Hey there everyone! I have a possibly noobish question about the number of active users.
I’ve been watching the stats on occasion and lately, I’ve noticed that Lemmy’s number of active users has been decreasing. (for the last month at least).
While the number has been on an upward trend for the last 6 months
Last month’s stats have been less than rosy.
So could anyone explain how this might affect Lemmy? I think I’ve read before that only people who post or comment count as active users, but seeing it go down is kinda alarming. So am I right in thinking that Lemmy has been losing active users since July 11 or am I missing something?
It’s a normal situation when you have big migrations like the reddit migration. Same thing happened on mastodon with the various twitter migrations.
A lot of people migrate thinking they’re reaching the promised land, realize they aren’t getting what the want from the new platform and go back. It’s the nature of bandwagon jumping.
It’s just fine. The process of growth is dynamic, and the people who remain are the ones who like the platform.
It would be interesting to see numbers from the Digg to Reddit migration. There was a lot of pushback initially. Reddit was “confusing” and “ugly”. I used both for a while but didn’t fully abandon Digg for at least a few months.
Lemmy on the other hand, Reddit made it very easy for me. I’ve been using Sync since at least 2014. Once it went dark I was full Lemmy.
To add to this, the best course of action is to:
- 1- Enjoy and continue to use the platform if you like it, so there is activity for new people to interact with
- 2- Continue to develop features
- 3- Moderate effectively to maintain a constructive experience
- 4- Then wait for the next outrage cycle to generate new interest
In our case, we already know that reddit is going to announce its IPO eventually. Assuming they don’t do something to piss off users sooner than this, this will likely be the next major event to drive people to check out Lemmy. People who checked it out but fell away will already have accounts, and new people will check it out for the first time. If we do steps 1, 2, and 3 well, when step 4 occurs the retention will be higher each time.–
