There was a post the other day about other lemmy servers that had thousands of inactive users. The OP contacted the admins of those servers to let them know and several admins did purge a load of accounts.
People were pushing for everyone to comment at least once a day so all the lurkers were counted as active users. It's a little bit of The Pot Roast Principle at this point.
Edit Ok, so don't just pick the first link off Google folks. That got weird fast. Have this Less insane version instead.
man what the hell is that article on? It starts off explaining the pot roast principle which ok that makes sense (it's that we often do things not because of logic but simply we were taught to do so by our parents), but then it says that a message to take away from the story is that "persistence is a virtue" which I mean I guess but you're kinda missing the point? But then in the very next sentence where it says "sometimes things we take as fact are just superstition" it goes "and we should consider prayer as a healthcare alternative" and compares listening to only medical science as like cutting the ends off a pot roast. Not like "superstitions hang around for a reason though and there's perhaps some minor psychological value in these harmless cultural things" or "people who strongly believe in something tend to report more positively in negative times" or even god forbid "have you considered that prayer is like cutting pot roast ends?", straight up "have you tried asking God for help? When was the last time you did that huh? Why are you treating God like a teabag that's pretty ungrateful you dick"
I'm guessing you probably didn't mean for that to be the message (this article is weirdly the first to pop up when you google the term) but uh, maybe you should vet your articles? Unless you're really trying to say we should try praying for lemmy to succeed
To be honest I picked the first result on Google, half-heartedly scanned it to make sure it actually told the story about the roast and went "good enough"
I just went back to reread it and I'm kind of horrified now. Going to have to edit in a less insane link.
I read about an experiment once, where monkeys were placed in a room with a ladder leading to a reward. Whenever a monkey attempted to climb the ladder, they were sprayed with water. Over time, new monkeys replaced the original ones, and even though the water spraying ceased, the monkeys continued to prevent each other from climbing the ladder based on learned behavior. This went on and on even though none of the monkeys in the room had ever been sprayed.
I think about that a lot whenever people say they aren't allowed do something, especially because of religion.
Most people just call that âcargo cultâ where they donât know why they do something, they just do the ritual without questioning it. Also it probably wonât lead to people looking up stuff related to putting a roast on a spit đ
This is a pretty standard curve for a recently discovered thing. Everyone is curious what it is, tries it out then a percentage decides it isnât for them and goes elsewhere.
I had to be pretty stubborn to get into Lemmy, never received the verification email (likely due to sudden server load) and no way to retrigger it, so had to wait until the new version came out. Apparently that removed the login block. Not to mention the filter on my account defaulting to showing no posts (needed to set language filter to include undetermined and my language), so it was kind of a rough entry.
But this number isnât total accounts, itâs active accounts. So that means people who have logged in at least once during the last month. The accounts still exist from when people came to check it out, but if they decided it wasnât for them or ran into issues like I did and didnât return then theyâd fall off the active user list.
New products face this curve all the time. Steady growth, discovery spike then retained user drop back to steady, hopefully accelerated, growth with a higher baseline than before.
I am also under the impression that active only counts users who commented or posted. So there is also a very significant possibility that people are just settling in and starting to lurk. It's really the 90-9-1 principle (in a stable community, 90% lurk, 9% are occasionally active, 1% are consistently active). It would really be weirder if we didn't see some lurkers after such a massive influx of people