Fediverse

Monthly active users.

It'd be hard to track lurkers on federated platforms though

People who don't do any of those actions are not active users. Lurkers are not active by definition.

They shouldn't be included in the active user count, because they're not contributing any activity.

That's me

I left then but forgot to join Lemmy until just last week.

After nearly a decade on Reddit, 6 months without any Reddit-like experience was kinda wild. I thought I'd feel like I'd have more time but other things just filled the doom scroll void. Once I started getting my memes from YouTube I decided it was time to try Lemmy.

I promise that's not it.

Nobody "forgot" anything. They were just too lazy and too unwilling to accept even marginally less polished or content-rich experiences. I think we all severely under estimated how much the average internet user has changed from a decade ago. The entrenchment is real and it goes far deeper than we realized. The days of userbase jumping from site to site might seriously be over. At least in the way it was back when Digg jumped to Reddit.

And that's really, really sad because that effectively means the boardrooms and shitty admins that run these sites can do anything they like and never face seriously pushback. As long as the content is there, the money will flow. Those of us that give a damn about useability, customization, moderation policies, user control, etc. they have literally no incentive to ever listen to us when they can reliably keep getting income from every teenager that only understands how to hit "Install" from the app store and literally nothing else.

The active daily user count is probably going up because Lemmy is a bit more settled now than it was 6 months ago. There's far less drama, the "main" communities are a little more decided, the 3rd party apps are all in place and more polished, and it's all a bit less janky now, with a bit more content to boot.

We're growing. Slowly. Very slowly. There will be no great exodus, there will be slow trickle.

Fedibird, a Mastodon fork I'm surprised they're counting separately.

I just hope the platform will expand into more niche content over time. The big topics seem to be news, politics, and some specific tech subjects. Would love to see arts/crafts/hobby related stuff take hold here as well.

That said, I do think a lot of the discussion happening here is pretty high quality and the place does seem to be improving over time. Time will tell. Hopefully more people wake up to the fact that reddit is not gonna hold up on the long term. I expect them to go IPO crazy this coming year and I don't think a lot of the core users are going to like it.

Okay but how do we quantitatively and unambiguously devise a metric for quality? More importantly, how do we come up with a satisfactory approximation to that metric? I'm open to ideas.

Quantity helps the quality in some important aspects though. For example we don’t have an equivalent to r/LegalAdvice or r/AskDocs because there isn’t large enough amount of people that are doctors/lawyers using Lemmy

Quality is subjective, you can't really measure it. Actual numerical stats like the ones from the post are more useful imo

it's why I've stayed since the initial huge migration from reddit. I find myself caring more about interacting with other commenters.

I never did that on reddit because comment sections just kinda felt like battlefields or playgrounds rather than discussions.

A powerful photo sharing platform without the shity parts of instagram. Just the opposite of doomscrolling prevalent there

Yep you'd expect it to climb significantly once .world upgrades. Basically this update messes with the baseline stat a lot so no reason to celebrate, but also no reason to really be fussed either way as long as we've got plenty people here to talk to 👍

the 2 million here includes the account bots that mass target open signup instances. (if an instance has no restrictions on signing up then they tend to make 8k accounts or something on it). fedidb detects that and excludes it

2% of active users vs 18% for Mastodon though. I'm impressed by Mastodon's percentage, how comes?

"What's a kbin?"