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There is a drop in monthly active Lemmy users (from 65k to 57k)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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JFC there's only 60k of us? And that's a good thing? 😳
It does explain why all the niche communities I visit have gone from quiet to abandoned.
That and the sorting at this time really doesn't allow for niche communities to grow.
This is one of the biggest issues with Lemmy right now.
I'm gonna keep holding out cause I hope that Lemmy will have improvements like sorting algorithms and mod tools and such, users have stabilized.
If the users keep going down I might have to go back to Reddit, a man can only laugh at the same Linux meme so many times.
Same and I hate that I would have to go back to reddit. I like that I can have decent conversations here but I also miss being able to talk about niche shows I like and quote things with people. The niche interests that Reddit offers isn't really on Lemmy.
Like I'm also no longer keeping up with my favorite radio show cause they have a sub Reddit and the people who listen to that show, aren't the kind of people who can just switch over to Lemmy. They don't know the first thing about changing platforms.
I already talked to someone else on here on providing my own content and being the change I want to see. But I've found so many communities where its just one person posting into the void and there's lots of posts from like a month ago and zero comments on every single one. Some communities seem to be just people posting news links to other sites. Which makes Lemmy seem like a directory- not a community.
Yeah, it's not a good thing and I'm getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody's claiming that's good for those platforms.
We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don't buy this arguments of "people are just not using their alts", I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP's arse with nothing to back it up.
This drop in users is natural though - not every person that got here with a hype train was expected to stay here, just like users who joined Lemmy just to wait until protests are over. Some users may switched from lemmy to kbin and are still with us, just using another software.
Before the exodux Lemmy was really empty. That's why people are so optimistic about the future of the threadiverse.
A slower growth trend would be "natural" as you describe it, but a drop in users should only be concerning at this stage, especially as the platform is still so young. Even a small amount of growth is still growth but a decline in users means more people are leaving the platform than joining it.
Again, you're pulling explanations out of thin air - go ahead and prove that those users are switching to kbin over lemmy, use some data to back up your claim.
Or accept that we have a problem with adoption and as a community we need to fix it.
User growth hasn't stopped, check this.
I said "Some users may switched" - I claimed nothing.
Lemmy is improving, mobile apps are in rapid development, and seems good (never used one so am judging from what I've heard), communities are being created everyday. No one in this thread said that Lemmy is in perfect state and we have nothing to improve. If you have some ideas on how can we make Lemmy better, you're free to share them.
Are you referring to the graphs here? The ones that show:
Those graphs?
Sure, 6-monthly users is increasing (and plateauing) and people sure are posting more comments, but those graphs do not paint a good picture and do not suggest positive user growth.
That's exactly what some people in this thread are claiming. Every time someone says "Good, less users is a good thing", they're saying nothing needs to change because that's what they want. I am saying that is not the case and I stand by that.
Lemmy is improving, but it clearly needs to go a lot further to start attracting users again.
Yep, this graph basically shows that growth hasn't stopped, it was just overtaken by the drop in Lemmy users. I will return to it a bit later.
Only if it's taken outside of context. Okay, I admit I shouldn't claim "No one said that", but in many cases people aren't celebrating the decrease of Lemmy users. For example, OP clearly stated:
From my perspective, this decline is a consequance of a rapid growth during last months: people were promised with a new reddit, but they got lemmy, with its quirks and issues. Of course, some people weren't satisfied with it - and when protests on reddit came to an end, they could finally abandon lemmy for the platform they were actually interested in.
That's why I pointed out on the fact user growth never stopped - Lemmy's still attracting new users, just people who weren't interested in lemmy in the first place decided to leave.
Side note: OP did originally have the phrase "And that's good for lemmy" (or something very similar to that) in the title of this post, but they've since edited it. I don't know of a way of recovering what the original title said to be certain but it's worth knowing this, as that's a lot of the context behind this thread around why people (like myself) are decrying those that are saying it's a good thing.
Yeah, I saw it too. Seems like OP wanted to bait to read the post text and not just scroll away with dreadful thoughts.
I did edit it, because I was getting too much negativity on the "good thing" part of the title.
I did not even intended as bait, I meant it as "it's a good thing that the community will stop thinking that everything is fine and actually reflect about how to fix it". That was my first comment with the post, but it got buried into the rest of the reactions.
Later threads like https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2243096 and https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2241408 seem to show that some people are indeed becoming aware of the issues.
Good, I'm glad you're not actually trying to spin the whole thing
A decline seems natural. Of course there are many people who came to lemmy to check it out, and not all of them stuck with it. That is to be expected, no?
Okay but how do we fix it? Are we allowed to solicit on reddit just to get people here? Are Lemmy users even getting the word out about Lemmy?
This isn't exactly the easiest platform to use. The term "instances" is probably intimidating to the average reddit user who has to do nothing more than type "reddit.com" to get to where they need to be.
I think the honest answer is to become active and solicit on Mastodon. Those users are not only far more open to the pitch of "Mastodon but with threaded discussions" but are far more legitimately engaged and active than Reddit users.
EDIT: Not to mention they can literally participate from their existing accounts. Super easy to get your foot in the door.
I think you answer your own question -
I quite like lemmy, but the barrier to entry is far too high to enjoy the platform. Assume your user doesn't give a flying monkies about federation and things like that, they just want the memes and content - if we can crack that, we might be onto something.
I was just hoping for something more than a meme/news site.
You can get that anywhere. So Lemmy isn't exactly standing out.
These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform's profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.
Also Lemmy is becoming a larger platform and Twitter- or "X"- is becoming a smaller platform. Sure total users might be down since right after the Exodus but that is obviously normal, a new baseline will be established that's still significantly above the pre Exodus baseline. Then reddit inc will do something else stupid and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again.
I think there's positives and negatives to having a small platform, and there's positives and negatives to having a larger platform. With a smaller platform, the quality of the comments in general is much higher with less low effort jokes which usually you've already read 500 times. With larger platforms, the smaller communities are much more active because there's a larger pool to draw those people with niche interests from.
honestly I wonder if it would be more effective to be talking about lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, compuverse.uk, beehaw.org... pretending they're just their own things and not talking about Lemmy or Federation or anything like that
might be good to get some users to just signup to the given instance, and slowly realize they're actually communicating with people from many servers and now they're in the rabbit hole lol
The average user cares about the health and quality of the platform though and a declining user-base is not good for either of those.
Sure, we don't want to be flooded with millions of users either but that's because we have a distinct lack of mod tools and features to deal with it. The solution is better tools and better ways of handling those users, not to keep the platform isolated and haemorrhaging users.
There's a happy medium between sitting in an empty bar and eternal summer.
Exactly. More people need to understand that this isn't a black and white issue. We need that happy medium.
Yeah, especially since you could have smaller, niche subs on Reddit, but those largely don't work here. The niche subs were some of my favourite.
There's also some niche subs that need the site to be popular. Eg, AITA or BestOfLegalAdvice (which required LegalAdvice to be mainstream).
When there's too much people on the social media site, it becomes noisy and unfriendly. I can't remember any subreddit with more than 20k users being any good.
Quality > quantity
Yes, but larger variety of active communities is better overall.
True, but it will be better overall with a small growth, not what we saw during reddit exodus. And this drop is just a logical end of this rapid migration, and now we'll see a slow but stable growth in Lemmy usage.
Depends. My main community on Reddit was effectively a link aggregate for a niche hobby that's well over a million subscribers at this point. And when the reddit blackout happened, it became extremely clear that there isn't another community out there that aggregates just as much content as they have there.
Lemmy just doesn't have the tools in terms of tagging and wiki to be able to replace what they've got yet.
If we had been 60,000 strong at Helmsdeep, Rohan would have fallen
@itadakimasu
> there’s only 60k of us? And that’s a good thing?
A centralised platform is a numbers game. The money for upgrading servers for growth has to come from one company, and if the platform shrinks it gets harder to get a return on that spending.
It just doesn't matter as much in a federated network. The cost of growth is spread across many servers. Some of which will end up shutting down, for a range of reasons. But others have room for growth.
(1/2)
@Blaze @Kushan @patatahooligan
@itadakimasu
Plus, the Lemmy servers are part of a much larger network; the fediverse. Not just other forum apps like KBin either. Right now I'm replying to this from Mastodon.
I have an alt on a .nz Lemmy server, but haven't got into the habit of using it yet. So at least some of the perceived shrinkage *is* due to that, rather than any failure of the network. Also due to spam and troll accounts being purged.
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@Blaze @Kushan @patatahooligan
Sorry this is unrelated, but how come your username says @null? Just curious
For me it says @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz, not @null. Clicking on your comment's Fediverse button to take me to your instance still shows the same.
Huh that's odd. It must be an issue with Sync related to them posting from a Mastodon instance.