So since the mass-exodus from Reddit we can see that the total amount of active users has gone down rather heavily: https://i.imgur.com/MeQok2F.png
This can seem a bit sad at a first glance. Where are we heading? But one has to remember that back during the summer many of us created several accounts to settle at an instance, there were also problems with spam-bots of various kinds.
So active users in itself is actually not that interesting. At least not the comparison with the peak. Instead we can watch the total amount of posts, how is that looking?
Well it’s steadily going up actually: https://i.imgur.com/i3Vse7Y.png
Though the increase has gone down slightly. This number however is influenced by other parameters as well. There are several reposts bots and such that mass-post to different instances. But it’s definitley a good tell it’s not going down.
Another interesting factor is comments: https://imgur.com/hWT8xvF
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so. What’s interesting here is that the decline has plateaued, which could indicate that the userbase has settled and become somewhat consistent. This is great news.
All in all, it seems like Lemmy has settled into a rather comfortable spot, with a decent amount of users, posts and comments. That is very slightly decreasing. Ideally we’d like to see this trend reverse, and perhaps that might happen naturally with due time when things have settled even more. For Lemmy I’d reckon the growth will look a bit like this. Whenever Reddit does something horrific (and it will happen more), we’ll see a mass-exodus with more users over here. Then it’ll decrease for a bit, settle and hopefully we can rinse and repeat. Anyway - that’s some irrelevant thoughts from me on the subject.
Just wanted to post these rather good statistics!
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I feel like the overall engagement has increased. I see a lot more niche communities (like people butchering their VWs in various ways 😂) and it’s nice! There’s generally conversation to be had and such, it feels like a healthy platform.
Lemmy slotted in the gap that Reddit left really easily for me, and I’m getting what I wanted from the platform.
One thing I love about lemmy is how easy it is to get a conversation going. On reddit it’s really easy to be buried in a thread, and if you get a response it’s often just a joke or a snarky remark. Here there’s so much genuine engagement. It reminds me of the transition from Twitter to Mastodon. I guess people who bother to make the move are more likely to be more engaged users, too.
Lemmy’s comment sorting does also actively prevent getting buried, unlike reddit (?). Newer comments are biased towards the top, and even heavily-upvoted older comments will fall towards the bottom. The lack of “global karma” and our community’s propensity to heavily downvote anyone doing redditisms like pun threads are also doing a lot of work here.
I didn’t even know about that, that’s really cool. I have noticed that if I come back to older posts there’s often a lot of new activity since I was there last.
Yeah! It doesn’t matter how stupid whatever point I have is, there’s usually some sort of conversation born from it, and I really enjoy that!
ignored ;)
i need to see those VWs please
I think it’s [email protected]
TIL how to link to communities on other instances in a way that keeps you on your own instance. thanks for that!
No problem :)
It definitely makes life easier
As a forever lurker, I agree with you, I’m unleashing up votes like never in my reddit life
Someone better versed in Lemmy may correct me, but isn’t comment activity more of a factor with some of the sorting algorithms (e.g. Hot/Active) here? In which case your upvotes may help but your comment may be even better!
Where are these VW communities you speak of…? Asking as the owner of an old Mk IV Jetta lol
They’d turn your Jetta into a fridge, I’m sure.
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I had to block that sub, I can’t stand classic cars being cut up like that.
My roomie is German so I share stuff from that community with him from time to time. It might be against the Geneva convention, but I’ve not faced repercussions yet.
Lemmy has replaced reddit completely for me. Sure the content isn’t exactly the same, but it doesn’t need to to be successful IMO.
Same. Since the app stopped working I sometimes accidentally get on Reddit, but not on my phone.
Also Lemmy banned a lot of bot accounts, so the user number is to take with a huge grain of salt. It could in fact be up from before the bot fiasco.
It takes time. Lemmy is still pretty niche and reddit just has a decade+ of accumulated lurkers.
The important part is that the best people from Reddit are here now.
(ヘ･_･)ヘ┳━┳
What did you call me? I’ll have you know that, as a former Redditor, we bring a certain level of trash regardless. Nice to be here, though ❤️
Yea, seems like the active posters are here and the trash is left on Reddit. The quality of posts in my subscribed subreddits is terrible now.
I checked it yesterday as I was suffering through a meeting that should have been an email and the content quality on reddit these days is appalling. I don’t have an account anymore, so I was just browsing r/all, but still, it’s very noticeable compared to a year ago.
The most noticeable thing when I went back to the site with a fresh account (unfortunately there are still a few real niche communities that I want to participate in that refuse to move) I was inundated with a bunch of right wingy content. New subs like “true unpopular opinion” parrot a bunch of shitty views disguised as “conversations”. Lots of racism, homophobia, and other terrible shit now there right in the open on the home feed.
As soon as I started seeing Reddit posts cited on mainstream news media like 5+ years ago, I knew Reddit was going to shit. Happens when a platform gets too big.
If an article sources from reddit, there is a high chance you can toss it straight into the bin.
Gaming “journalism” is full of that trash. “Players are upset with change X from game Y” and then cites an angry reddit thread and quotes posts as if it was an interview. Actual bullshit content.
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Don’t make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.
Look at reddit’s stats, active users didn’t drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.
A lot of us left entirely, but even more people just went full lurker mode. Taking “precious resources” away from Reddit servers while no longer giving them any free content in return.
These are the real heroes and martyrs
Would that be better than outright quitting the platform? Genuine question
Not really, it’s like giving attention to someone you hate. They feed off of it.
Not necessarily. As long as you just cost traffic and offer absolutely nothing in return, blocking their ads and even restrain from voting. The difference that would make is directly proportional to the amount of users doing it.
I don’t, btw. Just completely left and deleted a “nice” account. Fuck you reddit.
I did a Google search one time for Reddit traffic stats but came up empty handed. Is there a good resource for that?
I saw it through one of the apps which scrapes reddit comments for archival.
Reddit quit making those stats public a while back, sadly
Don’t kill me for saying this but I feel like Lemmy has become slightly worse than when the mass exodus happened. I won’t name names but there are so many copycat communities seemingly exclusively reposting the Greatest Hits from any given sub. It feels like we’re trying to be reddit 2.0 instead of lemmy 1.0
There’s also a discussion of this on hackernews, but feel free to comment here!
That hacker news bit got me, I won’t lie.
“An actual conversation about this post is happening elsewhere but I guess you can leave a comment here. I’m a bot so I won’t read it though lol”
To be fair, many of those are fascinating posts in their own right.
It’s one of the only bots I haven’t blocked so I do agree. It just feels weird to see. Like a reminder that hackernews is better
I went ahead and blocked it and spend time on HN along with Lemmy instead. HN discussions on those posts are always so much livelier than those sad, but interesting copycat posts.
Bot posts are soulless and when so many of the posts here are from bots, the whole site feels a little hollow
Agreed. I think it dilutes user engagement, because people will leave comments on these bot threads, never to be seen by anybody else.
I don’t use any social media except for Lemmy. It used to be only Reddit but jumped ship after the API changes. I’m enjoying Lemmy for the most part. Commenting is better because it gets more traction compared to Reddit. Unlike others I actually enjoy having all the varying opinions from “problem” instances. It makes it feel less like an echo chamber, which Reddit was bad for.
My only issue is because it’s so much smaller than Reddit, there isn’t as much content or niche communities. I miss some of the subs I used to frequent on Reddit. Some of them were made into communities here but barely have any activity, like one post per week. I guess at the end of the day it’s a good thing cause I spend less time on Lemmy than I used to on Reddit.
Definitely miss the niche communities, but not enough to go back.
My problem with niche communities, and most of Lemmy’s content in general, is that people are using the most weird, random, out-there sources for all of their topics. It more often than not that I see some strange, clearly biased source, over more reliable or professional sources.
There are many niche communities missing, but they will come with time and with people talking more.
I’m fully aligned here. I’m at the point where I lurk every day, but I remain wishing the niche communities were around. Obviously, I should be contributing myself, but…
I agree.
The best part I enjoy is being able to open this website without all the dark patters pushing me to install some dumb app just because they can scrape the data from my phone more easily.
Be the change you want to see in the Fediverse
Bringing the content from niche subreddits is what I am trying to do with Fediverser. What subreddits do you miss the most?
The problem with crossposting bots is that I rarely care for the OP as much as I care for the comments.
You’re in luck. Fediverser is made to bring comments as well…
Yeah, but if I have a clarification question or want to further discuss it, the bot is not gonna answer me. It doesn’t have the same feel to it for me, I dunno. But it’s a start I guess.
It will, soon. I’m working to make two-way communication. Responses on lemmy to a reddit bot will create a comment on the reddit thread.
I really miss hobbydrama. Someone made a sub over here and was reposting the material but seems to have stopped in the last month.
I am starting to be a bit bottlenecked by the amount of subreddits that we need to track. I am planning to let people import their own API keys and/or private JSON feeds to help fetching more data. Would you be interested in joining it?
Thanks for looking out-- I don’t really have any technical skills where I could mess with API keys or the like but I appreciate the thought.
Anecdotal, but I bounced around between 5 accounts when I first joined, then settled into 2. One regular account and one for memes/NSFW.
One account! Own your depravity! Lol
I like to keep my funposting separate from seriousposting. I frequently fail, but I try.
Does nsfw even exist on lemmy or am i on the wrong instance?
Check your user settings, you might have nsfw posts delisabled by default
I don’t. But most I’ve seen is just OF ads of the same girl or bot reposts with communities that only have like 50 images.
Not sure how that got deleted.
That’s just what lemmynsfw is unfortunately. It’s mostly bots reposting content or girls hocking their OF. There’s like Sexmeat who used to be a redditor, with a far more vulgar name (Fuckmeat) and maybe a half a dozen others.
.world might not be federated with NSFW communities, as a lot of major instances don’t want to deal with the legal ramifications of hosting pornography in any form. .ca has not defederated from the NSFW instances, however most of our userbase tends to block the communities when they do pop up, assuming they have NSFW enabled.
I started to find the porn side of things to be weird and pathetic. Outside of the random ass niche fetish communities popping up, it just feels really sad to see the same half a dozen girls trying to advertise to basically nobody. We have an infinitesimally smaller userbase than reddit, and as much as I like seeing naked ladies, OF ads get fucking tiresome and I think they are way less effective here than elsewhere.
lemmynsfw also banned CNC and is hostile to the drawn/animated side of the medium, which, if Pornhub’s numbers are anything to go by, is going to cut your participation big time. People love hentai and kink.
lemmynsfw’s admins never seemed to get that running a successful porn site means hosting content that might turn you off personally and trusting your mods to handle content control in categories unfamiliar to you.
Not surprising at all to me that a bunch of reposts and sex work ads what they were left with.
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Check out the lemmynsfw.com instance.
It’s very confusing because there’s settings for it in the apps, then there settings for it in your account and finally some instances don’t even federate with NSFW content so you have to check at all 3 levels to get it working.
It does exist
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I’m still working on that.
You’re right. Reddit was the same way during the Digg migrations. The first wave took place with the HD DVD code fiasco migration when some people setup their first accounts. It was a couple years later when Digg upset users again that the final big wave occurred. This is a great place for Lemmy as growing pains get worked out and development catches up to much needed moderation functionality.
As Cole and I say in reference to lemdro.id, it’s a marathon not a sprint! [email protected] has also been steadily increasing in active and subscribed users.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0,
Big copyright die mad
Oh, memories. I was still in college.
Yeah I expect the same thing to happen. Reddit’s gonna keep pissing users off as they race for their IPO and so this will happen in waves. And when Reddit goes public and needs to start MAKING BIG NUMBER GO UP, the site is really gonna change and people are not going to like it.
Meanwhile the Fediverse and its lack of profit motivation, algorithms, and advertising is going to start looking real appealing.
It might take years. But it does feel like the Fediverse is holding on and has what it takes to make it on the long term.
We will see another big one when old.Reddit.com dies, too. Some people just want a list, man! I don’t necessarily want to load every post and picture to scroll by…
Yeah I completely wiped my account and don’t post anymore but I still browse the site because it’s just a hard resource to replace overnight. But if they kill off old.reddit it’s gonna be a lot easier to wean off of it. Killing Apollo has cut my usage back considerably as I no longer use Reddit on mobile.
So I think killing old.reddit will be a big step as will them seeking more invasive ways to pump revenue. It’s all downhill for that site from here out as far as I see it.
Every comment in lemmy is a genuine contribution. What I hated most in reddit was chaining single letter comments to achieve what the shit. Makes me wanna barf.
This.
Edit: Thank you for the gold kind stranger!
Kidding aside, it’s nice to show up to a thread and be able to join in rather than shouting into the void of thousands of other users.
Same. I don’t miss that, or much, but I think we can all agree on missing the genius of Shittymorph. He truly had a way of gripping you into a comment and then suddenly it’s nineteen ninety-eight again, and you finally look at the username. Truly entertained every time, was sad but understandable to see him retire.
His timing is incredible, I don’t know how he does it. He stays away just long enough for the paranoia of getting pranked lulls, and then he hits you with the lols hammer. He got me a couple of days ago while I was lurking in one of the subs.
Oh shit, he’s actually around again? Last I heard he had “hung up the hat” so to speak. Perhaps that itself was a ruse!
He is! It was three to four days ago max. He is definitely a loved character as the whole thread lit up once they realized they got got…
To a certain degree, yes…but I feel like Lemmy has a lot more posts with comments chiming in only to sound smart or contrary. It’s super annoying, and I can’t tell if it’s better or worse than the constant in-jokes from reddit.
I feel like much of Reddit has the same problem to varying degrees depending on the sub (saw it all the time on r/Android and r/Apple, but didn’t see it at all on smaller/chiller subs like r/Tamagotchi). I don’t like seeing it on Lemmy either though, it’s not something the community or platform should positively reinforce
atm what makes me barf is the amount of spam. there’s tooo much of it on larger subs. i’m not clicking on your link gtfo.
To be spiteful I was thinking of selling my account to spammers to poison the well back there. I haven’t yet, but I’m still considering it.
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I’m starting to feel concerned with the many new low engagement communities that are copy pasted from reddit. I think there is a lot of value in feeling like you are in the company of people as smart as or smarter than you. That there is the potential to discover something new or grow.
Imo almost a million active users is about the right place to be. Fuck being as big as reddit.
The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren’t enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.
Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don’t believe there’s an equivalent Lemmy community.
Reddit’s massive strength is that it’s big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.
Yeah, I get that too. It’s a valid point. I’m hoping over time the internet at large will absorb some of those niches. I don’t even care if sometimes a web search takes me to reddit, or somewhere else really. I just want a place to browse that is less toxic than reddit. Lemmy’s userbase has gotten a little shittier lately imo, but still way better than reddit.
A lot of Lemmy’s problems can be summed up in a question: how does this benefit from not being a dedicated forum?
I want to go back to the decentralized internet where hobbyists were running their own servers and communities. Lemmy, like reddit, encourages centralization onto a single major platform, and I don’t like that.
Agreed 💯
Did you ever start a sub though? There were a ton of them dead or mod only. Mods or admins sometimes went nuts. Seattle had 5 different subs because they kept going full fascist and/or nazi.
Yes. We banned a ton of fake accounts and servers.
The amount of comments per month has gone down, but not by all that much. A 10% decrease from the top or so.
I’ve been a bit depressed. My bad.
be mindful of the now and don’t let the negative thoughts get the best of you
hope you feel better soon :)
Blue names breaking our backs to carry! 🎃
You are the only ones I recognize. Oh! And that account with the name and photo of Margot Robbie.
I’ve said it before but active users isn’t indicative of anything really, the early numbers were inflated due to:
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Bot instances before getting defederated
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People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)
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Early on there were a lot of small-ish instances that died off over time as people moved to more stable ones
Comments and posts are a much better indicator but it’s still not entirely accurate since it’s hard to tell how much of that is spam. I think it’d be nice if people stopped obsessing over graphs and just chilled out. I dumped Reddit a few months ago and it’s been pretty nice here.
People instance hopping before staying on one instance (I made 3 accounts before deciding on lemm.ee, that means 2 that used to be active are now stale)
I’m curious how many actual users there are beyond alts and bots. Maybe 25k? How cares, at the end of the day talking to 20-30 people here is plenty enough
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I recently came back to Lemmy from reddit to escape the batshit pro-Israel censorship happening on there right now and I have to say that the quality of the content and discussion has just gone up.
You say pro-Israel but I was literally permabanned from a couple of subs for asking for a source other than Hamas. Then when someone insulted me I made a joke about them taking sides. Apparently it was a mod who reported me to the admins as harassing a mod. Boom account is permanently banned from reddit for breaking their rules… again.
I do love how many times I can just make another account when I piss them all off.
I called Israel a genociding apartheid state and am still not banned. But that comment has neither up- nor downvotes, so I might have gotten a shadowban, dunno how I can check that and I also don’t really care.
They don’t bat an eyelid when you accuse Israel of being an Apartheid-state - it’s like water flowing off a duck’s back. Call Israel a kapo state, however, and they lose their shit. That they can’t ignore.
If you DM a link to your post, I can check for you. (I’m at work right n9w, but I can check in about three hours or so.)
Went to my profile on mobile where I’m not logged in and the comment says [removed]. I guess I got my answer lol.
Also I was misremembering, I didn’t call them out for genocide. “Israel is a far-right nationalist apartheid state” was the quote.
I just joined after taking a break from reddit because of its toxicity spread into some of the smaller subreddits was active in, or they just shut down entirely. Now I’m kinda lurking around to get a feel for the communities here and the culture of lemmy in general. I like it here.
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I’m on Kbin! Can confirm it’s great!
It’s weird how drama free kbin seems to be. Perhaps because we’re still smaller
True, yet big enough to have decent topic coverage. The software itself is pretty great
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Kbin is a seperate software project from Lemmy. However they are very much compatible with each other in terms of ActivityPub interactions. Meaning I, on a Kbin instance, can interact with you, on a Lemmy instance, flawlessly.
Kbinners are generally really cool.
But tbf, kbin/Lemmy federation is far from flawless, it’s still very inconsistent. For instance, kbin moderator actions don’t federate to Lemmy instances, so I constantly have to remove spam from kbin communities that our users are subscribed to.
Point being, we are making it work right now in suboptimal conditions, so it should get even more enjoyable once the software catches up to where it needs to be.
I do follow some kBin communities. I learned about federated social networks recently and I am still exploring them. It’s the same with Mastodon. I’m on the main server but I might switch to another instance because I’m more active with people on it, it happened gradually though. I’m just trying to learn where I fit in the best.
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