It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Same and I hate that I would have to go back to reddit. I like that I can have decent conversations here but I also miss being able to talk about niche shows I like and quote things with people. The niche interests that Reddit offers isn't really on Lemmy.
Like I'm also no longer keeping up with my favorite radio show cause they have a sub Reddit and the people who listen to that show, aren't the kind of people who can just switch over to Lemmy. They don't know the first thing about changing platforms.
I already talked to someone else on here on providing my own content and being the change I want to see. But I've found so many communities where its just one person posting into the void and there's lots of posts from like a month ago and zero comments on every single one. Some communities seem to be just people posting news links to other sites. Which makes Lemmy seem like a directory- not a community.
Yeah, it's not a good thing and I'm getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody's claiming that's good for those platforms.
We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don't buy this arguments of "people are just not using their alts", I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP's arse with nothing to back it up.
The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users.
These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform's profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.
Also Lemmy is becoming a larger platform and Twitter- or "X"- is becoming a smaller platform. Sure total users might be down since right after the Exodus but that is obviously normal, a new baseline will be established that's still significantly above the pre Exodus baseline. Then reddit inc will do something else stupid and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again.
I think there's positives and negatives to having a small platform, and there's positives and negatives to having a larger platform. With a smaller platform, the quality of the comments in general is much higher with less low effort jokes which usually you've already read 500 times. With larger platforms, the smaller communities are much more active because there's a larger pool to draw those people with niche interests from.
and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again
honestly I wonder if it would be more effective to be talking about lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, compuverse.uk, beehaw.org... pretending they're just their own things and not talking about Lemmy or Federation or anything like that
might be good to get some users to just signup to the given instance, and slowly realize they're actually communicating with people from many servers and now they're in the rabbit hole lol
Maybe, people do talk fondly about the days of forums that were dedicated to specific subjects with small communities where people all know each other and an instance can be much like that. Although sometimes what people actually want is different to what they really want, you know? Although I also do remember forums mostly too.
I think it's still good to talk about Lemmy and the fediverse is still good, I joined Lemmy earlier this month and the way ActivityPub works was quite appealing to me and really made me want to switch. It was slightly unintuitive at first but someone described it as being like the email protocol where you can view emails from anyone even if they're on say gmail and you're on Yahoo mail/proton mail/ self hosted email/etc and that made it make complete sense.
The average user cares about the health and quality of the platform though and a declining user-base is not good for either of those.
Sure, we don't want to be flooded with millions of users either but that's because we have a distinct lack of mod tools and features to deal with it. The solution is better tools and better ways of handling those users, not to keep the platform isolated and haemorrhaging users.
I mean, if you are saying the sky isn't blue, why not? A drop in users is a bad thing. Lemmy needs people and it needs content. This smells of the "good for bitcoin" meme all over again.
I edited because it seems it was too controversial, but anyway.
I commented saying that this should probably be a signal for people to start focusing on a few core communities instead of spreading like crazy.
It seemed that people were thinking that users would magically come to every community and make them active, but we are seeing the opposite. Which for me was a good thing because it would make people realize platform growth doesn't happen magically.
Yeah I think people have what happened to Digg in their minds and think there'll just be one single huge Exodus and Lemmy will explode over night, but that's unlikely. We just have to keep trucking and overtime reddit inc will make more and more stupid decisions and each time Lemmy and the dedicated will grow a but larger. Not to mention Twitter is imploding even faster, maybe we'll gain users from there.
Having a small community in the meantime isn't so bad anyway, there's less low effort comments and you can recognise people sometimes which is cool. There's positives and negatives to both small and large communities.
Some subs on Reddit were practically unusable due to the amount of users and the noise they created. Especially if you weren't in an American timezone so missed the early chatter before everyone piled on. I've come to appreciate less users being here.
@itadakimasu
> there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing?
A centralised platform is a numbers game. The money for upgrading servers for growth has to come from one company, and if the platform shrinks it gets harder to get a return on that spending.
It just doesn't matter as much in a federated network. The cost of growth is spread across many servers. Some of which will end up shutting down, for a range of reasons. But others have room for growth.
@itadakimasu
Plus, the Lemmy servers are part of a much larger network; the fediverse. Not just other forum apps like KBin either. Right now I'm replying to this from Mastodon.
I have an alt on a .nz Lemmy server, but haven't got into the habit of using it yet. So at least some of the perceived shrinkage *is* due to that, rather than any failure of the network. Also due to spam and troll accounts being purged.