with deflations in between

Worth noting that Hexbear(currently makes up 25% of all posts on lemmy) only saw a deflation in the initial weeks after launch. It then stabilised and didn't deflate at all over the course of 3 entire years of operating, it happily ticked along with new users coming in at the same rate as user churn. If other communities establish themselves and actually foster a real community that wants to maintain the space there will be an initial deflation but then people will just stick around visiting daily.

A culture of simply permanently moving here should be something people work to establish.

Here's a secret, online analytics are never that accurate. They're a huge mess pretty much everywhere. If you want to get real insights from analytics the best thing to do is compare things relatively, like with a/b testing.

My transition from Digg to reddit was a 3 year process.

I made a reddit account immediately. Barely used it for a year while I basically still begrudgingly used Digg and also used other sites like stumbleupon and Tumblr.

Year 2 was a pretty even mix.

Year 3 I made a reddit account Id end up using for like 10 years, daily. stopped Digg, and others, held onto Tumblr for porn til pornpocalypse.

Yeah, people shouldn't be pitting things against one another, it's not us against them (reddit). It's us FOR us. Let's go make lemmy better together, to hell with reddit.

That the initial wave of migration is subsiding is very clear, we can see it in the growth rate of lemmy.world as an example. After the initial boom around July 1st there was about a week of daily growth by 3-4k new accounts. Since then, the growth has declined and now hovers around 1k.

This is a crucial moment in time for Lemmy I think. It will be interesting to see whether that big chunk of initial migration is enough to achieve if not critical mass then enough momentum to get the snowball rolling.

We can't expect another huge Reddit blunder sending folks this way (though killing old.reddit isn't inconceivable), so we have to rely on naturally attracting and keeping users around now by adequately varied content and active enough communities. That requires a lot of active users and I wonder if we attracted enough to get there.

Very rational to curb the expectations, but I tend to think that people who would be dismayed by numbers (I.e activity) dropping, weren’t going to settle either way long term, which is of course fine and very valid too.

The steam a lot of communities have picked up won’t likely completely fade anymore though, here’s to hoping so at least.