Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.
That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.
The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.
Yep, arrived during the initial digg exodus, had tens of thousands of posts at Reddit, modded two subreddits. Closed my account the day during the protests and haven’t been back.
I’m not as active here, mostly due to a busier life but found a new home anyway.
I'm close to that too, but I think mine was 13 years. The weird thing that I've noticed is that most of the time I was on Reddit, almost no one I talked to in real life used Reddit. I struggled for years to try to get people to check the site out. Now that I left, I swear I hear someone I know mention Reddit exponentially more often. The average person doesn't give a damn about how shitty the platform has become, because they weren't around to see what it used to be. The average person WANTS to see ads interspersed with their cookie cutter content with stupid ass features like chat and followers. Good riddance.
Agreed. First they killed RedditGifts, then AMAs, then the up vote/down vote debacle, and when they took away my ability to use Relay is when I left. Screw them.
I'm a counter example. I contributed on Reddit, moderated my own subreddit with a couple of thousand viewers; couple of tens of contributors
I haven't been back to that sub, haven't appointed any other mods. If automod can't handle shit, shit isn't being handled
I have been back to other subs. There are small inoffensive places on Reddit that simply haven't moved
I still visit those subs, still write on them, just not nearly as often
Edit to add: checking today, those subs are becoming less good. With no good app, so many of the prolific commenters don't comment much now. I also had a reply to a 2015 comment I made. I thought stuff was auto-archived much quicker than that
I'm yet to encounter the majority of issues I hear Lemmings griping about. Everyone has been pretty civil toward me. Every time my inbox blows up I feel dread, only to open it and find zero confrontation or vitriol. I'm not running into any racists, sexists, bigots, etc., and I certainly haven't noticed a decline in content (I browse Top ~6 Hours).
I realize my personal experience doesn't equate to these problems not existing, but I do get the strong impression that people are exaggerating greatly.
Exactly my experience as well. Sure, I don't have infinite scroll, but I also don't feel like an algorithm is trying to make me angry. When I get responses, they're typically thoughtful or on topic.
I've been active for a month and in my opinion too many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets, but other than that it's alright.
Going back to reddit would mean to install that unbearable app they have and having to deal with incompetent admins, so I will stay here for some time.
I can see why it's off-putting for a lot of people though.
many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets,
I think thats the whole internet nowdays, unless you decide to exclusivelly consume cat content (and even then theres gonna be a way to jam in extremist political views by some nutter somehow).
Although i have to admit that the ones here are of a diferent breed than most, mainly tankies and people on that side of the compass (and yes they are very annoying about it).
One upside to lemmy is that ,at least up untill now,
the mods and admins are very neutral and i rarelly see deleted comments (or maybe they are hidden... i dunno) and that theres genuine free speech in here, i mean if you whant you can look at my comment history, i get downvoted to oblivion most of the time but my comments are still up and not censored.
Although there is this weird thing on other instances (im in sh.itjust.works and they dont do this i know i tryied it) that delete words on peoples comments and posts, mainly slurs and politically incorrect words. Really, i seen that some months before, dont know if it still like that now with the world users, but if you type something like fa***t in .world you will get "deleted" in that word specifically irc
I don't know how to feel about it, gives me some "spez editing the database to change comments" vibes.
I guess I would feel better to just get notified that my comment got removed.
Or is it just a displaying option based on the instance you logged in with and it gets filtered on the display side and a different instance user would still see the original?
Indeed it does, thats why i shit so much on political extremeism, it inevitably ends in censorship.
My advice would be that if it makes you feel uncomfortable (and you still whant to use lemmy), change instances, like i said, shit.just.works doesnt do that, dont know which other instances do and doesnt. I think lemmy.ml absolutelly does.
If you share a thought on a Biden/Trump thread, an Israel/Palestine thread, or another topic that attracts strong views, and your opinion is different than the hive, expect some vitriol and confrontation.
I've run into it while seriously looking for debate or productive conversation.
The same thing happens on Reddit, though. I think that's kind of just the internet from now on. /r/worldnews is literally just a pro-Israel, anti-Palestine echo chamber so it's nice to see another perspective on here. (I only browse Reddit at work not logged in for the record.) Over here, the hive mind on that seems to change thread to thread.
My only issue is the lack of small communities that get posts frequently, and yeah, duh, I should contribute, but theres only so much I can say about my transness.
One thing I miss about reddit is just being able to endlessly read about peoples experiences and stupid shitty trans memes, thats just missing here right now
Exactly this. My small Reddit communities had a few posts per day. The equivalent on Lemmy have a few per year. Still, I don’t miss them enough to go back.
I'm still seeing so much growth in new content and communities, idk if the raw number of users is the metric we even should care about. Is it the best measure of quality?
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well.. I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
I mostly lurk, too, but enjoy being around my fellow Lemmings.
The only decline I have seen as someone who mostly lurks is in conservatives who thought this was the next Voat. After the surge I saw an uptick in all kinds of people, and a lot of them I don't mind seeing leave.
You don't need this lil slice of the internet to be the "next big thing", you just need a place to go to see the stuff you like.
Ya ever since everyone defederated from exploding heads there's definitely less of them. Maybe one day they'll create another instance. I hope they do, maybe a less transphobic conservative instance, just for the variety of people.
Long time lurker here, 99% of the time I go to post a comment I delete it before posting like ah fuck it. I'm trying to engage a bit more now there are more users.
So, following the 90/9/1 rule, 90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% create content, we are primarily losing from the 90%? That seems to be a good thing for the long-term. As long as we aren't losing from the 1% I'd say we're good
lurkers are also not counted in this statistics. ifaik only active users who are posting or commenting are counted. so there might be more users out there who are active and just lurking and they are not counted.
I feel I have better engagement here. It is still missing some more niche communities that Reddit had, and I'm trying to be active to grow them, but it has been slow.
Yeah, it's plain to see that engagement is steadily climbing. The top posts keep getting higher and higher numbers and new, interesting communities keep popping up.