this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That hacker news bit got me, I won't lie.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"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"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, many of those are fascinating posts in their own right.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bot posts are soulless and when so many of the posts here are from bots, the whole site feels a little hollow

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. I think it dilutes user engagement, because people will leave comments on these bot threads, never to be seen by anybody else.