Editing to let people know that I will be blocking anyone who feels the need to tell me why this graph is inaccurate. I truly don’t care, but feel free to chime in with your useless take and land a spot on my block list! 🙂
Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.
Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you’ve seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.
The fact that you believe these platforms were the same before and after these events makes it sound like you were not, in fact, there to see it happen. In my experience, it permanently changed both platforms, transforming them from weird niche sites to genuine alternatives.
That said, what you find interesting or not is not any of my business.
This thread (and others in that post) might interest you: https://communick.news/post/2320430/4138857
Yeah, I know I shouldn’t bother. I am just annoyed by the misconception that all graphs should always start in 0 on the Y axis, as if it was some law of nature. Shouldn’t allow myself to get dragged in further. :)
I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had 1M 575k something before Elon, hit up close to 2M 1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)
Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem “a lot”. However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.
Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that.
So it increased by 200%
Mastodon had 1M something before Elon, hit up close to 2M and now is sitting around 800k.
This stat is really surprising. Do you by any chance have a link where I can see this data?
I don’t think that either Mastodon or Lemmy slid back anywhere near as far as back to baseline? Sure, usage went down, perhaps even significantly compared to the peaks, but I think that both retained a lot more users than they had before their respective spikes. I’m an example of someone who came into Mastodon with the Twitter exodus and into Lemmy with the Reddit exodus, and I’ve stayed for both.
I don’t mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.
Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg’s meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.
@rglullis@communick.news tbh we shouldn’t expect the adoption curve of any Fediverse software to be somewhat similar to the ones of centralised social networks, since Fediverse completely misses the commercial aspect that encourage key users to stay in the platform easing communities to stick to it as well. My guess is that without the action of commercial dynamics, the situation wouldn’t be so different from the jumps-and-losses moments we’re used to
