I don't know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain't ever going back. It's a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.
I've rid myself of reddit (never used Twitter thank God) but I'm still on windows. I just got a steam deck though and I'm loving the Linux desktop mode. What branch of Linux does the deck use? I know I could do a quick Google to find out but damn I love how well it runs. Linux isn't nearly as scary as I thought
I'll disagree with Taiyang about Manjaro; I think it diverges too much form Arch and much prefer EndeavourOS (which is what I'm using at the moment).
With that said, I wouldn't recommend anything Arch-based for a first timer. Quick sidebar: in Linux the "distribution" (the OS, basically - the variant of Linux) is separate from the desktop environment (the GUI). SteamOS uses the KDE desktop. If you like that, I think I'd recommend Kubuntu as a good Linux distro to start with. It's Ubuntu with KDE instead of the default Ubuntu desktop, so there's a ton of documentation and pretty much every app will work on it.
![email protected] is very active and a great place to ask questions and/or read up, or feel free to DM me!
I personally wouldn't push anyone away from Arch towards Ubuntu. Ubuntu broke with every major update and you always are running older "stable" versions of software unless you add a bunch of PPAs that are disabled on major updates and left to the user to sort out. And I'm not even going to get into the joy of Snaps. =(
IMHO something like EndeavorOS or CachyOS would far and away be both more stable, and a better noob experience. Or if you're just gaming, install SteamOS, because if you haven't broken it on your deck you probably wouldn't be breaking on your desktop either.
I love EOS, but it would be a lot to take in at once for someone new to Linux - learning KDE, the terminal, plus everything else (flatpaks, the AUR, and so on) is a lot. At least Kubuntu still has the familiar (to them) KDE but has a GUI app store and never needs to use the terminal. It depends how generally tech-savvy the person is I guess.
That is why I see Ubuntu as a non-starter unless you are prepared to deal with it's crippled usage by default, because adding anything is a surefire way to have it implode on version upgrade. Meanwhile, on a rolling release, baring things that break for most everyone, you just upgrade when convenient and go about your day. I just don't see Ubuntu as anything that should be suggested to anyone w/out command line knowledge and strong Google-fu, because it's not if - but when will your system implode with Ubuntu.
Like taiyang said, SteamOS is based on Arch which is super not newbie friendly, but the desktop modes "desktop environment" is KDE which available on pretty much any Linux distro, including beginner friendly ones like (K)Ubuntu and Fedora (although I'm not sure how beginner friendly Fedora is, regarding proprietary drivers and codecs)
Oh, you're like me! I did the dive into Linux, SteamOS is a fork of Arch Linux which is super not newbie friendly.
Manjaro is a good Arch Linux fork that works well for gamers, though. Still not idiot proof, as I can atest to breaking it several times, but that's the deal when you remove the training wheels off your OS.
Lucky it's easy to reinstall from a USB. A little less if you insist on a duel boot like me, but that's mostly Windows being a jerk.
Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)
WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can't be placed in the home directory lol).
You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.
Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.
On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.
Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.
As long as you only keep the Manjaro repos in your system, it is like using it on Arch, which even you Arch the Aur isn't perfect.
Because the Manjaro repos don't sync at the same time with the Arch repos, you might not be able to install/update some Aur packages as the version of X dependency might not match during that time.
But literary, Manjaro has been the most stable distro I've run, even more stable than Arch that recently broke on my system and required manual intervention because of their recent changes on their repo migration.
Same, I didn't know which server suited me so I created three accounts on various Lemmy servers and also one on kbin, but now I'm exclusively using just this account.
I wasn't really looking for a replacement, just wanted to break my reddit addiction which was hampering my productivity. Lemmy isn't a replacement in the sense, but a nice change and something new to try.
Same. I adopted a google account a long time ago, but I've finally hit my limit on what they've been doing with youtube and everything. Free and open source alternatives are the way to go, it may take a while to catch on or may never fully, but who cares. Switching to linux recently was the best thing I've ever done.
What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don't usually interact with the content there and most won't even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it's easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don't really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon's growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.
Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more 'main' people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that's a great start.
So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it's staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you're doing. It's already working.
Not sure about the other but PoppinKREAM became known on Reddit during the Mueller probe for very long, very well researched and cited comments mostly related to politics. Their citation style in particular meant their comments got tons of Reddit awards and were highly visible.
Man, those days were awesome. You'd browse the list of online people to find someone to talk to. A lot of the times there'd be no communication possible, but sometimes you'd get to know a little bit about the life of someone in a radically different culture. What a time to be alive.
When a blocked user replies to my message I get no notification and might just see "1 more reply" or something like that but when I click it it wont load. Only when I sign out can I read it. However I believe that the blocked users can still see my messages just fine. Same with bans. I can see all posts from lemmy.ml but they can't see mine.
I much much prefer the niche community here. Much less shit to have to wade through (see: came here to say this x 100000 per post) to get to the good comments and posts
People complaining about a loss of users are the same people that will complain about performance issues next time there is a huge influx of users that stresses the infrastructure for popular instances.
11 million comments this month. 11 million comments from people smart enough to leave behind the other. 11 million comments, likely largely from actual humans.
The blue one doesn’t reset count every mount so it’s cululative. It means people come and go.
There was a big Reddit rush and some people went back others got annoyed with the growing pains and went elsewhere. But the fact that it’s slowing down means it’s stabilizing to a dedicated community.
I would prefer to use Lemmy, but it simply doesn't have some things that reddit currently has. It could in the future, but it doesn't have the user base yet.
Here's the thing though... I've been on Reddit for over a decade before Lemmy, and whilst there may be less interaction the interactions themselves have been far more sincere. People are more willing to engage, and even with this random comment there's a chance someone would comment below.
The community feel of Lemmy is something, at least I've found, Reddit had lost a very long time ago.
Reddit's appeal was never in the popular subs, but in the long tail. Forget about the dozen subreddits with million+ subscribers, what made it interesting is the thousands of subs with a few hundred active users.
FWIW Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit as my go-to toilet reading material, and I'm sure there are many other lurkers around here who don't post much and thus don't show up in these stats. The more niche communities are still lacking in content, yes, but these things are best left to grow organically over a long period of time to maintain quality. It was the same on Reddit too before the enshittification escalated.
For whatever anecdotal observations are worth, I've recently been seeing a huge uptick in activity from the userbase that is here. Maybe it's been driven by posts like this one or memes about growing Lemmy, but people seem to be posting and commenting more than usual.
First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.
However, I'm considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it's even more cynical than reddit, and I'm losing interest in opening the app if it's just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.
(Yes, I'm subbed to upliftingnews. That's the 1%.)
Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?
Now that I've goten addicted to the block feature, I'm probably never going back to reddit. Dont like the content from specific servers while I'm browsing the top pages? Block, they stop existsing. Find myself getting baited into low effort arguements? Block and move on. I feel faaaarrr less stressed out lately
I feel the same way, my block list is massive. The app I use to browse, the lemmy version of Boost, also has a word filter option too, which isn't on the desktop browser interface (I don't think), so I can block names of certain people and current event incidents I'm not interested in seeing any more, without needing to block communities or users. It only works when the post actually has the words in the title, so ironic memes slip through all the time, but its better than nothing.
Oohh, that sounds pretty good! I'm a bit of an old man when it comes to apps though and try to avoid them unless absolutely necessary, that might tempt me into looking into some of the lemmy apps though!
I don't see their images, just a line of text that I'm not about to click on. For some reason I was imagining little round balls made of poo, possibly in a pyramid shape.
I've had like three accounts banned from .ml for saying, among other things, that the US revolution didn't involve kidnapping children. Trying to have any world news discussion here is completely impossible, and that's one of the more active areas on Reddit. No wonder people try out lemmy and then bail.
Well that's sad. But I suppose we're still in the new, rough period of Lemmy. The Wild West of federated, private server owned link sharing discussion sites.
I know this is just anecdotal, but I have literally not seen a single mention of Lemmy anywhere online or in the news in the last 3 months, including on Reddit. "Build it and they will come" only gets you so far...
It's also important to note that 0.19 has been a long time coming. I think part of the reticence to engage in full on Lemmy evangelism is that people recognize that the platform still needs work. Once everything starts working more smoothly and moderation tools get some upgrades, it'll become a lot easier to recommend Lemmy to the average person.
I would like to start doing this as well. Feel free to post a template of what you usually say to lure people in. I think more people here would be willing to go on a little misonary run 😉
Mastodon by comparison has attracted a number of people basically campaigning for its adoption with webpages and sign up drives.
I’m not clear on the details but I’ve picked up that some of that energy comes from people who see Twitter as politically important and so view Mastodon advocacy as a political act worthy of funding.
Reddit I imagine doesn’t attract that kind of interest.
But still, as you say, adoption could be better with some more community organisation.
Generally, the lack of synergy with mastodon is a continuous source of disappointment for me in how segregated the Fedi actually is and how insular masto actually is.
I think it would be wise for us to adopt a hashtag system so you can search by topic as opposed to by community. We're so segmented into smaller sub communities and different servers that it's difficult to find what you want to read.
Upside is that this change would effectively consolidate small communities across instances so they aren't so fragmented.
Downside is that there would be less control over what content is tied to each tag because I'm not sure how moderation would work. You can end up with issues where people maliciously flood a certain tag with junk.
Wouldn't Mastodon just be that? Lemmy and Mastodon federate - and you can see one in the other.
Twitter-likes are tag based. Reddit-likes are community based?
I think it's fine and good if communities merge or get subsumed by an equivalent on another instance.
Yes and no, ideally we would also still have communities. You can imagine how a topic like Henry Kissinger's death could be talked about in both of a politics sub, and noncredibledefence esque military based sub.
The point is basically to give better search functionality and bridge these communities by topic in a way.
Right now, you can't see Mastodon toots unless they go out of their way to link a Lemmy community. I hope we'll get better integration at some point (a way to subscribe to users or hashtags, maybe), because that would give a lot more activity
Lemmy is one of the healthiest fediverse communities. It's starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
It's starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit.
That is the case for me since Sync for Lemmy popped out.
Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
This reminds me of my mom watching TV novels back in the days when they aired daily, and now she watches the same novels but through streaming... Ahh some things never change
I'm really glad that it's small. I'd rather see genuine posts about 3D printing or aquariums or mountainbiking rather than ragetext memes or influencer shit on the frontpage of reddit. I do hope we kinda dial down the copy/paste bot content from reddit though, especially the memes.
Depends on how niche. Some stuff unfortunately only comes from truly large user bases. At a guess, the further you go from a tech/liberal core and overlapping hobbies, the longer it will take for the content to emerge.
I lurked for months because of lemmy.world's policy of only allowing real email accounts for registration. Reddit allowed anonymous accounts for years which encouraged easy participation at the cost of bots.
This definitely applies to me. I had a Reddit account for 5-6 years, but never made a single post and only wrote a handful of comments. I just feel more comfortable interacting here.
The actual content is way better now than it was the first couple of months after the Reddit thing. Initially a lot of the comments were either Reddit related or people trying to force communities that didn't necessarily have the population to survive, yet. That's all fallen away now and the content feels much more organic. Someone opening a Lemmy instance for the first time is going to find today's front page much more engaging than what it looked like in June/July.
Lemmy is becoming its own thing rather than a reflection of Reddit.
In some ways a lot more responsive as well. The news that Kissinger died was all over Lemmy for hours before I noticed one post about it crack the front page of Reddit, for example.
I don't care I'm here to stay. Only community I miss is formuladank for F1 shitposting. Been trying to get it going here but no traction yet. Everything else, Lemmy 4 life.
I used Reddit for years and maybe posted twice, here i just feel more compelled to participate. I find it hard to put into words, but Reddit feels like social media, which I hate, and lemmy feels more like an old school forum.
Why would more users be better? As far as I'm concerned whatever number of users are right now is the right one.
I definitely get the old school forum vibes. Reddit felt like talking into the void sometimes if a thread was popular and you weren't there from early.
It helps that our community is small enough that people are able to comment with people that they have something in common with. Compare that to Reddit when it felt like there was no meaningful conversation because there was too much of an ocean of users.
I think its because we aren't allowed by default to post images, which I completely understand after what happened back a couple months ago. I've been using Lemmy for more then 4 months actively but yet I still don't have permission to post pictures because of the fact that I'm too lazy to even try to get it enabled. This is a major reason why we aren't seeing a lot of content.
Also, this tends to be mostly a leftist leaning app, so maybe some people get drawn away.
A lot of accounts are interacting (voting, posting, etc.) on lemmy-visible activitypub services within a 6 month timespan, but most accounts are not active users interacting every month.
It's actually a very positive graph. Many of the new accounts would be spammers, bots, throwaway accounts, alts of banned users, users making account on multiple instances because of downtime, etc. So it's normal to see growth over longer spans of time that aren't completely reflected in monthly active user statistics.
The current plateau is probably for the best, it gives developers time to catch up somewhat with the last growth spurt. There will be other social media platform clusterfucks in the future that will kick off future growth spurts.
That's a good point. The devs, mods and everyone needs time to brace for the next wave of reddit exiles! As one of the API refugees, I remember how rough those first couple of weeks were...
My guess: monthly user add all the unique users in the last month. Half year add the unuque users in the past 6 months. This is why is bigger, but it grows slowly in the months with less unique users.
My guess green resets count every month. Blue resets every 6 months. So blue is cumulative of total users cover the last 6 months. It shows that new people keep on coming but others are leaving every month.
Don't pressure yourself to become an active monthly user. Just take it easy. I came here to have a peace with me not constantly shitposting to gain karma.
This place, it's ... beautiful. I've joined the communities with the topics i'm interested in and the posts I see are only (mostly) what I asked for.
The average person is reasonably educated, capable of arguing a point in good faith. It's not you against the world or the world against you here, it's more like, did you consider it from this point of view. That's nice!
The trolls and corporations have gotten board and are going home. The people with 2 backup accounts have stopped using them because their primary choice stays up, online and stable.
We could use a little extra mod tools and discovery, but this is a nice laid back place to relax and catch up on some random subject matter or ask for a little help in between life and sleep.
I like that I can somewhat recognize usernames across all the lemmy post I comment in. Im not sure if anyone really notices me or recognizes my username and goes 'Oh hey its smokeydope again' but I do that for some other active lemmy users and it starts to feel like we are all acquaintances working together to make an interesting experience for eachother and not just competing for attention without adknowledging eachother.
I gotta be honest...I am hanging on by a threat. The communities that I was engaged with on Reddit before the Snoopacolypse were pretty niche. I wasn't there for r/funny or r/videos, etc. I found similar communities on Lemmy, but they have soooooo little activity. I have to modify my sort just to see content, as its so old. When there are posts, they typically get very little discussion.
I am on Lem.ee, and I have the hardest time posting anything from mobile. It looks like it fails, and if I sort by new, it isn't there and never shows up - HOWEVER, I start getting replies, so someone is seeing it somehow.
I detest what reddit did and is still doing - but Lemmy is not filling that void for me, and its frustrating.
I think it’s fair to reply to niche-sub threads with a little PS:
BTW, I've recently shifted my online engagement to Lemmy, as I find it aligns more with my values and the way I like to share content. The community there is very welcoming, and they’d be incredibly receptive to the insights shared in this thread. Hope to seeing you there!
The mirrors from alien.top are perfect for this use case. I had about 40 subreddits which I followed but didn't participated much. I had them all mirrored to different communities and now I don't need to go to reddit anymore.
(Unfortunately, LW has blocked alien.top, so if you want to do something similar you'll need an account on a different server)
I'm liking the "cosiness" of the discussion threads on most posts, personally. On Reddit a popular thread would have hundreds or thousands of comments already by the time I got there and it felt like my responses were just being lost in a sea.
Well, I was doing the same, but noticed that even in the niche subs, the conversations seemed to be getting more and more... juvenile? Like prior to the Snoopacolypse (as you called it, and I love it! The term not the event in case that needs any clarification:-P), it was a point of pride for me that I had never blocked anyone in my life - whereas now I don't think twice before doing that bc who has time to waste on someone not engaging in good faith!? Especially if they lack enough self awareness to even realize that fact about themselves while they are doing it. (Tbf, possibly watching Innuendo Studios' analysis of GamerGate that uses many tactics of the Alt Right in America had something to do with my changing views as well:-).
Ymmv ofc, bc different subs means entirely different people & thus experiences interacting with them, but I'm just saying that rather than stick with the subset of that community that remained after Rexit, I eventually just find myself going or even wanting to go there less and less, instead enjoying engaging here more, even at the expense of not being able to talk about those matters. I haven't posted there for months, nor even commented for a month, and barely go once a week to read. Bc I use Kbin and the mobile browser experience here is so horrible to write a comment, I find myself not commenting here often either - but when I do I have much more fun doing so, not having to be anywhere near as defensive as that other place that shall not be named.
I hope you find something that works best for you as well, wherever that may be.
Try fiddling around with your language settings maybe? Sometimes the language filter can hide posts in a weird way.
Ultimately, if your only interest is in a handful of niche communities, then Lemmy isn't quite there yet, I agree. I am also missing a bunch of niche communities, but I enjoy most of the popular content that's on Lemmy anyhow, so I'm not too bothered by the loss of the niche stuff for now.
I think you may have misunderstood. I have FOUND communities, but there is not much engagement or activity. I have resorted to discord channels for most of them, but it is not the same.
Some of my most active subreddits were different 3d printing and 3d modeling groups, groups for games like Overwatch, and Payday. Different AI focused groups, but specifically groups like the Stable Diffusion sub, Subreddits that discuss my favorite shows, or styles of music. None of that is active here. It isn't that they don't exist on Lemmy, they are just ghost towns. I joined multiple instances and am very active and engaged on multiple accounts, on some of these groups - but there is not response. I was in the top 3% of karma earners on Reddit - and I did that by submitting and commenting a lot. That just doesn't happen here (yet).
Let me put this another way: if I create an overwatch community on https://level-up.zone, would you be willing to contribute there?
Also: If I set up the alien.top bots to mirror content from the overwatch sub, could you use that as a hook to reach out to redditors and tell them how to migrate to Lemmy?
I have tried to jumpstart a few communities by posting and commenting regularly . I would try a new one, but if people do not find or join, it will get caught in the same cycle as the existing groups. I like participating, but am not interested in being the single driving force, or moderating.
To answer your other question, I cannot stand when I see auto mirrored content from Reddit. I usually ignore those posts, as I have rarely seen comments happening. When the content wasn't created by somebody here, I don't think anybody is invested in maintaining or participating in the discussion.
We need to start somewhere. The mirrored content (and by content, I mean posts and comments as well) is meant to be a way to help bootstrap the communities. I can help as well, but only by giving you the tools to make this easier and in avoiding the feeling you'd be talking to yourself.
Same for me. I browsed Reddit exclusively for a bunch of small but active communities about books and niche games or shows. Most of those either don't have a place on Lemmy, or the place they have is a ghost town. Too little posts, and even fewer engagement. I frequently see posts with upvotes in the single digits and zero comments.
I don't plan on going back to Reddit, but at the same time I don't think that Lemmy is a valid substitute yet. Maybe it's also a problem of discoverability? Like, I heard of Lemmy during the APIcalypse, but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and I don't know how a normal person looking for a community online is supposed to find Lemmy, or even learn the existence of it.
meh. who am i, a fuckin executive? i don't care about graphs
frankly, it feels like lemmy has both grown and gotten worse - it attracted enough attention that there are now morons, bootlickers, corporate simps, and dickheads posting now, and upvoting each other's posts
Frustrating because of all the decentralized platforms lemmy feels the closest to the original. I’m still on Reddit because there’s more there but the app fucking sucks so much.
But what we forget is that not long ago Lemmy was very empty at least in my experience. So I left for some period, but when I came back July this year it was just completely changed. And it stayed this way, I don't need reddit anymore personally
Still on Lemmy exclusively, but it's not my first time using a reddit alternative. This is normal. A large influx of users when reddit fucks up, but some slowly migrate back. Until reddit fucks up again. The problem is none of the alternatives survive long term.
The Fediverse has been around for a couple of years now and it's an open protocol rather than just a single organization, so I'm liking its odds better than most.
It's actually quite a good sign that Lemme is as stable as it is. It's not populated, but it's stable. That means that there's always something to come back to.
I mean, isn't this exactly what we would expect? Big influx of people when reddit does something unpopular and people want alternatives, then a decrease as the anger fades and people either decide they don't like Lemmy for some reason, or just settle down into their normal, less active amount of posting, stabilizing at a number of users lower than the peak but higher than before the influx. Assuming that Lemmy still is around the next time Reddit gets people mad, it'll happen again, just like how Mastodon gets an influx of new users whenever Twitter does something to upset it's userbase.
I have to admit that I still go back to Reddit regularly. There‘s just (still) more interesting / engaging content and more interaction there.
Although I would be happy to go „all in fediverse“.
I think we'll need a more polished, tuned, crisper product in order to actually retain a significant userbase of less techy sorts. Which is probably still some time away.
For better or for worse, though, I don't think the social media landscape is going to change too much in the foreseeable future.
But really, this isn't good enough. It's lacking the layer of polish that the mainstream public expects, it's basically still in alpha. Development takes time is all.
So every month is higher than the month 6 months prior, that seems pretty good. Obviously won't be true 6 months after that July but certainly speaks to the community that has grown here and remained here.
What is considered as active ? Is someone connecting to his account and lurking considered active ? Or, someone who just up/downvote without commenting or posting ?
programming.dev changed how active users are calculated on their instance to include voters as well as posters & commentators. It's a massive difference - programming_humor went from about 700 monthly active users to about 7000, for example.
Viewing communities from other instances from programming.dev's perspective will give a figure that includes voting activity.
Prior to June 2023, Lemmy was holding steady around 1,000 monthly active accounts. So it's still up more than 30x from that baseline.
Since this graph shows active accounts and not active users, I'll bet a significant contributor to the drop is people not using all the alt accounts they initially created.
Why did it had to be the peak, though? We are talking about a time where "major" protests were being taken against a platform with more than 400 million monthly active users. Taking only 100k as the "peak" is already pathetic, now you are telling me that we should be happy to keep a third of that?
That's completely normal for literally any new platform. You saw the same thing with Threads, down to the hordes of people proclaiming it dead after the initial wave of interest calmed down.
Who had that? EVERY SINGLE (NON WESTERN) COUNTRY THAT HAS EVER EVEN let the narco dictators get votes. Cuba venezuela argentina ecuador, loads of Latin American ones. ALL FCKED BECAUSE OF FRAUDULENT TANKIE CARREER POLITICIANS
I don't know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain't ever going back. It's a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.
In 2022 I was Windows + Twitter + Reddit. In 2023 I'm full-time Linux + Mastodon + Lemmy.
I've rid myself of reddit (never used Twitter thank God) but I'm still on windows. I just got a steam deck though and I'm loving the Linux desktop mode. What branch of Linux does the deck use? I know I could do a quick Google to find out but damn I love how well it runs. Linux isn't nearly as scary as I thought
I'll disagree with Taiyang about Manjaro; I think it diverges too much form Arch and much prefer EndeavourOS (which is what I'm using at the moment).
With that said, I wouldn't recommend anything Arch-based for a first timer. Quick sidebar: in Linux the "distribution" (the OS, basically - the variant of Linux) is separate from the desktop environment (the GUI). SteamOS uses the KDE desktop. If you like that, I think I'd recommend Kubuntu as a good Linux distro to start with. It's Ubuntu with KDE instead of the default Ubuntu desktop, so there's a ton of documentation and pretty much every app will work on it.
![email protected] is very active and a great place to ask questions and/or read up, or feel free to DM me!
I personally wouldn't push anyone away from Arch towards Ubuntu. Ubuntu broke with every major update and you always are running older "stable" versions of software unless you add a bunch of PPAs that are disabled on major updates and left to the user to sort out. And I'm not even going to get into the joy of Snaps. =(
IMHO something like EndeavorOS or CachyOS would far and away be both more stable, and a better noob experience. Or if you're just gaming, install SteamOS, because if you haven't broken it on your deck you probably wouldn't be breaking on your desktop either.
I love EOS, but it would be a lot to take in at once for someone new to Linux - learning KDE, the terminal, plus everything else (flatpaks, the AUR, and so on) is a lot. At least Kubuntu still has the familiar (to them) KDE but has a GUI app store and never needs to use the terminal. It depends how generally tech-savvy the person is I guess.
That is why I see Ubuntu as a non-starter unless you are prepared to deal with it's crippled usage by default, because adding anything is a surefire way to have it implode on version upgrade. Meanwhile, on a rolling release, baring things that break for most everyone, you just upgrade when convenient and go about your day. I just don't see Ubuntu as anything that should be suggested to anyone w/out command line knowledge and strong Google-fu, because it's not if - but when will your system implode with Ubuntu.
I would absolutely recommend KDE Neon distribution as it comes with current, stable KDE. https://neon.kde.org . It is a Ubuntu LTS as well.
Like taiyang said, SteamOS is based on Arch which is super not newbie friendly, but the desktop modes "desktop environment" is KDE which available on pretty much any Linux distro, including beginner friendly ones like (K)Ubuntu and Fedora (although I'm not sure how beginner friendly Fedora is, regarding proprietary drivers and codecs)
Oh, you're like me! I did the dive into Linux, SteamOS is a fork of Arch Linux which is super not newbie friendly.
Manjaro is a good Arch Linux fork that works well for gamers, though. Still not idiot proof, as I can atest to breaking it several times, but that's the deal when you remove the training wheels off your OS.
Lucky it's easy to reinstall from a USB. A little less if you insist on a duel boot like me, but that's mostly Windows being a jerk.
Steam deck runs SteamOS, a custom distro built by steam specifically. You can download it here
It is SteamOS based on Gentoo.
Steamos 3 (the steam deck) is based on arch. They moved off of gentoo
Try manjaro, and hear me out here:
Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)
WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can't be placed in the home directory lol).
You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.
Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.
On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.
Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.
AUR isnt widely recommended in manjaro
As long as you only keep the Manjaro repos in your system, it is like using it on Arch, which even you Arch the Aur isn't perfect.
Because the Manjaro repos don't sync at the same time with the Arch repos, you might not be able to install/update some Aur packages as the version of X dependency might not match during that time.
But literary, Manjaro has been the most stable distro I've run, even more stable than Arch that recently broke on my system and required manual intervention because of their recent changes on their repo migration.
Nice change you made!!
Linux is a hell of a drug
I ditched Windows because I could not stand them restarting my PC without my permission after an update. And ads! Fucking ads on my start menu.
welcome home
Same
Same, I didn't know which server suited me so I created three accounts on various Lemmy servers and also one on kbin, but now I'm exclusively using just this account.
I wasn't really looking for a replacement, just wanted to break my reddit addiction which was hampering my productivity. Lemmy isn't a replacement in the sense, but a nice change and something new to try.
Same. I adopted a google account a long time ago, but I've finally hit my limit on what they've been doing with youtube and everything. Free and open source alternatives are the way to go, it may take a while to catch on or may never fully, but who cares. Switching to linux recently was the best thing I've ever done.
Same here
Well said
What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don't usually interact with the content there and most won't even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it's easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don't really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon's growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
this is my first comment on lemmy!
Do votes count as activity as well? Or just posts and comments?
There seemed to be an influx of reddit users but probably didn't like Lemmy's own distinct user base (*nix users for example)
I am kind of glad it settled down because I much prefer Lemmy over reddit
Damn, I’d better keep commenting, I usually just lurk/vote
Someone posted metrics for how many users vote. 131k.
For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.
Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more 'main' people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that's a great start.
So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it's staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you're doing. It's already working.
This is why Mastodon is so populated compared to lemmy. Elon just keeps making more and more mistakes.
Think it really was PoppinKREAM?! Love to read them again.
Them and Portarossa
Who the fuck are these people?
Not sure about the other but PoppinKREAM became known on Reddit during the Mueller probe for very long, very well researched and cited comments mostly related to politics. Their citation style in particular meant their comments got tons of Reddit awards and were highly visible.
PoppinKREAM and Portarossa are two extremely through researchers into politics, mostly US politics, and how we even got here.
Oh I was planning to check for Portarossa, one of the few usernames I recognize
On mastodon or Lemmy?
Lemmy for me, I never used Twitter, so I don't use Mastodon either
If it wasn't, it was a damn good imitator.
Aw man. ICQ. I miss those times.
So much happiness in this little sound.
https://youtu.be/6iCPIUGnHQ8?si=3HL_hsn34getR53x
Not clicking that. The sound is the thing I miss the least. It was enough to hear it in my head when I saw the comment.
I still have my UIN 8833052 :)
Mine was 6 digits. Good ole days of synchronous whiteboards. 🥲
You must have gotten one in the first week. I got mine in the rist month
Man, those days were awesome. You'd browse the list of online people to find someone to talk to. A lot of the times there'd be no communication possible, but sometimes you'd get to know a little bit about the life of someone in a radically different culture. What a time to be alive.
Sure, you miss it now.
I don’t care that the fediverse has a ton of traffic. It may not have the most users, but it definitely has the best
*tips hat
Lem'my
Very true. I'm still amazed how good lemmy is considering how small we still are.
Quick question regards blocking - how does it work exactly?
When I block someone, I can still see their message. Just won’t get a notification. I thought, it would be blocked entirely - so I’m a bit confused.
When a blocked user replies to my message I get no notification and might just see "1 more reply" or something like that but when I click it it wont load. Only when I sign out can I read it. However I believe that the blocked users can still see my messages just fine. Same with bans. I can see all posts from lemmy.ml but they can't see mine.
I much much prefer the niche community here. Much less shit to have to wade through (see: came here to say this x 100000 per post) to get to the good comments and posts
@Pregnenolone yeah I haven't seen a single "this is the way" comment chain since I got here.
I’ve seen a few but fortunately they’re rare and they are often downvoted or ignored
I think the #boost #feature also helps with this.
Lemmy doesn't have boosting. ...I should check out KBin sometime, also because of the better Mastodon integration
I'd highly recommend it. The dev has been on an #improvement rampage lately. The future of the project seems bright.
tries to resist urge, fails
Came here to say this!
This.
Exactly. I don't need the most users. The internet was better back when it wasn't everybody.
People complaining about a loss of users are the same people that will complain about performance issues next time there is a huge influx of users that stresses the infrastructure for popular instances.
I’m way less mad about Kbin having issues than I ever was at Reddit
11 million comments this month. 11 million comments from people smart enough to leave behind the other. 11 million comments, likely largely from actual humans.
Lemmy is thriving.
Plot twist: It's all piped.video bot.
lol ive never clicked a piped link even once
I did, once. It didn’t work.
Google's shareholders appreciate your contribution.
Yepp, that user was my first and only block ever. Yes, we get it. YT bad, Piped good. It was so annoying.
I didn't completely leave behind reddit. I still view, but I only comment/post on lemmy.
I'm similar, but I occasionally crosspost Lemmy posts to Reddit to try and drive more traffic here :)
Figured anything lemmy related was still getting nuked on reddit.
Most of us do :)
All the people returning and forgetting what reddit did and will continue to do. Then the next time reddit messes up, they will come back. 😔
Edit: other stats seem pretty good though! Unless i am misunderstanding them.
I can't wait until the next time reddit fucks up.
My money's on them killing off old Reddit next.
That would be juicy. That would drive a lot of people away.
As long as they need more money for shareholders you can count on it.
The blue one doesn’t reset count every mount so it’s cululative. It means people come and go. There was a big Reddit rush and some people went back others got annoyed with the growing pains and went elsewhere. But the fact that it’s slowing down means it’s stabilizing to a dedicated community.
I would prefer to use Lemmy, but it simply doesn't have some things that reddit currently has. It could in the future, but it doesn't have the user base yet.
The half year probably still includes all the Reddit refugees, maybe that’s why it hadn’t fallen yet
Lurker here. Just writing this as my first ever comment to push those numbers.
This graph is much more reassuring:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
We are stable, even slightly growing in the last few days.
It’s really painful that these graphs don’t start at zero. Hard to see if that growth is as dynamic as it looks
The average comments is far more interesting. Constant growth. Active accounts is skewed by all the alts new people make.
Good point, but I feel like alts haven't been used that much lately as instances have been stables for weeks now
What the heck happened on Nov. 3rd?
New Reddit UI for some users I think
so there was a wave of sign ups with the Reddit drama, and then people got bored. the graph looks about right to me.
Here's the thing though... I've been on Reddit for over a decade before Lemmy, and whilst there may be less interaction the interactions themselves have been far more sincere. People are more willing to engage, and even with this random comment there's a chance someone would comment below.
The community feel of Lemmy is something, at least I've found, Reddit had lost a very long time ago.
Sort of a quality Vs quantity thing I guess?
I dont get the hysteria, personally.
I came here to escape the crowds, not migrate with them.
Once a site gets too popular it gets normified and it just becomes nothing but reposts, in-jokes and low effort crap.
Reddit's appeal was never in the popular subs, but in the long tail. Forget about the dozen subreddits with million+ subscribers, what made it interesting is the thousands of subs with a few hundred active users.
You also have to realize that Reddit would squash popular communities that weren’t as advertiser friendly. Which led to the larger (bad) communities.
What hysteria?
It doesn't matter. I get all my news here and I can comment if I want. That's enough
For anybody interested, the monthly active users including voters is
131,150(131k)The one in the graph only takes into account people who have made a post or comment
Edit: The halfyear active users including voters is
253,166(253k)FWIW Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit as my go-to toilet reading material, and I'm sure there are many other lurkers around here who don't post much and thus don't show up in these stats. The more niche communities are still lacking in content, yes, but these things are best left to grow organically over a long period of time to maintain quality. It was the same on Reddit too before the enshittification escalated.
For whatever anecdotal observations are worth, I've recently been seeing a huge uptick in activity from the userbase that is here. Maybe it's been driven by posts like this one or memes about growing Lemmy, but people seem to be posting and commenting more than usual.
If lemmy has 100 users I’m one of them
If lemmy has 1 user it’s me
If lemmy has no users I’m dead
I don't know about huge but the data on the same page supports the observation on post quantity. It's still steadily increasing.
Comments might be currently on a stable trend.
It’s also a common finding from those comparing replies to the same posts on Twitter and mastodon: fewer but better replies on mastodon.
I've been trying to post as much as I find it possible and engaging.
It's anecdotal. It's not worth anything.
If reddit taught me anything, it's that a growing network isn't necessarily a good thing.
A dying one is generally worse though.
Infinite growth ruins everything. A smaller community is better.
Zoomed out graph including some months before the join wave
Users/month are relatively stable now at 33x users/month compared to pre join wave (users/month is people who have posted or commented)
Meh, lemmy is already interesting enough to kill time and past that I don’t care
First of all, rooting for decentralized net 100%. Watching Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc. all get screwed over from the top down sucks. I really appreciate the strong community here - having it smaller and more engaging encourages participation and makes it feel a little more human.
However, I'm considering leaving Lemmy just because somehow it's even more cynical than reddit, and I'm losing interest in opening the app if it's just 99% downers. I mean almost every article is just crushingly bad news. The world is in a rough state for sure, and staying informed is really important! But trying to live on and find the good is near impossible here.
(Yes, I'm subbed to upliftingnews. That's the 1%.)
Is this a demographics thing, or am I just subbed in all the wrong places? Maybe a bit of both?
BAD GRAPH, Y-AXIS STARTS AT 20K
Yeah, the Y-axis really needs at least a break.
What would starting at zero add besides another row that is unused?
The ability to eyeball how many times less users there are
Now that I've goten addicted to the block feature, I'm probably never going back to reddit. Dont like the content from specific servers while I'm browsing the top pages? Block, they stop existsing. Find myself getting baited into low effort arguements? Block and move on. I feel faaaarrr less stressed out lately
I feel the same way, my block list is massive. The app I use to browse, the lemmy version of Boost, also has a word filter option too, which isn't on the desktop browser interface (I don't think), so I can block names of certain people and current event incidents I'm not interested in seeing any more, without needing to block communities or users. It only works when the post actually has the words in the title, so ironic memes slip through all the time, but its better than nothing.
Oohh, that sounds pretty good! I'm a bit of an old man when it comes to apps though and try to avoid them unless absolutely necessary, that might tempt me into looking into some of the lemmy apps though!
Keep it in mind
We lost active users because of this
I've been registered on Lemmygrad. Got banned for saying Stalin is not a superhero and that he made both good and bad moves.
Noted, moved to lemmy.world
You mean a pic of a pig w shit on it's balls isn't high-minded discourse?!
@tigeruppercut is that what "pigpoopballs" is??
I don't see their images, just a line of text that I'm not about to click on. For some reason I was imagining little round balls made of poo, possibly in a pyramid shape.
yeah, it's an old pic so you may've run across it before anyway, but for some reason the hexies think it's the height of satire
there's a know your meme page if you're curious
@tigeruppercut thanks. That was underwhelming. I don't know why they post it so often!
I've had like three accounts banned from .ml for saying, among other things, that the US revolution didn't involve kidnapping children. Trying to have any world news discussion here is completely impossible, and that's one of the more active areas on Reddit. No wonder people try out lemmy and then bail.
Happy to see you're now on SJW, it's a pretty chill instance
Yeah, I was banned from world news for posting about jinping and uyghurs
Probably but people who make their account on Lemmy.world, the most common instance, also never see them.
It absolutely did. Instances should have acted on that day 1.
Day 1, most of the instances were down due to the massive influx
I was wondering what happened to lemmy.film.
Nobody knows unfortunately, but we created [email protected] as a replacement
Well that's sad. But I suppose we're still in the new, rough period of Lemmy. The Wild West of federated, private server owned link sharing discussion sites.
@Shyfer yeah it shut down which was disappointing.
Luckily due to the decentralised nature of federation there are movies communities at lemmy.world, kbin.social, and lemm.ee.
I know this is just anecdotal, but I have literally not seen a single mention of Lemmy anywhere online or in the news in the last 3 months, including on Reddit. "Build it and they will come" only gets you so far...
Because everyone who wants to use lemmy isn't posting about it on reddit.
I post on my country sub every week in the self promotion thread.
We also published a news in a well known national open source website.
I agree with you, people have to advocate about it, it's not magical.
It's also important to note that 0.19 has been a long time coming. I think part of the reticence to engage in full on Lemmy evangelism is that people recognize that the platform still needs work. Once everything starts working more smoothly and moderation tools get some upgrades, it'll become a lot easier to recommend Lemmy to the average person.
Definitely a good point too
I would like to start doing this as well. Feel free to post a template of what you usually say to lure people in. I think more people here would be willing to go on a little misonary run 😉
I'll have to translate it, I might do it later today, I'll keep you posted
You make a good point.
Mastodon by comparison has attracted a number of people basically campaigning for its adoption with webpages and sign up drives.
I’m not clear on the details but I’ve picked up that some of that energy comes from people who see Twitter as politically important and so view Mastodon advocacy as a political act worthy of funding.
Reddit I imagine doesn’t attract that kind of interest.
But still, as you say, adoption could be better with some more community organisation.
Generally, the lack of synergy with mastodon is a continuous source of disappointment for me in how segregated the Fedi actually is and how insular masto actually is.
I agree. No one knows Lemmy.
Still, as long as there is enough activity on it, I’m happy.
I commented on an admin post today saying "Lemmy is thriving" and the comment never appeared 🤣
Which means that the fact that so many users have stayed is even more impressive.
IDGAF IM HERE TO STAY. LEMMY IS COOL AND WTF EVEN IS A SNOO 😤😤😤
I think it would be wise for us to adopt a hashtag system so you can search by topic as opposed to by community. We're so segmented into smaller sub communities and different servers that it's difficult to find what you want to read.
Upside is that this change would effectively consolidate small communities across instances so they aren't so fragmented.
Downside is that there would be less control over what content is tied to each tag because I'm not sure how moderation would work. You can end up with issues where people maliciously flood a certain tag with junk.
The upside of communities is that each can moderate themselves, and you can block the ones that don't moderate to your standards.
Wouldn't Mastodon just be that? Lemmy and Mastodon federate - and you can see one in the other.
Twitter-likes are tag based. Reddit-likes are community based? I think it's fine and good if communities merge or get subsumed by an equivalent on another instance.
Yes and no, ideally we would also still have communities. You can imagine how a topic like Henry Kissinger's death could be talked about in both of a politics sub, and noncredibledefence esque military based sub.
The point is basically to give better search functionality and bridge these communities by topic in a way.
For now, search does work pretty well instead of tags, you can just search for the keyword
Right now, you can't see Mastodon toots unless they go out of their way to link a Lemmy community. I hope we'll get better integration at some point (a way to subscribe to users or hashtags, maybe), because that would give a lot more activity
@PopOfAfrica wait doesn't lemmy have hashtags? Or do you just mean everyone should use them more?
Weird, because I feel like it is more populated that it was after the huge influx of users because of the APIcalypse.
Lemmy is one of the healthiest fediverse communities. It's starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
That is the case for me since Sync for Lemmy popped out.
This reminds me of my mom watching TV novels back in the days when they aired daily, and now she watches the same novels but through streaming... Ahh some things never change
I'm really glad that it's small. I'd rather see genuine posts about 3D printing or aquariums or mountainbiking rather than ragetext memes or influencer shit on the frontpage of reddit. I do hope we kinda dial down the copy/paste bot content from reddit though, especially the memes.
The people who are here are more willing to post. So less of us overall but also less lurkers.
Yeah, it seems like the most logical assumption, anyway I'm happy here, hopefully it would not take too long for more niche stuff to kick in!
Depends on how niche. Some stuff unfortunately only comes from truly large user bases. At a guess, the further you go from a tech/liberal core and overlapping hobbies, the longer it will take for the content to emerge.
Well, for me it would be sufficient for some communities about specific videogames or tv shows/anime :)
But at least the tech community is rather calm. I can have a different point of view with them and have a calm discussion with them.
Other groups aren't like that.
I lurked for months because of lemmy.world's policy of only allowing real email accounts for registration. Reddit allowed anonymous accounts for years which encouraged easy participation at the cost of bots.
This definitely applies to me. I had a Reddit account for 5-6 years, but never made a single post and only wrote a handful of comments. I just feel more comfortable interacting here.
The actual content is way better now than it was the first couple of months after the Reddit thing. Initially a lot of the comments were either Reddit related or people trying to force communities that didn't necessarily have the population to survive, yet. That's all fallen away now and the content feels much more organic. Someone opening a Lemmy instance for the first time is going to find today's front page much more engaging than what it looked like in June/July.
Lemmy is becoming its own thing rather than a reflection of Reddit.
In some ways a lot more responsive as well. The news that Kissinger died was all over Lemmy for hours before I noticed one post about it crack the front page of Reddit, for example.
I don't care I'm here to stay. Only community I miss is formuladank for F1 shitposting. Been trying to get it going here but no traction yet. Everything else, Lemmy 4 life.
I used Reddit for years and maybe posted twice, here i just feel more compelled to participate. I find it hard to put into words, but Reddit feels like social media, which I hate, and lemmy feels more like an old school forum.
Why would more users be better? As far as I'm concerned whatever number of users are right now is the right one.
I definitely get the old school forum vibes. Reddit felt like talking into the void sometimes if a thread was popular and you weren't there from early.
Same. I participate much more here than I did on the red site.
It helps that our community is small enough that people are able to comment with people that they have something in common with. Compare that to Reddit when it felt like there was no meaningful conversation because there was too much of an ocean of users.
I feel dumb for having to ask but what exactly is "active users half year" vs "active uses monthly"?
Is half year just mean one or more comments/upvotes in the last 6months?
I believe the chart is if you are looking at last activity date.
Was this persons' last activity date in the last 6 months? Last 1 month?
Not sure how they are actually measuring that activity - whether that's logins or posts?
It's based on posts and comments.
Don't worry fam. Spez has several moves left in the Elonshitification playbook.
He hasn't even begun to malign ethnic or religious groups, accept no blame, and blame said groups' advocacy organizations for the problem!
i comment more than monthly on lemmy
Unfortunately it’s mostly bot posts and people of all the same thought processes with nothing to add to any conversation.
It's ok, it's just us cool kids left
I think its because we aren't allowed by default to post images, which I completely understand after what happened back a couple months ago. I've been using Lemmy for more then 4 months actively but yet I still don't have permission to post pictures because of the fact that I'm too lazy to even try to get it enabled. This is a major reason why we aren't seeing a lot of content.
Also, this tends to be mostly a leftist leaning app, so maybe some people get drawn away.
Sorry, dumb question but what the heck does Active users Halfyear mean? They've been on for a half year and are still active?
A lot of accounts are interacting (voting, posting, etc.) on lemmy-visible activitypub services within a 6 month timespan, but most accounts are not active users interacting every month.
It's actually a very positive graph. Many of the new accounts would be spammers, bots, throwaway accounts, alts of banned users, users making account on multiple instances because of downtime, etc. So it's normal to see growth over longer spans of time that aren't completely reflected in monthly active user statistics.
The current plateau is probably for the best, it gives developers time to catch up somewhat with the last growth spurt. There will be other social media platform clusterfucks in the future that will kick off future growth spurts.
That's a good point. The devs, mods and everyone needs time to brace for the next wave of reddit exiles! As one of the API refugees, I remember how rough those first couple of weeks were...
My guess: monthly user add all the unique users in the last month. Half year add the unuque users in the past 6 months. This is why is bigger, but it grows slowly in the months with less unique users.
Seems like a reasonable guess!
I'm guessing unique users who have been active on Lemmy within the past 6 months.
Makes sense to me!
Went to the website link looking for context and couldn't find it so I'll ask here. What is the significance of the blue Halfyear line?
Probably user active during the past 6 months (posting, commenting, ...) vs user active during the past month
Active users in the last six months. It will drop off when the usage peak is no longer included in the six-month period.
I believe it's there to massage perception 😂
My guess green resets count every month. Blue resets every 6 months. So blue is cumulative of total users cover the last 6 months. It shows that new people keep on coming but others are leaving every month.
Don't pressure yourself to become an active monthly user. Just take it easy. I came here to have a peace with me not constantly shitposting to gain karma.
Imma here, just a lurker
I am now an active user, lurking over
This place, it's ... beautiful. I've joined the communities with the topics i'm interested in and the posts I see are only (mostly) what I asked for.
The average person is reasonably educated, capable of arguing a point in good faith. It's not you against the world or the world against you here, it's more like, did you consider it from this point of view. That's nice!
The trolls and corporations have gotten board and are going home. The people with 2 backup accounts have stopped using them because their primary choice stays up, online and stable.
We could use a little extra mod tools and discovery, but this is a nice laid back place to relax and catch up on some random subject matter or ask for a little help in between life and sleep.
Yeah I've seen a shocking number of people here acknowledge when they've been wrong. It's great!
I like that I can somewhat recognize usernames across all the lemmy post I comment in. Im not sure if anyone really notices me or recognizes my username and goes 'Oh hey its smokeydope again' but I do that for some other active lemmy users and it starts to feel like we are all acquaintances working together to make an interesting experience for eachother and not just competing for attention without adknowledging eachother.
I gotta be honest...I am hanging on by a threat. The communities that I was engaged with on Reddit before the Snoopacolypse were pretty niche. I wasn't there for r/funny or r/videos, etc. I found similar communities on Lemmy, but they have soooooo little activity. I have to modify my sort just to see content, as its so old. When there are posts, they typically get very little discussion.
I am on Lem.ee, and I have the hardest time posting anything from mobile. It looks like it fails, and if I sort by new, it isn't there and never shows up - HOWEVER, I start getting replies, so someone is seeing it somehow.
I detest what reddit did and is still doing - but Lemmy is not filling that void for me, and its frustrating.
I feel you. The Network Effect is real, and the niche subreddits need a HUGE overall userbase to work at all.
The total population of Lemmy + Kbin is about the size of a medium size city subreddit.
I'm staying here for now. I sometimes cheat and browse reddit not-logged-in. I don't know what the answer is.
I think it’s fair to reply to niche-sub threads with a little PS:
Good idea
The mirrors from alien.top are perfect for this use case. I had about 40 subreddits which I followed but didn't participated much. I had them all mirrored to different communities and now I don't need to go to reddit anymore.
(Unfortunately, LW has blocked alien.top, so if you want to do something similar you'll need an account on a different server)
Very interesting; thank you
Promising, have to check this out!
Not sure if I’ll want to start with dummy accounts to test… by connecting my reddit account, am I actually potentially triggering more mirroring?
No. The mirroring is configured by the instance admin.
I'm liking the "cosiness" of the discussion threads on most posts, personally. On Reddit a popular thread would have hundreds or thousands of comments already by the time I got there and it felt like my responses were just being lost in a sea.
Yup. Once you hit a certain amount of comments on Reddit, any comment you make was completely pointless.
I unsubscribed from all the subs that big years ago. It's funny to see how people used Reddit so differently
I hear that, but also...
Well, I was doing the same, but noticed that even in the niche subs, the conversations seemed to be getting more and more... juvenile? Like prior to the Snoopacolypse (as you called it, and I love it! The term not the event in case that needs any clarification:-P), it was a point of pride for me that I had never blocked anyone in my life - whereas now I don't think twice before doing that bc who has time to waste on someone not engaging in good faith!? Especially if they lack enough self awareness to even realize that fact about themselves while they are doing it. (Tbf, possibly watching Innuendo Studios' analysis of GamerGate that uses many tactics of the Alt Right in America had something to do with my changing views as well:-).
Ymmv ofc, bc different subs means entirely different people & thus experiences interacting with them, but I'm just saying that rather than stick with the subset of that community that remained after Rexit, I eventually just find myself going or even wanting to go there less and less, instead enjoying engaging here more, even at the expense of not being able to talk about those matters. I haven't posted there for months, nor even commented for a month, and barely go once a week to read. Bc I use Kbin and the mobile browser experience here is so horrible to write a comment, I find myself not commenting here often either - but when I do I have much more fun doing so, not having to be anywhere near as defensive as that other place that shall not be named.
I hope you find something that works best for you as well, wherever that may be.
Try fiddling around with your language settings maybe? Sometimes the language filter can hide posts in a weird way.
Ultimately, if your only interest is in a handful of niche communities, then Lemmy isn't quite there yet, I agree. I am also missing a bunch of niche communities, but I enjoy most of the popular content that's on Lemmy anyhow, so I'm not too bothered by the loss of the niche stuff for now.
Please take a look at https://fediverser.network and let me know what communities you are missing.
I think you may have misunderstood. I have FOUND communities, but there is not much engagement or activity. I have resorted to discord channels for most of them, but it is not the same.
Some of my most active subreddits were different 3d printing and 3d modeling groups, groups for games like Overwatch, and Payday. Different AI focused groups, but specifically groups like the Stable Diffusion sub, Subreddits that discuss my favorite shows, or styles of music. None of that is active here. It isn't that they don't exist on Lemmy, they are just ghost towns. I joined multiple instances and am very active and engaged on multiple accounts, on some of these groups - but there is not response. I was in the top 3% of karma earners on Reddit - and I did that by submitting and commenting a lot. That just doesn't happen here (yet).
Let me put this another way: if I create an overwatch community on https://level-up.zone, would you be willing to contribute there?
Also: If I set up the alien.top bots to mirror content from the overwatch sub, could you use that as a hook to reach out to redditors and tell them how to migrate to Lemmy?
I have tried to jumpstart a few communities by posting and commenting regularly . I would try a new one, but if people do not find or join, it will get caught in the same cycle as the existing groups. I like participating, but am not interested in being the single driving force, or moderating.
To answer your other question, I cannot stand when I see auto mirrored content from Reddit. I usually ignore those posts, as I have rarely seen comments happening. When the content wasn't created by somebody here, I don't think anybody is invested in maintaining or participating in the discussion.
We need to start somewhere. The mirrored content (and by content, I mean posts and comments as well) is meant to be a way to help bootstrap the communities. I can help as well, but only by giving you the tools to make this easier and in avoiding the feeling you'd be talking to yourself.
Same for me. I browsed Reddit exclusively for a bunch of small but active communities about books and niche games or shows. Most of those either don't have a place on Lemmy, or the place they have is a ghost town. Too little posts, and even fewer engagement. I frequently see posts with upvotes in the single digits and zero comments.
I don't plan on going back to Reddit, but at the same time I don't think that Lemmy is a valid substitute yet. Maybe it's also a problem of discoverability? Like, I heard of Lemmy during the APIcalypse, but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and I don't know how a normal person looking for a community online is supposed to find Lemmy, or even learn the existence of it.
meh. who am i, a fuckin executive? i don't care about graphs
frankly, it feels like lemmy has both grown and gotten worse - it attracted enough attention that there are now morons, bootlickers, corporate simps, and dickheads posting now, and upvoting each other's posts
I for one like an open and public forum that allows for opinions I don't agree with. A diversity of opinion definitely seems like a big plus to me.
I see people saying this but I (thankfully) haven't seen them much yet.
Frustrating because of all the decentralized platforms lemmy feels the closest to the original. I’m still on Reddit because there’s more there but the app fucking sucks so much.
I'm contributing because I'm a bit of a meme repository and I get a more positive reception here than I do on Reddit.
Lemmy is in a healthy state.
But what we forget is that not long ago Lemmy was very empty at least in my experience. So I left for some period, but when I came back July this year it was just completely changed. And it stayed this way, I don't need reddit anymore personally
Still on Lemmy exclusively, but it's not my first time using a reddit alternative. This is normal. A large influx of users when reddit fucks up, but some slowly migrate back. Until reddit fucks up again. The problem is none of the alternatives survive long term.
The Fediverse has been around for a couple of years now and it's an open protocol rather than just a single organization, so I'm liking its odds better than most.
Traditionally, the alternatives to Reddit were worse than Reddit. This is the first time that that is no longer true.
You can also make an argument that Reddit was the improved version of Digg. History can repeat itself if the Fediverse proves to a superior model.
It's actually quite a good sign that Lemme is as stable as it is. It's not populated, but it's stable. That means that there's always something to come back to.
Hey, that's me
SQUIRREL! 🐿️
POPCORN! 🍿
We’re contributing some much hot content to Lemmy rn. ;)
I know, right?
I'm surprised it's such a small number but very happy to be one of them :)
How many people made 2-3 accounts to compensate for outages? Less outages means less alts being active .
Of course that won't accout for the whole amount of people leaving, but I bet if we could get that metric it wouldn't seem near as bad
This is true. I made accounts on like 7 different instances when migrating, but now I only ever use like 2
I'm on the main kbin instance, and I've requested ownership of quite a lot of magazines.
I mean, isn't this exactly what we would expect? Big influx of people when reddit does something unpopular and people want alternatives, then a decrease as the anger fades and people either decide they don't like Lemmy for some reason, or just settle down into their normal, less active amount of posting, stabilizing at a number of users lower than the peak but higher than before the influx. Assuming that Lemmy still is around the next time Reddit gets people mad, it'll happen again, just like how Mastodon gets an influx of new users whenever Twitter does something to upset it's userbase.
I have to admit that I still go back to Reddit regularly. There‘s just (still) more interesting / engaging content and more interaction there. Although I would be happy to go „all in fediverse“.
If I could post images, there would be more content... I don't understand why I can't.
You can but some instances (like yours) don't allow it.
On Lemm.ee you have to use an external image host and post links from them due to issues with keeping people from posting illegal imagery. Not sure how other instances have gone about mitigating that (if they have, they may just not be as cautious).
Oh no! Anyway...
Looks like the rate of decline is slowing. I bet it starts trending the other direction soon.
What do you think the local minimum will be? 30k? 35k?
On my phone both lines are the same color.
Juuuust keeping the lights on.
I think we'll need a more polished, tuned, crisper product in order to actually retain a significant userbase of less techy sorts. Which is probably still some time away.
For better or for worse, though, I don't think the social media landscape is going to change too much in the foreseeable future.
But really, this isn't good enough. It's lacking the layer of polish that the mainstream public expects, it's basically still in alpha. Development takes time is all.
So every month is higher than the month 6 months prior, that seems pretty good. Obviously won't be true 6 months after that July but certainly speaks to the community that has grown here and remained here.
What is considered as active ? Is someone connecting to his account and lurking considered active ? Or, someone who just up/downvote without commenting or posting ?
Users who posts or comments. I’m not sure about votes tho 🤔
Edit: its posts or comments. No lurkers. I think they should include voters to get an actual number.
programming.dev changed how active users are calculated on their instance to include voters as well as posters & commentators. It's a massive difference - programming_humor went from about 700 monthly active users to about 7000, for example.
Viewing communities from other instances from programming.dev's perspective will give a figure that includes voting activity.
Was going to comment about it, then saw it was you ha ha.
Glad that my votes are getting counted
Definitely would be a more accurate representation of "active" IMO
buggy, infrequent updates, lack of content, an ideological hive mind...is anyone really surprised?
Latest Jerboa release doesn't work with Lemmy 0.19 so i spend less time here
But posts are rising, and comments stable.. I think the story is more nuanced than that
I mean, the graph doesn't fo a good job of showing it, but it looks like there are around 50% more users now compared to June.
Prior to June 2023, Lemmy was holding steady around 1,000 monthly active accounts. So it's still up more than 30x from that baseline.
Since this graph shows active accounts and not active users, I'll bet a significant contributor to the drop is people not using all the alt accounts they initially created.
No, it means that there was a peak of user activity in June which is not being sustained.
That peak was never going to be sustained though. We're approaching the "stick around" number which is good to know.
Why did it had to be the peak, though? We are talking about a time where "major" protests were being taken against a platform with more than 400 million monthly active users. Taking only 100k as the "peak" is already pathetic, now you are telling me that we should be happy to keep a third of that?
Not happy, only that some drop off was inevitable. I'm hoping we start to see organic growth from here on and eventually exceed that previous peak.
That's completely normal for literally any new platform. You saw the same thing with Threads, down to the hordes of people proclaiming it dead after the initial wave of interest calmed down.
Quality over quantity. Reddit trying way too hard to capture the "normie" users is exactly what began its downfall.
The Fediverse is DYING! Everyone panic NOW!
You won't believe these Lemmy alternatives, number 5 will kill your entire family in shock.
yeeet
Too many armchair lefties here.
COME TO SOUTH AMERICA FOR A WHILE BEFORE YOU THINK FAKE COMUNISM = GOOD.
It gets better if you block Lemmy.ml. It's really just Lemmygrad pretending to be more moderate, and failing horribly.
I'd prefer the term statism, but I agree with you.
communism is a classless stateless moneyless society. which part of South America has that?
Comunism is a good idea
But attracts badddd leaders. On Every level.
Who had that? EVERY SINGLE (NON WESTERN) COUNTRY THAT HAS EVER EVEN let the narco dictators get votes. Cuba venezuela argentina ecuador, loads of Latin American ones. ALL FCKED BECAUSE OF FRAUDULENT TANKIE CARREER POLITICIANS
none of those societies are communist.
Dude come to South America...
LEFT WING POLITICIANS STEAL AND NEPOTISE AND RUIN THE ENTIRE CONTINENT.
& you are correct : THERE ARE NO, HAVE NEVER BEEN AND WILL NEVER BE ANY COMUNIST COUNTRIES. Because the leaders will neverrrrrrr be honest.
Power corrupts, yes.
But for comunism, unfortunately, it's WORSE: ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY.
BY ALL MEANS VOTE RED IN USA AND EUROPE. but that doesn't mean you can trust NARCO POLITICIANS in the rest of the world. PROVEN FACT.
a communist country is an oxymoron: communism is stateless.
Indeed. Stateless Senseless Scienceless Systematically SoSuperStupid Be poor so the presidents son can have a yacht like bill gates
you can't havea president and be stateless.
How many are bots
It's dead Jim.