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There is a drop in monthly active Lemmy users (from 65k to 57k) (lemmy.fediverse.observer)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.

Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.

Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.

Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)

Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

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[–] 41 points 3 years ago (40 children)

Yeah, it's not a good thing and I'm getting sick of people on here trying to gaslight themselves into thinking it is. The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users. Nobody's claiming that's good for those platforms.

We want growth, more users and more instances is better for Lemmy overall.i don't buy this arguments of "people are just not using their alts", I mean fuck off, that statement was pulled from OP's arse with nothing to back it up.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (26 children)

    This drop in users is natural though - not every person that got here with a hype train was expected to stay here, just like users who joined Lemmy just to wait until protests are over. Some users may switched from lemmy to kbin and are still with us, just using another software.

    Before the exodux Lemmy was really empty. That's why people are so optimistic about the future of the threadiverse.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (25 children)

    A slower growth trend would be "natural" as you describe it, but a drop in users should only be concerning at this stage, especially as the platform is still so young. Even a small amount of growth is still growth but a decline in users means more people are leaving the platform than joining it.

    Again, you're pulling explanations out of thin air - go ahead and prove that those users are switching to kbin over lemmy, use some data to back up your claim.

    Or accept that we have a problem with adoption and as a community we need to fix it.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (19 children)

    User growth hasn't stopped, check this.

    Again, you’re pulling explanations out of thin air - go ahead and prove that those users are switching to kbin over lemmy, use some data to back up your claim.

    I said "Some users may switched" - I claimed nothing.

    Or accept that we have a problem with adoption and as a community we need to fix it.

    Lemmy is improving, mobile apps are in rapid development, and seems good (never used one so am judging from what I've heard), communities are being created everyday. No one in this thread said that Lemmy is in perfect state and we have nothing to improve. If you have some ideas on how can we make Lemmy better, you're free to share them.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (18 children)

    User growth hasn't stopped, check this.

    Are you referring to the graphs here? The ones that show:

    • Monthly Active users in decline
    • Daily active users in decline

    Those graphs?

    Sure, 6-monthly users is increasing (and plateauing) and people sure are posting more comments, but those graphs do not paint a good picture and do not suggest positive user growth.

    No one in this thread said that Lemmy is in perfect state and we have nothing to improve.

    That's exactly what some people in this thread are claiming. Every time someone says "Good, less users is a good thing", they're saying nothing needs to change because that's what they want. I am saying that is not the case and I stand by that.

    Lemmy is improving, but it clearly needs to go a lot further to start attracting users again.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (17 children)

    Sure, 6-monthly users is increasing (and plateauing) and people sure are posting more comments, but those graphs do not paint a good picture and do not suggest positive user growth.

    Yep, this graph basically shows that growth hasn't stopped, it was just overtaken by the drop in Lemmy users. I will return to it a bit later.

    Every time someone says “Good, less users is a good thing”, they’re saying nothing needs to change because that’s what they want

    Only if it's taken outside of context. Okay, I admit I shouldn't claim "No one said that", but in many cases people aren't celebrating the decrease of Lemmy users. For example, OP clearly stated:

    It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping. Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.

    From my perspective, this decline is a consequance of a rapid growth during last months: people were promised with a new reddit, but they got lemmy, with its quirks and issues. Of course, some people weren't satisfied with it - and when protests on reddit came to an end, they could finally abandon lemmy for the platform they were actually interested in.

    That's why I pointed out on the fact user growth never stopped - Lemmy's still attracting new users, just people who weren't interested in lemmy in the first place decided to leave.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    Side note: OP did originally have the phrase "And that's good for lemmy" (or something very similar to that) in the title of this post, but they've since edited it. I don't know of a way of recovering what the original title said to be certain but it's worth knowing this, as that's a lot of the context behind this thread around why people (like myself) are decrying those that are saying it's a good thing.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I did edit it, because I was getting too much negativity on the "good thing" part of the title.

    I did not even intended as bait, I meant it as "it's a good thing that the community will stop thinking that everything is fine and actually reflect about how to fix it". That was my first comment with the post, but it got buried into the rest of the reactions.

    Later threads like https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2243096 and https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2241408 seem to show that some people are indeed becoming aware of the issues.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Yeah, I saw it too. Seems like OP wanted to bait to read the post text and not just scroll away with dreadful thoughts.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I did edit it, because I was getting too much negativity on the "good thing" part of the title.

    I did not even intended as bait, I meant it as "it's a good thing that the community will stop thinking that everything is fine and actually reflect about how to fix it". That was my first comment with the post, but it got buried into the rest of the reactions.

    Later threads like https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2243096 and https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2241408 seem to show that some people are indeed becoming aware of the issues.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    It seems the discussion moved to a doomy direction though. People kinda just read the title and then say that lemmy is basically dead and we should move back, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    You're not the only one who saw that. I saw it too. In fact, that's why I clicked the link.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I did edit it, because I was getting too much negativity on the "good thing" part of the title.

    I did not even intended as bait, I meant it as "it's a good thing that the community will stop thinking that everything is fine and actually reflect about how to fix it". That was my first comment with the post, but it got buried into the rest of the reactions.

    Later threads like https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2243096 and https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2241408 seem to show that some people are indeed becoming aware of the issues.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    growth hasn't stopped, it was just overtaken by the drop in Lemmy users

    Can you explain to me how this isn't a complete contradiction? How has growth not stopped while users have? That doesn't make any sense to me. Are we saying there's user growth or not?

    That's why I pointed out on the fact user growth never stopped - Lemmy's still attracting new users, just people who weren't interested in lemmy in the first place decided to leave.

    I'm trying to understand your viewpoint here, but I'm just not getting it. Overall users are in decline, that's not good. Sure, I have no doubt that we're still attracting new users but we're still losing users as well - more than we're attracting. We're at a net loss of users and that's not good.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    You said Lemmy can't attract new users at this point, I provided the evidence new people are this getting into the platform, it's just that statistics is overrided by people leaving us since reddit became usable yet again. It's one-time event though, just like reddit exodus was, so user growth will be positive again soon.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    You said Lemmy can't attract new users at this point

    Can you please point out / quote where I said this?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Okay but how do we fix it? Are we allowed to solicit on reddit just to get people here? Are Lemmy users even getting the word out about Lemmy?

    This isn't exactly the easiest platform to use. The term "instances" is probably intimidating to the average reddit user who has to do nothing more than type "reddit.com" to get to where they need to be.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago*

    I think the honest answer is to become active and solicit on Mastodon. Those users are not only far more open to the pitch of "Mastodon but with threaded discussions" but are far more legitimately engaged and active than Reddit users.

    EDIT: Not to mention they can literally participate from their existing accounts. Super easy to get your foot in the door.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Okay but how do we fix it?

    I think you answer your own question -

    This isn't exactly the easiest platform to use.

    I quite like lemmy, but the barrier to entry is far too high to enjoy the platform. Assume your user doesn't give a flying monkies about federation and things like that, they just want the memes and content - if we can crack that, we might be onto something.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users.

    These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform's profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Also Lemmy is becoming a larger platform and Twitter- or "X"- is becoming a smaller platform. Sure total users might be down since right after the Exodus but that is obviously normal, a new baseline will be established that's still significantly above the pre Exodus baseline. Then reddit inc will do something else stupid and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again.

    I think there's positives and negatives to having a small platform, and there's positives and negatives to having a larger platform. With a smaller platform, the quality of the comments in general is much higher with less low effort jokes which usually you've already read 500 times. With larger platforms, the smaller communities are much more active because there's a larger pool to draw those people with niche interests from.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again

    honestly I wonder if it would be more effective to be talking about lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, compuverse.uk, beehaw.org... pretending they're just their own things and not talking about Lemmy or Federation or anything like that

    might be good to get some users to just signup to the given instance, and slowly realize they're actually communicating with people from many servers and now they're in the rabbit hole lol

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Maybe, people do talk fondly about the days of forums that were dedicated to specific subjects with small communities where people all know each other and an instance can be much like that. Although sometimes what people actually want is different to what they really want, you know? Although I also do remember forums mostly too.

    I think it's still good to talk about Lemmy and the fediverse is still good, I joined Lemmy earlier this month and the way ActivityPub works was quite appealing to me and really made me want to switch. It was slightly unintuitive at first but someone described it as being like the email protocol where you can view emails from anyone even if they're on say gmail and you're on Yahoo mail/proton mail/ self hosted email/etc and that made it make complete sense.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    The average user cares about the health and quality of the platform though and a declining user-base is not good for either of those.

    Sure, we don't want to be flooded with millions of users either but that's because we have a distinct lack of mod tools and features to deal with it. The solution is better tools and better ways of handling those users, not to keep the platform isolated and haemorrhaging users.

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  • [–] [S] -2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (7 children)

    Do you need to be so agressive?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    I mean, if you are saying the sky isn't blue, why not? A drop in users is a bad thing. Lemmy needs people and it needs content. This smells of the "good for bitcoin" meme all over again.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (5 children)

    I edited because it seems it was too controversial, but anyway.

    I commented saying that this should probably be a signal for people to start focusing on a few core communities instead of spreading like crazy.

    It seemed that people were thinking that users would magically come to every community and make them active, but we are seeing the opposite. Which for me was a good thing because it would make people realize platform growth doesn't happen magically.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Yeah I think people have what happened to Digg in their minds and think there'll just be one single huge Exodus and Lemmy will explode over night, but that's unlikely. We just have to keep trucking and overtime reddit inc will make more and more stupid decisions and each time Lemmy and the dedicated will grow a but larger. Not to mention Twitter is imploding even faster, maybe we'll gain users from there.

    Having a small community in the meantime isn't so bad anyway, there's less low effort comments and you can recognise people sometimes which is cool. There's positives and negatives to both small and large communities.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I commented saying that this should probably be a signal for people to start focusing on a few core communities instead of spreading like crazy.

    I mean this place only really seems to have activity in meme pages, porn, and news.

    Feels more like a well behaved 4chan instead of a well behaved reddit.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    There is !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl to discover new ones.

    But I mostly agree, you have to look up for content outside of those 3.

    I tried to revive !personalfinance@lemmy.ml , !casualconversation@lemmy.world and !moviesandtv@lemmy.film, but that's harder than planned

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