Similar to Mastodon’s spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source
I’m not too worried. Graphs dont only go up. :)
Well, to keep a user is way harder than to attract his attention.
I think that the key differences between this platform(s) and the more known alternatives are part of the problem - people are very dumb these days and lazy. Often the first reaction to something new and not working in the expected way is to skip it, or demand the solution, rather than look around, try different approach and such.
I feel like I’m witnessing Diaspora 2.0 effect…
Yes, most people give up as soon as something does not work first time.
Maybe there are enough of us to be enough abd to fix those annoying little things that make lemmy complicated to use.
A lot if issues got resolved, apps are here,it is getting better fast.
I doubt it - too many people with different preferences they aren’t willing to let go, I’m afraid.
If you’re asking me, it’s “good enough” the way it is. I’d gladly have some more content filters, but even without them I perceive it as a platform with enough potential to consider it good.
There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.
It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.
Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.
I think those issues will be solved though. Apps will increasingly make onboarding simpler so Lemmy will be as simple to use as Reddit.
At that point really its just a case of waiting for Reddit to fuck itself, which it absolutely will do eventually via corporate greed, and there we go, all the Lemmy content anyone could ever need.
I don’t think Reddit will fall, sadly.
It harbors too many people, who go there for a specific content and don’t care about the internal dramas, or who leads the place and what he thinks about the userbase. In addition… Eh, it hosted Obama, Arnold, plenty of actors, celebrities.
My assumption is that it will simply evolve into something different, but no less popular.
After all, Facebook was caught redhanded on such abominable practices that it should be burnt to a crisp long time ago, and yet it’s still there, led by that automaton, what’shisname…
I mean Facebook is actually a perfect example though no? I don’t know anyone below 40 who uses it. Eventually people get fed up of these stupid websites and move elsewhere.
Reddit will be around just like Facebook sure, but somewhere else will pick up the slack.
In Facebooks case that was Instagram largely which you know, also they owned. In Reddits case it may be Lemmy it may be elsewhere, we will see.
I think I am on shitjustworks… i don’t know how big my instance is I just chose it because it has a cool name.
It has gone down a few times and at first my reaction was to go to is it down dot com to see if the problem was with my app… but then I had the realization that ohhhh, it’s just my home server is down… I thought about making a separate account on another instance but instead just decided to do something else with those few minutes I would have spent here….
No big deal…. It’s happened a few times in the couple months I’ve been here, but it always works eventually… I really like this platform, and the philosophy behind it, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand all the inner workings and how the instances work together, but I don’t feel like I need to.
But I can see how people who understand it even less than I do might get frustrated and so that is going to be a limiting factor with new growth here I would assume…
One thing that bugs me is people asking for/using tools that replicate the look and feel of Reddit instead of learning the ropes. I left Reddit, I don’t want another one. I get it, familiarity is comforting, but when the user base is a fraction of the other platform, no UI or app will ever give you the same experience. I say move on, get out of your comfort zone and participate.
Also, this graph does not take into account kbin which is essentially the same kind of software as lemmy but tracked seperately. Better data can be found here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Also, instance hopping and users registering on multiple instances before picking only one/being active on only once may be an explanation.
Also worth noting is Lemmy only counts posts/comments as “active users”. Lurkers who only read and up/downvote aren’t counted.
Me as well. I only remember this because around July 1st there was a post about it, which lead to a wave of “doing my part by posting my daily comment to count as an active user”-comments.
I think this is the biggest factor. Most people only lurk. How many people signed up and only lurk?
So true. This is straight from Lemmy’s documentation:
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
In this case, I have a theory. I remember a month ago people were posting a lot on Reddit and the !reddit@lemmy.ml community was extremely active. It was like group therapy for refugees. But now the new reality is setting in and people are actually having real and meaningful conversations, which means more lurkers.
So it doesn’t mean that active users are down per se, it’s just that it’s stabilised because people are mostly over Reddit.
Absolutely, and also keep in mind that many who were lurkers on Reddit and came over here maybe made one or two comments immediately saying something like “Happy to be on Lemmy!” and then went back to lurking here and haven’t commented since. They would have counted as monthly active users for July, but not August.
It’s natural progression once initial hype wears off. As long we manage to keep core amount of users it should grow slowly over time.
Reddit is going to keep trying dumb methods to monetize or annoy their user base. Digg did a similar thing. The people will slowly get more and more annoyed and the content here will increase. It’s just a waiting game and federated services are the future.
