Yeah this was always going to happen after a big rush. On any website a certain % of users that sign up won't like it and will move on. If you have a steady influx of users, you wouldn't notice it, but because of lemmys explosive growth due to reddit shitting its pants, then just like we saw a tonne of people leave at once, were now seeing a tonne of people leave at once, and now that that explosive user growth is normalising, for a short time we will see an overall decline in users until the amount of leavers normalises as well.

If were still losing people in a month, then we should be worried.

Some of those will be bots or trolls or just shitheads in general so no great loss

¿Se consideran como activos los que solo entran para leer y votar? Pues no comentan pero rien y no paran de reir. No hay que fiarse tanto de los números sino mas bien de la naturalidad, neutralidad y originalidad de respuestas.

Are those who only enter to read and vote considered as assets? Well, they don't comment but laugh and they don't stop laughing. You should not trust the numbers so much but rather the naturalness, neutrality and originality of responses.

quality over quantity: trash users can find their way out

I'm very interested to see where it settles. It should give in indication of what percentage of people are able/willing to use lemmy in it's current state.

The fediverse is such a cool project but it can be pretty rough from a usability standpoint.

Anyone know why I have to log back in every day or two?

Maybe that's because it's a terrible platform full of self-important geeks and incels?