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Quality over quantity.
It feels like that… the timeline reflects the vibe
This is actually pretty good user retention. Most platforms bleed way more users after a surge in sign ups (eg Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Bluesky).
Unlimited growth is capitalist mindset. Stability and community are what we value here.
Yeah. And we don’t need to attract the MOST people, just the BEST people
Rare user from feddit.it 🇮🇹
feels like there was a missed opportunity there
The fediverse has been feeling really good lately. It’s actually getting hard to scroll to the end of the frontpage.
And yet the graph is going down…
Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.
People have started using Piefed insted of Lemmy, but I’m not sure we should throw away hope for the fediverse because of that.
Poefed is part of the Fediverse so surely it’s still a good thing overall?
It’s all or nothing baby! Let’s burn it down if something isn’t perfect from day one.
People will come in waves, some will share the same mindset and others will seek out more dopamine centric engagement.
This doesn’t seem to be hoping for unlimited growth but rather that is has stagnated and is even falling. That can kill a community especially when it is as small as it is
Anecdotally, it doesn’t feel like the experience is contracting, or part of a shrinking community. It’s worth asking what the data means, and whether it’s bad, but there are definitely other reasonable factors too. Users from interoperable platforms like mastodon and piefed, individual people using fewer accounts, or even fewer lurkers, could be responsible for a good chunk of the data.
Everyone who compares growth here (here being very relative considering how it works) vs. the idealized Reddit is forgetting something. Age. You don’t get peak Reddit by looking at its first years, and yet you’re looking at the literal first years for Lemmy and company and saying it’s not comparable. No, it’s not.
Doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be constant discussion on improving and growing communities for better discussion, but the whole “oh no, the numbers are low” is ridiculous. Aside from being a aggregated discussion format, this is like comparing apples and cars. Reddit shouldn’t be a goal or benchmark, discussion flow here should be. I’ll be more worried about stagnation when feed numbers for myself drop back to the first few months, where there was concern about if federation would even work well. (and improving federation/defederation is also a great topic to talk about, it isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than it was)
@[email protected] @[email protected]
To which extent does this graph consider non-Lemmy users interacting with other non-Lemmy users through Lemmy communities as “active Lemmy users”?
I mean, I’m right now interacting with Lemmy using Sharkey. Similarly, I notice many Mastodon and Piefed users interacting with Lemmy communities. And that’s where my question comes in: would all of us count as “Lemmy users” according to the methodology behind that graph?
And piefed/mbin/kbin ect…
Normalize labeling all axes.
You can’t ignore PieFed at this point anymore. I think the statistic is skewed without it.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats
Piefied is at about 5k monthly users and rising, so that does help a bit. With that factored in the monthly users is probably about level over the last 2 years and comments are going up, although that could be the influence of bots as well.
which part, I can’t see Piefed in the data
Exactly
hey this is a nice rug, where did you ge-
- ow, wtf man! Is this how you treat your guests?
Based on what I’ve seen, much of this could be from instances with redundant accounts shutting down.
In other words, a lot of folks can’t sustain the burden of hosting an instance long term. That’s fine, and expected.
Especially since drama is more personal with the volunteering and donating.
It is what it is. I have no idea how to incite a new wave short of Reddit shitting itself in some way
I think what we can try to do is to create an active community.
In the old place, I recognized I really came for the comments. That’s why I try to keep my threshold for commenting low and comment often.
Even if it’s just to thank someone for a good comment or other low effort commenting, I like to think it helps.
We definitely need better onboarding. I am pushing for this on piefed via directs to [email protected] for new users to introduce themselves
I’m not a programmer so I can’t speak to how hard this is, but I think it would be a big asset to building user base if there was a neutral sign up website that wasn’t a specific instance. It would basically choose an instance for you automatically and skip that part. I figure there could be some list of general purpose instances compiled that are all fair game and the site would try to spread the load across instances.
Average user doesn’t care about federation, and all of that complexity is a big turn off. I know because I almost didn’t sign up myself because of that. Having to pick a team just to get in the door feels kinda bad.
I was in the same boat as you regarding signing up. I also agree with you that the concept of federation might be confusing for new users. Just gave up at the promt to explore other instances (in lemmy.world sign up) and signed up to lemmy.world.
I ended up where I did because I wanted the closest thing to no instance possible, and the great folks running this one try to do just that. It’s fediverse Switzerland lol
- point people to one instance you like instead of a general website
- on Piefed, when people register, they can either join indeed the instance they’re on, or have a look at other options: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser
Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion. This idea wouldn’t be to remove the normal sign up process, it would be a way to side step it entirely for those who don’t care about the technology aspect of it and just want to be part of the community.
If you want to pick your own instance or suggest one, that would still exist. This would just be an alternative. It would also help to avoid everyone gravitating towards the largest instance, because it would try to load balance people automatically.
Having to explain federation is kind of the issue in my opinion.
I don’t, nowadays, I just point to piefed.zip
This would just be an alternative
The issue is that there aren’t really instances that are similar enough to be considered interchangeable. They all have their specificity, be it admin style, defederation, downvotes enabled or disabled, front-ends available, etc.
Yeah that’s a good point. Maybe it’s too different for it to work. I maintain that complexity will continue to push people away, though. If instances are that different we might have better luck referring to them as their own sites. That would just increase the flocking to single mega instances though. The most important feature of any social media site is who’s on it.
It’s that live now for Piefed.social ?
Yep, it’s live.
I haven’t checked personally. Requires making new accounts to check each time
It should also fire when you manually make a user from the admin panel, if you want to test it out
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic/Onboarding/near/7719
You’re an admin IIRC?
Staff. I don’t think I can do that. I can check later
Ah, I misremembered!
Ugh that’s a really good point. I need to work on more ‘whatever’ throw away comments
Thank you for your service. I agree with you on the issue, but am a bit afraid that if more people onboard here, the threads will be just the same reddit hivemind circlejerk like ”i also choose this guys wife” etc. But since there is no karma to gain here I wish it will stay like this.
Yep. I agree with this. Re-creating Reddit at the same scale just brings all the same problems. I like that federation means smaller more localised communities that can be connected (or not). I get that it’s not what everyone wants or is used to, and that’s okay.
The rules of the game are different so Lemmy wouldn’t be like Reddit even with the same scale.
last 2 years look pretty stable to me
This is fine. We don’t need lemmy or the fediverse to take over completely immediately.
It’s a good working prototype that’s not a complete ghost town and that’s good enough for now. It doesn’t need to win everywhere immediately, it’s fine if it’s a working solution we can point to and new communities can be created if some people decide to and they won’t exist in a complete vacuum.
Is this counting Piefed?
No. It says lemmy only so no piefed or mbin
Last I checked, Piefed had only a fraction of the users Lemmy had.
I have an account in a Piefed instance and it’s awesome (especially if they add image galleries before Lemmy does), but I don’t think it would meaningfully move the graph.
I mean with how many instances have launched a piefed server the last few months and with how small Lemmy is in the first place even a thousand or so users switching would explain some of that slight downward slope at the end.
There are 43 Piefed instances.
Yes, it does - but you have to account for the users on there if you’re measuring the fediverse activity in general. And Mbin. Combined they’d add about 2.2k extra users this month.
Honestly, this is fine. This is a healthy community. If we had an exponential growth curve, the AI bots, clout-chasting influencers, marketers and data-mining scrapers would be all over these instances, and Lemmy frankly has very poor tools to deal with it.
There aren’t the niche communities, I agree that that’s regrettable. But we really do run into scaling problems.
There is a slow decline though. I don’t want exponential growth, but growth is important imo at this stage
Getting too big would attract the bots, corpos, and everything else that has ruined the internet. I’m fine with staying small.
Small communities can be nice but also it can get stuffy. And it can have some interesting consequences. Someone started freaking out about me stalking them because I replied to two (or three?) of their comments. I don’t think they knew how small of a place this is lol
I don’t think a community large enough to support lots of niche ones is possible without enshittification taking over.
