Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there’s a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
anecdotally; the lack of content and relatively steep learning fediverse learning curve compared to reddit both make it easy enough to understand why lemmy & the fediverse haven’t reached into the millions of users yet.
i’m a reddit refugee and i’ve handcuffed my ability to participate in reddit because i’m still angry about the api changes. i also work in technical, but i still struggle to understand all of lemmy’s (and the fediverse’s) quirks. both result me me still spending more time on reddit as an unregistered lurker than with lemmy as a member who can participate.
also we can see how it turns out the ones who migrate to lemmy is really a tiny minority, majority of people still using reddit like usual and most people dont want to use 2 website to just browse stuff they can already do in reddit
Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I’m not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.
I’m pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There’s still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).
Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.
Might as well throw in my rant here, as I’m against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can’t seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there’s really only one group of people here right now.
I think we’re going to be seeing new waves of Reddit users on a fairly regular basis. Steve Huffman likes to roll these things out slowly in drips and drops, and it is very unlikely that this move alone will make reddit significantly more profitable to run. If he wants to do an IPO soon then he’s going to need to make some more choices that really annoy the users (banning porn seems like an obvious one, even though he’s said something like he’s fighting to keep porn on reddit). They’re going to keep cracking down in dumb and obvious ways on things and redditors will abandon ship just as soon as something they care about gets in some way messed with.
Don’t forget that redditors have left reddit in large chunks dozens of times in the past.
Don’t care, there’s enough content to keep me happy and I plan to stay here until there’s not
I think there are 2 groups coming from reddit. 1- Users wanting a more niche community (think early reddit) 2- Users trying to turn Lemmy into present day Reddit. Theres a good amount of communities that are carbon copies of reddit subs. Personally I think that reddit has morphed into something toxic (Ive had a reddit account for 15 years). While its good to have growth, nobody wants to use a site that is so popular that Aunt Betty is chiming in with her love jesus memes.
