I think the number of servers is a interesting metric to look on, it correlates with users who are tech savy and are early adopters, before the exodus the number of servers was growing consistently , despite the number of users mostly staying the same, That was IMO an indication of the relative quality of lemmy at the time and indeed it seemed to got the most benefits from the exodus out of all the reddit alternatives.
compare that with peertube which shows consistent growth in the number of servers (see this month, and long term), I think what makes them better then lemmy currently is that they currently seem better at prioritizing feature development by using a dedicated site.
Also the total donations have declined in the last month (from €3962 to €3,771 today), So i think we should try to not get overconfident and work to secure the future of lemmy or some other open source reddit alternative.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
The donations being down is bad though. I would love for at least Lemmy.ml to sticky a post asking for funding; one has to look no further than Thunderbird to see how well that works.
Before the Reddit exodus, I don’t remember many active servers besides Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad (there was Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ca but they both had like 3 posts a week). Hexbear wasn’t federated, and servers were mostly being desperately spun up in anticipation for a flood of users who would crash the network.
There were about 80 before the exodus (may 2023), compared to to 40 (may 2022) and 15 (may 2021), about double the servers every year which is good considering this is “word to mouth” growth, even older data shows a clear growth trend, my guess is that i and others didn’t really see them because they are some dude community, even today i think i will have a problem listing more then 5-10 lemmy servers.
unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.
this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.
Ya know. The fact that active users was going down made me feel like part of the 1% of stubborn assholes but ever since RiF went dark the only time I’ve been on reddit is when a Google search took me there because fuck spez. I’m in it for the long haul. I won’t be going back. And ya know what? Fuck Google too. I’ve migrated to Firefox and DuckDuckGo since then too. Idk maybe it’s just cause I am stubborn but I refuse to be a hypocrite.
I hope you’re donating to the respective libreddit instance hoster, because unlike Reddit, they’re not a multibillion corporation with a steady ad income to pay for their traffic
If you’re not, then I suggest you use old.reddit.com with uBlock Origin
I joined !privacy and now I use GrapheneOS (instead of Android), Fedora (instead of Windows), Firefox (instead of chrome), Mullvad VPN, jmp.chat (instead of google voice), and Kagi (instead of google search).
It’s a rabbit hole.
Although Fedora was mostly because an update to windows 11 completely broke it and I didn’t feel like trying to fix windows so I just wiped my laptop and installed Fedora.
it’s an android keyboard that specializes in thumb movements, and in principle anables one to type fast using a single hand. That being said it is devilishly difficult at first and it has no autotorrect or suggestioins as of yet, causing small misspellings here and there
I assumed active users was going down partly because some of us created multiple accounts on different instances in the beginning to get a feel for it all, then ended up just using one
i hardly use lemmy compared to rif but i was under the belief reddit content is just better but the app sucks. i was wrong turns out it all sucks. rif just gave the shit a tuxedo.
nowadays i look at reddit and the content is asisine its all the same shitty headlines and weird ask questions “how much sex does the average woodchuck have during football season?”
it feels like Facebook. lifeless and like everyone is pretending
TL;DR: By default, Lemmy only counts posts and comments for active users. These instances also started counting the votes. According to Lemmy NSFW admin, there are 3 times more active users with lurkers.
Okay, that makes more sense, I was trying to figure out what had changed in the past week. I’m very curious to see how that data would look for other servers too. I think it’s more logical to count users even if they don’t post or comment, because they are still a critical part of the whole ecosystem if they browse and vote regularly. Even without saying anything, their thoughts and opinions help shape the content and discourse through voting.
And for that matter, weekly active users and daily active users would be two other interesting datapoints. You can see the daily and weekly users on the sidebar of instances, but I don’t know of any tool/site that scrapes all of that info and displays it in an easily digestible format.
Given all the different ways “active” is defined we may as well just collect all the meanings available.
Mastodon and Twitter etc, for example, count logging on as active.
While I can see the argument for voting, it is qualitatively different from posting/commenting. Knowing both, as well as log in numbers too might make sense. But muddying the waters is probably confusing … though it is interesting that any instance can define what it means by “active”.
I would say that voting isn’t actually different from posting/commenting. It’s a process whereby a user takes part in a discussion/topic/post. In an ideal world, everyone would post, but we shouldn’t act like active people who don’t feel like they have anything to say explicitly, aren’t here.
Totally agree. Even when two commenters are replying to one another, there is always another layer where they are also addressing everyone in the thread/community/instance/fediverse, which obviously includes lurkers.
The votes shape everything about the platform, so ignoring the lurkers in the stats feels like it’s missing an important data point.
I think if you exclude those 2 days we’re still on a very very slight downward trend, but once every instance adopts the new method it’ll be interesting to see what the trend is after that, it could be that users get tired or posting/commenting and fallback to being lurkers
If you look closely, the downward trend actually stopped before the change in stats. We dipped below 33,000 in mid-November, but then started hovering above 33,000 for multiple weeks until the bump.
Worrying that this is the CHUD invasion from parler or one of those pretend places to data mine hate and sell powdered eggs, lead pills and gold to mostly helpless idiots. Some comment sections have gotten noticeable shittier and less civil lately. We don’t need growth for the sake of it.
I’m a boomerang. Reddit has the content, but it’s largely focused on the larger subs which are the ones I want to avoid. I’ll have to decide whether or not I want to run into obvious tankies (mayo) or try to spot misinformation campaigns (reddit).
And reddit is getting worse in every way. Reddit wants to turn into an ad platform and that’s the way things are going. Lot’s more locked comments and posts, totally unchecked misinformation and dooming.
On iOS through firefox the google login prompt can’t be closed. This is what prompted me back, I started using Voyager again.
I might come back and search for another home server, create a new account and delete my old one. Start fresh.
I’ve seen this graph before. What is “Active Users Halfyear” and how is it different from “Active Users Monthly”, especially since they both change and are measured… monthly?
Probably “number of users who were active this month” for monthly, versus “number of users who were active the last half year (6 mo)” for halfyear. Both can be updated monthly. A user who was active 3 months ago would be in the second group but not the first.
While many suppose that majority just moved back, they didn’t! Less than half of users actually left Lemmy after an exodus, and now about what, 95% of users?..are actually from there.
Recently it seems like the Fediverse is a lot more quiet than before. Even in the tech and privacy communities I follow things have been rather slow lately.
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