What happened with active users on Lemmy?
What happened with active users on Lemmy?
I just noticed that active users on Lemmy got slashed, what happened?
References:
Lemmy devs decided to exclude lemmy.world from the join-lemmy site because it's too big. Obviously that removes a lot of active users.
That's stupid.
The main problem with lemmy now is adoption, there isn't a critical mass of users yet.
When users see the stats without lemmy.world, they'll be discouraged from joining. Add to that the issues with federation and the few who join will leave because of the steep learning curve.
Way to alienate potential users.
Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Lemmy.world is doing great and I'm happy for it and all that, but... 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.
buT mUh DeCenTrAlIZatiOn!
The decentralisation probably doesn't help either. People coming to Lemmy from other places are coming from a centralised system. That takes some getting used to.
If you're new to this, you can be forgiven by thinking that all the Lemmy instances are their own separate thing, like the forums of old, rather than that they're all interconnected (excluding a whole bunch of stuff about defederation and all of that mess).
Nah we'll keep dropping instances when they hit 20k users.
so lemmy.world became too big to fail and the other instances decided didn't want to risk a potential bail out?
This has nothing to do with other instances. The join-lemmy.org site is run by the Lemmy developers and they decide what happens with that site. They think it's problematic that lemmy.world is as big as it is (as one of the points of the fediverse is decentralization). So they removed lemmy.world from the listing on join-lemmy.org.
Note that this is in no way a defederation or anything of that sort. The site just doesn't show lemmy.world, that's all.
That is a very weird thing to do, unless they are looking to boost their own instance.
You can read their motivation in the linked pull request. FWIW I don't think there's any ill intent here and certainly not an attempt to boost their own instance. I think they just want Lemmy to be decentralized and lemmy.world being as big as it is kinda prevents that.
I'm not sure I would've done it that way personally but I can see the reasoning and it's not entirely unreasonable.
I very much doubt that they have discouraged signups to their instance many times
Why does removing them from the site also mean cutting their user count from Active Users though?
That's just how it works at the moment. It only counts active users from the sites listed.
@Blaze@feddit.org falling asleep with a smile on their face tonight :)
Not really, pretending a third of the monthly active users do not exist isn't really anything I'm happy about.
LW is still in these stats, so there's that
School probably.
Honestly, what's more surprising is the numbers are that drastic. I didn't think we have that many Gen Z users here.
EDIT: Actual reason can be found here: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
Thanks SorteKanin for providing the context.
I don’t get it. I work full time and have no problem wasting my
lifeI mean time here…The notion of "summer reddit" went hand in hand with notion of "mom's basement" and even "touch grass" in a way.
Namely, all are dated ideas from millennials that are still thinking the person on the other end of the comment is sitting in front of a computer, as the default. It ignores the simple fact we all have the internet in our pockets and can be chronically online AND actually out in the world doing things at the same time.
i'm in school, still have to shit from time to time
Hijacking top comment to give the actual answer: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
What is your default sort set to?
I'm set to scaled and subscribed by default which mostly gets me posts from the last 0-6 hours. But for some reason Lemmy on FF keeps logging me out so I get to see the default all with active sort and it's a wildly different user base.
There was a post the other day in like Linux memes about case sensitivity in the file system. Early on the post was mostly the Linux die hards who love their case sensitivity. After about 1.5 days it showed up in active and all of the newer comments were (probably normal people) bashing case sensitivity. It's almost like R*ddit to a degree where the general consensus in the comments can change over time as different users start seeing the post.
I sort by new a lot so it definitely could be that actually. Good point.
FediDB shows a stable 44k MAU
The statistics there is confusing for me.
How so?
How does the software pull the numbers? Maybe an instance got blocked 30 days ago?
We need @SorteKanin@feddit.dk to dive in and tell us how these numbers work!
Here you go: https://feddit.dk/post/7667476/10289642
School started? 🤷🏼♂️
I'm still here most of my day.
Part of it is that people also moved on from Lemmy too. Lemmy is nice, but there also isn't very much by way of activity on it, which feeds back into itself. No activity means there's nothing to draw people into it, and not enough to keep them around when they are there.
One of the communities and (non-world) instances I frequented is all but dead these days.
huh, there's a whole instance just for the Ascendance of a Bookworm anime/manga
Ya damn right! Probably would've been a lot more popular too if Lemmy had spoiler tag support (see discussion https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317). But now that the LN is finished, it'll probably be a lot harder to convince people to move over from the subreddit, even if spoiler tags were implemented. 😢 Maybe when the new season of the anime premiers it will pick up.
So, most user are passive user. Maybe they leave because nothing interesting.
One another hypothesis is that the stats is not count fully as some instance was not up to the task, slow, ... So the now stat is under-count
So, most user are passive user.
Always has been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
The actual reason is here: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/13842484
Honestly, it’s a short-sighted move made with hubris by the developer’s personal ideology. Both @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml admit in the PR that it’s not a good solution, but yet they continue any way — probably because it’s an easy “solution”, despite alienating 41% of their active user base.
It’s a terrible trend in a lot of programming circles that programmers think because it is easy and it “works” (in that one circumstance) that it must be correct. This can be evidenced by browsing StackOverflow and reading the accepted answers for a lot of questions (SSL errors in software and disabling hostname verification or cert checks comes to mind).
In my 18+ years of experience, if I find an “easy” solution to a complex problem, I keep looking for the correct solution. What is “easy” now will most likely lead to more complex problems down the line. And as they say, “if you can’t find the time to fix it right the first time, where are you going to find the time to fix it again?”
Look, I get Lemmy is meant to be decentralized. Hiding away your biggest instance looks shady to outside users not in the know. The real solution is to “go door to door” to app makers and ask them to not default to any one instance of Lemmy (side note: randomizing a default server is not much better). If anything, add a link to join-lemmy where people can browse the list of ALL instances (yes, ALL of them) and let them make a genuinely-informed decision on their own. As a convenience, and API should be provided (assuming one does not already exist) so that apps can query a pageable/searchable list of existing/active instances (maybe also provide a link to their homepage too).
Hell, if it makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, the default sorting of returned values can be weighted by percentage of active users (i.e., higher percentages get lower weights to help promote smaller instances). This would help to round out the number of signups without excluding instances.
But whatever developers do (not just Lemmy devs), do NOT overly dictate how people use your software “because I don’t like it”; lest you piss your user base off.
/two-cents
Edit: clarified a few points.
You're talking about something without actually clarifying what the hell you're talking about. That's the short sighted move? The easy "solution"? What "works"?
alienating 41% of their active user base
Why would distributing users to smaller instances alienate Lemmy.world users?
If anything, distributing the load results in a better user experience, since the last Reddit exodus was taking down .world every few hours.
Because it’s not simply “distributing” the load; it’s actively hiding an instance as if it doesn’t exist. So what do they do when the next instance gets “too big” for their liking? Hide it, along side LW? And the next?
Re-read my comment — specifically the second half where I offer a potential solution that would actually distribute the load more fairly without having to hide anything.
Eh .. i use lemmy pretty regularly but not in the last few days. Maybe it's just a lull
yeah it’s probably @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org ‘s fault
Lemmy pulled a CNN. Basically, all Trump news again.
Did lemmy do something in the meantime to keep bots out?
If a lot of them can't operate anymore like before they wouldn't count as active users anymore either and would explain discrepancies, or not?
Not that I know anything about how bots or websites work tbh.
The reason is here: https://lemmy.world/comment/12280494
Idk if bots were ever that present on here, excluding the ones that basically scrape reddit for content
Did a russian troll farm get shut down or something (/s)
No, ml and hex are still online
The asterisk means that, by "active users", they're considering only those who commented and/or posted "in the last month". Maybe join-lemmy's algorithm is considering from "day 1" of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?
If it's true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We'd need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.
Also, "only those who commented and/or posted". Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.
I have NO idea about the actual answer. Is it possible that these are from different time-of-day readings?
Think a lot of people joined because they were mad at Reddit's fuckery last year but have since gone back.
His screenshot is from a couple weeks ago.
Wait, TF
