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I don’t think that’s accurate. I something funny is going on with kbin that is causing fedidb to see one instance as two separate instances. So this number is about 50k too high.
Also, if I may be a little realistically pessimistic, for those hoping for continued growth. These things tend to happen in waves with deflations in between. It seems the Reddit wave has come to an end, and some drop in numbers might happen over the next few weeks or months. It’s natural, and I wouldn’t be dismayed by it at all. Events like the migration cause curiosity in some people who don’t settle. It’s fine.
Who knows what will happen going forward, Reddit it seems is still doing it’s bullshit it seems. But if you like it here, there’s plenty to focus on here to make this place happen. And we don’t need to worry too much about whether Reddit a dying or who’s winning.
with deflations in between
Worth noting that Hexbear(currently makes up 25% of all posts on lemmy) only saw a deflation in the initial weeks after launch. It then stabilised and didn't deflate at all over the course of 3 entire years of operating, it happily ticked along with new users coming in at the same rate as user churn. If other communities establish themselves and actually foster a real community that wants to maintain the space there will be an initial deflation but then people will just stick around visiting daily.
A culture of simply permanently moving here should be something people work to establish.
Interesting. Hadn't thought about the amount of posting done on hexbear. Do you know why they kinda defederated and are now re-federating?
Otherwise, another factor is the effect of the wider fediverse. Interconnectivity between lemmy and masto is not great, but I'm seeing more attempts at it and interest in it from both sides, which is cool. And people are likely to create accounts from either side too, which for lemmy/kbin means that millions of people are slowly learning about them with an already vested interest in fediverse platforms succeeding.
Interesting. Hadn’t thought about the amount of posting done on hexbear. Do you know why they kinda defederated and are now re-federating?
It was caused by technical differences in goals. At the time Hexbear came over things were built in a rush because /r/chapotraphouse had just been banned and there was very limited time to rescue some of the userbase who had migrated to a discord as a lifeboat.
Lemmy at the time was early development, and was absolutely not capable of sustaining the MASSIVE amount of activity that thousands of CTH users would create.
So Hexbear forked and developed solutions to handle the high load they needed while Lemmy at the time was pursuing other priorities - federation wasn't a thing and they had to achieve federation by a certain deadline to get some of the funding grants they were getting.
This difference in priorities led to the situation, and then Hexbear coming back took a very large amount of time because it was not trivial to migrate without massive issues. On top of that it was handled by dozens of different people throwing in help for free. Burnout and motivation play significant factors there. They will be federating with a limited list soon, I believe the intention is not to federate with anywhere that hasn't blocked meta though which makes me unsure about whether they will federate here because of the soft stance this instance took.
You've just reminded me I have an account there.
Here's a secret, online analytics are never that accurate. They're a huge mess pretty much everywhere. If you want to get real insights from analytics the best thing to do is compare things relatively, like with a/b testing.
Yeah, people shouldn't be pitting things against one another, it's not us against them (reddit). It's us FOR us. Let's go make lemmy better together, to hell with reddit.
That the initial wave of migration is subsiding is very clear, we can see it in the growth rate of lemmy.world as an example. After the initial boom around July 1st there was about a week of daily growth by 3-4k new accounts. Since then, the growth has declined and now hovers around 1k.
This is a crucial moment in time for Lemmy I think. It will be interesting to see whether that big chunk of initial migration is enough to achieve if not critical mass then enough momentum to get the snowball rolling.
We can't expect another huge Reddit blunder sending folks this way (though killing old.reddit isn't inconceivable), so we have to rely on naturally attracting and keeping users around now by adequately varied content and active enough communities. That requires a lot of active users and I wonder if we attracted enough to get there.
Honestly, I'm just waiting for sync for lemmy and boost for lemmy to release. Those two can actually get the snowball rolling as they were the most popular of the third party clients. (and also because I freaking loved boost 😍)
Very rational to curb the expectations, but I tend to think that people who would be dismayed by numbers (I.e activity) dropping, weren’t going to settle either way long term, which is of course fine and very valid too.
The steam a lot of communities have picked up won’t likely completely fade anymore though, here’s to hoping so at least.
Oh I'm not talking about a collapse or anything like that at all. Many are happy spending time here, even those that also spend time over on Reddit for some things too and the effect of this migration won't just disappear.
But these things come in waves, and so far have been trending upward, at least that's what has been seen over on mastodon.