Fediverse @lemmy.world QubaXR @lemmy.world 12mo ago

It's the gold rush over?

It's been a while since I last seen anyone posting graphs showing user base growth. Are we past the initial rush and bleeding numbers now?

73 comments

Slow organic growth is far better than explosives, unsustainable growth. We continue to provide content and actual authentic conversation and they will come.
- Yep, I also love the late 00s and early 10s feeling to Lemmy now. I find myself having more stuff done IRL since quitting reddit and browsing Lemmy occasionally.
  
  I'm finding I use Lemmy more than Reddit, because the place is less hostile and the discussions are usually actually worth reading again.
  
  No, no it's not.
- I came. And I agree. Anything that gets too popular too quickly just turns to shit. A huge influx of users who stuck around would have ended up turning this place into Reddit 2.0
  
  I don't want this to be Reddit 2.0
  
  I came.
  
  🤓
  
  It very nearly did. I was noticing reddit like behavior during the july 1 period of lemmy. Thankfully it has subsided and the general civility of discourse has returned.
  
  Either that or it's because I have blocked enough people already to weed out the assholes.
  
  I came too.
That’s possible. I think kbin/lemmy were less ready to replace Reddit yet for most users this time.

There was one guy in office who posts screenshots of funny Reddit posts in slack. Guess which app was he using! Official Reddit iOS app.
- The two mayor problems here are:
  
  1- The Fediverse's current lack of network infrastructure (on the idea that it pretends to be an alternative to both Reddit and Twitter).
  
  2- The lack of an app that satisfies the users needs, while also having a nice layout and stability.
  
  I do still have hope though, as Boost for Lemmy is yet to release.
  
  Connect is fine, been doomscrolling on it for weeks with no issues.
- It genuinely doesn't matter. I'd prefer it if it would stay at this level. Reddit sucks now. This is like Reddit was 13 years ago.
Stats would indicate that we may be approaching the leveling out phase.

I don't think we will be able to tell until we are looking back at it
- I wonder why the number of comments went up so drastically last Friday.
  
  I was drunk and on Lemmy.
  
  You're welcome.
  
  That is wierd huh.
  
  Bots?
- So posts are going up, users go down. I know that millions have been purged, but the loss looks much more organic.
- Kbin stats seem very depressing, but it's most definitely cause there's no app yet and it relatively new compared to Lemmy
Until the next big social media fuck up, which neither Spez nor Musk can stop themselves from making.

You're just here early, and the platform still needs work. It hasn't even hit 1.0 yet.
- Oh I don't mind at all. I liked it here. I think it only bugs me when statistics reporting is contingent on good news.
Content is up but users are down. Take that as you will.
- Link bots with thousands and thousands of posts.
- Active users is up slightly, that's a better metric for growth of the platform imo.
- Content is up but users are down
  
  I used the Point of View gun. It was me. Sorry. But now you all share my suffering. Hah!
I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the "Imaginary" series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don't have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That's not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.
- Yes! I think we have many communities that are either:
  
  way too specific
  
  carbon copies of identical topic on another instance
  
  Carbon copies are actually quite of an issue on the long term. It is difficult to understand the best one for a topic unless one visits many of them.
  
  Also because the number of subscriptions that one sees is only from their instance
- Maybe we got to ambitious with niche communities and should have stayed broad.
  
  But the niche communities were the best parts of Reddit. I pretty much avoided the general subreddits.
- I think a lot of the imaginary communities were on one of the .ml instances so are currently in suspended animation. That domain shutdown was really badly timed...
  
  Otherwise, it's the standard problem that only a small % actually post and Lemmy is much smaller. I do think that a better/fixed hot algorithm would help with post discoverability for smaller communities though.
  
  ( I mod a niche imaginary community for the Cosmere book series(es))
  
  Yeah, I don't think asking communities that are already fairly small on Reddit to create the same community on Lemmy was a good idea.
  
  For something like this it'd be best to start with a single community for the whole broad topic (like, ImaginaryStuff). Hell, Reddit used to be a "single subreddit" originally. And the niche subreddits didn't pop up until fairly recently where they were actually able to entice enough people to use them.
September will be a boost when HS and college get going.

Then Reddit will mess up again and we will have another big influx. Its bound to happen.
I noticed the same thing on Mastodon. The new users per day ratio is slowing, but each time Elon does his thing there's a new wave.
That would be an honest shame. All of this fuss of moving over and for what? Just for that rush of a breeze of not being on Reddit? I wondered how many treated it as that, took a break from Reddit before hopping back onto Reddit expecting things to magically improve during the time they were gone for.

It's still a shitty place, people.
- Yup, but I'm getting very strong Google+ vibes...
  
  No matter how small and quiet it gets here, I like it better than what Reddit has become.
Who cares. Just use it and enjoy.
Wait for Boost and/or Sync to release, that will be the real gold rush
- So far memmy is the best app in my books, pretty close to what Apollo used to be but still missing some key features like the jump bar.
  
  Voyager/wefwef is literally just an Apollo clone but it limits its search functionality to lemmy.worlds instance allow and block lists, cutting off less savoury parts of the fediverse, even if your account is hosted with a Switzerland (everyone allowed, nothing blocked).
  
  I just don’t like the idea of not having access to ALL of the instances, even if I never choose to go there. But like I said, memmy is the only app that truly searches across all instances sfw or not.
  
  Voyager/wefwef is literally most an Apollo clone
  
  That’s an extremely good quality, imo
- Doubt, but would be great to see. We're already all here using alternative apps until sync/boost releases then we'll move over. Will suck for existing apps to see a big loss.
  
  I've seen a lot of comments on disgruntled users on Reddit that are willing to give Lemmy a try, but only with a polished app. We'll see
For now.... until reddit's admins find themselves some more feet to shoot themselves in. In the interim there's always going to be a steady flow of those who have been permabanned for obscure and arbitrary reasons
it is just showing how much people actually use reddit on pc plus how much people dont care about actually using the bad reddit official app vs coming here where the communities are still few and front page is still so uninteresting

73 comments