1y ago

Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users

Similar to Mastodon's spikes last year, it seems. Anyways, there is data to think about. Source

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475 comments

That doesn't seem weird to me. Honestly it seems weird that it's that active. I would've expected a sharper, quicker decline. Retaining active users is hard.
- Exactly. Users who are involved in extremely niche communities will probably not find a place on Lemmy/Kbin yet. In 2008, reddit was the same. The politics subreddit only had 50,000 subscribers.
  It's all about momentum. The more users we have, the more engagement in niche communities, the more it'll attract and retain users.
  
  And loads of people hear the buzz, try it out and leave when they grow bored. I think the reason for the downward spike not being worse is that the threshold to take part in Lemmy communities is higher than many social media sites, and invested time registering makes people more likely to stay.
  
  Just to chime in, please correct me if I’m wrong, but Lemmy only counts activity as someone who’s posting or commenting (citation needed), so as more people go back to their old ways of lurking, activity will drop as browsing isn’t counted as activity
  
  Us lurkers are still here (hopefully) but it's easy to go back to the ways of scrolling without engaging
  
  That is true.
  
  That's correct on the active users, as more people go back to lurking it will show less users but good chance they just don't post much now
  
  Why I'm encouraging anyone who will listen to participate in their fledgling niche communities here. Even if it's just a little bit.
  One can simply lurk on the niche subreddits. Growing fediverse communities need active participation.
- Lemmy is a much closer analog to Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter. While Mastodon has similar basic functionality to Twitter, it lacks a lot of the features that make it easy to find new content and new people to follow.
  Pair that with some very polished third-party mobile reddit apps with large, loyal followings transitioning to Lemmy and it became way easier to abandon reddit for Lemmy than it was to leave Twitter for Mastodon. I'm a huge open source supporter, but the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
  
  the average user doesn't care about FOSS or open source software. They want something that looks nice and just works.
  Truer words were never said.
  
  I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I've tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.
- Am I being retained?!??
  
  Sigh... You're free to go sir. Have a nice evening Mr sovereign user.

475 comments