this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
88 points (95.8% liked)

Asklemmy

43336 readers
835 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I saw some stats on this months ago, especially after the initial explosion. I’m curious if the growth is still continuing at a good pace and also how everyone feels about the growth/activity within their communities.

top 33 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 81 points 10 months ago (2 children)

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Monthly active users is probably the more relevant metric.

36k which seems stable.

Expect another increase when 0.19 version is release, or next time Reddit messes up

[–] [email protected] 65 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Definitely feels emptier than it was a few months earlier, but so far I enjoy the "I'm not just a pawn in an ocean of users" feel that Lemmy gives vs Reddit

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I also appreciate not being the punching bag for people having a bad day. There seems to be fewer of those types on here.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

That’s one of the drivers for me interacting more here. On Reddit I either felt like everything that could be said had already been said or that whatever I may have to add would be buried.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t Reddit currently messing up things with search? And yeah I’d agree with the stable users comment. We shall see what the next few months look like to tell.

I think that the adoption will mostly work in steps. Lemmy is currently functional, not pretty, not stable, not well moderated, not well integrated with federation, and poor discovery but it is functional.

Hopefully the next time a wave hits, Lemmy will be more mature and ready to take in more users who will already have communities set up even if they’re small.

I’m concerned though given the slower pace of updates that’s often complained about though.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You’re using an instance that has a large chunk of the fediverse blocked and hasn’t even updated to the latest version.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Legit ignorant here, why does the version matter?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Probably missing features and less stable. I remember reading something about that in a patch notes post a couple days after the reddit debacle.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

That wouldn't prevent them from seeing content though - the defederation part is the important part.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Mainly because of bug fixes and new features like any other piece of software. The one they’re on was failing to federate mod actions properly, but they probably don’t care about that anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Hey, I run my own instance and periodically forget to check if I'm running an out of date version. Would you happen to know if there is any 'version out of date' indication that I've failed to pick up on? Or do I just need to manually check? Or can I get new version notifications by email?

No need to go Google it, I'll make time to search myself eventually -- but if you happen to know, you'd save me some time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Best to follow the GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Good to see you're still around!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah I even have... plans.

I've got some circuit boards for a particle spectrometer off at the factory. When they come in, it will probably be the first nuclear technology integration with Lemmy. Probably also the last, but if the user count keeps increasing, who knows!

Particle spectrometers make very good random number generators, and I have a Lemmy bot on my instance that does I-Ching divination that uses an inferior random number source (diode breakdown). I need a particle spectrometer for some science anyway, and it doesn't really cost more to make 2. How could I not, right?

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Who cares? Lemmy isn't a for profit entity. Growth doesn't matter. Quality does.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I agree that quality matters, but when we have a number of active communities where the content is supplied by bots I don't know that I'd say we're winning on quality.

More users means more people contributing instead of bots.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

That's not a direct correlation. More users could also mean more people to create bots.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (2 children)

With growth comes quality, though. Right now, almost every community/instance is supplied with content by only a small handful of users. This means less things to engage with on the platform, and more opportunity for people to spin a narrative with their content.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I feel like there are several of us not allowing that to happen on any of the conservative communities.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Counter point: parler

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hey, you're being downvoted for what I wanted to comment.

Seriously. We can have a nice space for us and people alike without the need to abide to the same rules the big platform do. I don't have a need for a 1:1 Reddit clone, I would just use Reddit if that's what i was looking for. We don't need to make it about the capitalist need for growth... But nice and growth really aren't the same thing. A few more people would be beneficial, but not by any means... I'd like if we focused on being nice and constructive instead. And do away with the dumping content here to make it seem more active without looking if it also generates engagement. Oh yeah and I'd like moderation and the tools available to get better.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

We need content, there's not enough people here to make enough good content yet. We need some growth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

My main point is, we don't need any people, we need the ones generating good content. And the content that people like to engage with. IMHO just dumping the news here doesn't do any good. I have a RSS reader for that. I want to have meaningful discussions. And not with just argumentative people. I think that would be a good incentive for new users to join. Yeah. And we need some more (good) moderators.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago

The growth is happening. You will need to be patient though, Rome wasn't built in a day.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Maybe I am reading this wrong but it looks grim. Downward trends all around

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago

In another situation, it would be grim, but having that downwards tendency right after a hype peak (Jul/2023, or ~~Reddigg v4~~ the APIcalypse) is expected - plenty users who'd come with the hype would go back, and plenty instance owners would realise that running an instance is way more work than they planned.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

Yeah, we had a massive inrush of people when the Reddit API thing happened. Things are settling since. I think (I don't know the exact metrics) it's been lots of inactive users anyways, because I can't feel activity decline in general.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Tbh it’s the reason I asked. I expected results to look about like this but I’m really interested in the graphs of posts vs active users.

Posting has exploded. I assume a good portion of that is bots. Bots posting news or reposting memes probably. However, a good portion of that must be users posting as well right?

I don’t think that retaining about half of the users that joined in the massive wave is bad actually, it’s the trends that come next where we see what happens. If that line keeps going down for the rest of the year, the platform is probably in trouble.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Oh my this site looks clean.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

I don't know about the real numbers but I feel like there's sufficient interesting content to check it several times a day. So if stays stable I'm pretty happy with status quo.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago