Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?

How is the size of Lemmy’s userbase changing? Is it growing or shrinking? How diverse is it? What do the current trendlines look like as we approach a year since Rexxit?

I feel like I used to see graphs on this sub fairly regularly, but haven’t seen one recently. There was also some ambiguity in the numbers as commenting and voting were added to the active user totals. Now that most (all?) instances have switched to 0.19, do we have a better idea of where things stand?

Aside from sticking around and posting, commenting, and voting, is there anything users should be doing to help grow the platform? (!lemmygrow would be a good name for a sublemmy, if anyone wanted to organize something)

In any case, thanks to everyone who has helped grow Lemmy to its current size!

Blaze,

Hello @threelonmusketeers,

Would you be interested in creating a community dedicated to community growth? Maybe something a bit more neutral like !communitygrowth so that it can be more inclusive to Mbin, Piefed, and in the future Sublinks?

I have a few theories I would like to discuss with other people interested in this topic

threelonmusketeers,

I would definitely be interested. Good idea to make it more general than just !lemmygrow, though “community” is still a Lemmy(-ish)-specific term.

Some other name ideas:

  • !fediversegrowth (if including Mastodon, Loops, etc.)
  • !fedigrow (shorter version of the above)
  • !threadiversegrowth (if limiting to link-aggregator discussion forums like Kbin, Sublinks, etc.)
  • !threadigrow (shorter version of the above)

Thoughts?

Blaze,

I just checked, Piefed calls them communities too, I guess Sublinks will probably do the same.

Fedigrow seems like a better name, communitygrowth seems a bit long, so I guess that could be the one? I’m afraid Threadigrow would be too confusing to people

threelonmusketeers,

!fedigrow sounds good to me! Short and general. More specific communities could be created later if needed.

jgrim,
@jgrim@discuss.online avatar

Yeah, we also call them communities

Blaze,

Small heads up to see if you already have an instance in mind? You are on SJW, that could work, otherwise I usually like Lemm.ee because it’s well managed and a very neutral name. Lemmy.ca does a lot for new joiners too with !newtolemmy

threelonmusketeers,

Haha, I was actually going to message you to ask if you had an instance in mind. I think we want a well managed and widely federated instance which is large, but not the largest. Any of the ones you propose sound good.

Blaze,

Slight preference for Lemm.ee on my side, but I let you decide in the end, you were the one who started the discussion, so you can choose!

threelonmusketeers,

Lemm.ee is fine with me!

Blaze,

Sounds good, do you create it, do I create it? :D

threelonmusketeers,

I don’t currently have an account on that instance. Might you be able to ask @Blaze to create it?

Blaze,

Sure, I just did!

!fedigrow

I created a first post, feel free to post there so that I can name you mod too

Baku,

Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?

It looks like Lemmy has shrunk overall since our peak of 68k active users in July last year to our low point (since rexxit anyways) of 32k, but we seem to be attracting more MAUs now and have climbed back up to 51k.

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/74826237-7b76-4b99-a30e-28f693024548.png

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by diversity, or at least what measure of it you’re seeking, but if you mean instances, there’s currently ~770 instances online, a bit over half of our peak in July. I’m not aware of any major instances that have closed down yet though, so I assume it’s mainly small, single user instances that have shit down, as well as a few hyper niche ones with very few members.

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/3b5c5de3-94dd-4df0-bfe2-f334b467f141.png

Average users per instance has also been increasing and is getting close to the levels we were at in june when everybody was joining the same few instances. That peak was 690 users per instance, that dropped to a low of 321 in July, presumably because there was more of an emphasis on getting people spread out after initial influx of people who just needed to go somewhere.

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/efa9c349-3f26-4de6-8444-79b06f6ecf3a.png

There was something interesting I noticed in the stats, in Feb there was a major drop in total posts of almost 5 million. I don’t know what exactly happened, but our total posts halved, so perhaps that’s why nobody’s been posting updates.

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/1bfa5522-cb6a-4169-8132-5a3ded963682.png

It’s even more obvious on the 120 day graph

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/55110849-1ae2-4b6d-8a27-eb22433cc379.png

Overall, it appears we have shrunk compared to our peak during rexxit, but we have been steadily increasing in both active users and posts (excluding the major drop in Feb) since our low point a couple of months after rexxit. That’s about what I’d expect, and quite good compared to most popular corpo sites which lose a lot more percentage of their MAUs after they’ve peaked. Threads lost something like 80% of their userbase a week after it launched. Also I don’t think that peak during rexxit will be our biggest peak. We’ll probably continue steadily gaining users until Reddit fuck up again and we get another influx, like what happened with mastodon.

FYI all these stats are fairly easy to find. I like FediDB because it’s got a more friendly UI, but Fediverse Observer has a more plain UI, so is better for posting graphs and such. But that’s the beauty of the fediverse, we can all access the same things through all sorts of UIs

Blaze,

Nice graphs

Audacious,

Are you able to track bot posts vs regular posts? I wonder if the major drop in posts was bots being stopped.

Baku,

As far as I know, no

hanrahan,
@hanrahan@slrpnk.net avatar

There seems to be more competition, not much for Masto, lots for Lemmy, or so it seems.

I was interested in Firefish but it seems to have fizzled out. Gotosocial looks to have promise.

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

IceShrimp is cool if you liked FireFish

olafurp,

Anectodally is getting a lot better recently. Quantity and quality is increasing and number of upvotes per post on frontpage is also increasing.

Auli,

I think the opposite it’s shrinking. Less posts, lots of reddit repost bots.

FlyingSquix,

90% of growth seen in graphics it’s me and my thousand alt accounts

threelonmusketeers,

I wonder why this was “Removed by mod”? It seemed like a relatively lighthearted and facetious comment.

Fiivemacs,

You would be one to only look at the pictures ya mouth breather…

Secret300,

I went back on Reddit a couple days ago and the difference is insane. Lemmy post and comments feel like real people. Reddit post are literally the same shit post or questions asked 3 years ago and filled with comments that seem like AI or just someone not putting in any thought

ManosTheHandsOfFate,
@ManosTheHandsOfFate@lemmy.world avatar

I’m subbed to r/horrorlit and keep wondering if I’m taking crazy pills because it feels like 30% of the posts are some variation of “What’s the scariest/best horror book you’ve read?” They reword it or give it a slightly different spin but it’s essentially the same question over and over. And then of course the responses are always the same 40 books being mentioned repeatedly. I don’t understand why anyone who’s been on the sub for more than a month would keep upvoting the same question.

Unicent,

I just came back a few days ago and have had the exact same experience.

merthyr1831,

Oh get over yourself lmao. Like reddit didnt have the_donald up on the front page for years

merthyr1831,

Anyone downvoting can go back to reddit: sorry your favourite democrats arent astroturfing the front page with heckin police puppers or whatever slop you miss from that cesspit.

5PACEBAR,

I feel like the quality and quantity of posts and comments have drastically increased over the last month. Idk what happened, maybe it’s just me but I’m glad this place exists. I’m having a blast! 💜

sag, (edited )

Shrinking I was Joking

wiki_me,

Yeah it’s probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .

Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.

On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .

RootBeerGuy,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Uh, did you check what is being posted on writefreely instances? It is no link aggregator, there is no competition with Lemmy at all.

Liz,

I find your take on that data to be super weird, given that Lemmy has 10x the number of monthly active users than writefreely. We’re not going to be beating Reddit anytime soon, but we’ve got a decent little community going.

wiki_me,

As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that’s somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.

Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.

Liz,

I don’t have anything to add but I wanted to say those are all good points.

ProdigalFrog,

Sublinks and piefed don’t compete with lemmy, or at least, they don’t weaken the ecosystem since they are all inter compatible.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Having other projects which are similar to Lemmy is a great sign. It means users have more choices available and developers can experiment with different solutions. It’s really not a competition, because the existence of more compatible Fediverse projects will also benefit Lemmy, as there will be more users and more content.

wiki_me,

Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.

What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).

I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most “thumbs up” on github).

With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

New users for Piefed and Sublinks are most likely to come out of the millions of Reddit users, not out of a few thousand Lemmy users. So this will increase the size of the Lemmy network and lead to more activity.

wiki_me, (edited )

Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn’t a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.

Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.

I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .

DaveFuckinMorgan,
@DaveFuckinMorgan@lemmy.world avatar

Shrinking because it’s full of, and ran by commie dumbasses. Nobody likes you guys.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Every instance is run by distinct admins. You can’t say that Lemmy as a whole is run by any specific group.

h3ndrik,

Idk. The software most people here use is made by a small group of specific people. It affects us all as this defines the interaction and moderation tools that are available. And dictates what admins and mods can and cannot do.

Also the large instances have a dysproportionate amount of say. For example the largest communities are on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. They run most of Lemmy.

Technically it’s all distributed over several different people. But they’re not equal in opportunity or reach.

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

We juste moved our community to !casualconversation hopefully others will do the same

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It would definitely be better if users spread more evenly over the instances, yes.

Urist,
@Urist@lemmy.ml avatar

Yeah, we are really, really bad. You should leave before you start transmuting yourself into a tank and begin involuntarily rolling over capitalists.

DaveFuckinMorgan,
@DaveFuckinMorgan@lemmy.world avatar

Not to mention their jokes suck

Urist,
@Urist@lemmy.ml avatar

18 days for this comeback was worse.

hanrahan,
@hanrahan@slrpnk.net avatar

There is a thing where some Americans when exposed to other ways of doing things in the world insisit everyone’s a commie. It’s interesting to me that McCarthyism persists and that commie is used as some sort of pejorative but can’t compete with the wide world on some things and resort to big daddy government protectionism eg TikTok, steel imports, ecars etc

numberfour002,

I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.

The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.

Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.

More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.

As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.

silasmariner,

Hah weird I’ve been feeling the opposite - like, it feels like there’s more content on here than when I joined, ain’t that weird. Although maybe I’m using ‘stuff I like’ and ‘upvotes’ as a metric and you’re using “community and interaction” maybe? Would seem to make some kind of sense

ZombiFrancis,

I think there has been some influx where a lot of new users made room for themselves while pressing others to leave/defederate. Beehaw was the notable and initial example where the growth of people from reddit resulted in less interactivity.

hahattpro,

Now I am surfing lemmy more than reddit, simply because lemmy load faster.

SupraMario, (edited )

I surf it because reddits app is trash and even the desktop old.reddit site is starting to be put out to pasture by reddit. It’s just better here. I use boost for Lemmy and it’s been amazing.

Corkyskog, (edited )

I came over during the whole API debacle and then realized it will either be great for my mental health, or eventually Lemmy will have just as much content. So far my mental health has improved… the content has improved a little too

SupraMario,

Yep, Lemmy right now reminds me of the very early reddit days, I’m sure in 15 years it’ll be completely different but for now it’s been great.

merthyr1831,

Im seeing more communities on my feed than ever. Even if it’s shrinking, the ones who stay are active.

Just FYI, every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff as people dont both signing in every day – which is basically how people use reddit and other apps but with such a large installcount they’re not as noticeable.

fuckingkangaroos,

every “wave” of signups from some reddit/other news relating to lemmy will always be followed by some falloff

Also as they see how much propaganda and political extremism is on Lemmy.

Bernie_Sandals,

Yup, I mean I’m pretty left, but the endless politics is probs bad for the platform in the long run. We need more “normie” and hobby communities if we’re gonna keep attracting new people.

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