Is the amount of Lemmy activity declining?
I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?
When I run out of stuff to see on Lemmy, I touch grass. Simple as.
I feel way more in control of my online experience when endless scrolling isn't possible.
This might seem like a clever way to say "sour grapes" to me. Saying that "little content is good because it avoids endless scrolling" is as weird as saying "living in the desert is good because it helps me control my diet".
To address the point: activity seems very much slowed down, and we have two years since the Reddit "exodus" and very little progress to show. We are yet to convert any significant significant community, most people just accepted the status quo and you can bet that the few active people around here still rely on Reddit to find content and repost here.
Aside from this meta-discussion about Lemmy and the Fediverse, there is basically no native group or community emerging.
I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.
Welcome! While you are still looking around, you may want to check out PieFed as well & e.g. https://piefed.zip/ . It offers tons of features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, flairs (both user and post), polls, combining together all cross-posts across all communities, etc. Check it out and prepare to just fall in love with it!:-)
Even better, while Lemmy is written in the Rust language and adds features at the timescale of multiple years (not joking here) whereas PieFed is written in Python and adds new stuff literally weekly. So the gap in feature sets, instead of ever closing, will only continue to widen over time.
Although if you are going to stay with Lemmy, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than what you are on now. Fortunately, you may not have to choose, if it opens up a PieFed instance by the same people (discussion).
Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.
It's summer, a few active posters are busy with either kids or time off
!fedigrow@lemmy.zip has a weekly thread for active posters, it used to be more active in June
It's fine, people will probably come back in September
!
It's funny though, because someone else said activity spikes in the summer because kids are out of school.
I saw it, but I'm not sure it's correct as the graph in that comment shows a dip rather than a spike
Also, most of the kids today are mostly on Tiktok or Twitch rather than text-based forum, be it Reddit or Lemmy/Piefed
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Total posts by month appears fairly linear.
Thank you, I had been looking for actual data and couldn't find it. You're right, does not seem to be declining.
I wonder if there an increasing percentage of bot posts, since I have prolific bot accounts blocked.
I wonder what's up with that number of servers decline.
I wonder what’s up with that number of servers decline.
Consolidation? Which is fine to that extent.
I'd wager many experimented with hosting a younger Lemmy, and hosts who couldn't sustain it got shaken out over time.
I wouldn't assume the rise in posts/comments is all bots, either. I don't have anyone blocked, and it doesn't feel overrun to me.
Total Lemmy Active Users by Month
There's a big spike during summer time. On reddit it was known as summer reddit. Basically all of the kids are out of school and have nothing better to do but shitpost online. Now they're going back to school. It could be the lack of different users you're noticing. Not sure why it dipped in July though, should have dipped in August.
Also keep an eye on: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats A couple thousand people (and several communities) moved there after lemm.ee died, but we interact with lemmy.
As for why it subjectively seems to be declining... maybe you know what you're gonna see in New, and so you engage less with posts? Maybe it's time to be more of a poster!
Yeah, OP. Ten million posts a month isn’t good enough for you?!?
Ten million and one would be better
It's not 10 millions created during a month, it's 10 millions existing posts at a certain month, whatever their creation date.
The actual number of posts per month would be the different between the total number of posts between two months.
Looking at the more detailed breakdowns, it looks like there are a couple of servers (Lemmit.online, alien.top among others) with huge numbers of posts/comments that appear to be entirely bots. Are those counted in the stats? Could those be messing with the overall graphs? If Lemmit's quarter of a million posts a month are counted, its going to make the monthly posts stat useless when even .world only has about 15k posts a month.
Edit: Comparing the graphs to the server list, it looks like Lemmit is counted, so the main graph is likely misleading. I did look through some of the bigger servers, and their rate of posting seemed fairly linear, but there isn't a good way to check overall.
If i'm not mistaken, the very last graph showing posts by month shows a significant decreasing over the summer, or at least specifically july (since august is not over yet). It says June is around 12M posts and July around 9M. August seems already over 9M and we're only 2/3 in, so maybe there was some drop around July for some reason, which could explain OP's feeling.
As for the reason, i'm not sure, maybe a combination of factors like some server blocking access from UK with the latest privacy bullshit, some server having signficant downtime (i think slrpnk.net had a problem with servers locking themselves up while tech admin was abroad), and maybe non-Lemmy factors like holidays (though they don't seem to impact previous years stats).
I honestly think that the whole internet is in decline.
I was just thinking everything seems to either be in decline, stagnation, or regression.
Hardly bothers me. I’ll be scrolling for maybe 2 minutes and reach yesterdays posts, get caught up. It’s nice to be on social media where you aren’t constantly scrolling.
Same. I feel like Lemmy is really a lot like early Reddit (pre 2012) and the sizes of the communities are perfect. You can actually contribute to a discussion instead of drowning in 20k inane joke posts.
Some niches remain underpopulated but I feel like this will eventually rectify itself as the more critical and thoughtful people move away from vapid platforms like Reddit, FB or IG. We'll continue to welcome them with open arms.
Totally agree. It's way more conversation here, you had no chance really talking on reddit unless it was a small sub. I like that you get to know people here as well
Your instance, lemmy.ca has blocked or defederated from a significantly high number of other servers. So that's the reason
You may want to check the list of instances defederated by your PieFed instance out then as it may by much longer that on lemmy.ca...
Hmm, my original account is on .world, but I started using this alt because it got slow. Maybe I should try browsing new there and seeing if it makes a difference.
There are plenty of new posts created, the problem is that most of them stay at 0 comments for ever.
But is that a change?
Same amount of posts, more comments. I'd wager on growing.
I'm relatively new here, the only negative thing I notice is mods/creators reposting the same stuff every ~6-24 hours to make it 'seem' like there is more activity, which I think backfires more than not.
If you mean the "how is your day going so far" type of posts, I don't think those are meant to be deceptive so much as to generate engagement by placing the post into people's subscribed feeds.
But if you mean the same identical post, that's not great - perhaps you want to unsubscribe from communities that do or even allow such practices.
I love the little personal threads. Im not sure if they exist on other platforms but its one of my favourite things about lemmy so far.
Are you sure you arent seeing posts of the same community being hosted from other instances? Ive been here a while and havent seen any reposting within the same community of the same instance. (Or atleast not repetitively.)
Very possible, I have not dug in on this, just a vibe.
Oh, I haven't noticed that.
I don't think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
I do think we face a real inertia right now where the general public has become convinced corporate social media sucks because people suck not because corporations suck and we need to refute that misconception if we want the fediverse to have a vibrant future.
It is really frustating how evidently unhappy most users of corporate social media are about their social media use, yet they show no signs of stopping and when you start to provide an alternate vision of social media they immediately shortcircuit to "social media is bad, I don't want more".
I do think if we don't start pushing back with an affirmative positive vision of why social media can be good we may see a period of depressed growth but I don't see that happening yet personally.
I don't think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.
Maybe for English and a handful of major European languages, but there's no way I could recommend the Fediverse (at least the Threadverse; I don't hang out on Mastodon) to an Arabic or Japanese speaker. In that area it's still severely lacking.
For Japanese speaking people there is Misskey - it is FOSS and uses ActivityPub.
Yep! I've been trying to find someone to do a non white make up post for !Womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone I've got nowhere
Good point, my bad I was unconciously assuming we were talking about the english speaking part of the internet, but yeah definitely.
I’m definitely bored of it.
Why?
Barely any content, endless reposts, and the same content as found on other popular forums
I've definately noticed it too. I've tried to look for stats, and most seem to indicate that there is plenty of activity, but I dont really see it. At this point, I can scroll through the day's all feed in like 20 minutes, nonetheless my subscribed feed. I kind-of wonder if theres one or two instances with a lot of bot activity effectively inflating the numbers.
Edit: Is there a way to see monthly posts by instance, or compare percentage of posts? That would be an easy way to prove or disprove my bots theory.
Edit 2: fediverse.observer shows monthly (Or rather, total by month) local posts by instance but not federated, and their overall stats are warped by a few bot instances that you can't filter out. That said, for local posts on a few of the big instances, the rate seems stable. That said, smaller instances are shutting down so I don't know if that has an impact on the overall posting rate.
I said that in July instance admins said it's often quieter over summer
I'd expect that, although I've noticed this trend continuing (and seemingly getting worse) for months now.
That was what got me making this post.
I think Lemmy needs a better way to federate communities, so if you sub to say a "Star Trek" community on 3 instances, you don't get the same post 3 times, but instead it's somehow linked and content federates; this would be at the community and not instance level, so there's more community self-governance, and communities can migrate instances without so much intervention from instance admins. I think that will really help growth and decentralization.
Piefed has this with reposts
Its so nice.
It does
mbin also will group multiple posts with the same link or the same title together. Occasionally, this means a months old post with the same (simple) title will show up, but I'm okay with that.
People always complain about this but Lemmy does actually combine crossposts in your feed. What frontend are you using? Or maybe it's just bugged? If someone can figure out the bug and how to reproduce it, it needs to be submitted to GitHub.
Here's a reference to the feature, a fixed bug, disabling the deduplication for a single community view https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2104#issuecomment-2316048658
The whole point of federation is a variety of moderation styles so it doesn't really make sense to federate in comments from other communities because it would take away any identity that exists
What about that issue do you think is causing less activity? Just people not wanting to engage as much because of the redundancy?
Yea, if people get too annoyed seeing the same story in 4 communities, I think eventually they consolidate down to one, and the fracturing reduces engagement across ALL the communities; a couple become ghost towns, etc. It's a different sense of engagement to see 4 threads with 2-4 comments instead of seeing 1 with 20.
I think these things oscillates a lot.
Perhaps the closure of Lemm.ee took away some of the quantity and variety of posts and communities?
I haven't seen activity declining, but I have seen good quality posts declining I have been seeing more low quality posts recently
Usually whenever I want to make a post, I think back to the comments I typically receive and think better of doing so, then don't.
I'm sure this is happening elsewhere too, e.g. on Reddit, though balanced by a much larger user base (and ofc bots doing a lot of the actual posting, and sometimes the commenting as well).
I probably should comment less often too:-). Really, touching grass and talking with people irl is much more fulfilling.
I don't know how to check for the whole lemmy but seems it's growing a bit but the MAU dropped a bit probably because of august: https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.world
But the fediverse in general doesn't grow too much except when a scandal happens.
Watch out, the statistics might not say what you think they do.
"Total users" is a meaningless metric. All it showes is how many users aren't using lemmy anymore.
"Monthly active users" is the only meaningful metric, and it's fluctuating and currently going down.
"Activity growth" doesn't actually show the number of new activities per month, but the total count of activities. So with constant activity you'd expect linear "activity growth" and with growing activity you'd see the line curling upward. It is currently mostly linear but slightly declining.
So these statistics show a slow decline, not an increase.
But in a way you can be happy that it doesn't grow a lot. With the base architecture of ActivityPub (every instance contains a copy of everything, all content needs to be propagated to all instances, all content needs to be duplicate-moderated by all instances' admins) it is absolutely not designed to handle large amount of users.
If only a tenth of a percent of Reddit users were to switch over to Lemmy, everything would grind to a halt and most instances would have to close down because running them would become to expensive for a non-profit project.
Yeah one has to be careful with statistics and I couldn't find the whole Lemmy in one place so it's also not representative of the whole Lemmy.
I thought ActivityPub did scale well and was ATProto (Bluesky) which had a lot more issues. I mean I can comment on Peertube using my Mastodon account meaning the whole Fediverse is properly connected and we are 1M MAU so I would say it already scaled good.
The user you are replying to has specifically sourced lemmy.world data there, which is not going to give you an overall for the wider fediverse.
That link is just hanging for me.
Naa, looks about the same. Im seeing more and more people step outside of lemmy though, this is nice. Theres a whole fediverse out there,go out and explore! And bring back cookies (and links)!
I rarely post but comment a fair amount. To me, it’s only been recent, but I’ve noticed a decline, too.